The reason the Pope is the Pope is that he is the custodian of the relics of St Peter.

Whoever the priest is, he is called Father.

This man is the master of us all.

We are all Danes now. We are all Jews now. We are all Pope Benedict.

The Pope is unique. A man who, because of his position, is obliged to remain attached to “the ceiling”, to see things “from the ceiling's point of view”.

The Priest is the common father, as it were, of all the world; it is proper therefore that he should care for all, even as God, Whom he serves.

Most priests are gay.

The demand for justice, rising from the families of the victims of paedophile priests in America and beyond, must be answered. And the Church itself in the past has not done everything possible to punish and prevent, sometimes preferring to hush up and cut short. But if there is one Pope who has not hidden in silence and embarrassment, but has strongly denounced crimes and omertà, it is Pope Benedict XVI. His ‘Letter to the Catholics of Ireland' is the most courageous document the Vatican has produced on the subject in its history.

With us, our Priests are Administrators of all Business, Art, and Science; Directors of Trade, Commerce, Generalship, Architecture, Engineering, Education, Statesmanship, Legislature, Morality, Theology; doing nothing themselves, they are the Causes of everything worth doing, that is done by others.

The Catholics have it right. I love what they do. That whole "the pope's infallible" thing is tremendous. Let's face facts: If you took somebody with no religious leanings whatsoever and locked that person in a psych ward with nobody around and no stimuli, the Catholic church is exactly what he'd come up with. "Listen to this. There's this old guy in a dress, see? He wears all these great costumes and wherever he says about anything from birth control to what to watch on television, that's it, 'cause pope knows best. He can't lift his head up, but, fuck, he's a genius.

Christ is the head of the corpus mysticum, which includes all men from the beginning of the world to its end. He is not the president of a special-interest club.

I’m gonna miss the old sith lord. He was the best pope atheists could hope for. He started out as a Hitler youth actually wearing a Nazi uniform. As a Cardinal, he famously conspired to conceal sex crimes against children for the sake of the church. As pope, he addressed an audience in an AIDS ravaged area of Africa, and told them that use of condoms actually increased risk of STDs. His objection to birth-control took precedence over human life. That is how evil he is.

We must either give up the belief in the Church as a divine institution altogether, or we must recognize it in that communion of which the Pope is the head. With him alone and round about him are found the claims, the prerogatives, and duties which we identify with the kingdom set up by Christ. We must take things as they are; to believe in a Church, is to believe in the Pope. And thus this belief in the Pope and his attributes, which seems so monstrous to Protestants, is bound up with our being Catholics at all; as our Catholicism is with our Christianity.

There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen. Now he belongs to the ages.