For months, I had been planning to visit London to abuse the Pope on his trip to the United Kingdom.
There are many reasons to go after Benedict, some personal and some a consequence of the office he holds. Thinking of them provokes the idea of rage; a wan hiss of displeasure freighted on a terrible-looking dragon straight out of the dark storm of mythology.
The idea that every new soul is a gift from God, and thus its prevention a sin, is appalling. Far better to have a pathetic life which last six hopeless weeks than never to have had it at all. This is the logic of the meek romantic, blinded by love and unable to think clearly.
Let us continue to see our women as empty vessels to be filled with children, thus says the Pope. And let us vilify the couples who intentionally remain childless, for they are scooped-out mannequins in the eyes of the Vatican.
None of this should matter to the atheist: he is not above such discussions, but removed from them, in the way that others greet cosmology or the West Lothian question with a shrug.
Yet it does matter, for the Pope only on Friday warned of the rise of secularism here. This, of course, is analogous to the tree surgeon asking what will become of him if the trees should wither, and advocating the planting of more trees without further ado.
Organisations exist only for their own propagation, no matter what the cost, and so it is with Catholicism. As long as there are sinners with a conscience, new sins will be invented to round up the unfortunates, and the self-referential nature of religion will continue unbroken. Those who invent the malaise own the antidote, delivered by the frightening appeal to a higher power.
In the end, though, I did not go. Going there or remaining here changes nothing, and the loudest protest I could muster would not alter one Catholic mind - and similarly I should remain unmoved by opposite views.
Truly, your author is supine, and accepts with a shrug that instututions and minds are immutable. There is not a flicker of protest left these days, nor a dissenting word, and not even the consolation that a few unpleasant words directed at Benedict would have been a lifter of my own mood, even as the whole of the rest of the cosmos trundles on in stark indifference.
