Writer Predicts Vatican Changes

Some cover headlines you can’t avoid. So when July Spin heralds an exclusive, “Sin City: Sex in the Vatican,” one may be moved to put aside the Atlantic Monthly, which predicts an economic depression.

Spin is a successful Rolling Stone for a younger set, one that likes White Zombie, not the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” and probably thinks H.R. Haldeman is an Australian heavy-metal group.

Here it beckons a staff writer who goes by the name Eurydice to take us into the undershorts of “the world’s last uncontested dictatorship and all-male professional association” - the Catholic Church, not the National Football League.

More to the point, this female writer has chums inside the Vatican, home to 2,000 bureaucrats and Pope John Paul II.

She contends that everyone she comes in contact with there “believes that Pope John Paul II’s death will signal the end of celibacy” and that the decline in priests and seminarians suggests why unnamed “Church insiders expect their next Pope to be the Vatican’s Gorbachev.”

She also suggests that economics will play a factor and hyperbolically cites as a critical element for change the many child-molestation lawsuits, which she estimates have cost the church $400 million in the United States alone.