It’s Almost as if the Pope Is Catholic
Yea, verily.
40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
So. The Pope told Congress to welcome immigrants, house the homeless, feed the poor, and stop selling weapons to murderous regimes.
It is almost as if he is Catholic.
Now I’m not Catholic, or even Christian, but I had the standard Sunday school upbringing and I’ve read both the the New and Old Testament.
Reading both is a good way to leave yourself with a lot of sympathy for the Gnostic types who believed there was no way the God of the Old Testament (bash out their brains) could be the same guy that Jesus was talking about.
Because I don’t believe that God made sure the Bible is inerrant (I know just a little too much about early church politics), I tend to concentrate on the parts that seem closest to what Jesus actually said.
Perhaps, like many, I read in what I want to see. But I think it’s minimal, because I got imprinted young. It’s more likely that reading about Jesus as a child formed my opinions of right conduct than the other way around.
It seems to me that what Jesus was most concerned with, in terms of the way to treat other people, is summed up pretty well by the Sermon on the Mount, the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would they do unto you), and the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
It’s always seemed to me that it’s better to be a good Samaritan (a non-believer who is kind to those in need), than to be a Pharisee, obsessed with the rules, but not kind in action.
Francis isn’t a radical Pope. He hasn’t said abortion is ok, or even birth control, or homosexuality. He’s pretty doctrinaire. What he has done is shift emphasis to the issues Jesus spent more time talking about, and extended those issues to modern concerns like climate change.
A good person, according to the Sermon of the Mount, can’t be a climate denialist, let alone be funding climate denialism. The people who are going to suffer the most from the climate crisis are “the least of these.”
To put it crudely, if you make climate refugees homeless, you’re making Jesus homeless. Those who die, well, you just killed a lot of Jesus.
When you lock people up in solitary confinement, you are locking Jesus up in solitary confinement.
When you torture someone, you’re torturing Jesus.
When you rape someone, yup, Jesus.
But when you feed someone who would have gone hungry, yes, you’re feeding Jesus.
When you give a refugee a home, you’re giving Jesus a home.
This is a powerful, and simple message. Everyone was made in the image of God. Everyone is God’s child. What you do to them, you do to Jesus, God’s only begotten son.
The holy, sacralized life, is one where you see God in other people, in the environment, and so on. Everything you see is God’s work. To mistreat it is to disrespect God. To mistreat God’s children is to mistreat Jesus.
We have had a number of Popes who a harsh, judgmental man might consider virtual Pharisees themselves. Picking no bones with church doctrine (though I might another day), emphasis matters.
Benedict, as Ratzinger, oversaw the destruction of liberation theology. This is how he made his bones, taking hope away from those who needed it most in the Latin American world. Depriving them of much of the powerful ideological, theological, and practical support of the church.
As you do unto these, the least of my children…
I suspect a result of the dismantling of liberation theology and its practitioners has paved the way for Evangelicals to make vast inroads into parts of Latin America, while the church can’t fill its ranks.
Young idealistic men, the sort of people you want as priests, don’t seem to want to be in the church.
My approval is unimportant, but I do approve of this Pope, despite the fact that I certainly disagree with him on many issues. Kindness is always admirable. Forgiveness is at the heart of the Church, and Francis has moved towards that. Yes, the Church disapproves of abortion, divorce, and so on, but Francis, step-by-step, is turning those back into sins which are much more easily forgivable.
We all sin. We all do wrong. What sins the Church, as God’s voice on earth considers more serious, as cause for being cut off from the sacraments, tells you what the Church thinks is most important.
It is here that I suggest one watch Francis’s efforts most closely, because it is here that will tell you what he most believes. He probably won’t change Church doctrine (some deny he can, that’s not an argument I care to get into today, especially as I’m hardly an expert on the Catholic church), but he can change its emphasis significantly.
Is abortion more important than war, homelessness, or the murder of the already born?
These issues, and how they are handled, will be the truest guide to Francis’s own soul, and for those who believe in the Catholic church and its version of God, they will matter greatly.
So, I pray for Francis. Under his care, may Catholicism come to treat Jesus far better than it often has in the past. And in so doing, may many lives be blessed with the kindness and love that should be at the heart of any religion’s teaching.
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The Vicar Visits CONgress
Once a thread passes 100 comments, the first 100 comments disappear. How can I make them re-appear?
Oh, now I figured it out.
Click “Newer Comments”, which are actually older comments.
And to get to the actually newer comments from the first 100 comments page, click “Older Comments”. 😆
Someone who can fix that needs to fix that.
The Questionmarks of the world and the Blizzards of the world deserve each other. 😈
The “Newer Comments” button doesn’t actually load anything more than the first four posts for me so I can’t read anything after my last diatribe 😉 Or in fact, well before it.
OK, now it came back.
No, it’s gone again. Oh well.
The point is that different kinds of struggles have different contexts. I’m certainly not going to say that LGBT activism didn’t fight its own uphill battles or try to compare who had it worse, so to speak.
On the economic front, the problem is that the people whose principal historical model seems to be (an interpretation of) FDR have not reckoned with the current nature of Western developed societies, which are consumerist societies in a different manner, certainly, then Depression-era USA. A large swath of workers want to know if their Audible and Spotify accounts will still work during and after the revolution. This, yes, despite increasing economic inequality and stagnating employment and so on.
To me, this suggests that the model that Ian and so on have been using is not fit for purpose—because it entirely fails to address this kind of question. You could trust the old sorts of communists to keep the lights on, maybe, but no one trusts the present-day left to keep modern consumer commerce running or to substitute an equivalent. Instead, everyone secretly suspects that the left wants people to pursue the tedious-sounding goal of Happiness(tm).
This dramatically reduces the plausibility of framing left-wing political activity using a negotiation metaphor. No one is really going to trust the left to run anything until they believe that present-day global consumer society will somehow continue to operate under left-wing reforms and governance. Only a real, physical crisis can change this, one in which consumer society cannot function anymore anyway — but a lot of people overestimate how quickly such a crisis is going to register.
LGBT, feminism, blacks, … it’s all identity politics. The elites will allow some victories there. It often even serves their divide and conquer purpose.
A general economic victory of the middle/poor classes, that’s what they won’t allow. That’s the holy grail.
EmilianoZ : “LGBT, feminism, blacks, … it’s all identity politics. The elites will allow some victories there. It often even serves their divide and conquer purpose.”
Racist and misogynist…because all them face terrible descrimination, at a level inconceivable to nice middle class straight white males.
You saying black people in the US or Australian Aborigines (etc) have no issues like greater poverty, shorter life span, jailed at Soviet Gulag levels, murders rates in the stratosphere…..?
You saying women being beaten up, attacked, raped, murdered, denied contraception, abortion and essential health care have no issues?
Obviously we mean nothing to you and our life and death issues are ‘not important’….
I am so tempted so say “well f**k you white, middle class, cis, straight male, you are part of the problem”.
Just taking we LGBTI people alone as an example (others please educate this ‘person’ about what women and coloured people face) :
{Note when I use the word ‘mainstream’ below it excludes coloured, natives, women, etc…we because we are all in the margins, just a shorthand term for all those so called ‘progressives that have sold out or are ineffectual…or dismiss our struggles as ‘identity politics’}.
The strength of the opposition, the sheer hatred we face makes what most of those other mainstream ‘progressives’ face look like a walk in the park. Murder, rape, physical attacks are commonplace.
Illegal for decades, classified as ‘mentally ill’, seen as ‘sexual freaks’ …… oh yes we got the lot.
You didn’t get (say) environmental activists being murdered just for being who they are, or getting banged up and being given hot and cold ECT everyday, which was happening right up to the 90s in some places for trans people (and for gay/lesbian ones just a decade or so earlier).
They don’t get presidential candidates and serious politicians in the US (and elsewhere) competing with each to be the toughest on abortion saying they’d ban it even it meant the mother’s life, in affect saying a woman’s life means nothing except as a womb.
They don’t face the OFFICIAL position of the Catholic church (and the WBC etc) openly being to totally eliminate trans people (and more quietly gay/lesbian ones too).
Compared to what we faced and what we face daily, all those other mainstream ‘progressives’ have no opposition at all.
Worse we had to change public opinion as a necessary precursor for many other changes. Not that long ago (going by the polls) homophobia and transphobia were ‘normal’ not just confined to a few minorities as now. That was very evident when the AIDS epidemic hit.
Our activists had to fight a long uphill battle to change that.
Other mainstream progressives worked (and currently work in) in a much more accepting environment. Even in the US polls have shown consistently that the majority of people are more ‘left wing’ than the so called ‘left wing’ politicians, being far more supportive of health system changes, welfare, environmental issues and so on.
We LGBTI people had to create that environment, changing a hostile one to a supportive one (and that is worth a book all by itself).
So I reject that argument, I think it is self serving and excuses failure…and helps avoid the necessary (and painful) self examination to work out what has gone wrong, then work out how to change.
I mean how did (as a classic example) the environmental lobby fail so badly over CO2? it wasn’t the opposition, they faced far worse over vehicle pollution controls in the 70s And all they had to do was to replace coal fired electricity generation, not that big an issue technically or economically. Yet they failed (and continue to fail) totally.
To understand that you have to examine the organisational, personal and inter-personal dynamics of all the various people involved and the bad decisions made sometimes decades before.
Why did all those US ‘progressives’ roll over when Clinton gutted welfare? When you look back at that time a well organised campaign could have stopped that dead easily.
And many, many other examples like that.
We LGBTI people haven’t been ‘allowed’ anything at all, it has been a long hard bloody struggle all the way and still is.
None of all those ‘progressives’, ‘left wingers’ and all the rest have ever faced anything like this (or ever will do):
http://www.christianpost.com/news/over-150-high-schoolers-stage-walkout-protest-after-trans-student-seeks-to-use-girls-locker-room-144253/
On the good news front:
“WBC chased out of KC by supportive parents and friends of trans homecoming queen ”
http://planettransgender.com/wbc-chased-out-of-kc-by-supportive-parents-and-friends-of-trans-homecoming-queen/
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