Stickybuffalo.com

I was rather amused, yesterday, upon reading how Britain apparently feels so un-Christian that one of Pope Ratzinger’s hangers-on, Cardinal Walter Kasper, just can’t hack it. From The Guardian:

One of the pope’s top advisers on his visit to England and Scotland has dropped out of his entourage following the publication of an interview in which he said that arriving in Britain “you sometimes think you’ve landed in a third world country”. [Kaspar] made his remark after noting that Britain was a “secular, pluralistic” country, [complaining that] “above all, an aggressive new atheism has spread through Britain. If, for example, you wear a cross on British Airways, you are discriminated against.”

It seemed suspicious when Kaspar suddenly dropped out of the tour for “health reasons,” and yet perhaps he really was ill, after all. Pope Ratzinger clearly isn’t eager to distance himself from these charges (which, aside from the “third world country” weirdness, largely echo previous papal mutterings). Indeed, today, he decided to go nuclear with anti-secularist rhetoric, bringing in the N-word:

We can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society… As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society.

The ironies and absurdities in this are really so many, and obvious, that I’m not even going to start listing them. Fortunately all of this is really nothing but the delusional ramblings of a grumpy old man, whose archaic cult is increasingly irrelevant to the continent which it once dominated with a brutal, iron-fisted tyranny of its own.

Ah, fortunate Europe.