This is how leadership and accountability are supposed to work these days; Gordon Brown is resigning just because his party came in second and he might be a liability to them. He's taking the fall for the Labour Party:
Gordon Brown has announced that he will step down as prime minister and leader of the ruling center-left Labour Party. Brown, who has served as prime minister since taking over from Tony Blair in 2007, said he had to take responsibility for his party's poor performance in last week's general election, in which no party gained a majority but Labour came in second to the center-right Conservative Party.In other news:
"The reason that we have a hung Parliament is that no single party and no single leader was able to win the full support of the country," Brown said outside No. 10 Downing Street. "As leader of my party, I must accept that that is a judgment on me." He added that he wanted a successor in place by September, when Labour holds its annual party conference.
Catholics' approval ratings of Pope Benedict XVI's job performance while in office had dropped 15 points over the past two years, according to a new poll conducted by Zogby Interactive and commissioned by the National Catholic Reporter weekly newspaper.
The numbers slid from 71 percent in April 2008, as the pope made his first pastoral visit to the United States as pontiff, to 56 percent in April 2010, as Pope Benedict and the Vatican came under increased media scrutiny over past handling of clerical sexual abuse cases.
"Fifteen points is dramatic," said John Zogby, who runs the polling firm that bears his name, at a May 6 luncheon in Washington during which the poll results were issued.
Approval ratings for the U.S. Catholic bishops fell even more than that of the pope, from 62 percent in 2008 to 45 percent in 2010, a drop of 17 points.
2 comments:
Great! Follow polls conducted to ascertain the opinion of the ignorant, un-catechized and even more morally bankrupt Catholic masses. Are you saying the Pope should really care about such polls? Fine, let him resign, and we can get Kasper the friendly poltergeist elected as pope to reform the Church. Get a grip! According to the DIVINE CONSTITUTION of the Church, the pope is SUBJECT TO NO ONE. This of course can make it both extremely difficult and extremely easy to bring about top-down reform. I would like it more if the Pope gave greater consideration to INTELLIGENT CRITICISM offered by those inside and outside the Church. At best, popular "opinion polls" (Who should give a d**n about the opinions of the uninformed and clueless?) should be used by the Vatican in crafting its responses to the press. Resignation? Come on!
I never said the Pope should resign.
I just thought that Gordon Brown's actions are a pertinent example in the workings of modern leadership. Labour wasn't getting the job done, negative public opinion, deserved or not, can cripple the effectiveness of any organization, so he stepped down for the good of the Party. He took on responsibility for the whole organization even though strictly speaking one man can hardly be to blame.
I never said anything about the the Pope resigning.
Post a Comment