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.

Can a sense of irony be essential to a sense of religion?   Kent Hayden, a newly graduated and entirely non-accidental theologist, argues exactly that today over at the Huffington Post (full article here).

Taking off from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s October 30 Rally to Restore Sanity — which seems to have made a lot of people feel quite good, despite the fact that its small-format TV-studio brand of irony was clearly an uncomfortable fit on the large open stage of the Washington Mall — Hayden ends up with this mini-manifesto:

Stewart and Colbert exploded the absurd in our political discourse so that a satirical generation can take the future of our country seriously. It is unclear what exactly that will look like going forward, but in the moment, it felt like a quarter-million people smiling broadly in the October sun.

If we were to explode the absurd in religion, if we exposed the fallacy of our reductive handling of systems of understanding the deep questions of life, would the same kind of sincerity emerge from our irony?

If Generation Irony came to our houses of worship carrying satirical signs that read “God Hates Figs,” and we laughed at clips of the simplistic and divisive rhetoric that makes us ashamed to call ourselves Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, atheists or whatever, and if we sang familiar songs together and listened past the demonization of the other, what would happen? If we exposed all the things that make our religious discourse absurd — all the squawking about other peoples’ sins, all the fighting about which language to use to describe the ineffable, all the simple-minded conflation of poetry and prose, and the universalizing of the particular — I suspect that there would be enough sincere goodwill floating in the wake of our laughter to give us goosebumps again, and to help us take seriously the future of our religious traditions.

Never mind for now that Hayden seems to imagine that satire and irony are the same thing.   (Satire attacks from the outside, while irony works its effect from within, subtly subverting the false premises of its target.)   He still has an excellent point.

The subversive power of irony applied to what passes for religion in these televangelist Bible/Quran-thumping times can help us see past the kindergarten caricature of the divine in which God is cast as the class bully dictating what we should love or hate — a small-minded god for small-minded people.   And once we’re past that caricature, we might be more open to the idea that what we so casually call ‘God’ is merely a reductive shorthand for something that is, by definition, beyond human comprehension.

Just about every religious person I respect — and there are many of them — comes equipped with a healthy sense of irony.  How else can one be both religious and intelligent in today’s polarizing world, where slogans pass for thought and certainty replaces humility?  How else escape the dehumanizing trap of hating people in the name of loving God?

The fact that humorless bigots loudly proclaim their piety is no reason to cede religion to them, just as there’s no reason to cede the United States to Tea Partiers loudly proclaiming their crude sense of patriotism.   If some people like their religion small and petty, I pity them.  For the rest of us,  it’s time to polish up our sense of irony and admire the accidental theology of a sign that reads ‘God Hates Signs.’

What exactly is a mensch?  I’m lucky enough to know quite a few people whom I honor with that title.  But the full appreciation of  menschlichkeit – best translated, Stephen-Colbert-style, as menschiness – seems to be elusive.  This is somewhat dismaying.  In fact, this is very dismaying.  So here goes.

As usual, idiot that I am, I went first to the OED.  I mean, only a schlemiel would look up a Yiddish word in the British crown jewel of English as she should be spoke.  Still, look I did, and here’s what I found:

In Jewish usage: a person of integrity or rectitude; a person who is morally just, honest, or honourable.

Okay, so it’s hardly a surprise that the OED just doesn’t get it.   Menschiness is admirable, sure, but bland?  Never!  Where’s the warmth, the laughter, the big-heartedness, the sheer vitality and generosity of spirit of menschiness?

Surely I’d find them in Leo Rosten’s Joys of Yiddish.  Surely?

Someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character.  The key to being ‘a real mensch’ is nothing less than character, rectitude, dignity, a sense of what is right, responsible, decorous.

Rectitude?  Decorousness?  Was Rosten actually trying to  make Yiddish boring?  Was he aiming for a Victorian drawing-room version of menschlichkeit?  Pfah!  Getting a bit desperate, perhaps, I turned to Wikipedia:

Mensch (Yiddish: מענטש mentsh; German: Mensch, for “human being”) means “a person of integrity and honor”… In Yiddish, from which the word has migrated into American English… a mensch is a particularly good person, like “a stand-up guy”…

In modern Israeli Hebrew, the phrase ben adam (בן אדם) is used as an exact translation of mensch. Though it usually means simply “a person” (literally, “son of Adam”) in general, it is used to mean “a nice guy” in the same way as mensch. This usage may have developed by analogy with Yiddish or by adaptation from Arabic (from which colloquial Israeli Hebrew takes much vocabulary), in which bani adam (بني آدم) has the same meaning.

Well, at least that’s an improvement, with German, Hebrew, and Arabic all thrown in for good measure and to keep your head spinning.  But it still doesn’t leave anyone any the wiser.  “A nice guy”?   Talk about lame.  Not that anything in the Wiki entry is wrong;  it just misses out on the full meaning of the word.

So faute de mieux (why not toss a soupcon of French into the mix while we’re about it?) here’s my idea of menschiness (and of course — especially since we’re speaking Yiddish — feel free to cavil, amend, expand, ridicule, or suggest something better):

A mensch is what I call a real human being — one with a fully functioning heart and soul and an infectious warmth and generosity of spirit.

That’s not a bad start.  But to get the whole of it…  well, that’s the thing with Yiddish — it’s hell to explain.  The one thing I’m sure of:  Whether you’re Jewish, Muslim, or Christian, Hindu or Buddhist, pantheist or atheist, animist or agnostic, male, female or any combination of the two, is totally irrelevant:  if you’re reading this and smiling in recognition, welcome to the human race — you’re a mensch.