I don't write Bergoglio off entirely, but I'm with Hemant on this. The Vatican's general attitude toward women, the LGBTQ+ community, atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers is mostly reflected without change in Frankie, and that should surprise no one. The Catholic Church is a monolith of doctrine and dogma, with roughly 1,600 years of social inertia doing its damnedest to hold it in place. It changes only when the actions of human beings who prefer to live in the 21st century rather than the 5th force the issue.
Frankie may have moved the Catholic needle a LITTLE, but only a little, and the Curia lost its shit and resisted every minuscule step of the way. Expect the same with the next so-called "Vicar of Christ," regardless of his attitude.
+++ I kind of hope the next Pope is a rigid conservative who embraces all the worst characteristics the church has to offer. Few things would accelerate the decline of the church faster.
1000 if you consider the ban on priests marriages, less than 200 for their position on abortion. 1600 is about the time the church abolished deaconesses.
Yep, the Vatican made a deal with Napoleon, for more canon fodder in exchange for them controlling education, if I recall correctly.
3. The history of the Roman Catholic Church’s position—from which all current US anti-choice extremist Christian positions derive—is not what you think. Today’s Vatican denounces even the words “reproductive health” as unacceptable in official UN documents—in case anyone might construe them to include the already deleted word “abortion”—and although the Vatican is a non-voting so-called “State” at the UN, it is a highly effective lobbying force continuously purging all UN documents of such language. It works on this in brotherly coalition with Islamists and Protestant fundamentalists; apparently, convenient patriarchal alliances against women override pesky little memories like, say, the Crusades.
It comes as a shock to most people that the Catholic Church’s fierce opposition to abortion was not always what it is today, because the Church pretends that its position on pregnancy termination has been based on a “right to life” and has remained unchanged for 2000 years. Poppycock. In fact, it has varied continually over the course of history, with no unanimous opinion on the subject at any one time.
In 400 C. E., Augustine expressed the then-mainstream view that early abortion required penance only for any sexual aspect of a sin, not as homicide; 800 years later Thomas Aquinas substantially agreed. (Pssst: the Church made them both saints.)
Between 1198 and 1216, Pope Innocent III ruled abortion as “not irregular” if the fetus was not “vivified” or ”animated”; animation was then considered 80 days for a female and 40 days for a male—male fetuses apparently could develop faster then slow-poke female ones. Oddly, it has never been explained how anyone in the 12th century could tell sex differences in the womb. Or was there some early version of ultrasound back then that historians somehow missed?
Pope Sixtus V forbade all abortions in 1588, but in 1591 Pope Gregory XIV rescinded that order, and reestablished permission to abort, this time equalizing things a bit: up to 40 days for either a male or a female fetus.
Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence (also now sanctified), was a 15th century Dominican who wrote a major treatise on abortion, in which he taught that early abortion to save a woman’s life was moral.
Thomas Sanchez a 17th-century Jesuit, noted that all his Catholic theologian contemporaries justified abortion to save the life of the woman.
It was as late as 1869—only about a century and a half ago—that Pope Pious IX ruled all abortion murder and defined it as excommunicable.
And therein, my friends, lies a tale.
Napoleon III was gravely concerned that the birth rate had been dropping and that France would face a serious depletion of soldiers for its wars and colonizations. Pius IX, for his part, had long yearned to pass a doctrine of papal infallibility—but had faced opposition from within the church as well as from external kings, czars, and the like. But Napoleon was an emperor.
So the two struck a deal.
In return for Napoleon’s powerful support for papal infallibility, Pius would change the Church’s regulation of abortion—which at that time forbade the procedure only after quickening, at about three months. But Pius, a shrewd bargainer, played hard to get. So Napoleon threw in a further inducement—that all teaching positions in French schools would thereafter be filled by the Church.
Done.
Napoléon would get his huge crop of babies to grow into cannon fodder, because the Vatican would outlaw all abortion. In return, Pious and all popes after him would get their infallibility plus Roman Catholic control of French children’s minds (and those of kids in colonies around the world) for generations to come. Women’s deaths, by now in the millions because of this bargain, would pay the price. But hey, the art of the deal.
Interestingly enough, however, and also contrary to popular belief, the prohibition of abortion is not governed by claims of papal infallibility. This leaves far more room for discussion than is usually assumed. Some Jesuit historians have actually been honest about this history.
There's an interesting angle to the whole 'morality' discussion and that is regarding contraception: The official line was laid down in an encyclical, called Humanae Vitae in 1968*, which took a very hard line about contraception. Apart from the 'rhythm method' (remind me, please, to post the video of Billy Connolly about that), any other contraception was declared an absolute no-no.
During the Second Vatican Council, there were discussions about human morality and there they produced a paper called Gaudio et Spes, which still being anti-abortion, was going down the route of putting such discussions into the responsibility of the loving, married (!) couple to decide for themselves. This was in 1965*. If this principle had been adopted as the official line, then the church would have had a very different history over the last few decades.
* I am remembering those dates from my school days, apologies if they're out by a year or max two. . One of the religious ed teachers offered a class on the issue of human morality and in particular the church's teaching on sexual morality, so for one term we went pretty deep into the documentS mentioned above. It was a very interesting class. I should possibly point out that the class was not 'instruction', it was examination of the documents, the predecessors, the decision making, the political climate inside the church and elsewhere.
And it was only in the 1960s that they got around to thinking abortion took a human life.
For the longest time, the RCC regarded abortion as a minor sin because (it was assumed) it was an indication of a far worse — yes, one of the seven deadlies — sin: Lust! Lust was so much more horrible than abortion. Love it!
It is also worth bearing in mind, that the pope was 76 when he ascended to the papacy. He was steeped in the church's teaching for decades, maybe it was the mistake of his critics that they were expecting too much change?
Personally, I won't join in in any hagiographies of him nor any villainification.
Francis gave the impression of a compassionate man, and I hope it wasn't just a paint job. Judging by the reaction to his death by right wing politicians and conservative clergy, there can be little doubt as to where their actual moral compasses point, and it is not toward social justice. I have long felt that people tend to value the authoritarianism of the institutional churches far more than anything Jesus supposedly said. It is ever so much easier to march blindly along behind a set of rigid rules, than it is to take on the difficult task of thinking for one's self.
Certainly he was compassionate, but that came less from the church than from his history in Argentina and the screaming poverty that was all around him.
His compassion was there in spite of his position, not because of it. The lifelong indoctrination and the power structure around him kept him from even recocgnizing the good he could have accomplished.
Exactly. For all the appearances of the pope being the head honcho, it's the Curia that really runs things. It's also primarily responsible for insisting that the Church MUST NOT CHANGE.
Bergoglio was close personal friends with Jorge Videla, the murderous dictator of Argentina in the 70s. As a high-ranking member of the catholic clergy, he supported every bit of the dirty war then, and was absolutely aware of the thousands of people imprisoned, tortured, murdered and disappeared. He doesn't get a pass from this just because he had a good PR team once he became pope. Another fascist bites the dust.
Definitely a flawed man - in a long line of them. He was the head of a death cult. The only thing I can say definitely, is he seemed a nicer human being than his predecessor. The RCC is hemorrhaging paid-up believers. Their most loyal members are soon to get their dirt naps and there will be a lot less need for priests and popes. I am all for that.
Pope Frankie was bad, but at least he wasn't Ratzinger. Dubya was bad but at least he wasn't Danger Yam. The comparison is apt, though it is depressing.
There's no evidence that Ratzinger personally protected any paedophile priests, there's evidence that Bergoglio personally protected lots, and also that he betrayed a number of priests critical to the Argentinian junta under his care to said junta.
In many ways Bergoglio was worse, at least Ratzinger was openly evil, Bergoglio was the devil who spoke with forked tongues.
Will the next guy be in the same sort of "progressive" (for the RCC) vein as Jorge was? Holy Mother Church hasn't earned any trust in their decision-making, so I wait to see if we get someone more in line with the supposedly compassionate teachings of Jesus or some regressive brute who longs for the Dark Ages.
My money is on Dark Ages. Although I don't expect a regressive brute. I expect a regressive frail old man, propped up for a decade or so by advanced medical science.
They are that stupid. They are seeing their parishioners vanish before their eyes. One has only to look at the numbers of people leaving the RCC in Bergoglio's home country. (The numbers of people signing out was so large that there were even pictures in the news here in the US, where events in Latin America are usually treated as if they happened in NeverNeverLand.)
At this point, I'm not certain that it matters. Attendance at mass is down, as is the case with most Protestant churches, while the numbers of the nones continues to rise. As Hemant himself states, while Frankie was something of an improvement on the Rat and JPII, his real impact on the world in general was minimal.
Whether the RCC likes it or not, they are becoming more and more irrelevant, which is fine with me.
I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but that makes me wonder about what is in the Vatican archives and libraries, in uncataloged behind-the-scenes collections, things lost for centuries... If there's one thing that makes me angry at the RCC, it's that: stealing and hiding knowledge, rewriting history in their warped image. Grrrrrr.
Like Limelight in NYC. I went there. You'd be amazed how many people wouldn't set foot in there b/c it used to be a church. Like dude, isn't the church just a fucking building? It's been deconsecrated (probably, I have no actual idea). It's the purpose that makes it church, not the building itself. But, I'm a poly/pan theist so I'm a bit of an oddity on that front.
I'll take progress over regress any day of the week. "Not sufficiently good!" is the sort of sentiment that helped put Trump in office...twice.
Not that public sentiment or disillusionment will have any impact on who becomes Pope (unlike democracies). We will get whom we get, and as Hemant says probably the best we can hope for is someone who pushes the Church in the right direction....but only slightly.
I frankly think age is more important than their liberalness. A Pope who can hold on to Francis' gains for 30 years is probably better than one who pushes hard for more reform for 10 and then dies. Because a 10-year top-down push wouldn't be successful, while 30 years of replacing Boomer and Gen-X bishops and cardinals with Millenials and Gen-Zers who grew up with gay rights and abuse scandals, is a whole heckuva lot of bottom-up influence in the right direction. IMO.
Problem is that the "progress" was illusory. The rcc is still the same woman hating, LGBT+ hating, paedophile loving authoritarian dictatorship it always was and will be until its death.
And may that death come sooner rather than later. The RCC has proven itself a detriment to humanity and the world at large, it's already long past time we had a nice noisy wake for it.
I feel like this is how we got here and I did vote like my life depended on it. When are we going to start putting more pressure on the so-called progressives and holding them accountable for their complete inaction? Corporate branded virtue signaling rounds and nothing changes or gets any better. The US is like a microcosm of the situation.
Ah yes, more of the "Let's cut funding to worthwhile programs and pretend it'll save Americans billions of dollars so we can give Musk and his cronies more cash to hold over people" policies. Trump cut Americorps too - you know, the folks who did stuff like disaster relief, building homes for vets, and general good works in exchange for help paying for college. Apparently, the point is freedom to die with as many options for suffering as can be managed.
Congrats, MAGAs, you ARE the reason we can't have nice things.
After electing a pope from Poland, Germany, Argentina I predict the next one will be a relatively young black bishop from Africa where the church is still growing. Magats will call this a DEI nomination. Progressives will aplaud his election until they discover that the new pope wants to expand the Ugandese church anti-LGBTQ policy to the rest of the world, ordering all catholic politicians worldwide to change their laws to impose a mandatory death penalty for LGBTQ people and abortionists.
Magats will be fine with it for the reason you point out in your last two lines. I.e. such a Pope is likely to be support criminalizing gays (and maybe even killing witches).
Besungu is apparently the youngest African cardinal at 65. I think the youngest cardinal who's a serious papal candidate is Pizzaballa at 60, and apparently 60 is a bit too young for the job.
The biggest issue I always had with Pope Frankie is a longstanding one: the sexual abuse of children by its leadership and refusal to address that issue in the manner it needed. That is not to say the other issues on the list aren't important or don't deserve to be addressed, but it is to say that this is a crime committed by priests that the RCC has consistently insisted on dealing with in-house then refused to do much about in violation of their own claimed beliefs. I have no patience at all for that attitude and even less for the RCC's behavior on the situation.
Women, LGBTQ+, the Russian assault of Ukraine, and so many other things Pope Frankie failed to address or handled wrongly should also be criticized without doubt. The guy might have been good about some things, sure, and that's nice, but when you lead a group of people who are supposed to be moral authorities and fail to protect children in said group's care, you are no hero. You're a monster with a great PR team.
The best thing that could happen is that the RCC loses its influence over the world and the new Pope will be a nothingburger to anyone. But that’s a fantasy. Despite little movements here and there, and only over centuries, for good things like hospitals and soup kitchens, the church has been a force for cruelty and evil for its history. I don’t expect this to happen anytime soon.
Back to reality, it would be nice, and it might happen, if the new Pope is more progressive than past popes. The PR Pope could have made the right kinds of changes within the Vatican to keep the trend moving toward progress. This is important to the USA right now. Because Vatican has been pretty cozy with the genocidal maniacs that have taken over regimes throughout history. Facing our own genocidal maniac, we need as many outside diplomatic agencies as possible to provide pushback on the Fanta Fuhrer and his minions. (Think despicable me minions regarding competence) What we really don’t need is this ancient, powerful nation to feed our dictator.
But then, there might be enough folks in the Vatican that want to hold tradition and support the genocidal maniac.
My two cents on who the next guy should be (not that the RCC would listen):
How about Cardinal Mykola Bychok, a Ukranian Greek prelate elevated by Francis on December 7th of last year. At 44, he's currently the youngest Cardinal and doesn't appear to have any "baggage" as far as I can tell.
Apparently there's one in the running whose last name is Marx, and apparently he's roughly as "progressive" as Fluffy was. I think I'll have a few giggles thinking about the fits of apoplexy just his name alone would give to the usual suspects...
That would be Cardinal Reinhard Marx, he is the bishop of Munich. Prior to that he was the bishop of Trier, that's a town in the far far West of Germany, it's literally just a centimetre east of Luxembourg.
Trier is the birthplace of Karl Marx (the one with the Communist Manifesto). Marx is a fairly common surname in that part of the world.
Don't know anything about Bychok but what you wrote here, but sounds like an excellent choice. I thought a Pope had to be 65 but apparently there is no "legal" minimum age.
By cardinal standards, he's a baby. These days, I think a likely candidate would have to be in their 60s and probably their LATE 60s to qualify at minimum.
It's as I said elsewhere on this post. The Church is mired in a quicksand of their own dogma and doctrines and the absurd insistence that their head honcho can actually be INFALLIBLE. This is the same church that took 400 years to acknowledge that they were wrong and Galileo was right. They STILL can't treat women as equals, nor can they deal equitably with the LGBTQ+ community.
The Church just deserve to be left behind. It has no place in modern society.
Well, Fluffy, you had a good run! Better than Pope Palpatine, at any rate- which isn't saying much of anything at all, because that's a bar so low only a mole could get under it, but there you go. Rest in peace, or whatever.
Now you'll have to excuse me; I'm rather busy annihilating the concept of nature over here.
I just went out to my Fuck Field, to see if I could find a fuck to give to the Catholic Church. Alas! My fuck field was empty! I do not have a fuck to give for the new pope.
Aside to Hemant: Catholics do not dunk people at baptism. Like us high church Protestants, they sprinkle.
Don't forget his response the the Charlie Hebdo massacre. While he condemned the violence, he also condemned the offending of religion by satirists and framed the murders as in some way understandable.
I don't write Bergoglio off entirely, but I'm with Hemant on this. The Vatican's general attitude toward women, the LGBTQ+ community, atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers is mostly reflected without change in Frankie, and that should surprise no one. The Catholic Church is a monolith of doctrine and dogma, with roughly 1,600 years of social inertia doing its damnedest to hold it in place. It changes only when the actions of human beings who prefer to live in the 21st century rather than the 5th force the issue.
Frankie may have moved the Catholic needle a LITTLE, but only a little, and the Curia lost its shit and resisted every minuscule step of the way. Expect the same with the next so-called "Vicar of Christ," regardless of his attitude.
+++ I kind of hope the next Pope is a rigid conservative who embraces all the worst characteristics the church has to offer. Few things would accelerate the decline of the church faster.
That's about the stupidest thing the Church could do. It's also more than a little likely.
That's what happens in organizations ran by people who are convinced God's on their side, and they could never possibly be wrong about anything.
1000 if you consider the ban on priests marriages, less than 200 for their position on abortion. 1600 is about the time the church abolished deaconesses.
1869 was when the church embraced anti-abortionism. Before then it was allowed for between 40 days and 13 weeks at various points.
Yep, the Vatican made a deal with Napoleon, for more canon fodder in exchange for them controlling education, if I recall correctly.
3. The history of the Roman Catholic Church’s position—from which all current US anti-choice extremist Christian positions derive—is not what you think. Today’s Vatican denounces even the words “reproductive health” as unacceptable in official UN documents—in case anyone might construe them to include the already deleted word “abortion”—and although the Vatican is a non-voting so-called “State” at the UN, it is a highly effective lobbying force continuously purging all UN documents of such language. It works on this in brotherly coalition with Islamists and Protestant fundamentalists; apparently, convenient patriarchal alliances against women override pesky little memories like, say, the Crusades.
It comes as a shock to most people that the Catholic Church’s fierce opposition to abortion was not always what it is today, because the Church pretends that its position on pregnancy termination has been based on a “right to life” and has remained unchanged for 2000 years. Poppycock. In fact, it has varied continually over the course of history, with no unanimous opinion on the subject at any one time.
In 400 C. E., Augustine expressed the then-mainstream view that early abortion required penance only for any sexual aspect of a sin, not as homicide; 800 years later Thomas Aquinas substantially agreed. (Pssst: the Church made them both saints.)
Between 1198 and 1216, Pope Innocent III ruled abortion as “not irregular” if the fetus was not “vivified” or ”animated”; animation was then considered 80 days for a female and 40 days for a male—male fetuses apparently could develop faster then slow-poke female ones. Oddly, it has never been explained how anyone in the 12th century could tell sex differences in the womb. Or was there some early version of ultrasound back then that historians somehow missed?
Pope Sixtus V forbade all abortions in 1588, but in 1591 Pope Gregory XIV rescinded that order, and reestablished permission to abort, this time equalizing things a bit: up to 40 days for either a male or a female fetus.
Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence (also now sanctified), was a 15th century Dominican who wrote a major treatise on abortion, in which he taught that early abortion to save a woman’s life was moral.
Thomas Sanchez a 17th-century Jesuit, noted that all his Catholic theologian contemporaries justified abortion to save the life of the woman.
It was as late as 1869—only about a century and a half ago—that Pope Pious IX ruled all abortion murder and defined it as excommunicable.
And therein, my friends, lies a tale.
Napoleon III was gravely concerned that the birth rate had been dropping and that France would face a serious depletion of soldiers for its wars and colonizations. Pius IX, for his part, had long yearned to pass a doctrine of papal infallibility—but had faced opposition from within the church as well as from external kings, czars, and the like. But Napoleon was an emperor.
So the two struck a deal.
In return for Napoleon’s powerful support for papal infallibility, Pius would change the Church’s regulation of abortion—which at that time forbade the procedure only after quickening, at about three months. But Pius, a shrewd bargainer, played hard to get. So Napoleon threw in a further inducement—that all teaching positions in French schools would thereafter be filled by the Church.
Done.
Napoléon would get his huge crop of babies to grow into cannon fodder, because the Vatican would outlaw all abortion. In return, Pious and all popes after him would get their infallibility plus Roman Catholic control of French children’s minds (and those of kids in colonies around the world) for generations to come. Women’s deaths, by now in the millions because of this bargain, would pay the price. But hey, the art of the deal.
Interestingly enough, however, and also contrary to popular belief, the prohibition of abortion is not governed by claims of papal infallibility. This leaves far more room for discussion than is usually assumed. Some Jesuit historians have actually been honest about this history.
https://www.robinmorgan.net/when-the-vatican-thought-abortion-was-moral/
There's an interesting angle to the whole 'morality' discussion and that is regarding contraception: The official line was laid down in an encyclical, called Humanae Vitae in 1968*, which took a very hard line about contraception. Apart from the 'rhythm method' (remind me, please, to post the video of Billy Connolly about that), any other contraception was declared an absolute no-no.
During the Second Vatican Council, there were discussions about human morality and there they produced a paper called Gaudio et Spes, which still being anti-abortion, was going down the route of putting such discussions into the responsibility of the loving, married (!) couple to decide for themselves. This was in 1965*. If this principle had been adopted as the official line, then the church would have had a very different history over the last few decades.
* I am remembering those dates from my school days, apologies if they're out by a year or max two. . One of the religious ed teachers offered a class on the issue of human morality and in particular the church's teaching on sexual morality, so for one term we went pretty deep into the documentS mentioned above. It was a very interesting class. I should possibly point out that the class was not 'instruction', it was examination of the documents, the predecessors, the decision making, the political climate inside the church and elsewhere.
(And as a reminder, my school was run by nuns.)
Interesting, I know so little of their theology.
https://daily.jstor.org/abortion-remedies-medieval-catholic-nun/
And it was only in the 1960s that they got around to thinking abortion took a human life.
For the longest time, the RCC regarded abortion as a minor sin because (it was assumed) it was an indication of a far worse — yes, one of the seven deadlies — sin: Lust! Lust was so much more horrible than abortion. Love it!
It is also worth bearing in mind, that the pope was 76 when he ascended to the papacy. He was steeped in the church's teaching for decades, maybe it was the mistake of his critics that they were expecting too much change?
Personally, I won't join in in any hagiographies of him nor any villainification.
Francis gave the impression of a compassionate man, and I hope it wasn't just a paint job. Judging by the reaction to his death by right wing politicians and conservative clergy, there can be little doubt as to where their actual moral compasses point, and it is not toward social justice. I have long felt that people tend to value the authoritarianism of the institutional churches far more than anything Jesus supposedly said. It is ever so much easier to march blindly along behind a set of rigid rules, than it is to take on the difficult task of thinking for one's self.
Certainly he was compassionate, but that came less from the church than from his history in Argentina and the screaming poverty that was all around him.
He cared. The Church? Not so much.
His compassion was there in spite of his position, not because of it. The lifelong indoctrination and the power structure around him kept him from even recocgnizing the good he could have accomplished.
Precisely my point.
And now I can't even make a pithy quip.
(ﾉ≧∇≦)ﾉ ﾐ ┻━┻
Every time he said something compassionate and people applauded it, the officials of the Curia immediately stated, "That's not what he meant!"
Exactly. For all the appearances of the pope being the head honcho, it's the Curia that really runs things. It's also primarily responsible for insisting that the Church MUST NOT CHANGE.
👆🎯
Bergoglio was close personal friends with Jorge Videla, the murderous dictator of Argentina in the 70s. As a high-ranking member of the catholic clergy, he supported every bit of the dirty war then, and was absolutely aware of the thousands of people imprisoned, tortured, murdered and disappeared. He doesn't get a pass from this just because he had a good PR team once he became pope. Another fascist bites the dust.
https://www.acidigital.com/noticia/26205/jornalista-revela-como-o-pe-bergoglio-conseguiu-a-libertacao-de-sacerdotes-sequestrados-pelos-militares-argentinos-na-ditadura
https://www.acidigital.com/noticia/26205/jornalista-revela-como-o-pe-bergoglio-conseguiu-a-libertacao-de-sacerdotes-sequestrados-pelos-militares-argentinos-na-ditadura
Definitely a flawed man - in a long line of them. He was the head of a death cult. The only thing I can say definitely, is he seemed a nicer human being than his predecessor. The RCC is hemorrhaging paid-up believers. Their most loyal members are soon to get their dirt naps and there will be a lot less need for priests and popes. I am all for that.
Pope Frankie was bad, but at least he wasn't Ratzinger. Dubya was bad but at least he wasn't Danger Yam. The comparison is apt, though it is depressing.
There's no evidence that Ratzinger personally protected any paedophile priests, there's evidence that Bergoglio personally protected lots, and also that he betrayed a number of priests critical to the Argentinian junta under his care to said junta.
In many ways Bergoglio was worse, at least Ratzinger was openly evil, Bergoglio was the devil who spoke with forked tongues.
Ratzi the Nazi was pure evil.
Will the next guy be in the same sort of "progressive" (for the RCC) vein as Jorge was? Holy Mother Church hasn't earned any trust in their decision-making, so I wait to see if we get someone more in line with the supposedly compassionate teachings of Jesus or some regressive brute who longs for the Dark Ages.
My money is on Dark Ages. Although I don't expect a regressive brute. I expect a regressive frail old man, propped up for a decade or so by advanced medical science.
If they want to be that stupid in the current political climate, they can watch as their parishioners vanish before their eyes.
They are that stupid. They are seeing their parishioners vanish before their eyes. One has only to look at the numbers of people leaving the RCC in Bergoglio's home country. (The numbers of people signing out was so large that there were even pictures in the news here in the US, where events in Latin America are usually treated as if they happened in NeverNeverLand.)
“ propped up for a decade or so by advanced medical science.”
Such a long substitute for “prayer”.
At this point, I'm not certain that it matters. Attendance at mass is down, as is the case with most Protestant churches, while the numbers of the nones continues to rise. As Hemant himself states, while Frankie was something of an improvement on the Rat and JPII, his real impact on the world in general was minimal.
Whether the RCC likes it or not, they are becoming more and more irrelevant, which is fine with me.
More churches to repurpose as museums, restaurants, live music venues, skateparks, etc.
St Denis cathedral has a fantastic acoustic.
St. Denis Savard? I didn't know France named cathedrals after Canadian hockey players, ;)
Come to think of it, some churches might make great hockey venues.
Especially the Vatican, they stole the best treasures from around the world.
I remember seeing a beautiful Roman marble sarcophagus in the museum and realizing they had to have robbed it from its occupant.
I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but that makes me wonder about what is in the Vatican archives and libraries, in uncataloged behind-the-scenes collections, things lost for centuries... If there's one thing that makes me angry at the RCC, it's that: stealing and hiding knowledge, rewriting history in their warped image. Grrrrrr.
I think you are a realist. We know they hide knowledge and enlightenment they disagree with, and always have. Galileo comes to mind.
Indeed. But that doesn't stop me from being furious at that behavior, and at the loss.
Like Limelight in NYC. I went there. You'd be amazed how many people wouldn't set foot in there b/c it used to be a church. Like dude, isn't the church just a fucking building? It's been deconsecrated (probably, I have no actual idea). It's the purpose that makes it church, not the building itself. But, I'm a poly/pan theist so I'm a bit of an oddity on that front.
Christians forget that "church" isn't really a building. It's a group of likeminded people.
Exactly, "where two or three are gathered in my name..."
I'll take progress over regress any day of the week. "Not sufficiently good!" is the sort of sentiment that helped put Trump in office...twice.
Not that public sentiment or disillusionment will have any impact on who becomes Pope (unlike democracies). We will get whom we get, and as Hemant says probably the best we can hope for is someone who pushes the Church in the right direction....but only slightly.
I frankly think age is more important than their liberalness. A Pope who can hold on to Francis' gains for 30 years is probably better than one who pushes hard for more reform for 10 and then dies. Because a 10-year top-down push wouldn't be successful, while 30 years of replacing Boomer and Gen-X bishops and cardinals with Millenials and Gen-Zers who grew up with gay rights and abuse scandals, is a whole heckuva lot of bottom-up influence in the right direction. IMO.
.
Problem is that the "progress" was illusory. The rcc is still the same woman hating, LGBT+ hating, paedophile loving authoritarian dictatorship it always was and will be until its death.
And may that death come sooner rather than later. The RCC has proven itself a detriment to humanity and the world at large, it's already long past time we had a nice noisy wake for it.
I feel like this is how we got here and I did vote like my life depended on it. When are we going to start putting more pressure on the so-called progressives and holding them accountable for their complete inaction? Corporate branded virtue signaling rounds and nothing changes or gets any better. The US is like a microcosm of the situation.
OT- Your daily reminder that conservatives don't just hate trans kids, they hate 𝘢𝘭𝘭 kids: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-trump-budget-cuts-harm-kids-child-care-education-abuse
But, y'know, they still want everybody popping out as many as they can because oligarchs need that cheap, disposable labor.
Ah yes, more of the "Let's cut funding to worthwhile programs and pretend it'll save Americans billions of dollars so we can give Musk and his cronies more cash to hold over people" policies. Trump cut Americorps too - you know, the folks who did stuff like disaster relief, building homes for vets, and general good works in exchange for help paying for college. Apparently, the point is freedom to die with as many options for suffering as can be managed.
Congrats, MAGAs, you ARE the reason we can't have nice things.
After electing a pope from Poland, Germany, Argentina I predict the next one will be a relatively young black bishop from Africa where the church is still growing. Magats will call this a DEI nomination. Progressives will aplaud his election until they discover that the new pope wants to expand the Ugandese church anti-LGBTQ policy to the rest of the world, ordering all catholic politicians worldwide to change their laws to impose a mandatory death penalty for LGBTQ people and abortionists.
Magats will be fine with it for the reason you point out in your last two lines. I.e. such a Pope is likely to be support criminalizing gays (and maybe even killing witches).
Besungu is apparently the youngest African cardinal at 65. I think the youngest cardinal who's a serious papal candidate is Pizzaballa at 60, and apparently 60 is a bit too young for the job.
If the Church wants to create a vocal and active campaign AGAINST IT, that may be the best plan.
https://thedevilspanties.com/archives/16595
Spot fucking on.
When Frankie was picked, I referenced the WHO. No change in policy, just better PR.
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
He says a lot of nice things, but continues to support the same old things.
The biggest issue I always had with Pope Frankie is a longstanding one: the sexual abuse of children by its leadership and refusal to address that issue in the manner it needed. That is not to say the other issues on the list aren't important or don't deserve to be addressed, but it is to say that this is a crime committed by priests that the RCC has consistently insisted on dealing with in-house then refused to do much about in violation of their own claimed beliefs. I have no patience at all for that attitude and even less for the RCC's behavior on the situation.
Women, LGBTQ+, the Russian assault of Ukraine, and so many other things Pope Frankie failed to address or handled wrongly should also be criticized without doubt. The guy might have been good about some things, sure, and that's nice, but when you lead a group of people who are supposed to be moral authorities and fail to protect children in said group's care, you are no hero. You're a monster with a great PR team.
The best thing that could happen is that the RCC loses its influence over the world and the new Pope will be a nothingburger to anyone. But that’s a fantasy. Despite little movements here and there, and only over centuries, for good things like hospitals and soup kitchens, the church has been a force for cruelty and evil for its history. I don’t expect this to happen anytime soon.
Back to reality, it would be nice, and it might happen, if the new Pope is more progressive than past popes. The PR Pope could have made the right kinds of changes within the Vatican to keep the trend moving toward progress. This is important to the USA right now. Because Vatican has been pretty cozy with the genocidal maniacs that have taken over regimes throughout history. Facing our own genocidal maniac, we need as many outside diplomatic agencies as possible to provide pushback on the Fanta Fuhrer and his minions. (Think despicable me minions regarding competence) What we really don’t need is this ancient, powerful nation to feed our dictator.
But then, there might be enough folks in the Vatican that want to hold tradition and support the genocidal maniac.
My two cents on who the next guy should be (not that the RCC would listen):
How about Cardinal Mykola Bychok, a Ukranian Greek prelate elevated by Francis on December 7th of last year. At 44, he's currently the youngest Cardinal and doesn't appear to have any "baggage" as far as I can tell.
(I know. "Dream on, NoGodz")
Apparently there's one in the running whose last name is Marx, and apparently he's roughly as "progressive" as Fluffy was. I think I'll have a few giggles thinking about the fits of apoplexy just his name alone would give to the usual suspects...
That would be Cardinal Reinhard Marx, he is the bishop of Munich. Prior to that he was the bishop of Trier, that's a town in the far far West of Germany, it's literally just a centimetre east of Luxembourg.
Trier is the birthplace of Karl Marx (the one with the Communist Manifesto). Marx is a fairly common surname in that part of the world.
Don't know anything about Bychok but what you wrote here, but sounds like an excellent choice. I thought a Pope had to be 65 but apparently there is no "legal" minimum age.
By cardinal standards, he's a baby. These days, I think a likely candidate would have to be in their 60s and probably their LATE 60s to qualify at minimum.
That's part of the problem with the RCCs "thinking." Going outside the box frightens them.
It's as I said elsewhere on this post. The Church is mired in a quicksand of their own dogma and doctrines and the absurd insistence that their head honcho can actually be INFALLIBLE. This is the same church that took 400 years to acknowledge that they were wrong and Galileo was right. They STILL can't treat women as equals, nor can they deal equitably with the LGBTQ+ community.
The Church just deserve to be left behind. It has no place in modern society.
I wish everyone could see as clearly as you do on that.
Well, Fluffy, you had a good run! Better than Pope Palpatine, at any rate- which isn't saying much of anything at all, because that's a bar so low only a mole could get under it, but there you go. Rest in peace, or whatever.
Now you'll have to excuse me; I'm rather busy annihilating the concept of nature over here.
I just went out to my Fuck Field, to see if I could find a fuck to give to the Catholic Church. Alas! My fuck field was empty! I do not have a fuck to give for the new pope.
Aside to Hemant: Catholics do not dunk people at baptism. Like us high church Protestants, they sprinkle.
Is it fuck season though?
And, what's the bag limit?
Do you have to throw them back if they are undersized?
imgur.com/gallery/QzrpedH
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqbk9cDX0l0
Don't forget his response the the Charlie Hebdo massacre. While he condemned the violence, he also condemned the offending of religion by satirists and framed the murders as in some way understandable.
Blasphemy should be free speech.