According to Italian media reports, our new Pope Benedict XVI has moved into the Vatican with two of his cats. With his earlier career dogged by controversy, he has wisely settled on cats. One only hopes that with so many cats around, the Vatican does not go to the dogs.
posted by The Transparent Ironist @ 8:03 pm
3 Comments:
At 3.5.05,
Anonymous said…
If having relatives - by birth or marriage, banned for catholic priests, by what logic are pets allowed?
At 3.5.05,
The Transparent Ironist said…
Good question. Most of the Catholic Orders are not exactly anti-social or even asocial; indeed, during the time when they were formed in the Middle Ages (some around 1200 AD), they were the first Brotherhoods and Sisterhoods on the social lanscape.(The Greeks too had some forms of these Brotherhoods, though not Sisterhoods!) So although Catholic monks and nuns 'renounce' their parents and relatives in the sense of giving up 'blood-connections' (arrrghhh...I hate this phrase) with them,they do this in order to create newer forms of connections with one another. Thus one nun will address another nun as her 'Sister' *even though* she is not her biological sister. As an Aquarian who is supposed to have 'universal tendencies' (courtesy Linda Goodwoman), this aspect of the Catholic Orders, viewing biologically-unrelated people as your own Brothers and Sisters, is one that has had a lasting impression on me. (And this is incidentally, for me at least, an interest rejoinder to Richard Dawkins' book 'The Selfish Gene'. Dawkins has apparently not done much research into these Orders where Brothers and Sisters with no desire to replicate their genes through offspring yet help biologically-unrelated people simply because they are human beings.)
This is one reason why I always feel uncomfortable when I spend too much time with my 'blood-relatives' back at home : I feel that I have withdrawn into myself away from the Brothers and Sisters outside my 'family-circle'. To this, of course, a feminist will reply that this discomfort with one's own 'flesh-and-blood', with one's own cousins, uncles and aunts, is the typical male disease of seeking abstractions, universalisations, wholisms, and generalisations, this time the ones that can be called a 'Humanity' that transcends one's 'blood-relatives'; and to this powerful critique, I can only plead guilty to have been born under the sign of Aquarius.
At 3.5.05,
The Transparent Ironist said…
Another brief comment regarding these two cats. I wonder if they are male or female, or whether the Vatican is interested at all in the gender (cats have gender?) of the pets of their Popes.(Another Pope, not too long ago, once kept a goldfinch as a pet.) I say this because the Greek Orthodox Church has an ancient monastery in Athos where not only no Women but also no Female Animals are allowed to enter. Gosh! Some men (and women too, no?) are really sensitive about their 'space'.
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