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Catholic Truthiness
Last edited Sun Sep 22, 2013, 01:21 PM - Edit history (1)
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/faithbased/2013/09/pope_francis_catholic_church_stephen_colbert_is_replacing_antonin_scalia.htmlMove over, Antonin Scalia. Stephen Colbert is now America’s Catholic.
By Jessica Winter|Posted Friday, Sept. 20, 2013, at 4:42 PM
The two heads of today's Catholic Church.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Reuters (2)
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has always reminded me of the robed men of the Catholic Church in which I grew up: well-fed and saturnine, burbling with derisive erudition, jolly one moment and imperious the next, a weary disgust often flickering at the edges of the brow and lips. These men only really engaged with the boys; the girls always seemed to them to have wandered into the room by mistake. I’ll never forget the look of vague revulsion on the face of the vast monsignor who served Holy Communion at my confirmation, the corners of his mouth pulling down to contain his nausea at the riffraff they let into the church these days. It’s the shape of a mouth reading an acrid Scalia dissent.
For a lot of reasons—because he is the longest-serving and most boisterous member of America’s own Ecumenical Council, because he frequently addresses Catholic groups, because Andy Borowitz says as much—we think of Justice Scalia as “America’s Catholic,” as my Slate colleague Dahlia Lithwick put it in an email. In fact, you could easily imagine him as America’s first Bishop of Rome, or at least his duly appointed representative. Pope Benedict XVI was a fun cartoon villain because of the fumes of nefarious conspiracy wafting off his haute couture threads—he was Mugatu in a chasuble. Scalia wouldn’t have gone shopping with him, but otherwise they were two hearts beating as one: They’re both deeply conservative, nostalgic for “tradition,” rigid in their interpretations of doctrine, belittling of women and gays, and forever erring on the side of consolidating more power—be it political, social, or religious—in the hands of the already powerful.
What Scalia and Benedict also have in common is that, for all their institutional authority, they represent a last stand against the prevailing, decades-long trend toward a more inclusive, liberal Catholic Church. For proof, of course, just look to Pope Francis, the selfie-taking, Twitter-using, biker gang-blessing, money-hating, atheist-redeeming, female-prisoner’s-foot-kissing Jesuit who made liberal Catholics everywhere gnaw ecstatically on their rosaries with an interview in the Jesuit weekly America magazine (excerpts of which were republished in the New York Times). In the interview, he makes it clear that, in contrast to his glamorous predecessor, Francis wants to frame the church as an institution by and for the poor. He’s sharply critical of “authoritarian” decision-making (specifically from his own past), “closed and rigid thought,” and “censorship.” He addresses the church’s views on homosexuality by posing a question that answers itself: “Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?” He doesn’t condemn birth control, but he does criticize the church’s obsession with it. Most intriguingly, Francis says, “We have to work harder to develop a profound theology of the woman,” and while I have no idea what that means, I guarantee that this thought never crossed the mind of Antonin Scalia, or of any man who ever dropped a wafer in my mouth at Mass.
In other words, Francis is shaping up to be the kind of pope that any lapsed Catholic lightly schooled in liberation theology and Madonna videos can embrace. But even a People’s Pope can seem a remote and shimmering figure—when I was a kid, John Paul II was never much more than a kind-looking grandpa in a plastic picture frame. For a lay Catholic, the literal embodiments of the church are always going to be its local priests and its most prominent cultural figures. So as the title has passed from Benedict to Francis, it follows that U.S. Catholics should have a new pope of their own.
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And is spot on with the profile of the local priests of my youth. Hadn't thought of it but Scalia does fit the mold. 
Love Colbert and he's not afraid to wear his religion on his sleeve.
He's also not afraid to make fun of some parts of it.
