Ooh, that must hurt. Benedict failed to sell out in Glasgow. Apparently, the Brits, who are, if anything worse than us politically, are far more enlightened when it comes to religion. Of course it doesn’t help when this sort of thing happens:
The start of the trip risked being overshadowed by remarks by one of the pope’s advisers, German Cardinal Walter Kasper, who said compared arriving in multicultural London to landing “in a Third World country.” He also told a German magazine that an “aggressive atheism” was spreading in Britain.
The British media, expressing outrage, cited the remarks as the latest example of a gaffe-prone papacy. Kasper’s office later said he would not be coming due to illness.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, former head of the Catholic Church in England, tried to limit the damage from those comments.
“I’m not really sure why Cardinal Kasper said what he said, he is a good man and a good friend. Perhaps he was having a bad day,” he said.
Yes, perhaps he was having a bad day. I’m not really sure who should be more offended, the British, or the people of the third world. One thing’s for sure, a cardinal should stay away from racially tinged statements, and that goes quadruple for a German cardinal, especially one working for a German pope with a questionable history, Nazi wise.
The problem for the Catholic Church is that its approach to the outside world hasn’t changed much since the 15th century. It never enters the heads of these people that they are answerable to anyone other than their pope, and they all agree that he is answerable to nobody. Instead of adapting to a changing world, the church has, with the notable exception of a few papal terms (we miss you, John XXIII) spent its time hunkering down. Instead of trying to lead by moral example, it merely legislated, at least for itself, what was no longer recognized by a once submissive Europe: its own infallibility.
It is rapidly becoming an irrelevant anachronism, reduced to obsessing about the normal sex lives of others while tolerating deviant sexual practices within its own ranks. Yet it still can’t quite understand why people are beginning to despite it.
So folks like the Cardinal can’t really help themselves. They don’t understand the world, and don’t care to do so. They say what they think because they are convinced they are right and they don’t really care what anyone else thinks. When the shit hits the fan, like it did for the German cardinal, they may backtrack for show (by, for example, as in this case, lying about being sick), but they remain mystified about why anyone could question them. It’s unlikely anything will change soon, particularly under this pope.
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