Pope's bishop pick criticized over Katrina comment

[kpete]

Source: Associated Press

Pope's bishop pick criticized over Katrina comment

VIENNA – Pope Benedict XVI's decision to promote a pastor who suggested Hurricane Katrina was provoked by sin in New Orleans was criticized Sunday by Austrian priests and church groups.

The Vatican announced Saturday that the Rev. Gerhard Maria Wagner, 54, would be auxiliary bishop in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria province.

A 2005 report by Kath.Net, a Catholic Austrian news agency, said Wagner had characterized Katrina as divine retribution in a short essay in a parish newsletter.

Wagner wrote that people should ask themselves whether the "noticeable" increase of natural disasters such as Katrina was a result of pollution caused by humans or the result of "spiritual pollution," according to a copy of the essay published Sunday on Kath.Net's Web site.


Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090201/ap_on_re_eu/eu_austria_new_orleans_bishop;_ylt=AlUWNOP4hXmSH8f7ddC4YE5vaA8F

[Name removed]

1. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[hedgehog]

2. I thought the OP read

Pope's bishop prick......

[nikkos_71]

3. Another example

of the religious piety plagueing this country and world. While they look down upon us sinners they neglect to acknowledge the hypocrisy within their own.

[NOW tense]

4. The Catholic church should love New Orleans.

If it wasn't for mardi gras I wouldn't know when lent is.

[nolabear]

5. I guess the rest of us were just collateral damage

The dead elders, the children who still cry when a big storm comes up, the sick who died in droves in New Orleans and during the evacuation, the families who have been blown apart by the strain, the people who were simply and honestly scraping by in a system where, in the absence of any care from anyone else, they took care of their own, the writers, artists, musicians, the people who worshipped in the plethora of Catholic churches and cathedrals, and those of us who didn't live there at the time but lost everything we know as our roots. And on and on and on.

I'm not a believer, but I also know that this kind of betrayal compounds the harm. That a man like this should have any power or influence at all makes me sad for the state of the world.

[tomg]

6. Benedict is rapidly becoming

the George Bush of Catholicism. "Heckuva job, Gerhard." He is bent on returning the Catholic Church, not to the Middle Ages so much as to the mid-17th century and the time of the Counter-Reformation and in the process driving out anyone still sane ( I think this is the point where my devout Irish-Catholic and democratic liberal parents would have bailed on the Church). It is not simply that Benny's recent picks have said particularly idiotic things that are guaranteed to legitimately infuriate whole groups of people: women, Jews, the entire population of New Orleans - so much as both Wagner and Williamson ( the Tridentine SSPX Holocaust denier) are ultra-conservative even by Catholic ultra-conservative standards, not only theologically but politically ( by analogy that is like a person in the Free Republic saying "Wow, that person is really a conservative asshole"). These guys make Pat Buchanan look like Mother Jones.

One question, though - in his pastoral letter Wagner wrote: "This was not the sinking of just any city but that of a people's dream city with the 'best brothels and prettiest prostitutes.'" I wonder how he knew. Maybe he took a field trip: Amsterdam, Bangkok, Las Vegas, NOLA.

[Ikonoklast]

7. Just the recognition and professional courtesy of one

in the same business to another.

[tomg]

8. You got it. nt