New Pope II

There has been a lot of unfair criticism of Pope Benedict XVI in the press. Please, let's stick to fair criticism, and give the guy a chance to be himself. In my previous post I used the phrase Panzer Pope - and I apologize. That's a bad echo. After all, if we must have military nicknames, why not Pope B16?

The best nick I've seen so far is by the copyrighting geniuses at the Sun who dub him "Papa Ratzi". Unfortunately, the same article's headline in full reads "From Hitler Youth... to Papa Ratzi". That's misleading, as even the same article says at the very end "He was 14 when forced to join the Hitler Youth. He later manned a German anti-aircraft battery — before deserting."

But that's the Sun. Even some respectable news outlets - like the Guardian - have referred to his joining the Nazi youth group as a reason to doubt him. Oh please...

On the other hand, perhaps they were using the term "Hitler Youth" in the same way as one would use "Concentration Camp", as in a forced punishment.

Of course, now that he's been chosen, the world - Catholic and non-Catholic - can return to ignoring papal instructions.

New Pope

Catholics all over the world - in Europe and the US anyway - will be praying for the health of Pope =Ratzinger - sorry, I mean Benedict 16 - that it will deteriorate quickly enough to prevent the health of the Church from doing likewise. His election also meant that calls for an Islamic Pope went unheeded. Seriously, the fact that Ratzinger wants to bring Europe back to the Church, and that he's the man to do it, shows how far he is from reality. Even in Germany his support among German Catholics was not particularly high (under 30%, but I can't find the article). His conservative dogma will be popular in growth areas like Africa, but surely they'd have preferred Arinze. I do not pretend to know enough about Latin America, given that they had multiple papabile and weren't actually too fussed about whether the next el Papa was from there.

On the other hand, maybe the Panzer Pope will blog.

Consider me impressed. The Wikipedia is up-to-date with Ratzi's new name within an hour of the election.

Speaking of Wiki's, I finally got the MLSS Wiki running yesterday. I'm not linking to it yet though, still testing. Tiki-wiki is great! Thanks to Gunnar Ratsch for doing the first one at Berder last year.