I am struck, while watching the Pope, clad in his outlandish medieval garb, speaking to reporters from the deck of a jet aircraft winging him 500 miles per hour, 35,000 feet high above planet Earth, or addressing the Brazilian throngs from a stage backlit by giant plasma screens generally used by rock concerts, that he is an anachronistic curiosity, a bizarre relic, a peculiarity of the sort once found only in old fashioned traveling carnivals. He is a man transported by the time machine of history into an era that has already left him far behind. The people of the 21st century are willing to keep him around because he makes them feel comfortable but they are no longer willing to organize the trajectory of their concerns or lives by his once divine dictates. He and what he represents is a mere shadow of former power and greatness. His influence waining, it is only a matter of time before modernity--that thumbing colossus that transplants living organs from one host to another, collides subatomic particles, and flies humans and robot emessaries to other planetary bodies--cuts the withering and atrophied umbilical and says, "You had your time, but we can take it from here now."

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