NSS: ‘Extraordinarily bad choice’
Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, comments on the Today programme regarding Pope Benedict’s Christmas message:
“I’ve no problem whatsoever with the message itself, which is a religious message.
“But I think it’s an extraordinarily bad choice for the BBC, and I think it’s actually a slap in the face to these tens and hundreds of thousands of child abuse victims.
“I think the problem is that the Pope, and indeed the Vatican, manages – because of its chameleon status between church and state – to kind of move to a position at any moment that accords it maximum power and the least amount of accountability.
“What we’ve been having, particularly with the Papal visit and again, indeed, with Thought For The Day, is the Pope pontificating his views and telling us everything and being totally unaccountable for the quite terrible things that the church has been responsible for.”
