Word: choiring
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...triumphant return to his Bavarian hometown of Marktl am Inn four years ago - his first since becoming Pontiff - was made all the more poignant by the presence of his older brother, Georg Ratzinger. Five decades after they'd entered seminary together, the new Pontiff and the retired church-choir director stepped with the same soft gait and wavy white hair into the town's tiny riverside chapel. Praying silently side by side, they might just as well have been an aging pair of humble village priests...
...that tender image has been shattered by recent allegations that young singers in the famed Regensburger Domspatzen choir, which the elder Ratzinger directed from 1964 to 1994, have suffered sexual abuse and beatings at the hands of priests since the 1950s. Though the retired Ratzinger, 86, denies any knowledge of sexual abuse during his time with the choir, he has admitted to slapping several singers and apologized for not having intervened to limit the crueler beatings that have been alleged by others. (See pictures of the Pope in the Holy Land...
...Others, however, claim Ratzinger must have known more at the time. Franz Wittenbrink, a former singer who lived at the Regensburg boarding school connected with the choir from 1958 to 1967, tells TIME it was "unimaginable" that Ratzinger hadn't heard about cases of sexual abuse during his time as director. Wittenbrink alleges that there was a "widespread system of sadistic punishments and sexual lust" at the school and in the choir. He says he was physically abused by young men in training to become priests at the school who would routinely smack him on the bottom with their hands...
Maybe the best example yet of the reality-fiction alliance is Fox's high school choir spoof Glee, which, in essence, is American Idol in teen-dramedy form. It is a literal re-creation of the pop appeal of Idol (just like Idol's, Glee's songs fly to the top of iTunes on a weekly basis). And it's also a critique of the American Idol culture that made it possible. In the words of Rachel (Lea Michele), "Nowadays, being anonymous is worse than being poor...
...snarky bloggers and strident talk radio, not to mention cable "news" largely preoccupied with the trivial, the tactical and the tawdry. Factor in an ever more fragmented audience, and the bully pulpit of Teddy Roosevelt's imagination is in constant danger of being drowned out by a Twittering choir...