[Dr. Howard]

(08-08-2016 11:25 AM)DamienCasanova Wrote:  

http://www.barnhardt.biz/2016/08/02/yes-...-the-head/


Yes, Antipope Bergoglio is Maneuvering to Set Up a “One World Religion” with Himself as the Head

In review, and in the interests of making absolutely certain that we are all thinking and reasoning from the firm foundation of a TRUE PREMISE or premises:

Pope Benedict XVI Ratzinger submitted an invalid resignation in February of ARSH 2013, predicated upon the error that the Papacy could be bifurcated or in any way shared or expanded. The relevant Canon is Canon 188, which states very plainly and succinctly:

Canon 188
A resignation made out of grave fear that is inflicted unjustly or out of malice, substantial error, or simony is invalid by the law itself.

...


Mary, Mother of The Church, pray for us.
St. Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church, pray for us.

Christ, have mercy on us.

So then what happens when Ratzinger dies if he's the pope but is in exile/incommunicado?

[RedPillUK]

Confirming himself as a communist is a new low.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/pope-francis-...27432.html

[Mercenary]

Source:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/12/07/...s-sin.html

Quote:


Pope Francis calls spreading fake news a sin
Published December 07, 2016


Pope Francis, who in the past has not shied away from offering his opinion on U.S. politics, said in an interview published Wednesday that “spreading disinformation” is probably “the greatest damage that the media can do” and called it sinful.

Pope Francis compared the spreading of fake news to the desire to eat excrement.


“I think the media have to be very clear, very transparent, and not fall into—no offense intended—the sickness of coprophagia, that is, always wanting to cover scandals, covering nasty things, even if they are true,” he said, according to the report. “And since people have a tendency towards the sickness of coprophagia, a lot of damage can be done.”

The pope made the comments to Tertio, a Belgian Catholic weekly, which published the remarks Wednesday, according to Reuters.

Major websites like Facebook have vowed to crack down on fake news sites, but there is a debate on what exactly qualifies as fake news.

The issue of sharing fake news was highlighted when retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn's son, Michael G. Flynn, tweeted about the false idea that prompted a shooting at a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor. He had been promoting a conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton's allies had been operating a secret pedophilia ring in the restaurant and noted it would remain a story until "proven to be false."

Officials confirmed on Tuesday that the younger Flynn was no longer with the Trump transition team.

[Dr. Howard]

(12-09-2016 12:45 PM)Mercenary Wrote:  

Source:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/12/07/...s-sin.html

Quote:


Pope Francis calls spreading fake news a sin
Published December 07, 2016


Pope Francis, who in the past has not shied away from offering his opinion on U.S. politics, said in an interview published Wednesday that “spreading disinformation” is probably “the greatest damage that the media can do” and called it sinful.

Pope Francis compared the spreading of fake news to the desire to eat excrement.


“I think the media have to be very clear, very transparent, and not fall into—no offense intended—the sickness of coprophagia, that is, always wanting to cover scandals, covering nasty things, even if they are true,” he said, according to the report. “And since people have a tendency towards the sickness of coprophagia, a lot of damage can be done.”

The pope made the comments to Tertio, a Belgian Catholic weekly, which published the remarks Wednesday, according to Reuters.

Major websites like Facebook have vowed to crack down on fake news sites, but there is a debate on what exactly qualifies as fake news.

The issue of sharing fake news was highlighted when retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn's son, Michael G. Flynn, tweeted about the false idea that prompted a shooting at a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor. He had been promoting a conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton's allies had been operating a secret pedophilia ring in the restaurant and noted it would remain a story until "proven to be false."

Officials confirmed on Tuesday that the younger Flynn was no longer with the Trump transition team.

The pope is just hillary clinton with her wig off.

[Mercenary]

This is a news article from 2014 from an official mainstream newspaper.
He really said this.

Quote:

Pope Francis says he would baptise aliens: 'Who are we to close doors?'

Pontiff made the out-of-this-world pledge during homily on acceptance

Adam Withnall
@adamwithnall
Tuesday 13 May 2014

Pope Francis has said that he would be willing to baptise aliens if they came to the Vatican, asking “who are we to close doors” to anyone - even Martians. In a homily yesterday dedicated to the concepts of acceptance and inclusion, Francis recalled a Bible story about the conversion of the first pagans to Christianity, according to reports on Vatican Radio. He said Catholicism was a church of “open doors”, and that it was up to Christians to accept the Holy Spirit however “unthinkable” and “unimaginable” it appeared. Describing how, according to the Bible, Peter was criticised by the Christians of Jerusalem for making contact with a community of “unclean” pagans, Francis said that at the time that too was “unthinkable”. “If, for example, tomorrow an expedition of Martians came to us here and one said ‘I want to be baptised!’, what would happen?” Clarifying that he really was talking about aliens, the Pope said: “Martians, right? Green, with long noses and big ears, like in children’s drawings.” Francis said that Christianity had struggled from its earliest stages with the temptation to reject “the living presence of God” in various forms. But he added: “When the Lord shows us the way, who are we to say, ‘No, Lord, it is not prudent! No, let's do it this way’. Who are we to close doors?” While Francis appears to have taken the argument to its logical extreme, this is not the first time that the Vatican has raised the prospect of baptising extra-terrestrial beings. Speaking at the British Science Festival in 2010, one of then-Pope Benedict XVI’s astronomers said he would baptise an alien “if they asked”. While he accepted that the chances of ever getting such an opportunity were slim, Guy Consolmagno said: “Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has – has a soul.”

[Mercenary]

News story from 2013 from when Pope Benedict XVI resigned:
He is still alive and still living in the Vatican.

Quote:

Lightning struck the Vatican not once but TWICE - hours after Pope Benedict XVI's shock resignation.

The spooky moment, believed by some, to be a sign from God, was caught on camera by AFP photographer Filippo Monteforte.

By Paul Cockerton

12:58, 12 FEB 2013Updated00:56, 13 FEB 2013

Lightning struck the Vatican not once but TWICE - hours after Pope Benedict XVI's shock resignation. The spooky moment, believed by some, to be a sign from God, was caught on camera by AFP photographer Filippo Monteforte. Today he described how he took the incredible image which has been beamed all over the world. He said: "I took the picture from St. Peter’s Square while sheltered by the columns. It was icy cold and raining sheets. When the storm started, I thought that lightning might strike the rod, so I decided it was worth seeing whether – if it DID strike – I could get the shot at exactly the right moment.” Filippo, armed with a 50mm lens, waited for more than two hours and was rewarded for his patience with not one but two bolts.He added: “The first bolt was huge and lit up the sky, but unfortunately I missed it. I had better luck the second time, and was able to snap a couple of images of the dome illuminated by the bolt.” The lightning touched the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, one of the holiest Catholic churches, after the Pope's shock admission he lacks strength to do the job.

The Vatican stressed that no specific medical condition prompted Benedict's decision to quit - the first pontiff to do so in 600 years. The move surprised even his closest aides, even though Benedict, 85, had made clear in the past he would step down if he became too old or infirm. In recent years, the Pope has slowed down significantly, cutting back his foreign travel and limiting his audiences. He now goes to and from the altar in St Peter's Basilica on a moving platform, to spare him the long walk down the aisle. Occasionally he uses a cane. His 89-year-old brother, Georg Ratzinger, said doctors had recently advised the Pope not to take any more trans-Atlantic trips. "His age is weighing on him," Mr Ratzinger said. "At this age my brother wants more rest." Benedict announced his resignation in Latin during a meeting of Vatican cardinals, calling it "a decision of great importance for the life of the church." He emphasised that carrying out the duties of being pope requires "both strength of mind and body."

He told the cardinals: "I have come to the certainty that my strengths due to an advanced age are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry." The Vatican will hold a conclave before Easter to elect a new pope, with Benedict holding great sway over who should succeed him to lead the world's one billion Catholics. Benedict has already hand-picked the bulk of the College of Cardinals - the princes of the church who will elect the next pope - to guarantee an equally-conservative legacy. There are no obvious front-runners to replace him - the same situation when Benedict was elected in 2005 after the death of Pope John Paul II. Given half of the world's Catholics live in the global south, there will once again be arguments for a pope to come from the developing world. When Benedict was elected aged 78, he was the oldest pope chosen in nearly 300 years. He raised the possibility of resigning if he were too old or sick to continue, when he was interviewed in 2010 for the book "Light of the World."

"If a pope clearly realises that he is no longer physically, psychologically and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right, and under some circumstances, also an obligation to resign," Benedict said. The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had an intimate view as Pope John Paul II, with whom he had worked closely for nearly a quarter-century, suffered through the debilitating end of his papacy. The Vatican said immediately after his resignation that Benedict would go to Castel Gandolfo, a summer retreat south of Rome, and then would live in a cloistered monastery. Benedict said he would serve the church for the remainder of his days "through a life dedicated to prayer."

[redpillage]

Islam Strengthening In Europe

Quote:

There are now many Catholic commentators who are questioning the Church's blindness about the danger Europe is facing.

"Islam has every chance massively to strengthen its presence in Europe with the blessing of the Church.... the Church is not only leading Europe to an impasse, it is also shooting itself in the foot." — Laurent Dandrieu, cultural editor of the French magazine Valeurs Actuelles.

"It is clear that Muslims have an ultimate goal: conquering the world...Islam, through the sharia, their law...allows violence against the infidels, such as Christians....And what is the most important achievement? Rome." — Cardinal Raymond Burke, interview, Il Giornale.

"[T]hey are not refugees, this is an invasion, they come here with cries of 'Allahu Akbar', they want to take over." — Laszlo Kiss Rigo, head of the Catholic Hungarian southern community.

François Fillon published a book entitled, Vanquishing Islamic Totalitarianism, and he rose in the polls by vowing to control Islam and immigration: "We've got to reduce immigration to its strict minimum," Fillon said. "Our country is not a sum of communities, it is an identity!"

Everyone in Italy and the rest of Europe will "soon be Muslim" because of our "stupidity", warned Monsignor Carlo Liberati, Archbishop Emeritus of Pompei. Liberati claimed that, thanks to the huge number of Muslim migrants alongside the increasing secularism of native Europeans, Islam will soon become the main religion of Europe. "All of this moral and religious decadence favours Islam", Archbishop Liberati explained.

Décadence is also the title of a new book by the French philosopher Michel Onfray, in which he suggests that the Judeo-Christian era may have come to an end. He compares the West and Islam: "We have nihilism, they have fervor; we are exhausted, they have a great health; we have the past for us; they have the future for them".

Archbishop Liberati belongs to a growing branch of Catholic leaders who refuse to see the future belonging to Islam in Europe. They speak in open opposition to Pope Francis, who does not seem too impressed by the collapse of Christianity due to falling birth rates, accompanied by religious apathy and its replacement by Islam.



Monsignor Carlo Liberati, Archbishop Emeritus of Pompei (left) belongs to a growing branch of Catholic leaders who refuse to see the future belonging to Islam in Europe, and who speak in open opposition to Pope Francis (right).
Pope Francis's official vision is personified by Bishop Nunzio Galantino, who was appointed by the Pontiff as the Secretary General of Italy's Bishops. Last December, Galantino gave an interview in which he dismissed any religious motivation behind jihadist attacks and claimed that, instead, "money" is what is behind them.

There are now many Catholic commentators who are questioning the Church's blindness about the danger Europe is facing. One is the cultural editor of the French magazine Valeurs Actuelles, Laurent Dandrieu, who writes:

"Islam has every chance massively to strengthen its presence in Europe with the blessing of the Church. The Church is watching the establishment of millions of Muslims in Europe... and Muslim worship in our continent as an inescapable manifestation of religious freedom. But the civilizational question is simply never asked .... By breaking away from the Europe's indigenous peoples and their legitimate concerns, the Church is not only leading Europe to an impasse, it is also shooting itself in the foot".

Dandrieu lists Pope Francis' gestures and speeches in favor of Islam and migrants:

"On October 1, 2014, the Pope received Eritrean survivors of a shipwreck off Lampedusa; on 8 February 2015, he made a surprise visit to a refugee camp in Ponte Mammolo, northeast of Rome; on April 18, he used the first official visit of the new Italian president, Sergio Mattarella, to demand 'a much larger commitment' for migrants; on 6 September 2015, at the conclusion of the Angelus in St Peter's Square, he called for 'every parish, religious community, monastery and sanctuary in Europe to host a family' of refugees; on March 24, 2016, he chose to celebrate the Holy Thursday in a structure housing 900 refugees, and to wash the feet to twelve asylum seekers; on May 28, he received children whose parents died in a boat that sank, filled with migrants; during the general audience of June 22, Francis went down to the crowd to bring back fifteen refugees".

But as Liberati's case demonstrates, resistance to Pope Francis' vision of Europe is growing inside the Catholic Church.

"It is clear that Muslims have an ultimate goal: conquering the world", Cardinal Raymond Burke said.

"Islam, through the sharia, their law, wants to rule the world and allows violence against the infidels, like Christians. But we find it hard to recognize this reality and to respond by defending the Christian faith (...) I have heard several times an Islamic idea: 'what we failed to do with the weapons in the past we are doing today with the birth rate and immigration'. The population is changing. If this keeps up, in countries such as Italy, the majority will be Muslim (...) Islam realizes itself in the conquest. And what is the most important achievement? Rome".

The first to denounce this dramatic trend was Italy's most important missionary, Father Piero Gheddo, who said that, due to falling fertility and Muslim fervor, "Islam would sooner rather than later conquer the majority in Europe". These concerns do not belong only to the Conservative wing of the Catholic Church.

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna and a candidate tipped to be the next Pope, is very close to Pope Francis, and is a centrist. Last September, on the anniversary of the Siege of Vienna, when Turkey's Ottoman troops nearly conquered Europe, Schönborn delivered a dramatic appeal to save Europe's Christian roots. "Many Muslims want and say that 'Europe is finished'", Cardinal Schönborn said, before accusing Europe of "forgetting its Christian identity". He then denounced the possibility of "an Islamic conquest of Europe".

After a Tunisian, who arrived among a flood of migrants into Germany, murdered 12 people at a Christmas market in Berlin, the Catholic archbishop of the German capital, Heiner Koch, another "moderate" Catholic leader appointed by Pope Francis, also sounded a warning: "Perhaps we focused too much on the radiant image of humanity, on the good. Now in the last year, or perhaps also in recent years, we have seen: No, there is also evil".

The head of the Czech Roman Catholic Church, Miloslav Vlk, also warned about the threat of Islamization. "Muslims in Europe have many more children than Christian families; that is why demographers have been trying to come up with a time when Europe will become Muslim", Cardinal Vlk claimed. He also blamed Europe itself for the Islamic takeover:

"Europe will pay dearly for having left its spiritual foundations; this is the last period that will not continue for decades when it may still have a chance to do something about it. Unless the Christians wake up, life may be Islamised and Christianity will not have the strength to imprint its character on the life of people, not to say society".

Cardinal Dominik Duka, Archbishop of Prague and Primate of Bohemia, has also questioned Pope Francis' "welcoming culture".

Among the Eastern Catholic bishops there are many voices raising concerns about Europe's demographic and religious revolution. One belongs to the leader of the Catholics in Lebanon, who paid an extremely high price for the Islamization of their own country, including murder and exile, and now see the danger coming to Europe itself. "I have heard many times from Muslims that their goal is to conquer Europe with two weapons: faith and the birth rate", Cardinal Bechara Rai said.

Another voice belongs to the French-born Bishop Paul Desfarges, who heads the diocese of Constantine in Algeria: "It's no surprise that Islam has taken on such importance", Desfarges said. "It's an issue that concerns Europe". Sydney Cardinal George Pell then urged "a discussion of the consequences of the Islamic presence in the Western world". Pell was echoed by Laszlo Kiss Rigo, the head of the Catholic Hungarian southern community, who said that "they are not refugees, this is an invasion, they come here with cries of 'Allahu Akbar', they want to take over".

On the political level, there is another a tendency, that of strong Catholic leaders who challenge Pope Francis on the Islamic question and immigration. The most important is the French presidential candidate François Fillon, one of the first politicians who "doesn't hide the fact that he's Catholic". Fillon published a book entitled, Vanquishing Islamic Totalitarianism, and he rose in the polls by vowing to control Islam and immigration: "We've got to reduce immigration to its strict minimum," Fillon said. "Our country is not a sum of communities, it is an identity!"

These politicians, bishops and cardinals might convince Pope Francis not to abandon Europe, the cradle of Christianity and Western civilization, to a looming dark fate. Michel Onfray wrote at the end of his book: "Judeo-Christianity ruled for two millennia. An honorable period for a civilization. The boat now sinks: we can only sink with elegance". It is urgent now to prevent that.

I am currently spending some time in Spain and watched a congregation leaving a beautiful Gothic church on Sunday. Over 90% of the people leaving were over 65 years old and at least 50% over 70 years old. I saw perhaps at most a dozen youngsters among what was a congregation of 250 people or more.

So there you have it. I asked my girl who would be visiting this church 15 or 20 years from now when over half of those people will most likely be in their graves. And we know that answer to that - Muslims, who would be happy to knock down any symbols of Christianity and turn that church into a mosque. At least if Podemos gets its way as they are eager to repeat Merkel's nation destroying course in the Iberian Peninsula as well.

What most Westeners also are unable to appreciate (or will be until it's too late) is that we are all living in what Islam considers the Dar-al-Harb, literally the house of war. And the (relatively) peaceful spreading of Islam via birth rates is not the only path toward conquering the West that lies in our future. There are different types of jihad and the violent type is the one not only favored but impelled by Mohammed as a duty for any true Muslim. So wait until those percentages push above double digit marks and watch what happens: chaos, civil war, and a complete break down of Western society.

The Roman Catholic Church is fucked as it is lead by traitor to its own principles and core beliefs.

[JohnKreese]

This is getting out of hand.

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/23/world/...index.html

Pope suggests it's better to be an atheist than a bad Christian

CNN actually seemed a bit based here:

Quote:

In the United States, some Catholics have cited the church's teachings on scandal to argue that priests should not distribute Holy Communion to politicians who support abortion rights. Francis, a sharp critic of capitalist excesses, turned his scorn instead on greedy businesspeople.

[DeusVult]

Lots of people have tried to destroy the Church. He's not the first or last.

[realologist]

[Renzy]

Notorious abortionist lauded by Pope Francis to speak at Catholic church in Italy via LifeSite



A breakdown from the article on this woman being celebrated by Pope Francis:

Quote:

Emma Bonino, a former abortionist once praised by Pope Francis as “a great Italian,” will appear in a Catholic church to present the pro-migrant campaign “ERO STRANIERO: La humanità che fa bene” (“I was a stranger: Humanity that does good”)

As an abortion rights activist and an abortionist herself, Bonino is directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of approximately six million Italian babies between 1968 and today.

On his blog “Stilum Curae,” Vatican-based journalist Marco Tosatti remarked dryly that “One assumes that now, after having helped deprive this country of an enormous number of human beings, [Bonino] will be able — in church — to push for a nice ethnic replacement program in Italy.”

Pro-abortion

Quote:

Bonino’s appearance in the Church of San Defendente, Ronco di Cassato, on July 26 will be one of several events celebrating World Refugee Day 2017.

More than 500,000 migrants have entered Italy in the past three years.

Pro-migrant inundation into the West.

Quote:

With friend and colleague Marco Pannella, a founder of the Radicals, Bonino championed a number of left-wing causes, including the legalization of recreational drugs, the banning of a national nuclear energy program, nudism, same-sex “marriage,” transgenderism, the abolition of the armed forces, the disbanding of NATO, the liberalization of porn laws, and mandatory sex education. According to Family Domani, Bonino identifies with the 1970s feminist slogan “No longer wives, daughters and mothers! Let’s destroy the family!”

This reads like a Greatest Hits List of Left wing causes designed to undermine and/or vilify traditional family values.

Quote:

Recently Bonino has taken up the cause of mass migration to Italy from Africa and the Middle East. Without irony, she says this migration is necessary to Italy’s survival because of the low Italian birthrate. She is calling for integration of the migrants, to save them from homelessness and human trafficking.

Demographic replacement as a solution to European sterility.

[WalterBlack]

The war against Pope Francis

Quote:

Pope Francis is one of the most hated men in the world today. Those who hate him most are not atheists, or protestants, or Muslims, but some of his own followers. Outside the church he is hugely popular as a figure of almost ostentatious modesty and humility. From the moment that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio became pope in 2013, his gestures caught the world’s imagination: the new pope drove a Fiat, carried his own bags and settled his own bills in hotels; he asked, of gay people, “Who am I to judge?” and washed the feet of Muslim women refugees.

But within the church, Francis has provoked a ferocious backlash from conservatives who fear that this spirit will divide the church, and could even shatter it. This summer, one prominent English priest said to me: “We can’t wait for him to die. It’s unprintable what we say in private. Whenever two priests meet, they talk about how awful Bergoglio is … he’s like Caligula: if he had a horse, he’d make him cardinal.” Of course, after 10 minutes of fluent complaint, he added: “You mustn’t print any of this, or I’ll be sacked.”

This mixture of hatred and fear is common among the pope’s adversaries. Francis, the first non-European pope in modern times, and the first ever Jesuit pope, was elected as an outsider to the Vatican establishment, and expected to make enemies. But no one foresaw just how many he would make. From his swift renunciation of the pomp of the Vatican, which served notice to the church’s 3,000-strong civil service that he meant to be its master, to his support for migrants, his attacks on global capitalism and, most of all, his moves to re-examine the church’s teachings about sex, he has scandalised reactionaries and conservatives. To judge by the voting figures at the last worldwide meeting of bishops, almost a quarter of the college of Cardinals – the most senior clergy in the church – believe that the pope is flirting with heresy.

The crunch point has come in a fight over his views on divorce. Breaking with centuries, if not millennia, of Catholic theory, Pope Francis has tried to encourage Catholic priests to give communion to some divorced and remarried couples, or to families where unmarried parents are cohabiting. His enemies are trying to force him to abandon and renounce this effort.

Since he won’t, and has quietly persevered in the face of mounting discontent, they are now preparing for battle. Last year, one cardinal, backed by a few retired colleagues, raised the possibility of a formal declaration of heresy – the wilful rejection of an established doctrine of the church, a sin punishable by excommunication. Last month, 62 disaffected Catholics, including one retired bishop and a former head of the Vatican bank, published an open letter that accused Francis of seven specific counts of heretical teaching.

To accuse a sitting pope of heresy is the nuclear option in Catholic arguments. Doctrine holds that the pope cannot be wrong when he speaks on the central questions of the faith; so if he is wrong, he can’t be pope. On the other hand, if this pope is right, all his predecessors must have been wrong.

The question is particularly poisonous because it is almost entirely theoretical. In practice, in most of the world, divorced and remarried couples are routinely offered communion. Pope Francis is not proposing a revolution, but the bureaucratic recognition of a system that already exists, and might even be essential to the survival of the church. If the rules were literally applied, no one whose marriage had failed could ever have sex again. This is not a practical way to ensure there are future generations of Catholics.

But Francis’s cautious reforms seem to his opponents to threaten the belief that the church teaches timeless truths. And if the Catholic church does not teach eternal truths, conservatives ask, what is the point of it? The battle over divorce and remarriage has brought to a point two profoundly opposed ideas of what the church is for. The pope’s insignia are two crossed keys. They represent those Jesus is supposed to have given St Peter, which symbolise the powers to bind and to loose: to proclaim what is sin, and what is permitted. But which power is more important, and more urgent now?

The present crisis is the most serious since the liberal reforms of the 1960s spurred a splinter group of hardline conservatives to break away from the church. (Their leader, the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, was later excommunicated.) Over the past few years, conservative writers have repeatedly raised the spectre of schism. In 2015, American journalist Ross Douthat, a convert to Catholicism, wrote a piece for the Atlantic magazine headlined Will Pope Francis Break the Church?; a Spectator blogpost by the English traditionalist Damian Thompson threatened that “Pope Francis is now at war with the Vatican. If he wins, the church could fall apart.” The pope’s views on divorce and homosexuality, according to an Archbishop from Kazakhstan, had allowed “the smoke of Satan” to enter the church.

The Catholic church has spent much of the past century fighting against the sexual revolution, much as it fought against the democratic revolutions of the 19th century, and in this struggle it has been forced into the defence of an untenable absolutist position, whereby all artificial contraception is banned, along with all sex outside one lifelong marriage. As Francis recognises, that’s not how people actually behave. The clergy know this, but are expected to pretend they don’t. The official teaching may not be questioned, but neither can it be obeyed. Something has to give, and when it does, the resulting explosion could fracture the church.

Appropriately enough, the sometimes bitter hatreds within the church – whether over climate change, migration or capitalism – have come to a head in a gigantic struggle over the implications of a single footnote in a document entitled The Joy of Love (or, in its proper, Latin name, Amoris Laetitia). The document, written by Francis, is a summary of the current debate over divorce, and it is in this footnote that he makes an apparently mild assertion that divorced and remarried couples may sometimes receive communion.

With more than a billion followers, the Catholic church is the largest global organisation the world has ever seen, and many of its followers are divorced, or unmarried parents. To carry out its work all over the world, it depends on voluntary labour. If the ordinary worshippers stop believing in what they are doing, the whole thing collapses. Francis knows this. If he cannot reconcile theory and practice, the church might be emptied out everywhere. His opponents also believe the church faces a crisis, but their prescription is the opposite. For them, the gap between theory and practice is exactly what gives the church worth and meaning. If all the church offers people is something they can manage without, Francis’s opponents believe, then it will surely collapse.

No one foresaw this when Francis was elected in 2013. One reason he was chosen by his fellow cardinals was to sort out the sclerotic bureaucracy of the Vatican. This task was long overdue. Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires was elected as a relative outsider with the ability to clear out some of the blockage at the centre of the church. But that mission soon collided with an even more acrimonious faultline in the church, which is usually described in terms of a battle between “liberals”, like Francis, and “conservatives”, like his enemies. Yet that is a slippery and misleading classification.

The central dispute is between Catholics who believe that the church should set the agenda for the world, and those who think the world must set the agenda for the church. Those are ideal types: in the real world, any Catholic will be a mixture of those orientations, but in most of them, one will predominate.

Francis is a very pure example of the “outer-directed” or extrovert Catholic, especially compared with his immediate predecessors. His opponents are the introverts. Many were first attracted to the church by its distance from the concerns of the world. A surprising number of the most prominent introverts are converts from American Protestantism, some driven by the shallowness of the intellectual resources they were brought up with, but much more by a sense that liberal Protestantism was dying precisely because it no longer offered any alternative to the society around it. They want mystery and romance, not sterile common sense or conventional wisdom. No religion could flourish without that impulse.

But nor can any global religion set itself against the world entirely. In the early 1960s, a three-year gathering of bishops from every part of the church, known as the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, “opened the windows to the world”, in the words of Pope John XXIII, who set it in motion, but died before its work had finished.

The council renounced antisemitism, embraced democracy, proclaimed universal human rights and largely abolished the Latin Mass. That last act, in particular, stunned the introverts. The author Evelyn Waugh, for example, never once went to an English Mass after the decision. For men like him, the solemn rituals of a service performed by a priest with his back to the congregation, speaking entirely in Latin, facing God on the altar, were the very heart of the church – a window into eternity enacted at every performance. The ritual had been central to the church in one form or another since its foundation.

The symbolic change brought about by the new liturgy – replacing the introverted priest facing God at the altar with the extroverted figure facing his congregation – was immense. Some conservatives still have not reconciled themselves to the reorientation, among them the Guinean cardinal Robert Sarah, who has been touted by introverts as a possible successor to Francis, and the American cardinal Raymond Burke, who has emerged as Francis’ most public opponent. The current crisis, in the words of the English Catholic journalist Margaret Hebblethwaite – a passionate partisan of Francis – is nothing less than “Vatican II coming coming back again”.

“We need to be inclusive and welcoming to all that is human,” Sarah said at a Vatican gathering last year, in a denunciation of Francis’s proposals, “but what comes from the Enemy cannot and must not be assimilated. You can not join Christ and Belial! What Nazi-Fascism and Communism were in the 20th century, Western homosexual and abortion Ideologies and Islamic Fanaticism are today.”

In the years immediately after the council, nuns discarded their habits, priests discovered women (more than 100,000 left the priesthood to marry) and theologians threw off the shackles of introverted orthodoxy. After 150 years of resisting and repelling the outside world, the church found itself engaging with it everywhere, until it seemed to introverts that the whole edifice would collapse to rubble.

Church attendance plummeted in the western world, as it did in other denominations. In the US, 55% of Catholics went to mass regularly in 1965; by 2000, only 22% did. In 1965, 1.3m Catholic babies were baptised in the US; in 2016, just 670,000. Whether this was cause or correlation remains fiercely disputed. The introverts blamed it on the abandonment of eternal truths and traditional practices; extraverts felt the church had not changed far or fast enough.

In 1966, a papal committee of 69 members, with seven cardinals and 13 doctors among them, on which laypeople and even some women were also represented, voted overwhelmingly to lift the ban on artificial contraception, but Pope Paul VI overruled them in 1968. He could not admit that his predecessors had been wrong, and the Protestants right. For a generation of Catholics, this dispute came to symbolise resistance to change. In the developing world, the Catholic church was largely overtaken by a huge Pentecostal revival, which offered both showmanship and status to the laity, even to women.

The introverts had their revenge with the election of Pope (now Pope Saint) John Paul II in 1978. His Polish church had been defined by its opposition to the world and its powers since the Nazis and the Communists divided the country in 1939. John Paul II was a man of tremendous energy, willpower and dramatic gifts. He was also profoundly conservative on matters of sexual morality and had, as a cardinal, provided the intellectual justification for the ban on birth control. From the moment of his election, he set about reshaping the church in his image. If he could not impart to it his own dynamism and will, he could, it seemed, purge it of extroversion and once more set it like a rock against the currents of the secular world.

Ross Douthat, the Catholic journalist, was one of the few people in the introvert party who was prepared to talk openly about the current conflict. As a young man, he was one of the converts drawn into the church of Pope John Paul II. He now says: “The church may be a mess, but the important thing is that the centre is sound, and one can always rebuild things from the centre. The point of being Catholic is that you’re guaranteed continuity at the centre, and with that the hope of reconstitution of the Catholic order.”

John Paul II was careful never to repudiate the words of Vatican II, but he worked to empty them of the extrovert spirit. He set about imposing a fierce discipline on the clergy and on theologians. He made it as difficult as possible for priests to leave and marry. His ally in this was the Congregation for the Defence of the Faith, or CDF, once known as the Holy Office. The CDF is the most institutionally introverted of all Vatican departments (or “dicasteries”, as they have been known since the days of the Roman empires; it’s a detail that suggests the weight of institutional experience and inertia – if the name was good enough for Constantine, why change it?).

For the CDF, it is axiomatic that the role of the church is to teach the world, and not to learn from it. It has a long history of punishing theologians who disagree: they have been forbidden to publish, or sacked from Catholic universities.

Early in the pontificate of John Paul II, the CDF published Donum Veritatis (The Gift of Truth), a document explaining that all Catholics must practise “submission of the will and intellect” to what the pope teaches, even when it is not infallible; and that theologians, while they may disagree and make their disagreement known to superiors, must never do so in public. This was used as a threat, and occasionally a weapon, against anyone suspected of liberal dissent. Francis, however, has turned these powers against those who had been their most enthusiastic advocates. Catholic priests, bishops and even cardinals all serve at the pleasure of the pope, and can at any moment be sacked. The conservatives were to learn all about this under Francis, who has sacked at least three theologians from the CDF. Jesuits demand discipline.

In 2013, shortly after his election, while he was still surfing a wave of almost universal acclaim for the boldness and simplicity of his gestures – he had moved into a couple of sparsely furnished rooms in the Vatican grounds, rather than the sumptuous state apartments used by his predecessors – Francis purged a small religious order devoted to the practice of the Latin Mass.

The Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, a group with about 600 members (men and women), had been placed under investigation by a commission in June 2012, under Pope Benedict. They were accused of combining increasingly extreme rightwing politics with a devotion to the Latin Mass. (This mixture, often seen alongside declarations of hatred of “liberalism”, had also been spreading through online outlets in the US and the UK, such as the Daily Telegraph’s Holy Smoke blog, edited by Damian Thompson.)

When the commission reported in July 2013, Francis’s reaction shocked conservatives rigid. He stopped the Friars using the Latin Mass in public, and closed down their seminary. They were still allowed to educate new priests, but not segregated from the rest of the church. What’s more, he did so directly, without going through the Vatican’s internal court system, then run by Cardinal Burke. The next year, Francis sacked Burke from his powerful job in the Vatican’s internal court system. By doing so, he made an implacable enemy.

Burke, a bulky American given to lace-embroidered robes and (on formal occasions) a ceremonial scarlet cape so long it needs pageboys to carry its trailing end, was one of the most conspicuous reactionaries in the Vatican. In manner and in doctrine, he represents a long tradition of heavyweight American power brokers of white ethnic Catholicism. The hieratic, patriarchal and embattled church of the Latin Mass is his ideal, to which it seemed that the church under John Paul II and Benedict was slowly returning – until Francis started work.

Cardinal Burke’s combination of anti-communism, ethnic pride and hatred of feminism has nurtured a succession of prominent rightwing lay figures in the US, from Pat Buchanan through Bill O’Reilly and Steve Bannon, alongside lesser-known Catholic intellectuals such as Michael Novak, who have shilled untiringly for US wars in the Middle East and the Republican understanding of free markets.

It was Cardinal Burke who invited Bannon, then already the animating spirit of Breitbart News, to address a conference in the Vatican, via video link from California, in 2014. Bannon’s speech was apocalyptic, incoherent and historically eccentric. But there was no mistaking the urgency of his summons to a holy war: the second world war, he said, had really been “the Judeo-Christian west versus atheists”, and now civilisation was “at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism … a very brutal and bloody conflict … that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years … if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not … fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting.”

Everything in that speech is anathema to Francis. His first official visit outside Rome, in 2013, was to the island of Lampedusa, which had become the arrival point for tens of thousands of desperate migrants from north Africa. Like both his predecessors, he is firmly opposed to wars in the Middle East, although the Vatican gave reluctant support to the extirpation of the Islamic State caliphate. He opposes the death penalty. He loathes and condemns American capitalism: after marking his support for migrants and gay people, the first big policy statement of his time in office was an encyclical, or teaching document, addressed to the whole church, that fiercely condemned the workings of global markets.

“Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”

Above all, Francis is on the side of the immigrants – or the emigrants, as he sees them – driven from their homes by a boundlessly rapacious and destructive capitalism, which has set catastrophic climate change in motion. This is a racialised, as well as a deeply politicised, question in the US. The evangelicals who voted for Trump and his wall are overwhelmingly white. So is the leadership of the American Catholic church. But the laity is around a third Hispanic, and this proportion is growing. Last month Bannon claimed, in an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes, that American bishops were in favour of mass immigration only because it kept their congregations going – although this goes further than even the most rightwing bishops would publicly say.

When Trump first announced that he would build a wall to keep out migrants, Francis came very close to denying that the then candidate could be a Christian. In Francis’s vision of the dangers to the family, transgender lavatories are not the most urgent problem, as some culture warriors claim. What destroys families, he has written, is an economic system that forces millions of poor families apart in their search for work.

As well as tackling the old-school practitioners of Latin Mass, Francis started a wide-ranging offensive against the old guard inside the Vatican. Five days after his election in 2013, he summoned the Honduran cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, and told him that he was to be the co-ordinator of a group of nine cardinals from around the world whose mission was to clean the place up. All had been chosen for their energy, and for the fact that they had in the past been at loggerheads with the Vatican. It was a popular move everywhere outside Rome.

John Paul II had spent the last decade of his life increasingly crippled by Parkinson’s disease, and such energies as he had left were not spent on bureaucratic struggles. The curia, as the Vatican bureaucracy is known, grew more powerful, stagnant and corrupt. Very little action was taken against bishops who sheltered child-abusing priests. The Vatican bank was infamous for the services it offered to money-launderers. The process of making saints – something John Paul II had done at an unprecedented rate – had become an enormously expensive racket. (The Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi estimated the going rate for a canonisation at €500,000 per halo.) The finances of the Vatican itself were a horrendous mess. Francis himself referred to “a stream of corruption” in the curia.

The putrid state of the curia was widely known, but never talked about in public. Within nine months of taking office, Francis told a group of nuns that “in the curia, there are also holy people, really, there are holy people” – the revelation being that he assumed his audience of nuns would be shocked to discover this.

The curia, he said “sees and looks after the interests of the Vatican, which are still, for the most part, temporal interests. This Vatican-centric view neglects the world around us. I do not share this view, and I’ll do everything I can to change it.” He said to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica: “Heads of the church have often been narcissists, flattered and thrilled by their courtiers. The court is the leprosy of the papacy.”

“The Pope has never said anything nice about priests,” said the priest who can’t wait for him to die. “He’s an anti-clerical Jesuit. I remember that from the 70s. They’d say: ‘Don’t call me Father, call me Gerry’ – that crap – and we, the downtrodden parish clergy, feel the ground has been cut from under our feet.”

In December 2015, Francis gave his traditional Christmas address to the curia, and he pulled no punches: He accused them of arrogance, “spiritual Alzheimer’s”, “hypocrisy that is typical of the mediocre and a progressive spiritual emptiness that academic degrees cannot fill”, as well as empty materialism and an addiction to gossip and backbiting – not the sort of thing you want to hear from the boss at the office party.

Yet four years into his papacy, the passive resistance of the Vatican seems to have triumphed over Francis’ energy. In February this year, posters appeared overnight in the streets of Rome asking, “Francis, where’s your mercy?”, attacking him for his treatment of Cardinal Burke. These can only have come from disaffected elements in the Vatican, and are outward signs of a stubborn refusal to yield power or privilege to the reformers.

This battle, though, has been overshadowed, as have all the others, by the infighting over sexual morality. The struggle over divorce and remarriage centres on two facts. First, that the doctrine of the Catholic church has not changed in nearly two millennia – marriage is for life and indissoluble; that’s absolutely clear. But so is the second fact: Catholics actually get divorced and remarried at about the same rate as the surrounding population, and when they do so, they see nothing unforgivable in their actions. So the churches of the western world are full of divorced and remarried couples who take communion with everyone else, even though they and their priests know perfectly well it is not allowed.

The rich and powerful have always exploited loopholes. When they want to shuck off a wife and remarry, a good lawyer will find some way to prove the first marriage was a mistake, not something entered into in the spirit the church demands, and so it can be wiped from the record – in the jargon, annulled. This applies especially to conservatives: Steve Bannon has managed to divorce all three of his wives, but perhaps the most scandalous contemporary example is that of Newt Gingrich, who led the Republican takeover of Congress in the 1990s and has since reinvented himself as a Trump ally. Gingrich broke up with his first wife while she was being treated for cancer, and while married to his second wife had an eight-year affair with Callista Bisek, a devout Catholic, before marrying her in church. She is about to take up the post of Donald Trump’s new ambassador to the Vatican.

The teaching on remarriage after divorce is not the only way Catholic sexual teaching denies reality as laypeople experience it, but it is the most damaging. The ban on artificial contraception is ignored by everyone wherever it is legal. The hostility to gay people is undermined by the generally acknowledged fact that a large proportion of the priesthood in the west is gay, and some of them are well-adjusted celibates. The rejection of abortion is not an issue where abortion is legal, and is in any case not particular to the Catholic church. But the refusal to recognise second marriages, unless the couple promise never to have sex, highlights the absurdities of a caste of celibate men regulating women’s lives.

In 2015 and 2016, Francis convened two large conferences (or synods) of bishops from all around the world to discuss all this. He knew he could not move without broad agreement. He kept silent himself, and encouraged the bishops to wrangle. But it was soon apparent that he favoured a considerable loosening of the discipline around communion after remarriage. Since this is what goes on in practice anyway, it is difficult for an outsider to understand the passions it arouses.

“What I care about is the theory,” said the English priest who confessed his hatred of Francis. “In my parish there are lots of divorced and remarried couples, but many of them, if they heard the first spouse had died, would rush to get a church wedding. I know lots of homosexuals who are doing all sorts of things that are wrong, but they know they should not be. We’re all sinners. But we’ve got to maintain the intellectual integrity of the Catholic faith.”

With this mindset, the fact that the world rejects your teaching merely proves how right it is. “The Catholic Church ought to be countercultural in the wake of the sexual revolution,” says Ross Douthat. “The Catholic church is the last remaining place in the western world that says divorce is bad.”

For Francis and his supporters, all this is irrelevant. The church, says Francis, should be a hospital, or a first-aid station. People who have been divorced don’t need to be told it’s a bad thing. They need to recover and to piece their lives together again. The church should stand beside them, and show mercy.

At the first synod of the bishops in 2015, this was still a minority view. A liberal document was prepared, but rejected by a majority. A year later, the conservatives were in a clear minority, but a very determined one. Francis himself wrote a summary of the deliberations in The Joy of Love. It is a long, reflective and carefully ambiguous document. The dynamite is buried in footnote 351 of chapter eight, and has taken on immense importance in the subsequent convulsions.

The footnote appends a passage worth quoting both for what it says and how it says it. What it says is clear: some people living in second marriages (or civil partnerships) “can be living in God’s grace, can love and can also grow in the life of grace and charity, while receiving the Church’s help to this end”.

Even the footnote, which says that such couples may receive communion if they have confessed their sins, approaches the matter with circumspection: “In certain cases, this can include the help of the sacraments.” Hence, “I want to remind priests that the confessional must not be a torture chamber, but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy.” And: “I would also point out that the Eucharist ‘is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak’.”

“By thinking that everything is black and white,” Francis adds, “we sometimes close off the way of grace and growth.”

It is this tiny passage that has united all the other rebellions against his authority. No one has consulted laypeople to find out what they think about it, and in any case their opinions are of no interest to the introvert party. But among the bishops, between a quarter and a third are passively resisting the change, and a small minority are doing so actively.

The leader of that faction is Francis’s great enemy, Cardinal Burke. Sacked first from his position on the Vatican court, and then from the liturgy commission, he ended up on the supervisory board of the Knights of Malta – a charitable body run by the old Catholic aristocracies of Europe. In Autumn 2016, he sacked the head of the order for supposedly allowing nuns to distribute condoms in Burma. This is something that nuns do quite widely in the developing world to protect vulnerable women. The man who had been sacked appealed to the pope.

The outcome was that Francis reinstated the man Burke had sacked, and appointed another man to take over most of Burke’s duties. This was punishment for Burke’s quite untrue claim that the pope had been on his side in the original row.

Meanwhile, Burke had opened a new front, which came as close as he could to accusing the pope of heresy. Along with three other cardinals, two of whom have since died, Burke produced a list of four questions designed to establish whether or not Amoris Laetitia contravened previous teaching. These were sent as a formal letter to Francis, who ignored it. After he was sacked, Burke made the questions public, and said he was prepared to issue a formal declaration that the pope was a heretic if he would not answer them to Burke’s satisfaction.

Of course, Amoris Laetitia does represent a break with previous teaching. It is an example of the church learning from experience. But that is hard for conservatives to assimilate: historically, these bursts of learning have only happened in convulsions, centuries apart. This one has come only 60 years after the last burst of extroversion, with Vatican II, and only 16 years after John Paul II reiterated the old, hard line.

“What does it mean for a pope to contradict a previous pope?” asks Douthat. “It is remarkable how close Francis has come to arguing with his immediate predecessors. It was only 30 years ago that John Paul II laid down in Veritatis Splendor the line which it seems that Amoris Laetitia is contradicting.”

Pope Francis is deliberately contradicting a man who he himself proclaimed a saint. That will hardly trouble him. But mortality might. The more Francis changes his predecessors’ line, the easier it becomes for a successor to reverse his. Although Catholic teaching does of course change, it relies for its force on the illusion that it doesn’t. The feet may be dancing under the cassock, but the robe itself must never move. However, this also means changes that had taken place can be rolled back without any official movement. That is how John Paul II struck back against Vatican II.

To guarantee Francis’ changes will last, the church has to accept them. That is a question that will not be answered in his lifetime. He is 80 now, and only has one lung. His opponents may be praying for his death, but no one can know whether his successor will attempt to contradict him – and on that question, the future of the Catholic church now hangs.

[Easy_C]

You know why the dialectic that the Pope and media are setting up is so dangerous?

Because it's a fool's mindset to assume that tough love and "showing mercy" are mutually exclusive. Forgiving what someone has done does NOT mean downplaying the severity of the mistakes being made or their consequences.

[Aurini]

(10-28-2017 01:42 PM)Easy_C Wrote:  

You know why the dialectic that the Pope and media are setting up is so dangerous?

Because it's a fool's mindset to assume that tough love and "showing mercy" are mutually exclusive. Forgiving what someone has done does NOT mean downplaying the severity of the mistakes being made or their consequences.

I'm finding that the Spirit is far more present in the "foreign" churches (Maronite, Coptic, etc) than in the Novus Ordo Western Churches which smell of menopause and modern architecture. I don't need to speak Arabic to understand the Catholic Mass when I hear it.

Remember: "Hair above the chin, subversion from within."

[debeguiled]

(10-29-2017 11:02 AM)Aurini Wrote:  

(10-28-2017 01:42 PM)Easy_C Wrote:  

You know why the dialectic that the Pope and media are setting up is so dangerous?

Because it's a fool's mindset to assume that tough love and "showing mercy" are mutually exclusive. Forgiving what someone has done does NOT mean downplaying the severity of the mistakes being made or their consequences.

I'm finding that the Spirit is far more present in the "foreign" churches (Maronite, Coptic, etc) than in the Novus Ordo Western Churches which smell of menopause and modern architecture. I don't need to speak Arabic to understand the Catholic Mass when I hear it.

Remember: "Hair above the chin, subversion from within."

If you want to get a jumpstart to your faith, check out Fr. Lazarus of the Coptic church. This dude is a former Tasmanian atheist currently occupying St. Anthony's cave in Egypt. He is almost too real.

[Aurini]

So... Anti-Pope Bergoglio is administering while this happens:

[url=https://twitter.com/ETDEUMPURITAS/status/925445201136582656][/url]

For you Protestants: I know we have a major divide, but either Luther was right, or he was wrong. No middle ground on this. The "Pope" is promoting theological multiculturalism.

Like - whatever goes, maaaaaan!

[TooFineAPoint]

He was right

[RexImperator]

Tomorrow Cardinal Bergolio is visiting Myanmar.
...dis gon' be good...
Will he lecture them on being more tolerant towards The Religion of Cuck ™?

[The Beast1]

I used to think Marty's proclamation that the papacy will be the seat of the anti christ was a bit bombastic.

Now, I think he was onto something.

[Kid Twist]

^While Jorge is the argentine marxist we know he is, Beast, you know better

the franco romans and their wayward children are caught up on many things, mainly politics, and while the man you speak of may rest on that as a symbol, he comes from a different place

[Paracelsus]

Frankie the Fuckwit now wants to change the Our Father.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/12/07/...+-+Text%29

Quote:

Pope Francis has suggested he wants to make a change to The Lord's Prayer, widely known among the faithful as the “Our Father.”

Specifically, the Catholic leader said in an interview Wednesday he would prefer to adjust the phrase “lead us not into temptation,” saying that it too strongly suggested that God leads people to sin.

“That is not a good translation,” the pope said, according to Reuters.

The phrase “do not let us fall into temptation,” which the Catholic Church in France has previously decided to use, would be a more appropriate alternative, Francis said.

He added that the phrase used by the French, or similar wording, should then be implemented around the globe.

The prayer originated from Jesus’s language of Aramaic. It was then translated to ancient Greek, and later to Latin.

It's getting worse.

[Number one bummer]

(12-08-2017 02:00 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

Frankie the Fuckwit now wants to change the Our Father.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/12/07/...+-+Text%29

Quote:

Pope Francis has suggested he wants to make a change to The Lord's Prayer, widely known among the faithful as the “Our Father.”

Specifically, the Catholic leader said in an interview Wednesday he would prefer to adjust the phrase “lead us not into temptation,” saying that it too strongly suggested that God leads people to sin.

“That is not a good translation,” the pope said, according to Reuters.

The phrase “do not let us fall into temptation,” which the Catholic Church in France has previously decided to use, would be a more appropriate alternative, Francis said.

He added that the phrase used by the French, or similar wording, should then be implemented around the globe.

The prayer originated from Jesus’s language of Aramaic. It was then translated to ancient Greek, and later to Latin.

It's getting worse.

Dumb thing to mess with but harmless in my opinion on a theological level. Upon reading the title I thought for a second he was seeking to change the actual phrase of "Our Father." There has been a push Christianity as a whole to remove the idea of God as a father to a more gender neutral reference.

Similar to protestant denominations that have altered the doxology in recent years. The common doxology is slowly being changed from "praise father, son and holy ghost" to "praise creator, son and holy ghost. You don't have to be a theologian to see the problem in removing God as a father figure.

Long story short, churches cucking out for gender politics is not going to attract the secular humanists that are pushing such narratives.

[lazy]

(12-08-2017 02:00 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

Frankie the Fuckwit now wants to change the Our Father.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/12/07/...+-+Text%29

Quote:

Pope Francis has suggested he wants to make a change to The Lord's Prayer, widely known among the faithful as the “Our Father.”

Specifically, the Catholic leader said in an interview Wednesday he would prefer to adjust the phrase “lead us not into temptation,” saying that it too strongly suggested that God leads people to sin.

“That is not a good translation,” the pope said, according to Reuters.

The phrase “do not let us fall into temptation,” which the Catholic Church in France has previously decided to use, would be a more appropriate alternative, Francis said.

He added that the phrase used by the French, or similar wording, should then be implemented around the globe.

The prayer originated from Jesus’s language of Aramaic. It was then translated to ancient Greek, and later to Latin.

It's getting worse.

In Spanish and Portuguese it has always been "do not let us fall into temptation".

There isn't enough information in those news. I'm guessing he's referring to the Italian translation.

[Paracelsus]

^^^^^

Yeah, but why? Why fuck with it just for its own sake? Does the fuckhead really think that how your average Catholic, born, raised, educated in the faith, is going to not understand that phrase never meant God is evil?

Me, I see it as an affront for the following reason: the prayer says lead us not into temptation. That's not leading us and causing us to sin, that's asking God not to put our human will to the test, because we know we're fallible and we're likely to disappoint. It's saying "God, you have full majesty over creation, full sovereignty over everything in existence including me, but please, don't put me in a situation where I could be tempted to sin against you, I don't want to let you down." It's the same prayer Jesus made in Gethsemane: "Father, let this cup pass my lips; nevertheless, let it be your will, not mine."

And I see this as more slippery slope: if he thinks he can get a change like that past the world's Catholics, what the fuck is next?

[Raylan Givens]

Quote:

Pope Francis strongly defended immigrants at his Christmas Eve Mass on Sunday, comparing them to Mary and Joseph finding no place to stay in Bethlehem and saying faith demands that foreigners be welcomed.

Francis, celebrating his fifth Christmas as leader of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, led a solemn Mass for about 10,000 people in St. Peter's Basilica while many others followed the service from the square outside.

Security was stepped up, with participants checked as they approached St. Peter's Square even before going through metal detectors to enter the basilica. The square had been cleared out hours earlier so security procedures could be put in place.

The Gospel reading at the Mass in Christendom's largest church recounted the Biblical story of how Mary and Jesus had to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem to be registered for a census ordered by Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus.

"So many other footsteps are hidden in the footsteps of Joseph and Mary. We see the tracks of entire families forced to set out in our own day. We see the tracks of millions of persons who do not choose to go away, but driven from their land, leave behind their dear ones," Francis said.

http://www.businessinsider.com/r-pope-on...ts-2017-12

Frankie's destruction of the ruins of Catholicism is on going. He will use every opportunity he has to signal.

To be clear, Catholicism was dead before Frankie took over, he is just nailing the coffin shut. Catholicism has existed only in books for some time now.