Dreadful Doldrums in Deutschland
Religion & Liberty Online

Dreadful Doldrums in Deutschland

Watch Germany fall further into the abyss as it turns its back on both liberalism and Christianity.

Once a staunchly pro-American, global economic powerhouse, the country is now the “sick man” of Europe more ways than one. These recent news items offer proof:

Chancellor Gerhard Schrr lashes out at the “unrestrained neo-liberal system” for his country’s economic woes.

Schrr has been actively courting Russia and China as allies; John Vinocur’s column in yesterday’s International Herald Tribune points to Schrrism as the root cause of Germany’s many ills.

In the midst of all their domestic troubles, German intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas, Günter Grass and Wolf Biermann have decided to nag the French into accepting the European Constitution.

And, to top it all off, despite being the first German Pope in nearly 1,000 years, Benedict XVI is more popular in Poland than in his homeland.

An English-language blog on Germany has regular updates on this depressing yet edifying story.

Kishore Jayabalan

Kishore Jayabalan is director of Istituto Acton, the Acton Institute's Rome office. Formerly, he worked for the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace as the lead policy analyst on sustainable development and arms control. Kishore Jayabalan earned a B.A. in political science and economics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In college, he was executive editor of The Michigan Review and an economic policy intern for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He worked as an international economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, D.C. and then graduated with an M.A. in political science from the University of Toronto. While in Toronto, Kishore interned in the university's Newman Centre, which led to his appointment to the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations in New York. Two years later, he returned to Rome to work for the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace as the Holy See's lead policy analyst on sustainable development and arms control. As director of Istituto Acton, Kishore organizes the institute's educational and outreach efforts in Rome and throughout Europe.