In the post below I mentioned that I prefer to delay commenting on matters profound until someone smarter comes along and does it for me. Mark Steyn to the rescue:
The root of the Pope's thinking - that there are eternal truths no one can change even if one wanted to - is completely incomprehensible to the progressivist mindset. There are no absolute truths, everything's in play, and by "consensus" all we're really arguing is the rate of concession to the inevitable: abortion's here to stay, gay marriage will be here any day now, in a year or two it'll be something else - it's all gonna happen anyway, man, so why be the last squaresville daddy-o on the block?
See how much work this saves me? (I heartily -- do I even have to say this? -- recommend the full article at the Telegraph. Registration required, but it's just an email address, if I remember right.)
I don't know what religion Steyn professes; or if he believes in any at all -- but he surely has a better understanding of Catholicism than, say, the CBC, which has spent the last week rounding up every feminist virago and homosexual malcontent it could find to explain how the next Pope must "fix" the church.
North American Catholics might be ambivalent about some of these issues, but to portray Frances Kissling -- a woman who heads the (memberless, but well funded) Catholics for a Free Choice, as representative of any kind of groundswell opinion is ludicrous. She ran three abortion clinics, for pity's sake.