War-popes from hell

Although the benefits and boons of using Shaba's diplomacy far outweigh the weirdness, I was wondering if anyone else noticed that:

-The pope tends to be a mad conqueror who will quickly blitz all over Italy.
-The death of the pope or your ruler doesn't reconcile you, so you can stay excommunicated forever (On Portugal, I was excom'd on turn 8 and reconciled on turn 97 when I finally started masscring Popes until I got a home town boy).
-With the pope on the warpath, you can get excommunicated for no reason that I could see. I had allied with Spain, kicked the Moors out of Iberia and had 8 dots on the Pope-o-matic Pope Love Meter... next turn I am told I am excommunicated. I thought that maybe Spain was being naughty somewhere but considering that they were sealed up inside my boundaries, I doubt it.
-Lastly, with everyone being good allies, you end up with crazy situations where everyone is allied to everyone else and by declaring war on one faction creates a world war as all the allies pile on.

I'm not familiar with this diplomacy of Shaba's, but it sounds interesting. Playing on VH the diplomacy kind of gets subsumed under the AI hate after a while. The Pope is already beast enough though, why would anyone possibly want to make him worse? O_o