Originally Posted by
Elke
It's really odd, because for decades he'd been scheming behind the scenes, and then someone figured it out and suddenly it was: OH JP U IZ TEH SAVIOUR OF UZ ALL! Maybe it's a typical European thing, because Eastern Europe was always less of a US concern, as opposed to the USSR itself. Don't know.
It also shows the deep schizophrenia in the antitheist community: on the one hand every moral statement by the Pope gets scrutinized to within an inch of its life, but the really worrying aspects of papal power are neglected or barely mentioned.
Another reason why it needs to be a Pope from the developing world: someone with that background might put the emphasis more on brdiging the gap between the North and the South, on the emancipatory message of the Gospel and on ecology. [Again, Benedict tried to smuggle ecology in, but not enough.]
Though on the other hand I do think the efforts in oecumene should be continued as well.