The New Pope and Feminism

I've known a number of Catholics in my life.  

It always astonishes me to meet Catholics who are intelligent, educated, and modern, especially those of the female variety.

I pose to them a simple question:  Do you think men are superior to women?

I do not think this to be true, and usually they don't either.  We are all equal creatures under the eyes of God.

But wait… why can't women be priests?  Are they not prepared to receive God's holy knowledge?  

Why are testicles and a penis a prerequisite for knowing The Divine, and spreading The Divine to our human species? 

Among other things, The Catholic Church is completely sexist.  It is a relic of an old way of thinking and living, where women stayed home and made babies while men did more noble things.  

The media coverage of the newly "elected" Pope upsets me.  The day that a female Pope is elected is the day that Catholicism deserves to make the newspapers in a positive way.  

But that will never happen…

Is it not the time we take a strong stance against archaic, sexist, racist, and classist thinking in our culture?  Is it not the time we acknowledge how marvelous, miraculous, and special human life is, and abandon systems of thought, like Catholicism (and religion), that run contrary to this?   

Call me a liberal, a polemic, a hippy, an atheist, a Marxist, a feminist… for I embrace one label, and that is, a Humanist.  And I see the sexism, pedophilia, ethnocentrism, and corruption of the Catholic Church to be anti-humanist.  And I plead to you, my brothers and sisters, to stand up against such things.