Monday Morning Cage Match X:At long last, apples vs. oranges.

The Cage Match marks its 10th week with this week's matchup, and that calls for something special. And ambitious. What more controversial, diabolical question could we possibly seek to solve than apples vs. oranges? Herewith: Fiona Apple vs. Prince William III of Orange. It's going to be a fight to the finish.

	Fiona Apple	William of Orange
Occupation	Pop singer	Sovereign prince of England
WINNER: William of Orange
Known for	Idiosyncratic lyrics and unusual musical arrangements	Championing the Protestant faith in the face of Catholic French ruler Louis XIV in the 17th century
WINNER: Fiona Apple
First big break	Triple-platinum 1996 debut album Tidal	1670 admission to the Dutch council overseeing the nation's defense budget
WINNER: Fiona Apple
Controversial quote	"This world is bullshit, and you shouldn't model your life on what you think that we think is cool, and what we're wearing and what we're saying."	"Every bullet has its billet."
WINNER: Fiona Apple (William's sounds cooler, but I couldn't figure out what the fuck he was talking about)
Questionable decision	Giving her second album a 90-word title	Restricting the religious freedom of Roman Catholics and non-Christians
WINNER: Fiona Apple
Questionable love interest(s)	"Magnolia" director Paul Thomas Anderson	Two male Dutch courtiers
WINNER: William of Orange (sorry, but "Magnolia" and "There Will Be Blood" really, really sucked)
Current fans	Moody teenagers vacillating between indie-rock hipsterism and goth	Northern Irish Protestants who like holding parades through Catholic areas
WINNER: Tie

FINAL SCORE: Apple 5, Orange 3. The great question is finally settled. You're welcome.

The Friday Random Ten+5 embarks on its latest futile enterprise: trying to make sense of the Catholic church.

This may not be of interest to anyone but us Catholics, and even then it may not be interesting to Catholics in the United States, but last week Pope Benedict XVI rescinded the excommunication of four ultraconservative bishops. And at least one of them, Richard Williamson, is a bit of a head-scratcher. He's vehemently anti-woman and anti-gay, which sadly are not the least bit rare in the modern church hierarchy, but he's so anti-female he doesn't even think women should wear pants, he's a 9/11 Truther, and -- the piece de resistance -- he's a Holocaust denier. Yahtzee!

Now why, pray tell, would the Pope go out of his way to bring a douche like that back into the church? The NYT article says it was to "[reach] out to the far-right" of the church, but there have to be less embarrassing ways of doing that. No, there's got to be some deeper (or perhaps not-all-that-deep-at-all) motive here, and I'm gonna find out what it is. Thus this week's +5 is Five Reasons Pope Benedict Might've Lifted Richard Williamson's Excommunication:



Williamson has a PlayStation 3 and Benedict wants to use it
The Vatican has a Wii, which is pretty awesome, but you can't play Guitar Hero or Guitar Hero II on it, and Benedict doesn't have the instrument attachments anyway. But Williamson has all that stuff, and as someone who's played Rock Band with all the peripherals, I can attest that it's pretty awesome. And I can see how it would be tempting, even to a spiritual leader who's supposed to be above all that stuff.



Williamson has a hot cousin
Again, I can see the temptation here, celibacy notwithstanding. This has been a staple of sitcom plots since the beginning of time, and it's not like anyone in North America cares what the Pope does in his private life to begin with, as long as he's not molesting kids. But she better be real hot to let a Holocaust denier back into the fold is all I'm saying.



Benedict likes Williamson's British accent
Say "I believe there were no gas chambers." Now say it in a British accent. Still sounds crazy and anti-Semitic, but now at least you sound like you were well-bred before you went off the deep end, doesn't it? Maybe that's what reeled Benedict in. If that's all he was after, though, I'd still rather he just start hanging out with Keira Knightley or Catherine Zeta-Jones or something.



Williamson works at a Starbucks so he has an employee discount and he promised Benedict free Starbucks
I dated a Starbucks barista for a (very brief) little while, and during that time I could walk into my local store and get a cafe mocha for fifty cents. A venti mocha, son. So again, I can see the temptation here. Supposedly you can't get a decent cup of coffee in the Vatican to save your life, and this is smack in the middle of espresso country, for crying out loud.

Williamson has pictures of Benedict doing something embarrassing
This is the obvious explanation, of course. But what would be embarrassing enough to warrant something like this? I mean, we already know Benedict was in a Nazi youth organization when he was a little kid and that he favors bright-red Gucci shoes. But what could it be? Certainly with all the controversy over pedophile priests in the last few years, if Benedict had been caught with a boy, we'd know about it. Maybe it was with a girl? Maybe . . . no.



Williamson caught Pope Benedict with Sarah Silverman. It all makes so much sense now.

As Denis Leary once said, "I'm goin' to hell for that bit. And you're allll comin' with me." On that note, the Ten:

1. Dr. Octagon, "Dr. Octagon"
2. Nancy Griffith, "Lookin' for the Time (Working Girl)"
3. OMD, "Electricity"
4. David Holmes, "My Mate Paul"
5. Sting, "All This Time"
6. Dead Milkmen, "Takin' Retards to the Zoo"
7. Pet Shop Boys, "West End Girls" (DJ Hell remix)
8. Richard Cheese, "Sunday Bloody Sunday"
9. OMD, "If You Leave"
10. Pet Shop Boys, "Psychological" (Ewan Pearson vocal remix)

I believe that's the first recorded instance in Internet history of a Friday Random Ten with two OMD songs in it -- mark it down in your diary, folks. But first, throw your own Random Tens (and Pope Benedict conspiracy theories, if you have any) in the comments.

Repudiating broad brushes.

While my mom and I were sitting in church on Good Friday, she noticed something in her missalette, a note printed at the bottom of the page where the Passion started. I don't know whether this is a new thing for the Catholic church, or whether they've been doing this for a while and we just didn't notice it, but here's what the note said:

The message of this liturgy in proclaiming the passion narratives in full is to enable the assembly to see vividly the love of Christ for each person, despite their sins, a love that even death could not vanquish. The crimes during the Passion of Christ cannot be attributed indiscriminately to all Jews of that time, nor to Jews today. The Jewish people should not be referred to as though rejected or cursed, as if this view followed from Scripture. The Church ever keeps in mind that Jesus, his mother Mary, and the Apostles all were Jewish. As the Church has aways held, Christ freely suffered his passion and death because of the sins of all, that all might be saved.

-- Bishops' Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs

That sounds like the kind of thing that might have been laid down in response to the controversy over the film "The Passion of the Christ" and what some interpreted as a tone of anti-Semitism, but whatever the Church's reason for including it, I think it's a good thing -- particularly coming from an institution that was responsible for, you know, that Inquisition thing from a while back.

And if the Catholic Church can issue a decree like this one, maybe it would do all of us some good this Easter season to issue some decrees of our own regarding blanket condemnations of large groups of people for the sins of a few -- f'rinstance, that we won't blame all Muslims for 9/11, and we won't blame all white people for slavery and racial injustice, to name just a couple of examples that have been in the news lately.

Too much to ask? I don't think so.

Oh, Catholic League, it's like I don't even know you anymore!

Despite being Catholic, I'm not a big fan of either the Catholic League or its president, William Donohue. The guy never met a TV camera he wouldn't leap in front of as if he was trying to take a bullet for it, and when he does, it's never over any issue that Jesus actually preached about -- it's always some TV show presenting gay people in too positive a light or something stupid like that.

So anyway, you can probably imagine the thud sound my jaw made when it hit the floor after I read this:

The opening seconds of [Mike] Hucakabee's Christmas spot features the candidate seated in front of a window pane which appears to form the shape of the Christian cross. Speaking in the ad, the former Arkansas governor tells viewers that "sometimes it's nice to pull aside" from politics and "remember that what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Christ and being with our family and our friends."

Donahue, the president of the Catholic League and an ardent defender of Christmas in what he believes is a secular "war" against the holiday, told hosts of the Fox and Friends morning program that the ad had gone too far.

"The whole idea is to give the appearance of a cross," he said, "and this is just injecting religion into politics even too far for guys like me."

Asked if the ad was "too much," Donahue said it was.

"Because there's a pattern here," he added. "Every other word out of [Huckabee's] mouth is that 'I'm Christian.' He's calling into question Romney's Mormonism . . . let people talk about there [sic] faith, but don't sell it on your sleeve."

Don't sell it on your sleeve. This from the guy who said in 2004 that for a Catholic to vote for John Kerry was "to cooperate in evil" and spent the entire election year attacking Kerry's faith. From the guy who threw a huge stink over the Bushes putting "Holidays" instead of "Christmas" in the White House greeting cards.

Well, guess what, Bill? You made this bed, and now the Republicans are making you lie in it. You spent an entire year hammering Kerry for not being Catholic enough to suit your tastes, and you blow an O-ring every time some artist or comedian does something you think is disrespectful of Christianity; don't be surprised now when guys like Huckabee feel like they have to go on TV and show the world what awesome Christians they are. They're doing it for you, Bill.

The weird thing is, though, that isn't the first time Donohue has said something completely out of character regarding a current presidential candidate. A few months before criticizing Huckabee for being too God Squad-y, he basically told pro-lifers not to be so hung up on Rudy Giuliani's pro-choice stance:

"The problem with the pro-life movement is that some people are purist, and as far as I'm concerned, they're detrimental to the cause," Donohue said. "It's important to be principled, but it's also important to be prudential."

Whaaaa? The guy who accused Catholic Kerry supporters of "cooperating in evil," now saying we shouldn't be such "purists" about the issue? I wonder if it's any coincidence that Donohue's startlingly laid-back attitude was expressed in late April, just days after three major polls showed Giuliani with double-digit leads over the rest of the field of Republican presidential candidates. Thus I also have to wonder whether Donohue didn't jump on that bandwagon a little early, figuring the writing was on the wall as far as the GOP nomination was concerned, and is now feeling a little heat as that faith-on-his-sleeve Bible-beater Huckabee edges past Rudy in some of the national polling. Rest assured that if Huck wins an early primary or two and starts looking like he's rolling toward the nomination, Donohue will pop right up to tell us what a nice, upstanding guy he is compared to Hillary/Obama/Edwards, who supports abortion and wants to put naked Jesus statues made of poop in our public libraries.

Let's call a spade a spade here: For all their talk about adhering to Catholic teachings, Donohue and the Catholic League depart completely from the church's official stance on the death penalty and the Iraq war (and even lied about the Pope's position on the latter), and are willing to be "prudential" about the abortion issue as long as the candidate in question is a Republican. The League is not a Catholic civil rights organization but rather an independent Catholic arm of the Republican Party, designed to manufacture outrage over alleged slights in Hollywood and the "liberal media" and then spin that outrage into votes for the GOP. It's a nifty little racket, one that worked out quite nicely for the Republicans in 2004 -- but let's be clear, it's no more grounded in actual Catholic theology than it is in the teachings of Immanuel Kant or Papa Smurf.

Then again, I still haven't seen "The Passion of the Christ," so in Donohue's mind I'm probably not a true Catholic in the first place. So don't listen to me.