It’s funny to listen to conservative American Catholics try to cognitively process the things that Pope Francis says that they don’t agree with. Some examples:
1. “He didn’t really mean what he said.”
2. “When you’re speaking off the cuff, you are not infallible.”
3. “The media distorted what he said. He didn’t say anything different from any other pope.”
4. “He’s a Pope of Darkness, as told by prophesy.”
5. “Some popes are terrible. I’m not saying that Francis is terrible. I’m just saying…”
If President Obama were the pope, it would be hilarious to see which conservative commentators used which of the above approaches to understanding him.
“Steve Skojek, the vice president of a real estate firm in Virginia and a blogger who has written for several conservative Catholic websites, wrote of Francis’ statements: “Are they explicitly heretical? No. Are they dangerously close? Absolutely…”
“There have been bad popes in the history of the church,” Mr. Skojec said. “Popes that murdered, popes that had mistresses. I’m not saying Pope Francis is terrible…”
No, why would we think that you’re saying that, you horrible person?
(shrug) this is why one doesn’t talk about religion and truth at the same time.
What whiners. This is one situation where they can’t take their ball and go home, so they’ll just bitch and make stuff up about Francis instead.
I imagine they would have acted the same way two millennia ago. “Jesus didn’t really mean what he said in the Sermon on the Mount. The Roman media distorted it…”
That statement is technically correct. The doctrine of papal infallibility is invoked only on special occasions.
That is not to defend the conservatives on anything else!
Yes but it is still funny. As if the ordinary, every day, “off the cuff” comments of a church leader meant nothing at all. It’s only to be dismissed because it wasn’t spoken within conditions that invoked papal infallibility?
That’s funny to me. And also funny because I doubt the same observation was ever applied to JP II.
Oh, I agree that it’s funny. After Pope Francis’ first public statements I remarked that now there are millions who are more Catholic than the Pope. And they’re proving me right.
Yes. It’s only infallible when it’s “ex cathedra” (literally, from the throne). Non-catholics usually don’t get the finer points of weaseling.
If Obama were the pope, he’d be so busy compromising w/the Opus Dei, the Mafia and trying to hustle his opponents that he wouldn’t have time to say much of anything real….just empty blessings. And if he did say something, the odds are that it wouldn’t happen the way he said it would.
But he would be the first black pope.
Duh.
WTFU.
AG
And they would definitely be calling him the Pope of Darkness.
‘Fraid so. But having enemies whose racism is the basis for their enmity does not a hero make. Bad black people have racist enemies too.
Bet on it.
AG
No doubt.
yeah, none of that is remotely on target, but it’s nice to know you’ve been reading your Dan Brown…
Who is Dan Brown? Oh. He’s that potboiler thriller writer. I don’t read that crap…in fact I very rarely read any so-called “fiction” anymore. The national news media have outdone almost all fiction writers on any number of levels, and now what we laughingly call “the news” is almost entirely fiction. It is fictional in the sense that any good fiction writer takes a set of recognizable facts…time, place, historical occurrences or occurrences that are likely to take place in the future, types of people…and then bends those “facts” to the arc of a selected storyline.
Is the news any different?
I think not.
And…why do you believe that I can’t think for myself?
“Oh,” again…they say that thieves always expect other people to be thieves. Ditto those with a ring in their nose that is attached to the various storylines presented by the Government Media Complex.
Sorry, cruzy. Homie don’t play that game.
You don’t believe that the Vatican is a rat’s nest of criminality and that it has been so at least since Pope Pius during W.W.II?
Then you ain’t been paying attention.
Bet on it.
AG
Pope Francis has actually won over some arch conservatives with the call for downsizing & poverty for the priesthood and monastic society.
well, conservatives love to underpay public employees, so at least they’re consistent.
While it’s nice when individual express faith through lack of materialism, you cannot competently run an organization the size of the catholic church if everyone who is in charge of anything has to live like a pauper. Even to the extent they already do, they have very serious problems.
And there you have it, my #2 reason for not being Catholic any longer, its organization. I just can’t set aside centuries of organizational abuses because a nice Pope comes along:-)
I may be taken in by him, but I think Francis is the first Pope in at least a thousand years to actually believe in what he says.
I think it’s probably fair to say that Benedict and John Paul II believed a lot of what they said. (Whether you’d agree with them is another matter.)
Besides, there’s no need to go back a thousand years; John XXIII (Pope John the Good) died just 50 years ago.
Will love to see what they say when Archbishop Neinstadt finally gets sacked here in MN. We’re on archbishop firing watch around here these days, as the pedophile scandals and displays of financial incompetence keep piling up. Neinstadt is a hardliner famous for his anti-gay advocacy. Most recent development: major twin cities donors to the diocese are withholding their donations until he is replaced.
Money talks. It’s one reason Cardinal Law left Boston. The archdiocese’s chief source of operating funds was an annual collection/campaign, and contributions plummeted as Law dug in his heels on the sexual abuse coverup scandal.
well, that sounds familiar…
Let the so-called “American Catholics” form their own church if they don’t like what Rome has to say, like churches have done for centuries. If they have the guts, which I seriously doubt.
I don’t get it, though. I thought these folks had a fetish for authority?
that’s what struck me, the willingness / unwillingness to follow his authority. To some degree that’s a feature of Catholicism – the Church is a theological entity, greater than any particular “church”/ bishop or pope. OTOH the reflexive adherence to their own pov rather than listen to the religious leader is a feature of American Protestantism.
Same thing happened with John XXIII and changing the mass to the vernacular so that folks could understand what was being said.
And not a whimper when Pope Paul VI ordered Father Drinan, a liberal, out of Congress.
Totally predictable.
It was John Paul II in 1980 who ordered all priests to give up political office. That appears to be primarily aimed at Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann and the Cardenal brothers, who were part of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. It seems like a US-centric view to see that order as being primarily about Drinan.
It had the effect of depriving the Congress of a liberal member of Congress. It was broadly interpreted as a move against Liberation Theology generally, which did not include Drinan, but did include the Berrigan brothers.
In this case, yes, US-centric view. It stopped a lot of things in which the Catholic church had be socially helpful and unleashed a religious-driven pathology in US politics.
It is quite possible to see Pope Francis, Barack Obama and say the new NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio in the same light. The same light that you might shine on JFK, RFK, MLK Jr., David Dinkins or any other relatively sincere “reformer” who comes to power in the midst of a massive criminal system. The system gathers its forces and resists in the most efficient way that it knows how to resist.
One of the great fiction titles is the line “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”
They used t’shoot them reformer horses in the bad old days…if of course they couldn’t buy them out…before the Information Age erupted. Now they just disinfo them into a failure swamp and then wait for them to drown. Wait for the next (<S>s</s>)election. It is so much more efficient that way. So much less…messy, don’tcha know.
Bet on it.
AG
‘Cause if there’s one thing Jesus was all about, it was showing appropriate disapproval of all the right people!
These people!
It was broadly interpreted as a move against Liberation Theology generally, which did not include Drinan, but did include the Berrigan brothers.
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cua go | tu bep | noi that
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