No…… although the insinuations about what he might have or might not have been doing during the years of Argentina’s military junta should come as no surprise to avid readers of Latin and Central American writers…

In Vargas Llosa’s “Feast of the Goat” for instance the Catholic Church colludes with the dictatorship Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Redpublic until the arrival of JFK..

and to those of us whoose teenage faith was saved by the reading of the works of Latin American Liberation theologians like Gutierrez, Boff and Bonino, the late seventies and early eighties were the years in which attempts were made to quash them by the appointment of ultra conservative bishops and cardinals. Many of these appointments were made by a certain John Paul II! Lest we forget Boff advocated the ordination of women in “Ecclesiogenesis” way back in the mid seventies.

But lets not talk about that, lets talk instead about the greatest soul duo of all time… the dynamic duo, Sam and Dave and also the band who backed them who happened to be one of the first mixed race groups….. Booker T and the MGs!

It may be in black and white and performed to a rather restrained looking and predominatnly white European audience, but their rendition of “Hold on I’m coming” on the Stax Tour is truly astounding(I’ve got it on the Otis Redding Respect Live 1967 DVD)! If only I could shake like that! And the faces that Donald “Duck” Dunn pulls whilst playing the bass are a picture! A bit like all those French arrivals at the enemy up the road in Newcastle, you have to say the Stax tour probably did a whole lot more for transforming race relations than the church did in many parts of the world. Proof for me that God uses anyone irrespective of their beliefs to bring in the kingdom, becasue if he relied only on Popes we would still be in the dark ages and as far away from the kingdom as ever!