If all goes according to plan, in about four days I will become infallible. I am taking this time to announce my candidacy for the papacy.

Forget that people don’t usually run for pope and that the choice is meant to be God working through the College of Cardinals in electing the pope. It’s a sweet gig. It’s a lifetime job where no one disagrees with you, because you can’t be wrong. And to get it I only need to convince about 88 Cardinals that God wants me to have the job.

Let’s go through my resume. I am a baptized Catholic who attended Catholic School from kindergarten until I graduated from high school. This means two things: I can tie a vicious knot in a tie and know all kinds of doctrine that appeared useless until this point, such as the qualifications and procedure of electing a new pope – verbatim.

One of the beautiful loopholes in the Catholic Church is that every Catholic man, eligible for the priesthood is eligible to be pope.

So here I am primed to be elected the next pope. When a pope is elected he gets to choose his new pope-name so I thought I better get to thinking about it. Then it came to me: Pope James John I. Two names of disciples that followed Jesus (may as well prove my resume true) and even better just think about the corporate sponsorship (which would of course go to charity). Pope Jimmy John will be all over billboards as the corporate sponsor of the sandwich shop.

At that point Pope Jimmy John would need to meet his public and I know just how I would do it. I would throw condoms from the window of my residence at the Vatican and tell the young assembled there to ‘be fruitful and multiply when you are good and ready and before hand use protection.’ I would then quickly change the rules about the whole priest celibacy thing and, while I was at it, welcome women fully into the priesthood.

I would have quickly dealt with the Church’s contraception phobia, help make more young people interested in the priesthood and start dealing with perceptions of a sexist church. There would obviously be more to do, but it seems to me when infallibility comes with the job there is no need to hesitate and keep a church stuck in the Middle Ages.

RYAN GAINOR IS A JUNIOR PHILOSOPHY AND NEWSPAPER MAJOR. E-MAIL HIM AT RMGAINOR@SYR.EDU.

Published on April 13, 2005 at 12:00 pm