Holy Orders

I make no apologies for today's blip, despite the general antipathy from various blippers on this site to matters religious.

Having been imbued from an early age with a Church of Scotland outlook on life, at the moment I am neither fish nor fowl, so to speak, but still retain many presbyterian hang ups, depending on how you look at it.
My Roman Catholic friends have many, many more hang ups, so I still feel a little more relaxed than them I think.

Although I view the Vatican's rules on abortion and contraception with ill disguised contempt and the child abuse by priests with total disgust, I did feel the urge to see the spiritual head of the Roman Catholic church in person on Scottish soil.

I felt it was an historic state occasion not only from the point of view of a meeting with the Queen, the head of the Church of England, on my Scottish doorstep, but for the very fact that whatever I and other non Catholics think, he is the leader of about 2 billion Roman Catholics world wide and, the big and, he was going to be driving near the Dower House on his way from Holyrood to have lunch with Cardinal Keith O'Brien at Morningside.

Of course, by the time the Popemobile arrived at Bruntsfield, the Pontiff had exhausted his waving and was slumped in his chair hoping to have his lunch pronto. However the Cardinal was still up for it, and waved his tartan stole as he passed, with a liitle -boy -enjoying -himself look.
By all accounts he had these tartan stoles secreted under his cassock to avoid bureaucracy and produced then once safely in the Popemobile.
He seems to me to be a man of fun and mischief with a wicked gleam in his eye and I bet he has a few rowdy parties to his name.
All this must be in contrast to the Pope who has the reputation of being a serious academic with none of the charisma of Pope John Paul who visitd Scotland 28 years ago.

I hope their lunch wasn't too dull. I bet it won't have been if Cardinal O'Brien had anything to do with it.