In today’s email edition of the New York Times, the teaser to Maureen Dowd’s “Should There Be an Inquisition for the Pope?” reads:

The Catholic Church, which gave up its credibility for Lent, can’t hide behind smoke and mystique as it faces a cascade of child sexual abuse cases.

I’m no Dowd fanboy, but the Lent line made me laugh out loud. I’ve heard of people giving up beer for Lent—or French fries, talking shit about other people—all manner of inventive sins-petite.

But the idea of the Church giving up its final spasmodic grip on authority—waffling on the issue of sexual abuse, even at the level of the Vicar of Christ himself—is just too funny considering Easter is nigh, and the bunnies and Impressionistic eggs are out in force, awaiting the returning smile of zombie Jesus in his world-ending second incarnation (like those bosses in the Final Fantasy games who morph into harder bosses as soon as you think you’ve beat them).

Really, this Pope news is sad-funny—like a burned-down last match next to an unlighted cigarette. I wonder what Ross Douthat would make of it. Have we naughty Americans syncretized away the Holy Mother Church’s authority (as a meme, as a matrix for creating societies and viewing our world)? Or has the Church done the damning work quite on its own?

But the problem with the Church isn’t lack of pluralism. Plenty of priests are well aware what year it is and what sort of world (pluralist, global) they live in. The problem is image control. The meme has gone wild. It’s too big to fail, and too big to control, and too big to rope back into the corral. The fact is, press releases from the horse’s mouth matter. The Pope matters.

For him to have hemmed and hawed on clear-cut child abuse… I’ll leave my assessment to a rude paraphrase of amateur powermonger and professional asshole Winston Churchill:

“I may be drunk, sir. But you’re an idiot. And tomorrow I’ll be sober.”