There is a new Pope

[Ned]

Ratzinger was an architect of Vatican II, and is recognized as one of the formost minds in the Church. This is exactly the kind of man who should be Pope.

I hope for the best.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Ecthelion
I don't mind any fvcking about the church or anything I'm not one of the lot, but I feel slightly offended by some people's reaction, how anything German with power is automatically Nazi. there've been Germans in the IWF etc, were they all nazis to you? but then they had a lot less press than this guy

Don't you understand? Every young German during the 30ies and 40ies was very happy to take part to the HJ and to whip Jews. If somebody didn't actively resist, and gave in to the various pressures, it MUST mean they were -and still are- a nazi monster

[Q Classic]

Isn't that like asking what's wrong with Jack the Ripper other than him being a murderer?

Last time I checked, there's nothing wrong with being a conservative Catholic, except for the fact that it might push the Church towards irrelevance.

I ask you again, what's wrong with Ratzinger, outside of being a superconservative?

[BeBMan]

I read Ratzinger had good chances because he's old, so he'd be only a pope of "transition". Question is what kind of transition there will be....

[BeBMan]

Btw, when do they start the orgies?

[Lancer]

I saw a catholic fella explaining how hundreds of years ago a catholic prophet had listed atributes of all the popes right to the end of the world. Attributes that could be matched with the popes that followed historicly. Anyway, there was only one more before the one that's alive when the end times, wrath of God, plague on the nations stuff starts.

I was kinda hoping for a younger pope myself.

[Agathon]

Last time I checked, there's nothing wrong with being a conservative Catholic

Check again.

[Q Classic]

End times.

'Cause if you can't laugh at the end times, what can you laugh at?

[Q Classic]

Check again.

And with that dogmatic answer, you've just consigned yourself to irrelevance on this topic.

Please, Agathon, don't make the same mistake you've done on the topic of Microsoft and Windows here.

[Ned]

We seem to have a second pope who early years were spent under Nazi rule. The Nazi's apparently had a profound effect on Ratzinger:

"As a seminarian, he was briefly enrolled in the Hitler Youth in the early 1940s, though he was never a member of the Nazi party. In 1943 he was conscripted into an antiaircraft unit guarding a BMW plant outside Munich. Later Ratzinger was sent to Austria's border with Hungary to erect tank traps. After being shipped back to Bavaria, he deserted. When the war ended, he was an American prisoner of war.


Under Hitler, Ratzinger says he watched the Nazis twist and distort the truth. Their lies about Jews, about genetics, were more than academic exercises. People died by the millions because of them. The church's service to society, Ratzinger concluded, is to stand for absolute truths that function as boundary markers: Move about within these limits, but outside them lies disaster.


Later reflection on the Nazi experience also left Ratzinger with a conviction that theology must either bind itself to the church, with its creed and teaching authority, or it becomes the plaything of outside forces -- the state in a totalitarian system or secular culture in Western liberal democracies. In a widely noted 1986 lecture in Toronto, Ratzinger put it this way: "A church without theology impoverishes and blinds, while a churchless theology melts away into caprice."

"The Vatican's Enforcer", National Catholic Reporter, April 16, 1999.

http://www.natcath.com/NCR_Online/archives/041699/041699a.htm

[Atahualpa]

Let's see how he does... personally I have little faith that the church will become some instution that I'd consider proud to be part of.

[Az]

Originally posted by Agathon

Nope, whipping Jews.

Well who hasn't wanted to whip Azazel from time to time.

You're all talk, Aggie.

Adolph I

[Heresson]

Originally posted by Ecthelion
first German in about 500 years.

No, for over 900. The one You mean was Dutch, not German.

Originally posted by JohnT
With the news of the new Pope, his name could only be:

Pope Ratzi the Nazi I

Yeah, all the Germans are nazis and saying stuff like that is so funny.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Ecthelion
there've been Germans in the IWF etc, were they all nazis to you?

The International Wildlife Fund? Or maybe Ignorant White Folks? Seriously, I have no idea what IWF stands for.

[Heresson]

Originally posted by Agathon
He's the worst choice they could have made.

Hearing it from You...