Pope Benedict has a ticking bomb in his closet. As a German bishop he presided over the investigation of a pedophile priest. Over 200 boys were counted as his victims and like an iceberg more are thought to have been molested by this man. His punishment was to be transferred to another church without any warning to the parishioners about his predilection for young boys. The pope’s brother was intimate with this offender’s history and even a causal observer has to come to the conclusion that the Catholic Church has been acting with criminal intent to prevent any convictions of their priests.

I attended Catholic grammar and high school. My alma mater is the Jesuit-run Boston College. The only time I can recall a religious member acting strange was at Xaverian, when the librarian Brother Jerome would ask students to sit on his lap. None of us thought this request strange, even though we regarded gays as queers. Other than that episode the priests and brothers led exemplary lives dedicated to learning.

Other students haven’t been so lucky judging from the newspaper reports telling of the widespread scandal. The cover-up is over and the highest ranks of the Church are guilty of conspiracy.

Thousands if not millions of Catholics are questioning their faith and Op-Ed writer Maureen Dowd has suggested that it is now time to transform the male hierarchy of the Vatican by naming a female Pope from the ranks of the religious orders of nuns.

A Nope.

A human who would look natural in a dress.

Not that the sisters of mercy are without sin.

At the local school of the deaf the nuns mistreated the unfortunate.

A friend’s sister went to this school and through sign language explained how the nuns punished the girls by making them drink urine from the nuns. I was no longer a Catholic at this point. I was 17. I never told anyone about her story. It sounded unreal. Now I realize that it was the truth.

And because of this I say nope to Nopes.

Then again the Pope is infallible.

He can do no wrong.