On modern day super-villainy
It seems to me that the Vatican is missing a trick in the fall-out from its sex-abuse scandal. Having successfuly walked away from a planet-wide paedophile ring while suffering barely a scratch, it should think about branching out. It turns out that Italy’s most wretched hive of scum and villainy wasn’t the Mafia. In its Crimen sollicitationis, the Vatican even has it’s own version of Omertà.
So why not global-scale armed robbery, drug-dealing or, even, humanitarian interventions? (That last one’s a difficult one to pull off but it currently also carries no penalties for the perpetrator.) Hell, when levels of impunity are running this high, why not go all the way? A satellite weapon made of diamonds perhaps, or a space station ready to bombard the planet and wipe it clean with poisons made from a rare orchid?
Then, once the dust has setteled over devasted capital cities and a Catholic master-race rules the Earth, Benedict XVI can put his hand-made Prada knock-offs up, safe in the knowledge that no-one is going to come knocking (other than the victims who can be fobbed off with a piss-poor apology).
(It also occurs to me that there’s something familiar about successive Popes’ taste for belated apologies – Hello Galilieo! You see it from other leaders as well. It’s how Gordon Brown can apologies for children abused from the 1920s to the 1960s while not uttering a word about children suffering at the sharp end of his own policies. That apology is for someone else to make much later on. Clearly New Labour and the Vatican have much to learn from each other. A league of super villains is surely called for.)



