Pope Benedict has added another ultra reactionary bishop to what I’ve decided to call his ‘rat pack’ . Not content with endorsing Holocaust denying Bishop Williamson, the  news today is that Ratzinger  has promoted Gerhard Maria Wagner  to the post of auxiliary bishop in the Austrian diocese of Linz.

Wagner  believes Harry Potter is “pure satanism” and that Hurricane Katrina and the Tsunami in Thailand were not natural disasters but God’s way of punishing sinners.

Of New Orleans, Wagner wrote:  “This was not the sinking of just any city but that of a people’s dream city with the ‘best brothels and prettiest prostitutes’‘” . (which begs the question: Who are the  advisers who enable him to grade these sex workers with such authority? Or is he speaking from personal experience?)

Ratzinger himself shares Wagner’s view that J.K. Rowling is doing the devil’s work.  He replied to a protester who wrote to him by saying  “It is good, that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly” . There are numerous websites devoted to this issue – try ‘Harry Potter is of the Devil‘ for size!

By promoting Wagner, you have to conclude that is not offended by his comments about New Orleans or Thailand.

Out-bloody-rageous!!!!  The Rat must be stopped!  If there really was an interventionist God the thunderbolt should have struck the Vatican by now.