New York
Happiness is a German pope succeeding the greatest pope ever, a Pole. Not everyone agrees with me. Blogger Andrew Sullivan, a Brit expatriate and gay-rights advocate, called it a ‘full-scale assault’ on liberal Catholics. If he is a typical liberal Catholic, he has just doubled my joy at Benedict XVI’s election. Fifty years ago, secular liberals predicted that education and science would do away with the opium of the people. They were as wrong about the power of faith as they’ve been wrong about everything else. An hysterical Irish–American, Maureen Dowd, writing in the Big Bagel Times, described the new pope as a hatchet-faced bully, a Cardinal No, a Vatican Darth Vader. Dowd should be excused. She was traumatised early on when Gabby Hayes (the dirty old mumbling drunk of old cowboy films) turned her advances down, as did, later on, the smooth Adolph Menjou, not to mention Boris Karloff.
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