"A Long Strange Trip" - The Grateful Dead

I'm a non-practicing Catholic (I don't need to practice, I already know how!), so, a dead Pope, has a little resonance in my life. On the one hand, it means almost nothing except, another human being has passed, reminding us all of the Emergency Exit Door just offstage. 'Pope' has always seemed to me to be an absurdly inflated job title, we don't need no stinking Pontiff to interpret anything for us. The Roman Catholic Church looks to me to be another evil bureaucratic power structure that only serves itself. Then there's the hideous spectacle of Pedophile Priests, and the Church's ridiculous stand on birth control in an already over-populated world.

On the other hand, there is this from Mr. Sun:

"Imagine a boy who loses his mother at age 8, his only brother at age 12, and the last remaining member of his family, his beloved father, at age 20. In an oppressed country in troubled times, he is completely alone in the world. What does such a boy make of his fractured life? He becomes the spiritual leader of more than a billion people. There is so much in the external world, and my internal beliefs to obscure the wonder of that beautiful story, but I don't think I'll let it happen. This non-Catholic is going to remember the story of that boy for at least a little while as the sides inevitably begin to form."

For a moment, if you can forget all the bullshit, all the pomp and circumstance, you have to marvel at how that little boy survived to make something of himself. Human beings sure are a curious lot!