Is the Pope needlessly dividing the Christians with his assertion that Catholicism is the one true religion? I went back and read Pope Benedict's Without Roots, published last year, and I see that the Pope completely understands that the real threat comes not from Protestantism or even other religions but from an aggressive secular ideology that seeks to discredit God and drive religion out of the public square.

Pope Benedict likes to stir things up. Last year it was his Regensburg address in which he quoted a Byzantine emperor to the effect that Islam was a religion of violence. There was a big uproar in the Muslim world. The Pope pointed out that he was merely quoting an ancient source. Soon he had met with leading Muslim clerics and praised Islam for the habits of devotion and prayer that it cultivates in its faithful. The Pope seems to have no trouble distinguishing between traditional Muslims and radical Muslims.

Models, like small children at adult dinner parties, should be seen but not heard. But supermodel Gisele Bundchen is apparently suffering from Tyra-envy. Recently she took on Pope Benedict and offered some sage comments on current social issues.

Challenging the Pope's appeal to young people to defer sex until marriage, Bundchen said, "Today no one is a virgin when they get married. Show me someone who's a virgin." I bet I can meet Bundchen's dare, although I don't want to be the one doing the research. Even so, Bundchen is confusing facts with values here. She is describing how, in his view, people do act, while the Pope is talking about how people should act. Bundchen's logic is analogous to someone who calls for an end to speeding laws because "no one goes the speed limit. Show me someone who doesn't speed."

Next, Bundchen addresses contraception. "I think it should be compulsory to use a contraceptive." Compulsory. I nominate Bundchen for contraception czar to enforce this rule. Fortunately the technology is now available to install cameras in every bedroom. Finally, abortion. Bundchen wants to know what's the big deal? If a woman "thinks she doesn't have the money or the emotional condtion to raise a child, why should she give birth?" For Bundchen the unborn child simply doesn't exist. She is like one of those plantation mistresses who couldn't understand the hubub about slavery. "There's work to be done and none of us wants to pick cotton, so why not make the slaves do it?"

Hey, I don't like to pick on someone so cute. But precisely because she's a supermodel, the young girls listen to people like Bundchen. Can't she find a better cause, or simply walk the catwalk and smile?

A 27-year-old German man managed to jump onto Pope Benedict's uncovered popemobile in a dramatic breach of security which has triggered fears for the safety of President George Bush when he visits the Vatican on Friday.

As reported, it seems like Pope Benedict is condemning Marxism and capitalism with equal intensity. "Pope Blames Marxism, Capitalism for Problems," reads the AP headline for the pope's speech in Brazil concluding his five-day tour through South America.

But a closer look reveals that the Pope is condemning Marxism and socialism inherently, while he is only condemning capitalism for making possible certain undesirable cultural and moral consequences. In particular, socialism leads to an equalization of misery while capitalism makes possible materialism, secularism and moral decadence. Who can deny that the pope is right on these counts?

Radical libertarians, I guess. These folks seem to believe that what the market does is always right. These fellows will be happy to see the Pope slam Marxism, which "not only causes economic and ecological destruction but also a painful destruction of the spirit." But other things the pope said may give them pause. The Pope also warned of a "weakening of Christian life in society," produced he said by "a worrying degradation of personal dignity through drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness." The Pope also faulted "secularism" and "hedonism" for supplanting religious and ethical convictions.

Something big is going on in South America. In a word, Pentecostalism. A recent study by the Pew Research Center shows that there are now half a billion Pentecostals in the world. Half a billion! That makes Pentecostalism the second biggest group within Christianity, after Roman Catholics. And the numbers of the Pentecostals continue to swell in countries like Brazil and Chile. These countries were once Catholic but are now divided between Catholics and Pentecostals.

The Pope is visiting South America, where he is delivering some well-administered chastisement to politicians and interest groups that support abortion. Some have accused the Pope of "meddling," but what they don't recognize is that the international left from Europe and America is very active in South America, attempting to liberalize the abortion laws that have been democratically adopted in those countries.

My post on limbo has attracted a good deal of intelligent comment, but what puzzles me is how atheists who believe in all kinds of immaterial reality (free will, consciousness, the unconscious, human rights and so on) profess utter amazement when religious concepts like the soul and immorality are mentioned. "So where is this soul?" these radical empiricists demand to know. Yet at the same time they talk about "self-discovery" as if there was a certain kind of "self" hiding inside of them. They speak of their "unconscious" as if it were observable under a microscope. In short, these empiricists are phony realists whose empiricism only seems to kick in when religious ideas are mentioned.

In this context several of them like to respond to theological concepts by asking, "And when will the church resolve the issue of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" No reason to write Pope Benedict about that. For the benefit of humanity, I am going to settle this issue once and for all. Angels, like dreams, are immaterial things. They don't have a bodily existence. Consequently they do not take up actual space. Therefore an infinite number of angels can dance on the head of a pin. Of course the atheist may laugh and say that angels don't exist. But equally obviously the atheist doesn't know that. His premise that they don't is just as faith-based as the believer's premise that they do. And given the premise that there are spiritual beings called angels, my conclusion follows inevitably. You see, my atheist friends, it's a simple matter of logic.

Most people reading the headline, "Pope Gets Rid of Limbo" are probably thinking, "What a killjoy! We really liked that game." They have in mind, of course, the game invented in Trinidad in which people shimmy their way to an ever-lowering pole and then try and propel their bodies, facing up and legs first, under the bar. It's a lot of fun to watch, especially when there are girls doing it, and alcohol is involved.

This type of limbo has not been outlawed by Pope Benedict, although I am sure he is ambivalent about it. Rather, the Pope has approved a theological commission's recommendation that the Catholic Church get rid of it's longstanding concept of limbo--a place, mentioned nowhere in the Bible, where babies go if they die before being baptized. Limbo has never been a formal doctrine of the Catholic Church, but it was considered sufficiently standard to be included in pre-communion lessons in Catholic schools around the world.

I was scornful of the idea when I first learned it in Catholic cathechism. But over the years I saw that it makes a kind of sense. The Christian idea is that we humans are born with original sin, what Immanuel Kant called the "crooked timber of humanity." This warped disposition is part of our nature, and therefore Catholics held that even newborns have it, and how can anyone who has an unrepented sinful nature go to heaven? Hell seemed like too harsh an alternative for little ones who had done nothing wrong, and so the Catholic Church invented limbo.