Brazzil

You mean onanists don't you? And your premise as to the onanistic soul of America is at best specious and at worst vapid. Your disrespect ie. 'cannonizing a charlatan' is churllish and is less critical analysis rather than some personal psychological cant of your own experience with the church. That you were able to 'free your loins' would seem pubescent, except you have long ago transcended the age of pubescence. You seem in the first seventeen years of your academics attained a certain lucidity regardless of the source of your schooling and that you transcended it is certainly not unique. There is no one so anti Catholic than an ex Catholic. Your personal condemnation which you mask as academic criticism, offers criticism without solution. It would be better if the Papacy would become financially involved with Brazilian education, demanding attendence, under penalty of 'eternal damnation',(and ignorance and poverty is a form of eternal damnation) than to, by its abeyance, contribute to a continued misery of ignorance and its consequential poverty. It is better to attend a school run by educated Jesuits than to run rampant in a neo liberal pseudo intellectual liberal hedonism. Then when they reach the age of your enlightenment they too could shed the shakles of lineality of thought and 'free their loins' though the freeing of ones mind is a greater freedom. It is better to go to school, than not. If the Papacy would contribute to the educaation of the millions of Brazilians that are damned to an intellectual illiteracy as a consequence of fear of Catholic totalitarianism, propagandized into a failed philosophy of liberalism, and its consequence of ignorance and poverty. The Pope did not excommunicate anyone. He stated that we excommunicate ourselves by our behavior, making ourselves unfit to partake of the eucarist. It is better to attempt to achieve the impossibility of absolute (in this case) Christian morality than to dismiss it as historically irrelevant, anachronistic. It is better to be seventy five percent moral than one hundred percent immoral. The Pope's political cant seemed more an admonishment to the political powers that be than a Hitlarian dictum. It is better to strive to a moral imperative and fail than to abandon it to a liberal hedonism. The inclination to divinity is as old as man, as well as his failure to attain it. The father lectures out of love to his children a path to happiness, to joy, to meaning. But what son does not resent the Freudian father and the judgement of irrelevency. It does not negate that which is positive to the human condition. Let the Papacy invest in Brazil, in its education, its poverty, its political inequality.
Let the Pope speak to the silent listeners of Government, and in some small way stir the conscious of those that can indeed change the lives of millions of people, but do not.

Letting your personal religious past, pride and predudice seep in to what is supposed to be serious writing is highly unprofessional. Using your own example of the dog, your logic, instead of being transparent, is as yellow as a dog's hind leg.

The catholic church sucks big!!! All religion sucks!! It is the opiate of the masses. Just look at the world today. The "saint" is just another doll for people to worship.