“The selection of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina to be the new pope of the Roman Catholic Church is being seen as a move that will continue to cement Catholic-Jewish relations. Bergoglio, 76, who took the name Francis I and is the first Jesuit ever to be chosen pope, has “demonstrated his profound solidarity with the Jewish community of Argentina in both times of sorrow and joy,” said Rabbi David Rosen, International Director of Interreligious Affairs of the American Jewish Committee. He was referring to the high marks Bergoglio received in his response to the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed more than 100. The bombing, believed to be the work of Hezbollah terrorists with the backing of Iran, was one of the worst anti-Jewish attacks ever in Latin America. In 2005, Rabbi Joseph Ehrenkranz of the Center for
Christian-Jewish Understanding at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield,
Conn., praised Bergoglio’s leadership, saying: “He was very concerned with what happened.”..…………..”

The Jewish Weekly sees this new Pope as being ‘sensitive’ to Jewish
concerns. You’d think the National Socialist thugs still rule from the Baltic to the
Alps and Il Duce rules in Rome. (And WTF does a Pope have to do with Hezbollah or Hamas or Mossad or the Strait of Hormuz?)

Speaking of that: what about Muslim concerns?
Don’t we have some: Sunni concerns, Shi’a concerns, Wahhabi concerns. How about
despotic concerns? Interesting that so much gushing praise and goodwill is issued by world media
about the new pope: you’d think he was elected instead of being appointed by a few
of his pears. Sort of like the Saudi king or the Iranian Ayatollah or the
Yemeni president are selected. But that is okay: even the Saudi Mufti is not elected or
appointed by his peers, but appointed by the princes.

Obviously a Pope selected
by his peers can only do so much reform, until he collides with the special (or perhaps peculiar) interests
of the peers who appointed him. IF he does: he usually doesn’t as we discovered
in the recent couple of years regarding the continuing, er, problems of Penn
State the American Catholic Church and the reported alleged continued cover-up.

Cheers
mhg