Hello.
I am a 76-year-old man who gets overwhelmed easily and has a difficult time keeping his thoughts straight. I’m confused a lot, and sometimes I don’t remember things that have happened just minutes ago. This is what happens when you are this old. You speak slower, your mind wanders, and doing simple tasks becomes difficult because concentrating is hard.
I don’t understand what’s happening around me most of the time, and usually I want to be in bed because of how tired I am.
I’m also a sexually frustrated person. I have been celibate for nearly 45 years, and I’m constantly paralyzed by intense sexual longing. Throughout the day, my mind—gone as it is—is filled with vivid carnal images. In fact, there will be many times throughout my papacy when I’ll be sexually frustrated and thinking about sex. I’ll probably think about sex during Easter Mass. I’m thinking about sex right now.
I want to have sex very badly.
So, that’s me: an elderly, sexually deprived man who has trouble remembering names, faces, and words when he tries to talk. Sometimes I’ll be speaking a sentence and stop because I can’t think of the right word to say. This didn’t happen when I was young. I’m also a man who faces a difficult job with complex problems. The problems frighten me because complex things make me nervous and confused and make me snap angrily at people for no good reason. Also, I’m tortured on a daily basis by my improper thoughts of naked women.
Since being selected as Pope, I have been introduced to many new people who are saying many things I don’t understand. I’m too embarrassed to say, “Stop. I’m overwhelmed. You need to speak slower. I’m scared of new things, and I’m worried I’m too old to be doing this job.”
I think about what it would be like to kiss a woman a fair amount, and at night I wonder what would happen if I masturbated. The fact that I even have these thoughts, and that God knows I have them, makes me feel extremely guilty. That guilt eats away at my insides, and the knowledge that I’ve freely chosen that guilt to be part of my life only makes me angrier.
So, to summarize, there are times when I can’t focus on a single thing because a) I’ve forgotten what day it is, and b) I’m distracted because I’m thinking about sexual intercourse.
I’m also a tired man. If you want my honest opinion, I don’t have the energy to fix a corrupt institution marred by scandal. I’m not quite sure I have enough left in the tank, as they say, to lead the Catholic Church into a bold new era. The thought of having to make the Church relevant to a whole new generation of Catholics exhausts me. All of that sounds like a job for a young person who both remembers where he puts things and isn’t constantly questioning whether or not he wasted his life depriving himself the pleasures of the female body.
Truth be told, my ideal day is waking up, eating breakfast, and then sitting down in a chair and looking out a window. That way I’m not hearing things I don’t like, and I’m never being put in an uncomfortable position. I don’t like feeling uncomfortable. I don’t like it. I don’t like it. I don’t like it!
I just want to sit in my chair and think about dying and never having sex.
I love you, my children. Pray for me as I begin this new journey.
