But on the bright side, once their server comes back up, we’ll finally have a pope with an on-line fan club.  This sort of thing is so important.  And it proves that the church have clearly elected someone who is in touch with the needs of the faithful as they face the challenges of the 21st century.

Yeah, OK.  But at least he has an amusing-sounding name.

Still, with any luck he’ll only hang around long enough to drive the last few moderates out of the Vatican, and lock the Catholic church firmly on course for complete irrelevance within my lifetime, and then he’ll have the decency to snuff it, because really, the head of one of the world’s major religions having been a Hitler Youth member is about as black as I can take my humour.  (“Everyone else was doing it, and he didn’t like it very much” get him a pass as a weak and feeble human, and I’m not about to condemn Ratzinger for it.  But I think it really should have put him out of the running for “God’s representative on earth”.)