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.