FRANK IN SENSU STRICTU

THE NEW BISHOP OF ROME, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires and perhaps former chemical engineer before entering into the much-hated fraternity of the Jesuits, promises to be something of a revolution in the Roman Catholic Church. As indeed all popes tend to promise before they become bogged down under the weight of trying to supervise (when they try) the most labyrinthine, underhand, corrupt and incomprehensible organisation that exists on the face of the Earth. If it is in any manner a reflection of what life after death may be then Heaven help us.

 

HOWEVER, AS IS ALWAYS STATED each time a new pope is "elected", he may well bring something new to the Roman Catholic Church.

 

THE MOST OBVIOUS FACTOR which differentiates him from the last cluster of popes is that he is the first one for over fifty years who is not openly a war criminal, given the fact that he has not been a member of the Curia, which, when not helping the Nazis outright at the time of World War II, did their best to conceal the fact that the Vatican either concealed, contrived to conceal or in fact destroyed documentation detailing the papacy's involvement in the horrors of the Holocaust and other sundry mass executions in Italy.

 

ONE IMAGINES THAT A FURTHER feather in his mitre might be the fact that -- to date -- there are no widespread stories of priests buggering young boys in Argentina, unlike the churches in Europe.

 

YET AS I WRITE I AM WATCHING a news item suggesting that our good Francis I was not, as one might state, wholly forthcoming in his defence of the thousands of people who disappeared during the ruthless, bloody dictatorship in Argentina. Everything changes but everything stays the same.

HUGO'S THERE?

ONE SHOULD NEVER SPEAK ILL OF THE DEAD, I have always heard; and I am perfectly prepared to stick to this maxim, which means that I should, in theory, not have anything off-colour to state about the manic, histrionic, corrupt and shameless "politician" who was the leader of the sub-third world banana republic that was generously called Veneziola (in homage to its being similar to Venice) by over-optimistic Tuscan explorer Amerigo Vespucci in 1499.

 

HUGO RAFAEL CHÁVEZ FRÍAS is as I write being given a send-off that makes many people think of Lenin, although I personally tend to think of Stalin. I am currently being reminded that Chávez is "not dead", but that "all Venezuela is Chávez". (Which, of course, allows me to speak ill of him.)

 

I MUST CONFESS THAT I HAVE NOT spent a great deal of the last fourteen years trying to find out what President Hugo Chávez of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has been up to; and I am prepared to listen to arguments on both sides of the divide. Occasionally I have seen bits of what he has been saying on TV, and my attention has been lost very quickly.

 

I HAVE READ ACCOUNTS of his raising the standard of living among the poor of the country, and ones which state that the homicide and robbery rates have never been so high in Venezuela, particularly in Caracas, as during his period of tenure. I have also read that he managed to build up a personal fortune of over 200 million dollars.

 

AND SO I SHOULD LEAVE IT AT THAT. Were it not for the fact that when a leader dies and has literally millions of toothless and apparently brainless supporters prepared to take a week off work in order to traipse past his rotting corpse I tend to imagine that something is rotten in the state in question.

 

(My picture shows Jack Parrot, from the film "Robbers of the Caribbean")