Pope makes jokes about women. They're not funny.

Over at Raw Story, we learn that for the first time, the pope was interviewed by a woman. Apparently all his previous inteviewers were male. Odd, that. So how did it go, you ask. Frankie didn't do well, not well at all.

In his first interview with a female journalist since his election to the spiritual leadership of the world’s 1.2 billion baptised Catholics, Pope Francis dodged a string of questions about whether he intended raising the status of women in his church while making a couple of jokes that some may find diminishing.

After he said a few folksy-cutesy things about women, the interview turned a corner. 

But when his interviewer, the Vatican correspondent of the Rome daily Il Messaggero, Franca Giansoldati, asked him whether he did not detect an underlying misogyny in the Catholic church, Francis replied: “The fact is that woman was taken from a rib.” Giansoldati wrote that he then laughed “heartily” before saying: “I’m joking. That was a joke.”

The 77-year-old pontiff went on: “The issue of women needs to be gone into in more depth, otherwise you can’t understand the church itself.” But did he envisage, say, appointing a woman to head a Vatican department?

“Well,” replied the pope cryptically. “Priests often end up under the sway of their housekeepers.”

Ugh. It's like they interviewed a guy from one of those "men's rights" forums that are actually feminist-hating forums. Thanks, Francis, for making us ill by giving male-chauvinist-pig responses when asked serious questions about the status of women in the church. We get it: you don't care.

Thus we learn that the pope is a caveman and the situation of female Catholics will not improve during his reign. It's sad. But the church is known for this, so we shouldn't be surprised. It's just that the old fool elicited hope in so many when he was elected. Now that hope is dashed.