Stardate 20020208.2113

(On Screen via long range sensors): One problem with the Catholic Church is that there is no provision for the pope to retire before he dies. As a result, near the end of his life the church has to put up with a few years of senility. The current pope was vigorous and important fifteen years ago, but now he's used up. Sadly, the church has to wait for him to die before he can be replaced with someone else.

The Pope's message for Lent this year says that disease is punishment for sin. Those who get ill do so because they're sinners; the Bible says so. Have they gone mad?

Does that mean that Penicillin cleanses your sins more than the Host?

The Church faced that problem in the 18th century. It used to be thought that lightning was divine retribution. Then Franklin invented the lightning rod, and suddenly the houses of saints and sinners were no longer being retributed. In fact, the opposite occurred: the sinners put up their lightning rods; the churches refused to do so, and what with their steeples and towers often being the tallest objects in town anyway it turned out that they were getting struck a disproportionate amount of the time.

But if God's Judgment could be subverted with a silly piece of metal and a cable, then just how powerful was God anyway? The only answer was to discard the idea that lightning was actually anything except a natural phenomenon.

By the same token, if disease is a punishment for sin, then modern medicine must be the most amazing theological innovation of all time. Just look at all the sin which has been removed from the world. Lepers can be healed; no-one gets the pox; even many venereal diseases (surely punishment for sin if there ever was one) can be cured with antibiotics.

And how do we explain vaccines? Is the MMR jab a better way to remove sin from a baby than baptism?