Pope Benedict XVI, and a little celibacy will fix what ails ya ...

(Above: Lady Gaga getting down and dirty with the rosary. You can see the video on YouTube, but all we want to know is when Madonna is going to sue for intellectual property theft).

How better to introduce a light hearted note for the imminent long weekend than a bit of Catholic bashing?

Well not so much bashing as to observe the stubborn forlorn intransigence of the Catholic hierarchy, as encapsulated in Celibacy understanding obscured by 'secondary scandals', says Pope.

Celibacy is central to the priesthood, Pope Benedict XVI said on Thursday, amid concerns from some that the requirement has somehow contributed to the wave of abuse scandals rocking the Church.

"For the world where God is not present, celibacy is a great scandal... that should disappear," the pope said.

Hark, is that a paranoid I see before me?

Actually it reminds me of the time when I had an intimate discussion with a trainee priest about the burden of giving yourself to god.

He spoke of his "nocturnal emissions" - such a strange term for spontaneous eruptions of precious bodily fluids - and his inclination to indulge in guilt-laden masturbation. I thought it a little too much information at the time, but it was university days, a world where god wasn't present, damn her absentee landlord ways, and there was the smell of hippie lubrication in the air.

He left the priesthood within a year, and within a year was married, and shortly after that had children, and for all I know remains happy in his heterosexuality, not in a rampant but in a seemly, so and thus way. I suspect he would have made a good and caring priest because he was a good, caring and kindly person. Lost to the church.

Of course the current pope is keen to toe the party line on celibacy:

Priest celibacy was "an act of faith and fidelity" towards God and a way to anticipate on earth the pureness of the afterlife, said the pope.

This understanding of celibacy was often obscured by "the secondary scandals of our failings and sins," he added -- an oblique reference to the priest paedophilia revelations that have rocked the Church in recent months.

Indeed. I guess it's hard to overthrow a policy that's been around for almost a thousand years. Might make people wonder why they'd given up on sex, and why some instead have taken to peculiar perversities.

On the other hand, celibacy didn't really get going until 1079AD, and as usual, there's a half way decent wiki on the topic here. Which makes you wonder about all those fornicating priests active for the first thousand years of the church, before the church got hard line? How about the pureness of the afterlife for that lot?

That's why it's always good fun to get down and dirty and speculate about Jesus having it off with Mary Magdalene. Pity Dan Brown ruined the fun.

Surely by now even the Catholic fundies, with their strange cilice ways, and the Islamic fundies might have noticed that half the crazed ratbag religious extremists wandering through life have a distorted relationship to their sexuality (phew, managed to avoid the stereotype of saying they'd never had a good fuck!)

What never fails to intrigue me is the way free market people, usually of a conservative kind, let the Catholic church off the hook. Talk about a failure in branding, talk about a disgruntled, failing staff, talk about a corporation losing its way and failing to institute innovative and new marketing strategies and new products as a way to revive the brand in the marketplace. How about a new angle? Join the church, save souls, and enjoy a normal sex life?

Meanwhile there's a fair argument that celibacy - a notch up from abstinence - is at the heart of the Catholic church's failures in matters such as paedophilia. Sure abandoning sex to have it off in a spiritual way with god gives its priests and nuns a charming eccentricity, unmatched by the bland lifestyle choice of an Anglican vicar, but it also leads to needless complications. Including logic:

Some senior Catholic clergymen and intellectuals have called for a new discussion of the issue of priest celibacy when considering the possible causes behind the sex abuse scandal.

But the pope said criticism of celibacy "can come as a surprise at a time in which not getting married is increasingly in fashion."

Well a man elected to the papacy at the age of 78 would say that, wouldn't he? But if you can make head or tails of that last sentence about him being surprised ... let's hope it was a journalist who failed at his Pitman's course in shorthand and so produced a transcription error (dear lord, that such a thing as Pitman shorthand should have ever walked the earth, now as strange and exotic as eight track cartridges).

You see, it's a deft theological hand that can turn talk of celibacy in the Church into not getting married being the new fashion, so bringing about the disappearance of marriage and the destruction of the foundation stone of western culture ... Talk about cognitive dissonance ...

But it did remind me of the fun to be had by considering the cultural collisions between Roman celibacy and sordid secular minds.

As a starting point, you can troop off to Troy Patterson at Slate and his Naughty Nuns A brief historical tour occasioned by the new Lady Gaga video.

Inspired by the latest Lady Gaga video, Patterson jots down a commendable number of Catholic naughty nun moments in his top ten list, including Héloïse and Abelard, and naturally Boccaccio's The Decameron, and of course he also finds a place for Rivette's La Religieuse and Russell's The Devils.

But to prove he's a genuine connoisseur, he also includes Black Narcissus, surely one of the fruitiest portraits of repressed sexuality ever to grace the screen. It still turns up late at night on (Oz) ABC every so often.

Well there's no point in stealing Patterson's thunder, and hopefully some time soon he'll get around to the male equivalent. Naturally once again Boccaccio will be somewhere near the top of the list as he celebrates the grinding of pestle and mortar.

Meanwhile, here's wishing everyone a pleasant Queen's Birthday long weekend, and what better way to celebrate than with a hearty exchange and/or expenditure of precious bodily fluids. Yes, we still celebrate the Queen's birthday on a day that has nothing to do with the Queen, while celebrating a Queen who also has nothing to do with Australia, outside the peculiar mental life of David Flint and sundry women's magazines.

But back to the pope. It's an oldie but a goodie, but how natural it is to compare his denialism to General Jack Ripper ...

Mandrake: Jack... Jack, listen, tell me, ah... when did you first become, well, develop this theory.
Ripper: Well, I ah, I I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.

Mandrake: (sighs fearfully).
Ripper: Yes a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly: loss of essence.
Mandrake: Yes...
Ripper: I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women... women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.

Mandrake: Heh heh... yes.

Long may priests continue to deny women their essence. With a bit of luck, the age of priests in the church will soon hit eighty. Back in 1996 a study found the average age was 56 years, and in 2001 in the Melbourne diocese in house figures revealed that the average age of diocesan priests on appointment had risen from 44 in 1977 to 60 by 2001! (Catholic Australia). No wonder they don't keep a firm hand on the stats ...

By golly, there's a firm policy choice. Better to fade away than indulge in sex. The absent god is cunning in her ways ...

(Below: Clovis Trouille's Religieuse Italienne fumant la cigarette, 1944, included in Patterson's naughty nun list, and no, just because I was tortured by Dominicans, doesn't mean I have a Fellini thing about nuns).