Tuesday, January 06, 2009

The death of satire

This is a genuine news report. It's not meant to be funny or ironic:

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has declared that capitalism is dead because of the credit crunch.
[...]
Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, 76, made the astonishing claim at a lavish fund-raising dinner at Claridges...
[...]
The four course dinner, with a champagne reception, had been provided free of charge by Derek Quinlan, the property developer, who owns Claridges who is worth an estimated £60 million.
The assembled capitalists had just pledged hundreds of thousands of pounds to the Catholic Church.

4 comments:

Fidothedog said...

And they wonder why the pews are nearly empty come Sunday.

North Northwester said...

It goes on...
The Rt Rev Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, said: “Labour made a lot of promises, but a lot of them have vanished into thin air,’’ he said. “We have not seen a raising of aspirations in the last 13 years, but instead there is a sense of hopelessness.
When a big bank or car company goes bankrupt, it gets bailed out, but no one seems to be bailing out the ordinary people who are losing their jobs and seeing their savings diminished.’’

Um, and who works for, buys from, is paid pension income from and sells to that big company, I wonder, if not 'people'?
It's not like I favour the bail-outs, but sweet Jesus, this boy's got it so wrong!

Though a non-believer I've got a lot of time for the Catholic Church and I know that they are instructed to render unto Caesar and deal with the real world of taxation and power, but who are they rendering unto in economics: Groucho? Harpo?

Or the other one, maybe...?

Unknown said...

From what I see on the British Catholic blogs I read, the UK bishops are clowns.

Anonymous said...

Do you think they might refund our Peter's pence?