Press ridicules RP 'popemobile'

Press ridicules RP 'popemobile'

MANILA (AFP): The Philippine press yesterday attacked the
locally-assembled "popemobile" which John Paul II will use in his
visit here this week as "ugly" and a national embarrassment.

"One has the right to expect something better from the
Filipino," former press undersecretary Horacio Paredes wrote in
his column in the Malaya newspaper.

"What we have shown the world with this monstrosity is the
crudity of our workmanship, something very unfair to the rest of
us Filipinos," he added.

The three million-peso (US$125,000) vehicle, which features an
armored, box-shaped glass canopy, "lacks artistry and design" and
"looks like a tank," he wrote.

The pontiff survived a 1981 assassination attempt in Rome,
"but who'll save His Holiness from embarrassment if he tools
around Metro Manila in that monstrosity of an armored jeepney?"
publisher Max Soliven wrote in the Philippine Star.

The Jeepney is a Filipino car based on wartime American jeeps.
Soliven said the papal jeep was "so clumsily designed (the Pope)
will only look like a chimpanzee on display aboard a rolling
Barnum and Bailey coach."

"How can the Vicar of Christ, the Leader of the Faith for over
a billion Roman Catholics all over this planet, be seen to cower
in a glass menagerie -- to have so little faith in Divine
protection?" he added.

Popular television and radio newscaster and talk show host Ted
Failon said the Popemobile "looks like a gas chamber."

He said it appeared to have the rough suspension attributes of
the "jeepney," the smoke-belching converted light trucks that
form the backbone of the country's urban mass transport system.

Officials of Francisco Motor Corp., the jeep's assemblers, and
CTK Inc., its armorers, could not be reached for comment.

Cardinal Jaime Sin, the Manila archbishop, sprinkled holy
water on the jeep last weekend when it was unveiled to the public
for the first time.