Happy Ash Wednesday! Pope Francis, previously deemed the saving grace of the modern Catholic Church, is proving once and for all that you can't get rid of thousands of years inadequacy with one complex man.


In an interview published in Il Corriere della Sera, Pope Francis said that it's unfair that the Catholic Church has gotten so much heat for the sexual abuse within its ranks, even though tons of other entities have the same problem. Via AFP:

"The Catholic Church is perhaps the only public institution to have acted with transparency and responsibility. No-one else has done more. Yet the Church is the only one to have been attacked."


Francis said that cases of abuse "are terrible because they leave very deep wounds" but "that the great majority of abuses are carried out in family or neighborhood environments." True, but you can't do as much about the abuses happening within individual families as you can with the people you allow to represent your organization. Francis also gave props to Pope Benedict (word of advice: don't praise a man who left before the job was done) because of the work he'd done on this issue.

In the same interview, Francis said that marriage is between a man and a woman, "that women can and ought to be more present in the places where the Church's decisions are made" and that the Church should "take into account people's situations" when it comes to birth control. Lastly, he's into good movies. He recently watched Life is Beautiful and he enjoyed Wajda. He giveth and then He taketh away....