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Disgraced president retreats to monastery
Published: 11 Mar 12 10:51 CET | Print version
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/politics/20120311-41267.html
Ex-President Christian Wulff has gone on a temporary monastic retreat, according to the Bild am Sonntag newspaper. Allegations of corruption in the past months have taken their toll, sources high up in Berlin political circles said.
- Berlin mayor admits taking free holiday - Politics (10 Mar 12)
- Politicians rain on Wulff's farewell torch parade - National (8 Mar 12)
- Can Gauck be president 'while living in sin?' - Analysis & Opinion (22 Feb 12)
Wulff is deeply religious and has long been active in the "Pro Christ" movement. In 2007, while state premier of Lower Saxony he travelled to Rome for a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI.
The former president has also used the time out to undergo a full health check, according to the report. On February 23, he was admitted to a Berlin military hospital with acute renal colic.
"We get visits from many people who are insecure and unsettled, or whose lives are going through a tremendous upheaval," Father August Hülsmann of the Herz-Jesu Monastery in Neustadt an der Weinstraße in Rhineland-Palatinate told Bild am Sonntag.
Hülsmann said he reads the Bible with his guests, walks through the forest with them, talks and listens to them. He said that an increasing number of people were in need of this kind of healing.
Meanwhile, the political storm over the Wulff allegations goes on. On Sunday politicians from ruling and opposition parties called for the former president to refrain from claiming staff and office expenses.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said the Wulff-bashing had gone too far. "You don’t kick a man when he's down," he told the Passauer Neue Presse on Saturday.
The Local/jlb
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Your comments about this article:
>Wulff is deeply religious and has long been active in the "Pro Christ" movement.
This is one reason why I detest people like him. Holier-than-thou types - who are themselves, according to their own standards by which they never tire to judge the rest of us, the worst and biggest sinners of them all.
If he really were such a pious, virtuous man, he never would have engaged in his shady secret deals to begin with, he wouldn't have been such a freeloader and sponge... and he especially wouldn't have screwed his now-wife Bettina after his ex-wife's back... and wouldn't have ditched his first wife and their daughter for somebody else.
How do you square that with your "deep religous beliefs", Mr. Wulff?
He wants a suite nearer to god.
Sympathetic? Not so much.