This is simply outrageous! The Catholic Church, this self-appointed pillar of morality against the so-called "culture of death" pandering to the celebrity worship culture. Beatification and Canonisation are normally very lengthy processes, which can take decades. Miracles are required. At a time when the catholic Church is finally starting to be called into account and has this huge image crisis, they suddenly decided to yield to public demand (John Paul II actually said that the Church was/is not a democracy!!!) and give this already highly mediatic pope the highest proof of stardom they can come up with. In my mind they are simply trying to capitalise on the wave of sympathy created by the death of the previous pope before it cools off. Petty!
Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at...
they'll be saying it was a miracle he wasn't shot next...
ReplyDeleteHe would be brought to sainthood anyhow. He was a true servant of the servants of god and a proud representation of tradition and the catholic church. We might have not agreed with all his desicions but this man was a true living saint, unlike the current pope.
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