VERSION|0.5.1|NAME|Dinah|DATE|1375095346|CONTENT|I have no doubt there are lay Catholics, nuns and priests who as individuals or in small groups do much good working amongst the poorest people on the planet, in slums, ghettos and remote rural locations.  All credit to them.  However, the current Pope’s stance on the ‘poor’ would carry more credibility if his Church would drop its war on women, in the form of denying them contraceptive and abortion rights and access to the priesthood.  Women and children bear the brunt of world poverty because they are powerless, often poorly educated or not educated at all, and women who are constantly bearing children they are unable to feed are in no position to do anything about alleviating their poverty.  If they were given the opportunity to get an education and limit their families this would make a very real, global rather than localised, difference to levels of poverty and over-population.

Celibate male priests can have no real understanding of the problems families can encounter, and the straight ones can end up, consciously or otherwise, punishing women for being forbidden objects of temptation.  By being barred from the priesthood, women have no voice in the Catholic hierarchy.  Unless the new Pope is prepared to push for real reform and risk upsetting the reactionary forces in the Vatican nothing will really change.  Tweedledum may have replaced Tweedledee, but apart from a bit of window-dressing the differences between their policies will be barely noticeable.
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