The pope's cousin is a JW

by loosie 45 Replies latest social current

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  Pole

  Can you imagine Ted Jaracz saying Catholics are not that bad?
  Pole
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  AlmostAtheist

  Since she left the one and only true faith, I wonder why her Catholic cousin is still willing to talk to her? Doesn't he risk being excommunicated for talking with an admitted apostate?

  OH THAT'S RIGHT! It's the *JW's* that shun family members that change their beliefs, not the Catholics. Yes, it makes sense now.

  Never mind, carry on...

  Dave
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  melmac

  I may be mistaken, but I think I heard a similar story before, when John Paul II was the Pope...
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  misspeaches

  OMG... that is hilarious... Looking at the article and the locality, dates of convention, the circuit this lady would come from and which convention she would be assigned to etc this article appears to be genuine.
• 

  ozziepost

  A typical Witness news release from a DC all right!

  Did he say that - about the halls being the right size and the churches being empty? Come off the grass! It's typical Dubbie folklore!

  BTW he r home town of Cooma is the place that's pedophile heaven in dubbieland. It was the place exposed on the "Sunday" program. Enough said?
• 

  aqwsed12345

  The story claims that an Australian Jehovah’s Witness, Stefanie Brzakovic, is Pope Benedict XVI’s cousin and that the Pope phoned her to praise Witness evangelism:

  “You Witnesses are doing the work we Catholics should be doing.
  Your halls are small but full; our cathedrals are great and empty.”

  For Witnesses the anecdote is catnip: even the pontiff allegedly concedes their superiority. For ex‑Witnesses it is classic “JW folklore.” What do the records actually show?

  1 | Genealogy: there is no cousin

  • Benedict XVI’s maternal line—Rieger, Peintner, Tauber, Reiss—has been traced in Bavarian and Tyrolean church books back to 1780. His grandfather, Isidor Rieger, was an only child; therefore no collateral branch exists for a second‑cousin, let alone a first.

  • Stefanie Brzakovic’s mother, Katharina Berger (baptised 20 Aug 1894, Garmisch) is recorded as the daughter of Johann Berger and Barbara Bartl. These surnames never intersect the Ratzinger tree.

  Without a shared great‑grandparent, “cousin” status is genealogically impossible.

  2 | Geography: childhood hang‑outs that couldn’t happen

  Stefanie said the families “played together” in Weilheim, “about fifty kilometres away.” In reality:

  • The Ratzingers lived near Traunstein in south‑eastern Bavaria.

  • Weilheim lies west of Munich, nearly 100 km from Traunstein by 1930s roads.

  For farming families of modest means that was an all‑day trip, not an afternoon jaunt. No parish, school or civic ledger places the two clans in the same district.

  3 | The nickname that gives the game away

  Bavarian Josephs are nicknamed Sepp/Sepperl. Stefanie alone invokes “Ratzinger‑Pepi,” a Viennese diminutive scarcely used around Traunstein. Real childhood friends do not botch this detail.

  4 | Déjà vu rhetoric

  The Pope’s alleged compliment is word‑for‑word identical to lines printed in Watchtower literature years earlier (Watchtower 15 Jun 1993; Awake! 8 Feb 1982): “You are doing the work we should be doing.” Copy‑and‑paste folklore, not papal diction.

  5 | Silence where evidence should be

  No Vatican note, no papal audience, no phone log supports a 2005 call. Crucially, The Watchtower—which eagerly prints clergy compliments—never published the story. That editorial silence is the strongest sign Brooklyn knew it would not survive fact‑checking.

  Verdict

  Every verifiable strand—ancestry, distance, dialect, publication history—contradicts the anecdote. What remains is an uncorroborated reminiscence that mirrors long‑standing Witness propaganda tropes. Far from proving papal admiration, the “Pope’s JW cousin” saga illustrates how rumours flourish when they confirm a community’s self‑image and when no one stops to ask for birth certificates, parish ledgers, or a simple map.
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  HereIam60

  Hasn’t there already been a long argument about this already? Even if true, so what? By the way that “You witnesses are doing the work we ——— should be doing” etc. has been used many times in so called experiences, just fill in the blank.
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  TonusOH

  The story about a person from a different Christian faith admitting that JWs "do the work that we won't" was a common JW trope when I was growing up. The WTS liked to play up anything that they did that was different, and how it demonstrated that they 'have the truth.' They did something similar by only ever reporting stories about blood transfusions that had adverse effects, to show that their stance on blood was the right one.
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  joey jojo

  His grandfather, Isidor Rieger, was an only child; therefore no collateral branch exists for a second‑cousin, let alone a first.

  Am I reading this wrong?

  A grandfathers children and how many children they have determines if the grandchildren have cousins.
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  slimboyfat

  I have personally been told that “Jehovah’s Witnesses do the work we should be doing” in more or less those words by a few different people, including a Christadelphian and a Church of Scotland member. They apparently came up with the same thought all on their own by looking at JW preaching. I didn’t take it to mean they suddenly think JWs are the true religion. It just seemed to mean exactly what they said, and that they admired the persistence of JW preaching even if they didn’t agree with the content. It’s really not that remarkable an observation and is entirely believable as something a Catholic, even the pontiff might say. I’m not saying he definitely did say it, I wasn’t there, but any argument that he couldn’t possibly have said that is clearly wrong.