RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Pope Benedict XVI

VATICAN CITY - Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany, the church's leading hard-liner, was elected the new pope Tuesday evening in the first conclave of the new millennium. He chose the name Pope Benedict XVI and called himself "a simple, humble worker."

Ratzinger, the first German pope since the 11th century, emerged onto the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, where he waved to a wildly cheering crowd of tens of thousands and gave his first blessing as pope. Other cardinals clad in their crimson robes came out on other balconies to watch him.

"Dear brothers and sisters, after the great Pope John Paul II, the cardinals have elected me — a simple, humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord," he said after being introduced by Chilean Cardinal Jorge Arturo Medina Estivez.

"The fact that the Lord can work and act even with insufficient means consoles me, and above all I entrust myself to your prayers," the new pope said. "I entrust myself to your prayers."

The crowd responded by chanting "Benedict! Benedict!"

If the new pope was paying tribute to the last pontiff of that name, it could be interpreted as a bid to soften his image as the Vatican's doctrinal hard-liner. Benedict XV, who reigned from 1914 to 1922, was a moderate following Pius X, who had implemented a sharp crackdown against doctrinal "modernism."

On Monday, Ratzinger, who was the powerful dean of the College of Cardinals, used his homily at the Mass dedicated to electing the next pope to warn the faithful about tendencies that he considered dangers to the faith: sects, ideologies like Marxism, liberalism, atheism, agnosticism and relativism — the ideology that there are no absolute truths.

"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism," he said, speaking in Italian. "Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards.

Ratzinger served John Paul II since 1981 as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In that position, he has disciplined church dissidents and upheld church policy against attempts by liberals for reforms. He turned 78 on Saturday.

The new pope had gone into the conclave with the most buzz among two dozen leading candidates. He had impressed many faithful with his stirring homily at the funeral of John Paul II, who died April 2 at age 84.

Ratzinger is the first Germanic pope since monarchs imposed four men from that region in a row in the 11th century.

Quote:

---

klinton said:
The one fun thing about this whole pope thing was the cacophony of bells (both when Jean Paul passed on and this morning). Here in Montreal there's literally (seriously, no exageration) a cathedral every few blocks. This morning, for about 20 minutes the city was engulfed in the sound of bells tolling...it was really cool actually.

I think they should have papal elections more often...

---

They can keep having them untill they find one that will renounce the council of Trent.


Judging by his right ring finger and the hair it would apear that this picture was taken long before he lost his precious to that Hobit.

Quote:

---

Jim Jackson said:
He won Monsignor Congeniality.

---

That was good.

Quote:

---

klinton said:
Not just German...he was in the junior Hitler corps or somesuch shit. God, I wish I was catholic somedays.

---

Quote:

---

wannabuyamonkey said:
to his credit when he was drafted into the German army he defected.

---

Quote:

---

VATICAN CITY - Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany, the church's leading hard-liner, was elected the new pope Tuesday evening in the first conclave of the new millennium.

---

Quote:

---

I'm Not Mister Mxypltk said:
I've heard he's somewhat of a dark figure.

---

Quote:

---

Jeff Gannon said:
To be fair though, joining the Hilter youth was compulsory after 1936.

Still, theres plently of reasons to be dissapointed in this guy. He's a hard liner on most everything the last Pope was hardline on. Only even more so.

so contraception is still bad for married catholics. Which means you either overpopulate the world as they do in the 3rd world or else you only fuck 2 or 3 times in the course of your marriage as to keep your family managable.

Only a celibate priest is capable of seeing any logic to this.

---

Quote:

---

Darknight613 said:
Now now...let's give the guy a fair chance.

(Shyeah, right. A fair chance? You guys?)

---

Quote:

---

the G-man said:


Apropo of nothing, is it my imagination, or is this not the first and only post to date that "Jeff Gannon" has made that wasn't "in character"?

---

Quote:

---

Cowgirl Jack said:

---

that looks extremely homoerotic...

Was that ever shown on the E! channel by any chance?

Quote:

---

Jeff Gannon said:

Quote:

---

the G-man said:


Apropo of nothing, is it my imagination, or is this not the first and only post to date that "Jeff Gannon" has made that wasn't "in character"?

---

What's not "in character", f**kwit?

Do I have to be a flaming queen in order to think the Catholic Church is full of it in regards to contraception/overpopulation and the rampant buggery of altar boys? And that this evil looking twat isn't likely to do a damn thing about it. No, he'd rather keep married people from wearing rubbers.

---

Quote:

---

wannabuyamonkey said:


I think what he meant is somethimes you forget that you're a liberal impersinating a conservitive and just act like a liberal.

---

Quote:

---

Papal hopeful is a former Hitler Youth

Unknown to many members of the church, however, Ratzinger’s past includes brief membership of the Hitler Youth movement and wartime service with a German army anti- aircraft unit.

Although there is no suggestion that he was involved in any atrocities, his service may be contrasted by opponents with the attitude of John Paul II, who took part in anti-Nazi theatre performances in his native Poland and in 1986 became the first pope to visit Rome’s synagogue.

The son of a rural Bavarian police officer, Ratzinger was six when Hitler came to power in 1933. His father, also called Joseph, was an anti-Nazi whose attempts to rein in Hitler’s Brown Shirts forced the family to move home several times.

In 1937 Ratzinger’s father retired and the family moved to Traunstein, a staunchly Catholic town in Bavaria close to the Führer’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden. He joined the Hitler Youth aged 14, shortly after membership was made compulsory in 1941.

He quickly won a dispensation on account of his training at a seminary. “Ratzinger was only briefly a member of the Hitler Youth and not an enthusiastic one,” concluded John Allen, his biographer.

Two years later Ratzinger was enrolled in an anti-aircraft unit that protected a BMW factory making aircraft engines. The workforce included slaves from Dachau concentration camp.

Ratzinger has insisted he never took part in combat or fired a shot — adding that his gun was not even loaded — because of a badly infected finger. He was sent to Hungary, where he set up tank traps and saw Jews being herded to death camps. He deserted in April 1944 and spent a few weeks in a prisoner of war camp.

He has since said that although he was opposed to the Nazi regime, any open resistance would have been futile — comments echoed this weekend by his elder brother Georg, a retired priest ordained along with the cardinal in 1951.

“Resistance was truly impossible,” Georg Ratzinger said. “Before we were conscripted, one of our teachers said we should fight and become heroic Nazis and another told us not to worry as only one soldier in a thousand was killed. But neither of us ever used a rifle against the enemy.”

Some locals in Traunstein, like Elizabeth Lohner, 84, whose brother-in-law was sent to Dachau as a conscientious objector, dismiss such suggestions. “It was possible to resist, and those people set an example for others,” she said. “The Ratzingers were young and had made a different choice.”

In 1937 another family a few hundred yards away in Traunstein hid Hans Braxenthaler, a local resistance fighter. SS troops repeatedly searched homes in the area looking for the fugitive and his fellow conspirators.
“When he was betrayed and the Nazis came for him, Braxenthaler shot himself because he knew he couldn’t escape,” said Frieda Meyer, 82, Ratzinger’s neighbour and childhood friend. “Even though they had tortured him in Dachau concentration camp he refused to give up his resistance efforts.”

His condemnations are legion — of women priests, married priests, dissident theologians and homosexuals, whom he has declared to be suffering from an “objective disorder”.

He upset many Jews with a statement in 1987 that Jewish history and scripture reach fulfilment only in Christ — a position denounced by critics as “theological anti-semitism”. He made more enemies among other religions in 2000, when he signed a document, Dominus Jesus, in which he argued: “Only in the Catholic church is there eternal salvation”.

Some of his staunchest critics are in Germany. A recent poll in Der Spiegel, the news magazine, showed opponents of a Ratzinger papacy outnumbered supporters by 36% to 29%.

As one western cardinal who was in two minds about him put it: “He would probably be a great pope, but I have no idea how I would explain his election back home.”

One liberal theologian,when asked what he thought of a Ratzinger papacy, was more direct: “It fills me with horror.”

---

Quote:

---

"In the Church, priests also are sinners. But I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign, as the percentage of these offenses among priests is not higher than in other categories, and perhaps it is even lower.

"In the United States, there is constant news on this topic, but less than 1 percent of priests are guilty of acts of this type. The constant presence of these news items does not correspond to the objectivity of the information nor to the statistical objectivity of the facts."

—from "Cardinal Ratzinger Sees a Media Campaign Against Church," Zenit.org, December 3, 2002

---

Quote:

---

Vatican Says Condoms Don't Block HIV, BBC Reports

Oct. 9 (Bloomberg) -- The Roman Catholic Church has urged followers in developing countries not to use condoms to prevent the spread of HIV by telling them the contraceptives have holes that allow the virus to pass through, the BBC reported

The church's position has forced an AIDS teaching center in Kenya to stop distributing condoms, with some priests saying the contraceptives ``are laced with HIV/AIDS,'' the center's director, Gordon Wambi, said in the documentary, according to Bradshaw. In another scene, a Catholic nun advised a choirmaster infected with HIV against using condoms because they couldn't stop the virus from infecting his wife, Bradshaw wrote.

The WHO, a United Nations agency, said women in particular suffer a loss of human rights when they are denied protection from HIV. ``Condoms need to be more widely accepted, available and used,'' according to the WHO Web site.

---

Joseph Ratzinger of Bavaria, now the new Pope, Benedict XVI, also is widely described by those who know him as a modest, gentle man with a shy smile, a large intellect and a ready handshake.

And the man who appeared on a balcony yesterday with a beam so bright it lit up the whole Square of St. Peter hardly looked like the Vatican's feared hatchet man.

"I think it would be wise for everyone to check their conceptions of Cardinal Ratzinger at the door because all bets are now off," said Vatican expert Rocco Palmo.

"In his job [as the Church's doctrinal watchdog] he became a controversial figure," Palmo added, "but the 'Panzer cardinal' is not going to become the 'Panzer Papa.'"

Because of his thick German accent when speaking Italian, his severe enforcement of dogma and his onetime membership in the Hitler Youth, Ratzinger has often been unfairly lampooned as a Nazi.

But he has strong fans among Jewish leaders, who say he was behind John Paul's unprecedented efforts to reconcile with Jews.

"He is the architect of the ideological policy to recognize, to have full relations, with Israel," said Rabbi Israel Singer, chairman of the World Jewish Congress.