We have a much more serious problem with this new pope than that he had to serve in the Hitler Youth for a while or that he is a zombie: Bill Dembski loves him, thinks he's going to favor Intelligent Design creationism, and that he's going to help destroy evolution. John Lynch seems to know a bit about his background on the topic, and is unimpressed with the quality of the Catholic anti-evolution argument. Here's Pope Ratzi on evolution:

It is the affair of the natural sciences to explain how the tree of life in particular continues to grow and how new branches shoot out from it. This is not a matter for faith. But we must have the audacity to say that the great projects of the living creation are not the products of chance and error…(They) point to a creating Reason and show us a creating Intelligence, and they do so more luminously and radiantly today than ever before. Thus we can say today with a new certitude and joyousness that the human being is indeed a divine project, which only the creating Intelligence was strong and great and audacious enough to conceive of. Human beings are not a mistake but something willed.

Bleh.

I can see why Dembski would be giddy with delight, though: he's got a fellow anti-scientific teleologist in the Vatican now. And in the White House? Dembski thinks so:

I’m predicting that Bush and Benedict XVI will play much the same role in the distintegration of evolution (i.e., the ateleological materialistic form of it that currently dominates the West) as Reagan and John Paul II did in the disintegration of communism.

Neither Bush nor Pope Ratzi are scientists. They don't do science, they don't support science. They aren't going to provide any evidence, and they aren't going to persuade anyone on scientific terms. It is revealing, to say the least, that Bill Dembski thinks these two can determine the outcome of a scientific endeavor—and it's clear that the Intelligent Design creationists don't see this as a project that will be settled by legitimate evidence. It will be settled by the side that has the most potent autocrat.