My wife once volunteered to supervise, for a week, a local kindergarten's playground activities. One day, one little boy attempted to bamboozle her about a misdemeanor he had committed against another little boy. My wife, seeing through this obvious ploy, explained to the first little boy that there once lived a man by the name of Richard Nixon, who did some very bad things. But the worst thing he did, she continued, was to try to cover up his transgressions. "The cover-up is often worse than the crime," she instructed the lad. She related this incident to me with hilarious effect, saying I should have seen the unsettled expression on the utterly uncomprehending little boy's face.
I wish my wife were here to explain life to Pope Francis. His cover-up of his meeting with the transgressive Kim Davis was more sinful than that of the little boy's, in that Francis should have known better. A Davis lawyer tells the NYT that his client "and Vatican officials had agreed to keep the meeting secret until the pope had left the United States because … 'we didn’t want the pope’s visit to be focused on Kim Davis.'" Yet now, of course, the memory of the pope's visit will be focused on little else; and the pope's silence about the meeting — which the Vatican insists was meant to be only temporary — has the stench of a cover-up.
A daily reader and — shameless hint — regular contributor emailed this this morning: "I can’t articulate how horrible I feel about this. Back to the cold comfort of cynicism for me. People and Popes will always break your heart."
I had always been invulnerable to papal heartbreak because my cynicism extended to all organized religion. Today, I feel the reader's pain.
Perhaps if my wife had been Pope Penn I, she could have enlightened the scheming little boys who run the Church. And boy, is Pope Francis ever in for a lecture when he meets up with my wife.