The Anarchist Pope

It's Friday; time for a nice little laugh o' the week. Over at Vox Nova, David Wheeler-Reed asks his readers to finish the sentence “If I were elected Pope the first thing I would do is...”. Then he asks us to keep our answers short. Michael Iafrate obliges David's first request, but not his second by posting a laundry list of, shall we say, rather progressive items:

1) Give Fathers Jon Sobrino and Roy Bourgeois a phone call.
2) Ordain some women.
3) Tell gay people that they are not “intrinsically disordered.”
4) Abolish every “military diocese.”
5) Issue an apostolic letter on collegiality/ecclesial subsidiarity.
6) Canonize Oscar Romero and Dorothy Day.
7) Appoint a lay theologian as head of the CDF.
8) Go “get in the way” of some wars with the Christian Peacemaker Teams.

Their are some things wrong within this list which I have to point out. First of all, using a telephone would show an obscene disregard for indigenous peoples who don't possess a phone, especially by the first American pope who would then be seen as beholden to the evil telecom giants. Why not send smoke signals to them? Or have it delivered by vegetarian carrier pigeon?

Secondly, I hope that when he goes to ordain "some women" that he would have a woman choose which ones to ordain. Because as a male, he'd probably be tempted to just ordain the ones he considered to be hotties. We all know that's just how men are.

Finally, he left off number nine which should really be to pass the papacy on to someone else. He is, after all, an anarchist and as such should not even be participating in such a blatant celebration of patriarchal white male power in the first place. Of course if he can ordain women, I suppose he could just make a papal declaration that he himself is female and a person of color. That would solve the dilemma handily.