Opponents reject ‘overdose of religiosity’
After allowing the outpouring of emotion for the Pope, who headed the Catholic Church for 26 years, some elected officials on the left in France and in Spain have begun raising concerns about acts of official mourning by their secular states.
In France, where politicians are always sensitive to the separation of church and state, the Greens on the Paris municipal council found it “completely inappropriate” to lower the French flag at public buildings, even calling it an “abuse of power” by the French president.
The anti-AIDS group Act Up remembered the Pope with his ultra-conservative sexual views as an “accomplice of the epidemic” and called for the homage to the pontiff to be “in proportion to the 10,000 people who die daily of AIDS”.
In Spain, where a day of national mourning was observed on Monday, six socialist or communist lawmakers refused to stand up on Tuesday in a minute of silence observed by the Spanish parliament in memory of the deceased Pope.
The media also came under fire for its extensive coverage. The French satiric weekly Le Canard Enchaine ran the headline: “Overdose of religiosity: Where is the separation of church and the media?”
The Bulgarian press, too, derided the media for its obsession with the Pope’s last days and his death.
“Turning the death of a spiritual leader into a political and television show is an abomination,” wrote Duma columnist Alexander Perpeliev.
In Russia, another country of the Orthodox church, Alexei Mitrofanov, vice-president of the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, accused the Russian media of participating in “Catholic propaganda”. The day before, 98 lawmakers voted for a resolution to limit coverage of events related to the deceased pontiff.
Ex-priest and German psychoanalyst Eugen Drewermann said the ceremonies around the Pope’s death “are worryingly similar to what we saw with the burial of Ayatollah Khomeini”, the founder of the Islamic republic in Iran.
