The Pope Loves Pussycats

Along with an enormous entourage and a message of peace, the Pope brought with him to the United States a lifelong love of cats.

Benedict's kindness toward the strays of Rome is already the stuff of Vatican legend. His house in Germany, its garden guarded by a cat statue, was filled with cats when Benedict lived there full time before he was posted to the Vatican in 1982.

And Benedict is, without a doubt, the first pope to have had an authorized biography of him written by a cat -- Chico, a ginger tabby who lives across the road from Benedict's old house in Germany.

Keep reading.

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Click here, here and here to read more about the Pope's passion.

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Check out Joseph and Chico: The Life of Pope Benedict XVI as Told By a Cat.

Comments

[aristippe]

11:14 PM on 04/22/2008

Frill-necked Lizard?

[SoozeNYC]

03:58 PM on 04/22/2008

This piece spent some time at the top of the most e-mailed articles in the New York Times. What I find irritating about this oh-so warm-and-fuzzy piece ("Awww, gee, the Pope likes kitty-cats! What a mensch!") is that it is pure fluff and misses some critical points that might be a lot more revealing about the guy's nature:
How does he feel about spaying/neutering? Is that a crime against God's law, like birth control for humans?
How does he feel about the thousands of cats and kittens that are euthanized or otherwise murdered in Italy every year (I know, I lived there for a while and most of the kittens born in our village were routinely drowned)?
This is propagandistic crap. Oh, I believe the guy loves animals; but HItler loved children and animals, too -- at least, the ones he didn't consider vermin. (And the Vatican did bubkus to stop him from murdering THOSE,)

[Hopalongpoppyseed]

11:39 AM on 04/22/2008

I read somewhere, the Pope seems to like his red shoes.

[JScott]

11:29 AM on 04/22/2008

Interesting it's cats that aren't really compliant (which the Catholic church loves-compliant adherents)
remember cats don't have owners they have staff.

[sassafra]

08:47 PM on 04/21/2008

mumblety-peg?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumblety_peg

[JohnFromCensornati]

06:24 PM on 04/21/2008

And here I was thinking Doberman Pinscher.