HABEMUS PAPAM: WE HAVE A POPE...! BY SANDRA HARRIS.

HABEMUS PAPAM: WE HAVE A POPE!

BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘I have to go to Rome, for an audience with the Holy Father.’

‘Don’t worry, Len, they repeat those shows all the time.’

‘An Audience with Lily Savage, that was good as well.’

Bishop Len Brennan in conversation with Father Dougal Maguire in sitcom FATHER TED.

I never normally post about religion, but it’s not every day we elect a Pope to be the new head of the Catholic church, a church with roughly 1.406 billion members worldwide.

The previous pope, Pope Francis, passed away on the twenty-first of April this year, Easter Monday of all days. A nice day to die if you’re a Pope, I think, because, in the Catholic Church, Easter is seen as even more of an important celebration than Christmas. I found this fact very strange when I was younger.

Easter is great and all that, but you don’t get presents at Easter, only chocolate eggs, unlike Christmas, where you could technically come in for all manner of goodies, including chocolate, in the form of selection boxes, choccy Santas, net bags of gold coins and choccy Christmas tree decorations.

That’s on top of other presents like dolls, books, tricycles, tin whistles you only played for one day and then got bored of, board games (the clue is in the word, people- bored…!) and other treasures.

Plus, Easter only really lasts a day, two at the most, or two weeks if you count the school holidays, but Christmas in Ireland now goes on for the whole month of December and a good half of January as well, lol. Good luck with trying to get anything done until nearly February, if you want to be perfectly blunt about it.

Anyway, the new lad is called Robert Francis Prevost and he comes from America. His Pope name is Leo the Fourteenth and he’s a mere piddling sixty-nine years old, so his Papacy could conceivably last twenty years, if he’s blessed enough to live so long.

I was watching Sky News as they, and millions of others across the globe, were waiting for the new Pope to come out onto the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square last week. I must admit, I caught some of the emotion that was going around and I sniffled a bit when Robert Prevost came out, smiling and looking warm and approachable.

Why are you crying? my son asked me. You don’t even go to Mass! Cheeky pup. No, I replied, I don’t go to Mass (or Confession!), but I was baptised a Catholic and I believe in God and I say my prayers every day. And that’s all true. I had the kind of convent school education where the catechism, as they called it, was drummed into you by the nuns, so you couldn’t not catch it.

My view of religion is probably still quite juvenile, though, as a result of what the nuns taught me. God is a really old man with a really long beard and a long white robe and sandals, exactly as portrayed in The Simpsons, and Jesus is the same only younger.

The devil is a horrible person dressed in fire-engine red with horns, cloven hooves and a pointy tail. If you’re a good person in life, you’ll go to Heaven. If you’re bad, the fires of Hell await you for all eternity. Yikes…

Heaven is a lovely big garden where you can hang out in perpetual sunshine with all your loved ones and all the pets you lost in life. Chefs are on hand to cook you anything you want to eat at any time of the day or night and none of the televisions ever show advertisements.

Hell is a terrifying place with fires that rage day and night, and devils jab you with red-hot pokers round the clock, even on your tea-break. The milk for your cornflakes has been left out of the fridge all night and is a bit lukewarm (yuk, torture!) and the Internet connection is a tiny bit slow. (Even worse torture!)

Purgatory is the place where you go if you’re not quite good enough to go to Heaven just yet, but neither are you evil enough for Hell. So, you just have to wait a few thousand years in Purgatory, which I’ve always pictured as a drab-looking waiting-room with no TV or radio, no phones allowed and only the most boring, dog-eared and out-of-date magazines on the table to pass the time. Accountant’s Monthly and the like. A few thousand years is a mere blink of the eye in eternity terms, of course, but, to the person waiting, it can be like waiting for a snail to climb Mount Everest.

On the other hand, childish as these beliefs and ideas might sound, I think my values are decent enough. Treat others the way you’d like to be treated, and judge not lest ye be judged. I have terrible trouble with that last one. I’m always judging people.

Should she be wearing that belly top with her weight?

I’d never let my kids run wild like that.

That comb-over isn’t fooling anyone!

Those kids shouldn’t be eating those sweets. Their mother’s to blame.

What do they think they look like in those matching shorts and T-shirts?

He smokes how many ciggies a day? No wonder he has lung problems!

What a show-off, with her yoga mat and her gym clothes twice a bloody day like some obsessive…!

I’m working on it, though, because I’m absolutely terrified of the ‘lest ye be judged’ part. I could see God being very strict about that part of the dictum. I could really see me being called out on my judgy-ness on the ominously titled Judgement Day, on which only the Lord, fairly or unfairly, is entitled to judge. I only hope I have time left to change my ways…

Anyway, that’s me. Now, what about the new Pope’s thinking on current affairs? Well, he was in favour of COVID-19 vaccines and he supported George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protesters. He’s not too keen on President Trump’s immigration policies and generally advocates kindness and compassion for migrants and the poor.

He opposed gender ideology being included in the school curriculum in Peru, where he spent time as an Augustinian missionary, because he thought it promoted ‘genders that don’t exist.’ This was back in 2016, so I don’t know if he’s changed his mind on the subject since then. I ain’t saying nothing. I’ve gotten in trouble that way before, shooting my big fat mouth off.

He also seems to oppose abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, homosexuality and women priests. A few people are probably going to have a problem with some of his views, so it’ll be interesting to see how things pan out during his reign. I wish him the best of luck with it all, anyway, and a long and fruitful Papacy.

I’m off now to spy on the neighbours. Yer one next door has a fella coming round in the mornings while her bloke’s out at work, and I don’t think he’s teaching her to hang wallpaper, if you catch my drift, plus her young lad’s almost certainly growing hash on their balcony. Oh no, wait, the judging…