Dear Benny: Welcome to America. Love the shoes!

[COMMENTARY]  Dear Pope Benedict XVI,

Hey, Benny, how’s it going? I am glad to see you are here in America, and the media has been falling all over itself to drool on you. Top of “Live With Regis and Kelly” on Thursday was a conversation about your red shoes and whether or not they were Prada. I was relieved to know that you pay a lone cobbler somewhere in Italy to hand make each shoe for you. Those are absolutely divine shoes, and frankly — I want a pair.

I note, as well, that you are careful to color-coordinate your shoes with your dress, er, um, vestments. That’s very smart of you. But I must ask, do you do the color matching for yourself, or does one of your assistants do it?

Oh, hey, Benny, while I am asking you a bunch of questions, I just have to ask you, how come you get to wear a dress AND have a job for life, but you and your church actively work to oppose human rights ordinances that would assure other cross-dressers their right to work? Don’t you think RuPaul would be just sinfully delicious in one of your get-ups singing “You Better Work”? Oh, my goodness, that sent shivers down my spine.Hey, you know, Benny, that might just be the way you can get those young Catholics back in the pews. You could show them that the Catholic church loves regular old homosexual and transgender people as well as the child-molesting vestment-wearers you all have hidden from justice since the dawn of the church! Think about it! RuPaul high-kicking down to the altar whilst screeching “You go, GIRL!”

That, Benny, is a faith someone can commit to! Think about it.

Oh, wait. That might be too much. We want the priests to stand out. They need to be in their dresses. No one else should be cross-dressing.

Oh, Benny, wait a minute. This might not work. When you wrote a paper for the Vatican in which you said that homosexuality was “intrinsically disordered,” a “moral evil” and an “objective disorder” and said the church had to fight against legislation that “condoned” homosexuality, just what exactly were you attacking as the head of our modern-day inquisition?

So, Benny, when you ran the Inquisition under Pope John Paul, and you decided to comb the seminaries for those with homosexual inclinations, just exactly how did you determine that? For that matter, you told the press on your flight here that you wanted to find those who show a hint of inclination toward pedophilia. Have you perfected gaydar, Benny, and not shared it with the rest of the world?

Or have your whiz kids in dresses under the gilded roofs of the Vatican found a scientific way to identify pedophiles?

Those would both be helpful to those of us in the secular world, Benny.

And if the answer is no, Benny, just how are you going to find those with homosexual inclinations? Will you purge the priesthood and seminaries of Broadway fans? Effeminate men?

I gotta tell ya, Benny, it’s gonna cause a HUGE problem in society if you toss out all the homos from the priesthood. As the incredible playwright Paul Rudnick wrote in his play “Jeffrey”: “Maybe you didn’t hear me. I’m a Catholic priest. Historically that’s somewhere between florist and chorus boy.”

Oh, yeah, and remember, Benny, I want a pair of those fabulous red shoes to wear with my vestments, er, um, dress.

Graphic: Society of Mutual Autopsy: Red Hot Papa