"As if they can barely see him…"

Irish writer John Waters, on Pope Benedict and the zeitgeist:

“When you are invited on to a radio programme, all they want to talk about is sex abuse,” he said. And the Pope – whose writings on beauty, truth, on the nature of man, on Christ, he finds absolutely gripping and of huge importance – is caught up in a drama where no one really listens to what he has to say or takes any notice when it is explained to them.

“They’ll just repeat what they are told – that the Pope insulted Muslims or whatever, and they don’t want to know any more. They don’t want to be challenged. I remember when he spoke out about condoms and Africa – well, I’d been in Uganda and knew that what he said was true, and the facts on the ground there proved it. But when presented with this information on a radio debate, people just didn’t listen, didn’t want to know.

“And all of this is being conducted in an arena which is provided by the media, so in a sense it’s hostile. I don’t mean that there is a deliberate attempt to make it so – I just mean that all the assumptions are entirely secular.”

It’s almost comic, he noted. “No one wants to read what the Pope has actually said, his speeches, his books – they’ll even tell you that they don’t need to do so. They have just been given a narrative, and they accept it and stick to it, and that’s that. There’s no openness, no opportunity to dialogue.”

And…

One major problem, he believes, is that the generation of people now generally running things in the West, the “baby boomers”, have managed to combine both the holding of power with the language of opposition.

“They’ve been in charge for a good while now, and they have imposed their views – a limited vision of freedom and a specific view on human sexuality – all expressed as being very idealistic. This makes it harder for a younger generation to find its own voice,” he argued.

Yeah, you’ll want to read it all.