Jacksonville, FL – Rogers Cadenhead, a lapsed Catholic who registered the domain BenedictXVI.com weeks before the new pope was elected, has stated that while he is unsure what to do with the domain, he believes selling it to a pornography or gambling site would be wrong.Cadenhead bought the domain on April 1, more than two weeks before Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was election as the 265th pope. Ratzinger, a former archbishop from Munich, Germany, announced he would take the name Benedict XVI. Divine intervention had nothing to do with it, Cadenhead asserted. He bought the domain as well as many others, based on an educated guess after studying the potential papal names.
Cadenhead was thrilled when Ratzinger announced his papal name. “I felt like my horse had come in first at the Kentucky races!” he said.
Cadenhead insisted he is not just cyber-squatting or occupying the domain out of spite. To the contrary, Cadenhead does not want to reap any profit from the domain, and asserted that he is doing the pope a service by preventing the papal site from being bought by inappropriate companies, such as pornographers.
Asked if he would turn down millions of dollars for the site, Cadenhead replied, “Good Heavens no! It’d be a bitter pill to swallow but if that’s the price of virtue then so be it.”
The site benedictxvi is currently receiving more than 1000 hits per minute from curious web surfers. The site only points to his personal site for the moment. “I can almost see the smoke rising from the server,” he said.
He said he would hand over the site to papal officials for “two nights at the Vatican hotel, one of those hats, complete absolution and world peace.”
