What is the sound of one pope retiring?

I've said that I approach each morning as a blank slate, waiting to see what topic the day's cartoons will prompt me to riff on, but I'll admit I have been hoping for a good "Papal retirement" cartoon, and with some increasing impatience.

Apparently, judging from the cartoons, there appears to have been some sort of problem with pedophilia in the church. (Okay, I actually knew that.) And some issues with people not quite understanding how the papacy works. (Hard to make a point without firm bearings.) And more. (Definitely a case where more is less.)

Finally, Matt Davies came up with a panel that actually ties in the news with a relevant topic, and manages to do so without a backhanded slap at the Roman Catholic Church. It's even funny, in a depressing "yeah, no kidding" kind of way.

Davies isn't the only cartoonist, by the way, to play on the "retired folks working as Wal-Mart greeters" idea, but the notion of the pope being forced into that role is ... well, it won't fly. You don't have to wade into the whole semi-paranoid "golden treasures of the Vatican" zone, but, come on, the dude ain't gonna be eating cat food, either.

One of my more memorable professors at Notre Dame maintained that there was no such thing as an "ex-Catholic." You could no more be an ex-Catholic, he insisted, than you could be ex-Irish or ex-Italian.

And for all our go-rounds -- and we had some memorable ones -- this was a place where we agreed, though his "ineradicable mark" was my "permanent scar." But he was right in that Catholicism is not a jacket that you can take off and put on again. It is an identity.

I once read, in a book that appears to have escaped, that a disproportionate number of hippies were Catholics and Jews, the sociologist's theory being that kids in more easy-going cultures had less substance against which to rebel.

I think that's probably correct, not just for the actual hippies but also among the much more numerous freaks, the distinction being that "hippies" in the real sense had a kind of zen outlook, and there were far more long-haired, guitar-slinging people wandering around with unresolved authority issues than there were productive, self-contained, counter-cultural artists and poets.

Which brings us to the only koan anyone outside a zen monastery knows, the story of the two monks, the river, the stranded woman and "Put her down. I did, a mile ago."

You cannot be an ex-Catholic until you have successfully put her down and moved on along the path. Until then, you are only a "recovering Catholic," and while it is unfair to demand more than that of people, it doesn't mean, to reference another gem from the Sixties, that we should be asked to take your bad trip.

So anyway.

So, anyway, Davies takes the interesting news story of the Pope's sensible-but-nearly-unprecedented decision to step down and pairs it with the modern phenomenon of American seniors who would dearly love to retire but cannot.

The best part of his cartoon is the caption, "Lucky young fella," which both tells us that this Wal-Mart worker is older than 85 and also expresses envy without anger. It's just the way it is. Some folks get to retire. We don't.

And the tripod cane tells us that he isn't working for lack of stimulus at home. He shouldn't be doing this. And yet there he is. And it's just the way it is.

I've got a retired friend who is a good guy but, as those of us in the Club are allowed to say, is kind of a hardass bluecollar Jersey mick, and prone to think that people's misfortunes are the result of their own poor planning and their lack of character and self-discipline.

Or he was, until about a year ago, when he started to volunteer as a Meals on Wheels driver, and the scales of theory fell from his eyes. "You wouldn't believe it ..." he'd say, but then would kind of drift off into non-specifics as that soft Irish heart melted from the sorrow of what he had seen.

And it's everywhere.

I've known two people who retired from good, professional positions, but then had to return to the workforce in order to secure health care until they were old enough to quality for Medicare. But even a guy with a doctorate shelving goods at Target is nothing in today's world.

I've also heard, both from social workers and from town council members, of older people trying to eke out a living on less than $1,000 a month in Social Security, whose houses are paid for but whose property and school taxes continue to rise and whose rural homes are heated by fuel oil that becomes less affordable every year, and who do not live within walking distance of groceries in areas with no public transportation and whose families may be hundreds or thousands of miles away in this mobile, rootless society of ours.

Look: I'm not an ex-Catholic, because there's no such a thing, but I have put the woman down and, if you haven't, I can't help you. I would strongly suggest you find someone who can.

Meanwhile, I think we should probably try to help that old fella down at Wal-Mart and not bother to obsess over the old fella in the Vatican.

Comments

[Sherwood Harrington]

I am reminded of a Cronin-esque English professor at Amherst who wrote on a paper by one of my friends, "This is perfect. Don't ever do that again."

This post is superb, even by your standards. Thanks for starting out my morning right -- and you absolutely can do it again, far as I'm concerned.

[Owen]

Amen, Sherwood. A home run, Mike - and not a "just cleared the fence home run." Rather, a "the left fielder didn't even move" home run.

[Bob]

As already noted, kudos, Mike. A great and memorable column. I've enjoyed the site immensely since being directed here from CIDU several months ago.

I didn't attend ND, but I did marry a lovely lady with the surname "Cronin." I'm sure my father-in-law would have been fast friends with Fr. Ed (as he has been with dozens of priests over the past 7 decades, including many years of night school at a Catholic University).

[Mary in Ohio]

A Baptist minister I had to interact with back in my newspaper days referred to them as "reformed Catholics." And a friend of mine who was "raised Catholic" and ended up in a rather high position with the Unitarians said that a high number of Jews, Catholics, and Atheists become Unitarians. (I have no idea what ex-Baptists gravitate to.Or whether "Atheist" should be capitalized like the other particular belief systems are.)

And yes - the center fielder didn't even look around.

[Mike Peterson]

I'm going to give Matt a lot of credit for teeing up the ball I hit. Not only, as noted, did he not clutter the commentary with a lot of personal baggage, but he went beyond an observational gag to make a quiet point with a real barb to it.

I can build on stuff like that all day. And I think that's where real power comes from in art -- rather than making strident points yourself, you plant little bomblets and then let them go off on their own timing.

As noted recently, the difference between Salvador "Look at me!" Dali and Marc "Let me tell you a story" Chagall.