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Admirable absence

Francis X. Rocca

Pope Benedict XVI is not exactly known as a slacker, but it turns out that his boyhood included at least one episode of failing to turn up as required.

The pope’s brother Georg has told an Italian journalist that young Joseph Ratzinger habitually skipped meetings of his Hitler Youth group, and thus “brought economic harm to my family because by not doing so we could not receive the discounts for school tuition.”

As Hamlet said, some rules are “more honor’d in the breach than the observance.”


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