You can't be a Catholic and a grownup

That's one of Orwell's “hard truths”. It's in the same vein as Marx's “religion is the opium of the people” and Freud's assertion that religious believers display a “persistent neurosis”. But hey, we must always look on the bright side as the Monty Python group sang. Woody Allen, a latter day philosopher said once, “traffic in midtown Manhattan is very congested today, is the Pope or some other show business personality in town?” So now we have the first Francis but it could have been otherwise. We could have had Francis Albert Sinatra. Don Rickles says that he and Dean and Sammy worked tirelessly to get Frank made Pope. “That way,” he said, “we'd only have to kiss his ring.”