German Paper Mocks Late Pope

German newspaper mocks John Paul II, beatification process

(CWNews.com) – A caustic article about the beatification process for Pope John Paul II, published in the German newspaper Die Welt [The World, one of Germany’s “leading” dailies, despite not having posted a profit in recent memory has drawn a protest from the Polish ambassador to Germany.

Die Welt referred to the late Pontiff as “an unsympathetic old man,” and included a series of tasteless jokes about the Pope and the cause for his beatification. The newspaper crudely suggested that the late Pope, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease, might have won a medal at the Para-Olympics.

It joked that he should have written books entitled, “Witches were never burned at the stake,” and “The Enlightenment, or The Jewish Spy.”http://www.cwnews.com/news/viewstory.cfm?recnum=50307

Analysis and opinion from a reader: No matter how you feel about the late Pope, John Paul II, his legacy or his church, the Die Welt attack should make you at least vaguely queasy. Publishing as they do in a nation without hardly even a semblance of free speech, the comic geniuses at Die Welt, as cowards do everywhere, take cheap shots when they know they will face no consequences. Similar snide remarks about Islam, for instance, or the Holocaust, would subject the authors to violence or to prison terms languishing alongside “witches” and heretics like Ernst Zundel or Germar Rudolf. Stands to reason that Die Welt owes its existence to the British occupation forces, who founded the daily in 1946, and is today the “flagship” of the once-powerful Axel Springer media empire. Like nearly all “mainstream” papers in the West, Die Welt is a major lossmaker. As far as Catholic-bashing being “politically correct,” Die Welt has been unable to pierce the market in Catholic areas of Germany. Although the Christian religion is no longer much of a force in much of Europe, historically Catholic/Protestant division has been the cause of untold suffering, accounting for millions of deaths in Germany in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) alone. Christianity has been the main form of white religious life for at least 1500 years, and its institutions, holidays, etc., are closely indentified with Western Civilization. With comparatively few adherents today, it is the “weak link” for those who hate and seek to destroy the West and the people who make up its biological foundation. One fear in these Europe-hating circles is that the latent force that exists within Christian tradition will some day be reasserted.

http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=158

http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=86

2007-04-04