Titles I Wish I'd Written: "The Red Prada Shoe Drops?"

"The red Prada shoe drops?": Andrew Sullivan, commenting on the story that appeared in the news yesterday (here's John Hooper in The Guardian) that Benedict resigned after having received a dossier compiled by three cardinals he had commissioned to look into the Vatileaks scandal, who informed him of a gay cabal in the Vatican.

Andrew Sullivan adds:

Hmm. Is the Vatican’s grotesque hypocrisy on the issue of homosexuality part of this story? We don’t yet know.

In a hermetically sealed organization rife with internal divisions and outright power struggles between factions, where control of massive sums of money is the ultimate prize, anything is possible. And, to my way of thinking, "anything" includes even the leaking of bogus reports that try to blame the considerable problems of that hermetically sealed organization's leadership on hidden gay cabals.

On the other hand, as I've said frequently here in the past, I've never encountered any flavor of homophobia more toxic than the kind that emanates from the Catholic clerical club. And I know from personal experience that it's perfectly possible for someone in that club to be both gay himself and bitterly vindictive towards others who are gay and self-accepting.

And so I think it's best to adopt a wait-and-see approach to this report--to wait and see if we ever obtain any real information at all about what's going on inside this hermetically sealed, power-hungry, intently homophobic but homoerotically bonded all-male club, as the transition to a new pope takes place.

P.S. Later in the day: I'm just now seeing that Colleen Baker wrote about this story yesterday at Enlightened Catholicism, with her usual insightfulness. Her posting is here, and I highly recommend it.