Passau Bishop Stefan Oster had a huge internet hit at Easter. One or two of the bishop’s jokes have been a tradition for several years at the annual Easter Vigil in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Passau, where the resurrection ceremony is celebrated. The “Easter jokes” uploaded by the Diocese of Passau’s YouTube channel have also enjoyed great popularity in recent years. The bishop’s humorous comment from 2023 was viewed more than 520,000 times.
But this year the Easter joke, which was actually a passage from the “Little Book of Easter Laughter” and was read out by the 58-year-old, broke the million mark after just a few days. As of yesterday evening, the video, which made it into almost all major German (online) media outlets, had around 1.4 million views, and this number will certainly increase in the coming days.
About the video:
The humorous article read by Oster was about a “woman from a city” who wanted to go on vacation in the Bavarian Forest in the 1920s. At that time it wasn’t really developed for tourism. The woman wrote a letter to the local council asking whether there was a toilet in town. At first no one could do anything with it, but then they were sure that it could only be a “forest band”. The local council assumed that the “new modern city dwellers” would spell the word differently, namely “Waldcapelle”.
Hearty laughter from the bishop
Of course, the village has had a toilet for more than 300 years, and there are expert instructions from the priest, and on special occasions even accompanied by a brass band. When reading out the congregation’s response, the bishop himself could hardly contain his laughter, which was celebrated on social networks. The video went viral, primarily because of the hearty laugh of Stefan Oster, who was appointed 85th Bishop of Passau by Pope Francis on April 4, 2014.
“I always tell a joke at the end of Easter services. It’s an old church tradition: ‘risus paschalis’, Easter laughter. As a bishop, I took that up again ten years ago at my first Easter celebration in the cathedral here,” writes Oster Request from the OÖN. The bishop, who is very present on social networks, has organized a joke competition on his Facebook account in the past. Before the Easter services there is now a “certain level of expectation” when it comes to “Easter jokes”. The story he told was new to him. “I knew it would be well received,” said Oster.
When asked whether he had expected so many hits on the video, the bishop replied: “No, I wouldn’t have expected a million or more. But that it would do quite well on the Internet, that’s for sure. The jokes in the In recent years, some have already received several hundred thousand views.”
The mood during the joke was also very good on Easter Monday, but not so exuberant. “Probably also because I was able to pull myself together a little more. Many people have told me that they had to laugh so much at Easter Vigil because I was almost tearing up with laughter,” says the humorous bishop.
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Source: Nachrichten
