The new Pope II.

I have just watched Luther with Joseph Fiennes, which I really recomend if nothing for its historical perspective. I don't remember having heard about it when it was released in New York, in September 2003, according to the NYTimes review:

Although ''Luther,'' Eric Till's teeming screen biography of Martin Luther doesn't strain to make parallels between the 16th century and the present, the comparisons between then and now are obvious. The handsome, fact-filled historical epic, in which a fiery-eyed Joseph Fiennes portrays the father of the Reformation, depicts the events that gave birth to Protestantism as a life-and-death political struggle between a corrupt, repressive, intransigently conservative establishment (the Roman Catholic Church) and a liberal populist movement that spins out of control and wreaks havoc.

With religious fundamentalists of every stripe ferociously resisting globalization and modernity, variations of the same primal struggle are still being acted out all over the world. And you are likely to come away from ''Luther'' with the useful but gloomy realization that the movie's essential conflict is a never-ending ideological rift programmed into the species.

The election of Ratzinger today makes me feel like the catholic church today is moving closer to become once again the church it was before the Reformation. How can someone like me, gay, culturally liberal, raised catholic reconciliate its faith with its church? For me this is a moment of loss.

Related: "Extreme Homophobe Ratzinger Elected New Pope".