No really – thank you.
Teresa Benedetta translates a bit from Sandro Magister’s blog (which I vote for just officially translating into English along with Magisters’s other pieces at his site..why not?) in which Magister rather bitingly compares two recent Q & A’s with the Pope:
One must say that between the two Q&A sessions that the Pope had – on Feb. 17 with Roman seminarians, and on Feb. 22, with the Roman parish priests and clergy – the first group did much better than their elders.
The seminarians had agreed in advance about the six questions they were going to ask. That may have taken away some spontaneity [Teresa’s comment: If one reads the transcript, one wouldn’t say so], but it made for an efficient question-and-answer. The questions may have been too ‘formulated’ but they had the virtue of brevity and clarity.
The priests, on the other hand, really went overboard! Theoretically, the microphone was open to anyone, but it was promptly seized by those who had already warmed themselves up previously – prepared themselves, that is, not so much to ask the Pope a question but to show themselves off to him in self-celebratory panegyrics.
The parish priest of Divino Amore started with a lecture on the things that his Santuary [?] has done or is planning to do. When he finally got his turn to speak, the Pope started by saying: "I think you already have given us the answer to your question…"
Theer followed other feigned questions of exaggerated length, punctuated by impatient muttering in the audience.
If you really want to keep up to date on your Pope news and if you happen to speak Italian, you might as well join about 300,000 other visitors every day to the "Petrus" news site – it’s been in existence for a month and is already the third most visited online Italian newspaper site after Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica
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