My campaign to be Pope starts here

I was surprised and delighted to discover on the BBC website a couple of hours ago that I am fully eligible to be elected Pope next month. It seems that there are no boring requirements about having to be an ordained priest, or a Bishop, or a Cardinal, and you don't even have to attend Mass every week (which is just as well, because I haven't been to church since the Easter Vigil last year). Being a baptised male Catholic is quite sufficient - which, frighteningly, makes me a more important Catholic than Cristina Odone.

Well, clearly this is the type of exciting opportunity that I simply can't afford to pass up. Not only would I become leader of the world's biggest religion, I would also be a Head of State, an absolute monarch, and I would get to see my head on stamps and coins and so on. So for any members of the College of Cardinals who may be passing by (hello Keith), here is my hastily-assembled mini-manifesto for my forthcoming tenure as Supreme Pontiff.

1) Immediately upon being elected, I will renounce my papal infallibility. This will head off the risk of any further embarrassing additions to Catholic dogma along the lines of Pius XII's bizarre insistence that the Virgin Mary was bodily lifted up into heaven at the end of her life.

2) I will authorise the ordination of both female and married priests. Let's face it guys, it's going to happen one day anyway, so instead of being dragged into it kicking and screaming in 700 years' time, let's just get it over with and have a sandwich.

3) Cardinals will no longer be appointed, but instead elected by Catholic congregations. If Cardinals get to elect Popes, it's only fair that we little people get to elect the Cardinals. This would also of course end the destructive feedback loop of conservative Popes appointing conservative Cardinals, who then go on to elect yet another conservative Pope. Now, I'm guessing that the objection to this idea will be that the feedback loop constitutes "the will of God", but just hang on a cotton-pickin' minute here. When Catholics receive the Sacrament of Confirmation, they have the wisdom and understanding of the Holy Spirit bestowed upon them. So it's high time that we trusted the Holy Spirit to do his job, and allowed him to guide the electoral choices of rank-and-file Catholics. It may well turn out after the first batch of elections that the Holy Spirit has rather more liberal views than we previously suspected, but so be it.

4) Elections for Cardinals will naturally be conducted by Single Transferable Vote.

5) The ban on contraception will be lifted, thus extending the life expectancy of millions in the developing world, and putting an end to one of the most ludicrous pieces of Catholic doctrine. As things stand, if you make the human decision to use contraception, you are thwarting God's will that a new life should commence, but if you make the equally human decision not to have sex in the first place, you are apparently embodying God's will that a new life should not commence. There are intelligent badgers in Drumnadrochit who can see the slight flaw in that logic.

6) Masturbation and 'impure thoughts' will no longer be a sin, making life considerably less confusing and miserable for hundreds of millions of teenagers.

7) Divorce and gay marriage will both be authorised.

8) More young people will somehow be persuaded to go to church. I freely admit that I have no idea how I will actually achieve this, and a judge-led inquiry may be needed to come up with suggestions. However, I solemnly pledge that whatever approach is taken, it will be more sophisticated than the traditional one of "let's have more guitars".

9) The Vatican City will enter the Eurovision Song Contest.

Now, obviously this manifesto has the shortcoming of having been dreamt up over the last ten minutes (for some reason I'd never previously considered what I would do if elected Pope), so if anyone has any constructive suggestions, I'd be very happy to tweak it.

Allowing married priests would be a good first step for the Vatican

Having followed some of this year's Irish general election campaign, and indeed to some extent the 2007 campaign as well because I happened to be on holiday in Donegal at the time, I'd never have thought Enda Kenny was capable of delivering a speech that would make anyone's blood run faster. He certainly proved me wrong last week with this devastating attack on the Vatican -

"...for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual-abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See, to frustrate an Inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three decades ago.

And in doing so, the Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism...the narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.

The rape and torture of children were downplayed or 'managed' to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and 'reputation'.

Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St Benedict's 'ear of the heart'......the Vatican's reaction was to parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer.

This calculated, withering position being the polar opposite of the radicalism, humility and compassion upon which the Roman Church was founded."

The Vatican later recalled its ambassador to Dublin, and issued a statement that expressed surprise at certain "excessive reactions". Personally, I'd have said the Taoiseach's comments marked the end of a decades-long under-reaction. But will the church now be shamed into getting its house in order at last? It's highly unlikely because of two basic aspects of the nature of the institution -

1) Catholics can't reform their own church. I know from my own experience that there are many liberal Catholics out there (my mother is one), but unfortunately their combined voices count for absolutely nought. Their function in the church is not to stand up for what they believe in, but instead to listen and understand why they are wrong, and then to shut up. That's the case both at micro-level (individual parishes) and at macro-level. It's the quintessential self-perpetuating hierarchy - the Pope appoints Cardinals who agree with him, and the Cardinals elect a Pope who agrees with them, and nobody else has any power at all. This lack of accoutability isn't supposed to matter, because the appointments are really "made by God". Well, frankly you don't have to disbelieve in God to recognise that for the self-serving mumbo-jumbo that it is. Probably the only way anything will ever change for the better is if someone "does a Kinnock" - ie. gets elected as Pope on the basis of traditionalist views, but then turns out to be a reformer.

2) Priests have to be both male and celibate. Now, there's nothing wrong with being either male or celibate (indeed I've had a degree of involuntary experience with both over the years), but it does mean you're selecting from a very narrow gene pool. The fact that such a disproportionate number of priests turn out to be abusers leads to the obvious suspicion that a certain category of person is being attracted to a celibate "profession" for the wrong reasons, and if that's the case surely the first thing you need to do is urgently broaden recruitment. OK, female ordination probably isn't going to happen for centuries (if ever), but given that married priests are already allowed in certain limited circumstances it really is hard to understand why the retention of the requirement for celibacy is such a red-line for the Vatican.

Pope continues to duck the core issue

It's of course very encouraging to see the Pope finally give some ground on his previously absolutist stance on condom use.  But it's more than a little troubling that he very carefully singled out "male prostitutes" as his example of the exceptional circumstances in which it might be justified.  It seems logical to assume that most prostitutes and their clients are perfectly well aware that they are straying well beyond the strictures of the church anyway, so would always have been less likely to be influenced by the teachings on condoms.  The biggest single problem with the previous stance was in fact the way it discouraged the use of condoms by Catholics within marriage, even when it's absolutely essential to protect the health of one partner.

So why has Pope Benedict chosen to leave a degree of ambiguity over the really core issue?  I can only assume it's because any acceptance of contraception within wedlock, for whatever reason, would implicitly concede the point that married sex can be 'recreational', and doesn't happen for the sole purpose of producing children.  If so, the fact that people's lives are still being put at risk simply to uphold a world view that is so totally and demonstrably divorced from the way the real world works - and always has worked - just beggars belief.