Cardinal Walter Kasper, maybe should shut up?

[TheBeast]

You will recall Cardinal Walter Kasper who fell ill after telling a German magazine that arriving at Heathrow airport was like landing in a "Third World country" and therefore couldn't accompany the pope on his trip.

According to the BBC, Vatican officials have now clarified his "Third World" comment and said it referred to the UK's multicultural society.

Sounds incredibly patronising and racist to me.

Shame he's "ill" - how inconvenient that he isn't available to clarify his statements

And I agree - if multicultural = Third World then USA, Australia, most of Europe must be Third World nowadays.

Doesn't the catholic church have members who originally come from a range of backgrounds?

Actually, had he just meant LHR was a dump, that would be acceptable. Italian airlines fly into Terminal 2, which is an absolute shithole.

But thanks to the PR spokesman taking an ambiguous comment and making it worse, we now know the man actually did mean "lots of black faces", which is straight forward racism. Ratzinger is a friend to holocaust deniers (Richard Williamson) and his sidekick is a good old-fashioned racist. Nice state visit.