PopeWatch confesses that when he first heard of this, he recalled the scene from the film Twelve O’clock High where General Savage, played by Gregory Peck, is briefing his 918th Bomb Group. He announces to them that Intelligence has reported that the Germans have been taking fighter units from the East Front and stationing them in Germany. Savage pauses, smiles, and says to the laughter and cheers of his men, “I guess they’ve heard about the 918th!”
From The Eponymous Flower:
“This is interesting, as the Argentine Master of Ceremonies of the Pope, Msgr. Guillermo Xavier Karcher, said for the first time in interview in April 2014 that the Pope reads a single newspaper, La Repubblica, and that it prepares a map for him of the daily press. But he neither reads the Internet nor could he use a computer. Curial Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, President of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, said on June 23, 2015 at the Europe Forum in Bilbao, the Pope had confided to him on 18 June in Santa Marta: “I know that there are many blogs against me.” It was a statement that he could only make from information provided by others.”
Go here to read the rest. Time for one of the favorite poems of PopeWatch:
He is nearly 80 years old. My dad is a good 15 younger and doesn’t do computer stuff. (Mom was an early adopter, and still doesn’t do blogs.)
Lawyering is probably more like being a Catholic priest than cowboying is…do you know any 80 year old lawyers that don’t do computers?
I had to laugh at your comment, sorry.
My dad is an active 84 year-old lawyer who is quite active on his computer and on the internet. I’ll ask him what blogs he follows, but he’s got an active Facebook presence. Who knows, maybe he’s the exception!
—-
Reminds me of the anecdote of the New Your socialite surprised by Ronald Reagan’s election when she never met anyone who wanted to vote for him
Laughing is good!
You want depressing, we had a couple of shop heads that couldn’t figure out how to download an attachment from ship’s email and print it– just five years ago. They weren’t even 40.
One of them couldn’t manage it even after he was shown how by multiple people; he’d be about 45, now.
Among the non-blog-related folks I know on facebook, the ones that can figure out how to check if a meme is baloney is depressingly low; the number that follow blogs (not counting blog-style “news” sites, like Huff’n’puff) is in the handful.
I suppose you could ask your dad if his professional associates tend to be bloggy or not– I know that back when I was a teen, there were some folks who were in their 80s and active in conservative circles, and I’m pretty sure that Patterico’s had a decent number of grandparent/great grandparent types back in ’04, and that a lot more people read blogs than comment on them.
Pope should get his own blog. We could correspond. Imagine being able to tell Pope he is a heretic and he in turn would call you a “self absorbed, Promethean, no-palagian”. What fun!
The Bear drifts off to sleep every night with a smile on his face imagining a translated copy of SCB is provided to the Pope every night. It’s harmless.
Some will recall that last spring I recounted how two very pro-Pope-Francis members of a quite-progressive (and shrinking—they haven’t had a novice in about 8 years) women’s religious order excitedly spoke about their recent Easter-season visit to Rome and the Holy Father’s audience, and that “they even paid us to attend.” Things then were so bad for the usually intensely crowded papal audiences which have shrunk under this papacy, that, yes they are, sotto-voce, paying people to attend.
Now this information comes out:
Oh, the Francis Pontificate is succeeding!\
” On August 26, 2015, the statistics released by the Papal Household Prefecture show::
•1,548,500 were present at the 30 audiences of 2013;
•1,199,000 present at the 43 audiences of 2014;
•400,100 present at the 27 audiences of 2015.”
So, the average number of persons present at each audience is as follows (from the same source):
•51,617 in 2013;
•27,883 in 2014;
•14,818 in 2015.
The numbers don’t lie: it is a reduction by 1/2 from each previous year. So, Catholics are running from this papacy.