The Whore of Babylon

I've been a fan of Fernando Vallejo since I saw Our Lady of the Assassins. After that I dug into several of his books, and when I ran into La Puta de Babilonia (ISBN 970-37-0326-7) I snapped it up. The opening paragraph gave me a frisson of delight:

La puta, la gran puta, la grandísima puta, la santurrona, la simoníaca, la inquisidora, la torturadora, la falsificadora, la asesina, la fea, la loca, la mala; la del Santo Oficio y el Índice de Libros Prohibidos; la de las Cruzadas y la noche de San Bartolomé; [...] la que reprime a las demás religiones donde manda y exige libertad de culto donde no manda; [...] la corrupta, la hipócrita, la parásita, la zángana; la antisemita, la esclavista, la homofóbica, la misógina; [...] la puta de Babilonia, la impune bimilenaria tiene cuentas pendientes conmigo desde mi infancia y aqui se las voy a cobrar.

My loose, unprofessional translation:

The bitch, the great bitch, the greatest whore, the hypocritically pious, the loan shark, the inquisitor, the torturer, the fabricator, the murderous, the ugly, the crazy, the bad; she of the Holy Office and the Index of Forbidden Books; of the Crusaders and the eve of St. Bartholomew; [...] she who represses other religions where she has power and demands freedom of worship where she does not; [...] the corrupt, the hypocritical, the parasitic, the shiftless; the anti-Semitic, the slave, the homophobic, the misogynist; [...] the whore of Babylon, the unpunished two-thousand-year-old bitch has been screwing with me since my childhood and now it is payback time.

It was highly satisfactory as a polemic, and for a fellow traveler it was enjoyable to sit back and enjoy the outrage of a highly informed, deeply knowledgeable and extremely articulate critic of a vain, useless, and obsolete institution. However, the opposite of love is not outrage: it is indifference, and Vallejo remains in the orbit of the Vatican's dark star, obsessed with the enemy he would destroy. I would prefer to let the RC church hang itself on its own rope, as it seems to be doing a pretty good (if sometimes frustratingly slow) job of it.