Will the next Pope be a Zionist?

I found this article on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency website. It's a horrible piece and goes to show the sheer inhumanity of some religious types. The headline is Potential pope favors Jewish presence in Israel. We're off to a flying start. For centuries no-one objected to a Jewish presence in Israel (or Palestine as it used to be called). Then it gets more explicitly zionist.

A potential successor to Pope John Paul II spoke out strongly in favor of the Jewish claim to Israel.

Ok, still a bit mealy-mouthed. What does this Jewish claim amount to? Armed sovereignty of Jews over non-Jews?

Archbishop of Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn also rejected the notion that European Christian support for Israel stems from guilt over the Holocaust.

No serious observer ever thought it did stem from guilt. It's imperialism stupid!

"Only once in human history did God take a country as an inheritance and give it to his chosen people," Schoenborn said Wednesday in an address at Jerusalem's Hebrew University.

So god prefers Jews and a Jewish state must accord Jews preferential treatment under its apartheid laws because if god was a legal system that's what he would do. And who are godly Catholics to argue with god?

A Palestinian priest challenged Schoenborn's claim that Christians should celebrate the Jewish return to Israel, but Schoenborn responded that while the Arab-Israeli conflict is a matter of international law, the Jewish presence in Israel dates back to the Bible.

Meaning what exactly? Well, this guy is 58. If he becomes pope his pontificacy could last 30, or even 50 years. Perhaps we should welcome this, after all he'll have plenty of time to explain his deliberately meaningless and racist drivel. We shouldn't be too surprised at this. I remember back in the 1980s when apartheid South Africa was embarked on one of its subterfuges to hide apartheid behind some kind of tricameral parliament where whites would rule supreme and "coloured" would have some kind of bogus representation. Blacks were excluded still and the ANC called for a boycott. While the election campaign was on, the pope was in a plane crossing southern Africa. The story goes that the plane developed difficulties near to Mozambique. Instead of landing in Mozambique the papal plane landed in the land of apartheid. Whilst in South Africa, the pope said that it would be a sin to boycott the elections. So our man Christoph might get to follow in a fine apartheid supporting papal tradition.