a dismal failure
Thank you to the Vatican for doing the world no favours. Our last ray of hope can only be that Ratzinger is a closet homosexual/sexual health expert/liberal who has, for his whole life, pretended to be otherwise just so that he could become Pope and then come out of the closet in a multicoloured explosion of genuine humanity.
on the up side, he's 78 so shouldn't last long... interesting history: member of the Hitler youth, fought for the Nazis in WWII... oh, i do love the christians!
As a German I have to say: I am so ashamed. Another sick German for the history books.
They swapped the TV in the bar over to announce this last night and was there a collective cheer of patriotic joy that a German had been chosen, or did everyone point out that they had already left the Catholic Church? I'll let you guess, but I bet you can already buy "bin schon ausgetreten" t-shirts.
Ich bin schon ausgetreten... except I don't recall ever having been part of a church to begin with.
Gunty, you are not to blame, and your occasional apathy towards Germans is well documented to boot, but on the upside there aren't that many sick Germans in the history books, they just worked extra hard to make themselves famous. Are you still considered German anyway? You spend so much time abroad; maybe it's time you just defected once and for all.