The Popes new feature movie ’78 year Old Virgin’ was meet with rapturous applause at its initial screening.Indian pilgrims bound for Catholic Youth Day in Sydney, have taken the opportunity of a stop-over in Auckland to ‘do a runner’.
The absconders from an escorted group of 220 were billeted in Auckland prior to traveling to Sydney, but almost as soon as the plane had touched town, a number high-tailed it and are now in hiding.
It’s become clear a number of this group were simply using Catholic Youth Day as a ruse to scam N.Z Immigration authorities into issuing temporary visa’s and it’s that very same Department that now has to spend tax-payers dollars tracking down the missing pilgrims.
One of the naive billets from St Thomas Moore Church in Auckland tried to persuade the public that this was not a mass immigration scam by claiming “I’m guessing they’ve taken a holiday in New Zealand, but I don’t think they’d give up the chance to meet the Pope”.
Clearly this individual was not at Auckland the airport to see the 39 missing seats on the connecting flight to Sydney, the equivalent of one in five from the original group.
Another host was more realistic as to the absconders motives. Kim Wannenburg told Newstalk ZB the two men she was billeting told her they were going to the local shops to buy her daughter a present. They never returned.
To rub salt into the proverbial wound, a spokesman for the N.Z Shikh Community who are now assisting authorities find the group, said the majority of the missing men were not even Catholic!
New Zealand Catholic Church spokeswoman Lyndsay Freer (pictured) told Radio New Zealand the mass defectio
n was “shocking” and “there was no reason to believe the missing pilgrims were not genuine”.
As per usual this shock and indignation from Catholic Church authorities did not translate into dollars. It’s the standard ‘all care no responsibility’ policy and the cost for finding the group is now being picked-up by the muggin’s tax-payers.
What Freer and the N.Z Catholic Church have yet to answer is ‘why were large numbers of pilgrims of other faiths traveling with the group in the first place?’.
With a modicum of journalistic detective work is was easily established (via the local Indian community) that the pilgrims contained a large number were Shikhs, and it’s likely it will be within this community, that the missing men will ultimately be located.
The lyrics to Monty Pythons ‘Every Sperm is Sacred’ seem strangely ironic:
I'm a Roman Catholic,
The absconders from an escorted group of 220 were billeted in Auckland prior to traveling to Sydney, but almost as soon as the plane had touched town, a number high-tailed it and are now in hiding.
It’s become clear a number of this group were simply using Catholic Youth Day as a ruse to scam N.Z Immigration authorities into issuing temporary visa’s and it’s that very same Department that now has to spend tax-payers dollars tracking down the missing pilgrims.
One of the naive billets from St Thomas Moore Church in Auckland tried to persuade the public that this was not a mass immigration scam by claiming “I’m guessing they’ve taken a holiday in New Zealand, but I don’t think they’d give up the chance to meet the Pope”.
Clearly this individual was not at Auckland the airport to see the 39 missing seats on the connecting flight to Sydney, the equivalent of one in five from the original group.
Another host was more realistic as to the absconders motives. Kim Wannenburg told Newstalk ZB the two men she was billeting told her they were going to the local shops to buy her daughter a present. They never returned.
To rub salt into the proverbial wound, a spokesman for the N.Z Shikh Community who are now assisting authorities find the group, said the majority of the missing men were not even Catholic!
New Zealand Catholic Church spokeswoman Lyndsay Freer (pictured) told Radio New Zealand the mass defectio
n was “shocking” and “there was no reason to believe the missing pilgrims were not genuine”.As per usual this shock and indignation from Catholic Church authorities did not translate into dollars. It’s the standard ‘all care no responsibility’ policy and the cost for finding the group is now being picked-up by the muggin’s tax-payers.
What Freer and the N.Z Catholic Church have yet to answer is ‘why were large numbers of pilgrims of other faiths traveling with the group in the first place?’.
With a modicum of journalistic detective work is was easily established (via the local Indian community) that the pilgrims contained a large number were Shikhs, and it’s likely it will be within this community, that the missing men will ultimately be located.
The lyrics to Monty Pythons ‘Every Sperm is Sacred’ seem strangely ironic:
I'm a Roman Catholic,
And have been since before I was born,
And the one thing they say about Catholics is:They'll take you as soon as you're warm.
You don't have to be a six-footer.
You don't have to have a great brain.
You don't have to have any clothes on.
You're a Catholic the moment Dad came,
As I’ve rallied before on this blog, New Zealand is now seen as a soft haven for economic refugees who use ‘religious persecution’ as a guise to gain access to residency. In this case a so called pilgrimage sponsored by The Catholic Church was sufficient for N.Z Immigration officials to ‘lower their guards’ and the result of their intransigence is all there to see.
As I’ve rallied before on this blog, New Zealand is now seen as a soft haven for economic refugees who use ‘religious persecution’ as a guise to gain access to residency. In this case a so called pilgrimage sponsored by The Catholic Church was sufficient for N.Z Immigration officials to ‘lower their guards’ and the result of their intransigence is all there to see.
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