…I’m not saying it, just relaying info. 
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NYT:
Archbishop Viganò could be in for a chillier reception the next time he returns to the Vatican.
The archbishop, who was exiled to the United States in 2011 after losing a high-altitude Vatican power struggle that became public in an infamous leaks scandal, now finds himself at the center of another papal controversy.
…
In January, Archbishop Viganò will turn 75, the age at which bishops must submit a formal request to the Vatican for permission to resign. These requests are not automatically accepted, and bishops often stay in their appointments long after. It seems unlikely, church analysts say, that Archbishop Viganò will be one of them.
Pope Francis ‘could give Archbishop who arranged meeting with Kim Davis the boot’
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Good, but none of this latest news changes my opinion of the pope. As Francis, he is a great guy. As head of the church, he represents one of the worst, longest standing forces of evil the world has ever known, and he perpetuates it by remaining at the helm.
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Any version seems to require the participation of someone high up in the Church.
Did that involve the Pope. Recent statements seem to say that it did not. So that leaves the question; does this expose the reform he brings as being mere PR or does he bring reform but face some significant opposition from the American diocese?
It was “Private” in that the church owns all the pictures of the event. It seems plausible the pope didn’t request this meeting or even know who he was hugging. But I suspect it takes these events take some serious strings being pulled and the lists are checked by more than one person. So if it doesn’t show the Pope saying one thing and doing another, it shows the church doing that.
Going by the New York Times article, it appears that this was arranged by Archbishop Viganò. He had already been sent over here from Italy after being involved in some sort of political scandal in 2011, and the Pope can require him to retire when he turns 75 in January 2016; many people expect that Francis will do just that.
I’m not interested in defending anyone other than the Pope on this; this definitely appears to have been arranged by Catholic insiders, without Francis’ knowledge, to score political points for Kim Davis and her supporters.
Incidentally, the Vatican press release on the subject mentions that “The only real
audience granted by the Pope at the Nunciature was with one of his former students and his family.” This turns out to have been a male student and his husband, and there is video of the Pope happily embracing him. I think it’s telling to compare that to the way he’s distancing himself from Kim Davis.
Whilst I’m organising my thoughts I couldn’t help but address this, seeing as he’s come up.
Probably the Dalai Lama doesn’t deserve the same depth of criticism as someone personally and organisationally embroiled in the protection of child abusers but he is the avowed re-incarnation of the leader of a church, the central tenant of which is to free oneself from the wheel of life.
I can assure you this has been a topic of some discussion in many different streams of Buddhism and continues to be a vexing issue for even those committed Theravada (‘elder’) Buddhists.
Probably there is some intersection of deserved criticism between the two figureheads, being that they both fundamentally adhere to the philosophy of patriarchy.
So.
The pope, the church, the sexual abuse, torture and sometimes murder of children with the accompanying cultural fallout, echoing other long-standing misery-inducing traditions such as the edict against contraception.
Possibly the oldest organisation, still extant, to which the maxim of ‘too big to fail’ (or even significantly reform) is not only promoted but accepted by a large number of people.
Perhaps over the years, bankers learned a lesson or two about plausible deniability emerging through distributed responsibility from the church, which of course is known for being one of the worlds largest launderers of money, including that stolen from Jewish people during the holocaust and of course, from the mafia.
But really, that’s just an aside about the type of organisation, admittedly a large and unwieldy one, that the church embodies.
My motivation in criticising the church, I admit, stems from a personal dislike of top-down organisations which mediate spiritual experience. Especially if those organisations are culturally intransigent, which of course, catholicism and buddhism have both proved to be many times over the years. (Zen organisations during the second world war are responsible for some fairly rigorous evil.)
This is why I was careful to demark my views on the culture of catholicism and it’s accompanying spiritual image-system. I do think that both organisations provide a foundation of ceremony which, in the right and compassionate hands, can be spiritually enlightening.
So I am for reform, rather than annihilation. I do not consider the catholic church to be an enemy but I for sure consider it a harbinger and creator of suffering where none need occur.
I am especially critical of the heads of the church because of the ongoing process of uncovering evidence that they were directly aware and sometimes personally involved in the protection of child abusers.
I’m kind of going to go through this back to front, because your summative paragraph seems to throw those preceding it into a different light.
I don’t think that focusing on criticism of an organisation which induces misery construes a digital exclusion of compassion for the victims of that organisations policies and actions. Feeling compassion for the victims can go hand in hand with attempts to criticise the causes of that suffering.
Perhaps that’s not what you meant, and I definitely agree that some people couldn’t care less about such nuance amidst their hatred of organisations like the church. Maniacal atheism aside, however, I don’t think there are many such contrarians about.
Which brings me to your previous statements, with which I wholeheartedly agree but for that last paragraphs apparent colouration.
I immediately thought of the police.
Is the scandal of racially motivated murder and incarceration of minorities by police in America fundamentally about their failure to protect (and serve) those communities? Or is it about the situation that systemic perversion enables? The central problem: the culture of abuse, murder and incarceration of those people?
Of course, they are not doing their duty but surely the focus is on their criminal malfeasance and the subsequent institutional protection and emergent motivation, the collective ideology of the perpetrators?
The enablement and the specific criminal actions, not the failure to live up to a stated organisational goal.
I think that you are encouraging a focus on the victims, which is admirable, as compassion always is. Perhaps the most admirable human quality.
But I don’t think that distributed responsibility and plausible deniability gives any organisation any moral protection whatsoever.
Not in the hands of the police. Not in the hands of BP or other polluting oil companies. Not in the hands of the NSA or GCHQ or the banks and not in the hands of the catholic church.
In each of those places individuals made decisions to enable evil behaviour.
And it is to the eternal shame of the individuals who populate such organisations that the brave insiders who speak out against and reveal such systematic evil are so rare.
So yes, my invective focuses on the corruption and the systemic violence inherent in such organisations and those individuals who enable it but it is by way of my compassion for their victims.
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Just because everything happens more quickly these days.
Well, it she was right at the time, and I can’t think of anything that’s changed that.
Having heard a lot of things he’s said and knowing his English is far from perfect, I would guess that this was more likely a comment about how he thinks the world sees women. That doesn’t exonerate him: 1) his view of women is very gender-essentialist; 2) this is a fun-house mirror of “I hope my kid isn’t gay because gay people have harder lives” thing. The Dalai Lama is pretty hip for an old man, but even he can’t get away from the fact that old people are stupid bigots.
I think there is something else to it, though. A lot of organizations have protected a few criminals, very few do it on the scale of the Catholic church as recently as the Catholic church. Francis said he was happy to find out that only about 4% of priests were pedophiles. I’m pretty sure that means that 4% of priests actually abused children. And of course the church was also busy promoting the spread of AIDS in Africa, encouraging states to criminalize homosexuality and abortion, and who knows what else.
Penn State and Subway presumably both have people in the organization that ought to answer for what they did to support Sandusky/Jared and that never will answer for that. What they haven’t done is taken the chief architect of the coverup and named him infallible ruler while sticking their necks out and claiming to be a moral authority for the world. Hypocrisy really rankles people. If the Catholic church didn’t want all this ire, they might have avoided painting a giant bullseye on themselves.
I agree that people love their retribution theatre, and a lot of people like to see the guilty punished more than they like to care about people who suffered. But that’s not limited to the church specifically, that’s just how a lot of people are. Their outrage is still about what the church did.
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LOL
How come you can say the same thing I did, link to the same press release I did, and you don’t get attacked or wall of text responses?
Hmph!
Obviously its a cat vs dog thing. Obviously!
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I swear one of these elections I’ll get off my ass and make oldpeoplearestupid.com to encourage youth to get out and vote. Put up graphs like this one from [Pew Research][1]:
We cannot let these elderly morons run the country!
[1]: http://www.pewforum.org/2015/07/29/graphics-slideshow-changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/
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Took me a minute, because the X-axis isn’t labeled… This is % favoring same sex marriage…
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The god. damned. baby. boomers.
On course to be more obstinate and uncompassionate than the preceding generation.
As appalling as they are unsurprising.
Yeah, the graph was this interactive thing that I couldn’t just copy image from so I screen shotted it and I guess I left off important information. It is indeed % support for gay marriage. But the thing is, it could be about almost anything. If you see a graph like that, you can basically put down all your money that the young people are right and the old people are bigots.
Yes, it goes for lots of things. Are the older people bigots or just haven’t caught up yet? I’m not giving them a pass. I’m trying to understand them. I know lots of older people who are on or below the line, rather than above it. I also know some above it who truly are bigots. But also, there is a gray area (ba-dumpbump_psssh) where it may not be as bright a line as you are suggesting. Thoughts?
Carrousel?
I suspect that everyone is to some extent a product of their time. Society progresses and eventually it gets harder and harder to keep up as it gets further from what you think of as normal.
Now you’re a bigot.
The onus is on old fogies to stay in touch. Or just enjoy their free old person pass on being awful.
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Some day somebody will note that the only thing holding back progress is the Millennials irrational belief in the now-discredited science of statistics…
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Statistics only works 95% of the time.
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