Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

According to the official program, on Sunday, in New York, at 9:30 a.m, Pope Benedict XVI will visit the site of the "former World Trade Center". And doesn't the use of the word "former" there still shock? After greeting some of those who survived the attacks, and family members who lost loved ones, "the Pope kneels before a pool of water and candle, offering a silent prayer."

Meanwhile, the good burghers of Erfurt in eastern Germany are being treated to a staging of Verdi's Un ballo in maschera with a naked cast wearing Mickey Mouse masks and dancing among the symbolic vestiges of the Twin Towers. But as Harry de Quetteville noted in the Daily Telegraph: "Foreign audiences may find naked singers cavorting in front of the iconic ruined mesh of World Trade Centre metalwork most provocative." Indeed. What kind of cretin dreamed this up? He's called Johann Kresnik and he's Austrian, which might explain why one of the "American" female singers wears a toothbrush moustache and performs Nazi salutes. Why do European leftists always put Hitler moustaches on those who helped save the continent from a thousand years of barbarity? Is their self-hatred so perverse? And is the travesty of Verdi in Erfurt simply a declaration of moral and artistic bankruptcy by those who have no values or ideas anymore?