Woo-hoo!  We have a new pope!  Woo-hoo!  The old guys got together and picked another old guy to impose old guy values on 1.2 billion people!  Pope Francis I.  Woo –

Oh what the hell.

Once again I’m finding an aspect of life that’s never bothered me before – that I never paid much attention to before – is ticking me off mightily now.  In 2008 and 2012, it was politics; this week it’s the papal conclave.  Well actually religion in general and the sheer arbitrariness and, really, unholiness of it all.  

For the weeks leading up to the gathering I heard an endless dissection of the process of pope picking past and present.  Most Catholics aren’t Italian but most of the cardinals are, so we usually have had Italian popes.  We couldn’t have an American pope during the Cold War because the Vatican didn’t want to take sides.  The new pope might be from the Americas to show the Latinos that the Church gets them and to shore up their support.  The cardinals should be picking someone who can get the Church past all the nasty sex scandals of the past few decades.

Hm.  Something’s missing here.  What could it be?  Oh yeah.  God.

After all, isn’t God supposed to be what all this is about?  Why does any of the rest of this matter?  This guy, Francis I, is going to be the conduit to God for more than a billion people, yet I can see none of Him in this process.  What I see is a bunch of old guys going into a very pretty room and – presumably – arguing who amongst them will be the next prince of the Church.  This time they wound up with the runner up from the last pageant – I mean assembly.  Why was he the most holy this time when the last time he lost to the guy who oversaw the modern Inquisition and hushed up those priestly indiscretions?

Isn’t choosing the pope a big enough deal that there should be a definitive choice?  It’s one thing to pass Obamacare with a 60% vote, but shouldn’t the pope be a unanimous choice?  Shouldn’t the conduit to God be an absolute decision?  Even with Benedict XVI’s last-minute change to the rules, Francis only needed 75% of the cardinals’ votes to win.  That leaves a full 25% who may think he’s a poser.

I’m not being facetious.  Obviously I’m not very religious.  I like logic and evidence.  I would think choosing a pope was important enough that God would send a lightning bolt to write the name of the chosen one in the stones of St. Peter’s Square.  Boom!  Then we’d know the right guy and everyone would have to get behind him.  No questions; no politics.

As it is, it’s just a bunch of guys taking into account a lot of things that shouldn’t matter in the interest of maintaining the status of the Church.  You’d think history would have taught them better.  After all, there’s a world full of Protestants because a guy in the 16^th century decided the Catholic hierarchy was corrupt.  Oh, and let us not forget the Papal Schism when the old guys couldn’t agree, resulting in dueling popes in Rome and Avignon.

Of course the Catholics aren’t the only ones who baffle me.  There are orthodox and reformed versions of everything from Judaism to Methodism.  Why?  Some guys disagreed.  There’s a Church of England because one guy decided the Pope was cramping his style.  European kings and queens spent hundreds of years executing “heretics” to prove their righteousness.   And Shiite and Sunni Muslims have been knocking each other off for a thousand years because two groups of guys disagreed on who got to succeed Mohammed.   None of these splits has anything directly to do with God.  They’re all political and personal.  And yet millions of people fall in line and act as if there’s something rational there.  Worse yet, they’ll kill each other to do it.

So when I hear that the new old guy that the other old guys chose as their leader, the guy another bunch of old guys back in 1870 decided would be infallible once he got the job, says marriage equality is the work of the Devil, I’m inclined to say I want a recount.  Or a lightning bold etching in St. Peter’s Square.