Though you're probably thoroughly weary of the topic, three more short takes on the day of four popes that I find worth reading:
Michael Coogan for Yale Books Unbound:
The haste to canonize the last five deceased popes is an effort to shore up the diminished spiritual authority of the papacy. If every pope is a saint, who could dare disagree with them?
J. Peter Nixon in a dotCommonweal posting entitled "#enoughalready":
The question that must be asked--particularly in light of Sunday’s canonizations--is whether this increasingly obsessive focus on the opinions, theology, spirituality and personal witness of the pope is a healthy thing for the Church. The purpose of authority in the Church is to form a community that can bring forth "a great cloud of witnesses," not to place the burden of that witness on a single individual.
Jayden Cameron at Gay Mystic:
Behind the contradictions and the paradoxes, however, lies a subliminal message - that our hope and our trust cannot be placed in the institutional church any longer, at least in its outmoded form. It has had its day and today was a dramatic example of the dragon in its death throes. The Catholic tradition will live on, new creative forms of community will spring up, but Rome has become a sideshow for the barkers, drawing us in with false and distorting mirrors.
I find the graphic being used at many blog sites around the internet, but I haven't yet seen any indication of its ultimate source. I would gladly give credit to the producer of this image, if I knew this information.
