I meant to post about this earlier but forgot. On Friday evening, while in New York City, the Pope visited St. Joseph’s of Yorkville, the church that runs the elementary school my little brothers attend. As the church is just a block and half away from our home, and as we’re on the 25th floor facing in that direction, we had a pretty good view of the circus. There were about 25 police motorcycles in the Pope’s motorcade, to go along with the dozens of police cruisers, 2 fire trucks, 5 fire department vans, 5 ambulances, and numerous unmarked black SUVs containing, I would guess, ninjas with rocket launchers. There was also a sniper team on the roof below us. They gave all the families on the surrounding balconies good, long looks, including ours. (They also made a point of waving back to the people who waved at them).
Oh, and all the garbage cans had been removed from my neighborhood two days prior to the Pope’s visit. If you’re wondering what people do when you take away public trash cans, the answer is either brilliant or retarded: they drop their trash in heaps on the now vacant street corners.
In addition to the many gawkers and supporters who packed the surrounding streets for the visit, there was a group of ten or so protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church. Let me tell you, they’re not fans of His Holiness.
These are the types of signs they carried. Specifically, a few of them proclaimed:
GOD HATES FAG ENABLERS
PRIESTS RAPE BOYS
POPE IN HELL
PERVERT POPE
FAG PIMP POPE
GOD HATES AMERICA
(Incidentally, check out some of the videos attached to those signs. The POPE IN HELL and FAGS DIE GOD LAUGHS videos, for example, are kinda fascinating – they’re incongruously cheery, and clearly aimed at a younger audience. I’m pretty sure the girl with the winning smile who narrates those vids was one of the protesters – she’s kinda cute in a “sex after marriage” sort of way.)
Anyway, their message was a pretty hard sell on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Their wasn’t even any animosity because no one took them seriously enough to get angry. It was just a case of gawking at the freak show.
In summation, a fun time was had by all. Unless you were a motorist anywhere in the vicinity during rush hour, that is. In that case you probably spent an hour and a half in a literal stand-still waiting for the cops to remove the barricades from in front of your car.
I was kind of amused that the number of homeless people espousing religious messages in hopes for change just about tripled this weekend. I guess they were hoping to take advantage of that old fashioned Catholic guilt I have heard so much about.