Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

The Pope

I’m fascinated by the amount of media attention that’s being given to the Pope’s latest health crisis.

Catholicism, and by extension, the Pope himself have generally been treated by the media as a sort of quaint anachronism. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about. That “he seems like a nice enough old guy but he’s really out of touch with the modern world” attitude. And that’s the more favorable popular attitude. A growing number of people, it seems to me, have outright hostility towards the Pope and Catholicism.

I don’t know where all of this favorable media attention is coming from. Even assuming there’s some conservative Christian influence at work in the media (Bush-y evangelical type stuff), I’d not have expected this much. In my experience, evangelical Christians aren’t huge fans of Catholicism either. They may agree with the Catholics on the abortion thing but they just can’t get behind the whole praying to the Virgin Mary and the Saints thing.

So, it’s just weird. Unexpected. I simply can’t believe that many Americans are terribly worried about the Pope. I could see it as a “10-minutes into the hour” sort of news story, but not as the number one story!

It’s strange.