Any change?

That would be a big no.

With Ratzinger's resignation there's a new pope (I was about to say "we have a new pope", but *I* don't actually have any kind of pope), and people are still watching to see if he will bring change to The 
World's Most Corrupt Organization (TM).


Early signs suggest not. Here are three recent news items suggesting it's business as usual with the Catholics.

He is planning on keeping up the war on women religious leaders. As reported in Slate:

Pope Francis announced Monday morning that he will stick to his predecessor's hard-line approach to reforming an umbrella group representing about 80 percent of U.S. nuns, an organization that Benedict XVI believed was promoting "radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith."

And two items showing the church intends to stay firmly planted on the wrong side of history on gay rights:

That was a brief honeymoon, Rhode Island. Just hours before becoming the 10th state to approve marriage equality, the slim, pocket-sized state — which also happens to be the nation’s most Catholic — received a stern warning from the Bishop of Providence.In a seriously buzzkill message, Bishop Thomas Tobin issued a pastoral letter to his brothers and sisters in the Ocean State suggesting they might want to decline invitations once same-sex marriage becomes official in August. “It is important to affirm the teaching of the Church, based on God’s word, that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2357),” he writes, “and always sinful. And because ‘same-sex marriages’ are clearly contrary to God’s plan for the human family, and therefore objectively sinful, Catholics should examine their consciences very carefully before deciding whether or not to endorse same-sex relationships or attend same-sex ceremonies, realizing that to do so might harm their relationship with God and cause significant scandal to others.”

And in New York, not only are they telling Catholics not to go to same-sex weddings, they're actually threatening to arrest gays who have the temerity to show up at church:


Cardinal Timothy Dolan today used the NYPD to prohibit from Sunday worship services gay Catholics and their allies by barring their entry into NYC’s historic St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the iconic home of the Roman Catholic Church in New York.

The small group of silent Catholic protestors were threatened with arrest by a New York City Police detective — unless they first washed their hands.

Apparently the irony of the Catholic church accusing someone else of not having clean hands, after decades of covering up for child rape, was not obvious to Dolan or any of his advisors.

Change could come, but so far it looks like "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."