That headline isn’t mine — it’s courtesy of Stephen Colbert, the Comedy Central host of The Colbert Report, and a practicing Catholic.  His word for Ratzinger/Benedict’s resignation: “popectomy.”

I find myself in the same bind as Colbert.  It seems like I should have all sorts of incredibly pertinent things to say about Ratzi’s helicoptering off into the twilight, but the papacy has become so impertinent that the only real question that concerns me is this:

What happens to the nifty red shoes?

Prada shoes, they say.  Ratzi’s favorites.  To be left behind as he he now declares himself just “a humble pilgrim.”  (Gagging sounds heard offstage.)

How humble?  Well, since he’s said he’ll live out his remaining days “hidden from the world,” I’m assuming he means “hidden” in the same sense as the Mahdi, the messiah figure of Shiism, who disappeared into a cave twelve centuries ago and who will return at the end of days.

Of course Ratzi has to give up the red shoes.  Who could hide in red shoes?

Especially since he has such a lot to hide from.

What’s really puzzling is that anyone still takes the papacy seriously.  The media are hyping up the election of a new pope for obvious reasons.  Men in fancy dress, an electoral race, cloaked ambition, secret balloting, colored smoke — it all makes for good theater.  The fact that so many of those involved in all this are deeply corrupt gives an extra thrill to it all.  Whether it’s actual pedophilia or “merely” covering it up;  closet homosexuality by public homophobes;  unveiled misogyny displayed in the inquisition of nuns;  plummeting numbers of priests unable to marry a woman, let alone a man;  and now, a secret report on a sex and blackmail scandal within the Vatican walls — how could the media resist such a totally sick soap opera?

What we’re seeing is a huge fundamentalist institution deep into the process of self-destruction.  It’s imploding right in front of us.  The weasel has definitely popped, and the infallible is about as fallible as it can get.

If the Roman Catholic church doesn’t undergo thorough reform, right now, predicts the famed Swiss theologian Hans Kung, it will “fall into a new ice age and run the danger of shrinking into an increasingly irrelevant sect.”  He cites a recent poll in Germany showing that 85% of Catholics support marriage for priests, and 75% support ordination of women.

Religious historian Garry Wills’ new book Why Priests? – A Failed Tradition goes further and advocates abolishing the priesthood altogether.  Not only did Christianity begin without a priesthood, he points out, but it actively opposed it.  And rank-and-file priests are speaking up too, like Tony Flannery in Dublin, suspended by the Vatican for refusing to adhere to church orthodoxy on contraception and homosexuality, or Roy Bourgeois in the US, who was excommunicated for supporting the ordination of women.

But all this is far too pertinent.  So let’s take refuge in the impertinent and get back to the issue at hand:  what’ll happen to those hand-made red shoes?  Will they be bronzed like baby booties?  Will they be displayed in an air-conditioned glass relics case?   Will they be auctioned off on eBay?

Fundamentalists of all religious stripes, take note:  this is how imposed orthodoxy ends — not with a bang, but with a red-bootied whimper.

Even as the Catholic Church shields and panders to child rapists masquerading as priests (I use the word “panders” advisedly, since so many of the children are altar boys),  it’s gone to battle against its own nuns.

The Apostolic Visitation currently in progress is not a new take on the Annunciation.   It’s an investigation of convents and women’s orders in the U.S. inspired by the well-founded suspicion that they’re not all Vatican-kosher.   Essentially, it’s a form of Inquisition.   And yet another sign of how firmly the Church has its finger on the self-destruct button.

Not so long ago, outrage was restricted to feminist Catholics like Mary Hunt, whose article here pulls no punches.   A brief extract:

God knows Catholicism has a gender problem. But the structures of power are so perverse as to be dangerous. More than mandatory celibacy, homosexuality, all-male priesthood, and other reasons floated to explain why so many priests abuse children and why so many bishops cover up for them, the monarchical model of power is, to my mind, the major reason why crimes went unchecked and criminals remained in ministry. In a monarchy, there are no checks and balances against power at the highest levels. There is no way to vote the bums out or force them with threats of removal to run institutions in a transparent, indeed legal, way.

Now the outrage is spreading within the Church itself.  Earlier this year, the bishop bums created a ton more of it by censuring the dozens of leaders of women’s Catholic orders (representing tens of thousands of nuns) who signed a letter to Congress supporting the health-care bill.   And then news broke of a critically ill pregnant mother of four told by her doctors in a Catholic hospital in Phoenix  that the only way to save her life was to terminate her 11-week pregnancy.   Sister Margaret McBride, the hospital administrator on duty, convened the Ethics Committee and with the patient’s agreement, approved the procedure.  By doing so, she ensured that the woman lived, that four children still had a mother, and that her Church dug itself still deeper into an apparently bottomless moral cesspool.

It excommunicated her.

So here are two faces of Catholicism:   on the left, the nun who faced what for her was an agonizing choice (reportedly a strong right-to-life advocate, she indeed opted, though not in any way she expected,  for life over death):

And on the right,  the bishop, Thomas Olmsted, who ordered both Sister McBride and her patient to be excommunicated, and threatened to remove recognition (and thus funding) of the hospital as a Catholic institution.

The excommunication seems to be up in the air since it was publicized, though Sister McBride has been “reassigned” within the hospital.   Maybe she’s swabbing floors as punishment.  But what’s needed, as Mary Hunt so cogently advocates, is far more than a clean-up of the Church by women, “as though, being women, they will flap their white veils and make all things new.”   What’s needed isn’t women as bishops, or even, as Maureen Dowd argued in the New York Times, a woman as Pope.  What’s needed is “a new model of church without a pope or anyone else on top…  A democratic, participatory, egalitarian church.”

The irony is that that’s exactly how the church began in the first and second centuries, before power, wealth, and hierarchy took over.   Before it incorporated.   That’s when the Jesus movement was still about liberation and social justice, Mary Magdalene was still the apostle to the apostles, and the least relevant thing about Jesus’ mother was whether she had an intact hymen.

(Postscript:  the day after I posted this, Nick Kristof wrote an op-ed in the NYT with a title I wish I’d thought of:  “Sister Margaret’s Choice.“)