to Benedict XVI

Dear Mr. Pope Benedict #16:

You read a speech on the first day of this new year of 2013 in which you condemned modern capitalism and the injustices it perpetuates. While giving this speech, you were likely wearing a silken robe and fancy hat, the price of which could have fed a thousand starving children for a month. While listening to your speech, the army of soft-skinned and corpulent men who serve as your bishops and cardinals were likely patting themselves on the backs for deciding to join one of the greediest and least-transparent organizations ever established; as they listened to you lament the death of kindness and generosity, these minions were likely having the lint brushed from their tailored suits and getting second helpings of rich and hearty meals while just outside their doorsteps children scraped and begged and died of curable diseases.

Instead of showing the world what it means to sacrifice by selling the tons of gold you and your henchmen continue to horde within your churches' gilded walls and using the proceeds thereof to fight poverty and gender inequality in all corners of the globe, you deny women the right to join the clergy and spend time writing books about how many donkeys might have witnessed the birth of a dark-skinned, wiry-haired manchild. If you were truly a man of god, you would not bellyache about the greed of others while your Catholic church sits on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of real estate and innumerable works of priceless art – you and yours would be out in the streets with dirt under your fingernails working tirelessly day and night to realize Jesus' lessons of frugality, love, and self-sacrifice.

I, too, am guilty of not doing enough to help my fellow man. However, I do not command the attention of a billion devoted believers across the globe, adherents who do just enough to satisfy their consciouses without truly impacting their finances, followers who blindly heap praises upon you, their debauchee-in-chief, a pontiff who dresses in golden threads and perambulates on luxurious carpets in earthy palaces that are filled with the opulent evidence of a millennium of self-aggrandizement. In my early teens, I met your predecessor, the Polish fellow named John Paul II. At one point, he wiped his thumb across my forehead; at the time, I thought it swell to have been blessed by a pope; now, however, I realize just how little his gesture meant, just how hollow his and your words are, and just how much you, Herr Ratzinger, are to blame for the sadness and privation we experience today. Shame on you, for your hypocrisy, and for having the power to do much but insisting on doing little.

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