Pope Benedict XVI resigns

fanaskin_sl said:

http://southernnationalist.com/blog/...in-the-USA.jpg


not numbers but an ancestry map.

Click to expand...

Facepalm.

So it looks like the world will not end after all according to that one "profit" that made a list off all the remaining popes. This current one was supposed to be the last one and Italian. Something about of Peters blood or some shit.

(shrug) I guess I will just have to wait for NK to invade ala Red Dawn before I can start using my Fallout shelter.

Quineloe_sl said:

How big was that wave exactly?

Click to expand...

Not as big as I thought:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_...n_to_Argentina

Also, I was under the impression there was an ideological reason for former nazis to go to Argentina, but it appears it's more about going to a country that already had a big german community and social and economic ties with Germany. Thirdly: the german that fled nazism before WWII outnumber those that migrated after WWII (not to mention it's hard to tell how many of this post WWII wave were fleeing nazis and how many were people looking for a new start far from a country in shambles).

I always assumed it was because after a war of that scope, no one was going to spend much effort chasing the defeated remnants into fucking south america.

If they'd run to africa probably some one would have chased them. But south america? Who is gonna send a brigade into south america to go round up some low ranking nazi officers?

Zhaun_sl said:

Sweet.

Suffer not the Heretic to live! *burn-kill-purge!*

Click to expand...

The last guy was the inquisitor (he was the prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is what they renamed the Roman Inquisition), this guy is just a Jesuit.

Cantatus_sl said:

To be honest, the thing I find most surprising about this choice is that they went with another really old man. I remember looking up that most popes in the 20th century were in their mid-60s to early-70s when elected. Benedict, at 78, was a definite outlier, and it was suspected that he was chosen since they figured he wouldn't last long, giving them a breather after a semi-progressive pope that served for over 26 years. Pope Francis I, at 76, makes him the 9th oldest pope electedin modern times, and the 3rd oldest pope in the past 300 or so years.

They can't be counting on this guy sticking around for long, which makes me wonder if this was just their way of satisfying the fact that they haven't had a pope outside of Europe (or The Holy Roman Empire, if you include the few from North Africa), letting them get that out of the way so they can go back to the status quo, or if it's their way of bridging the gap so they can start having popes from outside of Europe. The guy is a born Argentinian, but of Italian descent, so he gets to be from another continent while ruffling as little feathers as possible, which makes the next pope to be elected from South America to possibly not be as big of a deal.

Click to expand...

If I had to guess I'd say their main motivation is that he's pretty much squeaky clean. He has no connection at all that I'm aware of to the child abuse scandals that have been devestating the church and thats huge right now. Throw in that he's a vatican outsider and thats even more distance between him and the scandals. Now add to that that in terms of christian priestly ideals as advertised on the box by all accounts this man actually walks the walk- refused the cardinals palace, rides the bus, tends the poor etc and thats both refreshing and actually pretty inspiring, and thats a huge bonus. He appears genuinely humble and very human and quite approachable, and possessed of at least some humor, which is a marked and valuable contrast to Ratzinger who came off as humorless and was all too easy to make jokes about. Throw in the south american thing as a huge bonus to a large chunk of the worlds catholics, and a lesser but still significant bonus to every other non-european catholic community, and the fact that he's old and apparently already slowing down a bit and thus wont be around for long probably means they hope he will last just long enough to hopefully ride out the child abuse scandal and put it behind them, and then die so they can go back to their old habits. Assuming he doesnt stack the cardinals during his time, of course. And he appears to follow church doctrine regarding gay marriage etc so there's no worries about him being a radical reformer. Given all that I'm actually rather surprised it took them 5 votes to elect him really.

It is definitely nice to see a pope that really believes in helping the poor.

Araysar_sl said:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-879101.html

Click to expand...

That's perfectly fair. But the mission was not to kill or try all nazi's. The mission was to liberate Berlin and defeat Germany. At some point the war has to end.

That some offenders were sentenced to exile rather than death. It's not satisfying, but I don't know that it's a mockery of Justice.

Even Pope threads are not immune to a good old fashioned Godwin.

Germany : Argentina :: Poland : The Falklands.