Doubtful. Many come from Protestant traditions that believe Catholics aren’t Christians.
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I’m happy to have a mixed impression of Francis, he seems to be about the best I could have hoped for in a pope, while still being a pope. He’s wrong about gay marriage, but I really appreciated when he came out and talked about how the “obsession” with homosexuality was bad for the church. That was a real rebuke against the assholes that have been actively fighting gay rights and tacitly (to actively) supporting violence against anyone who isn’t cis and straight.
There’s a weird reverence for Catholics in right wing America, though, isn’t there? Like, the right wing supreme court nominees are nearly all Catholic (possibly in an attempt to find people who would stop abortion rights, gay rights, etc). I think the Catholic church’s hatred of gay people and social progress in general kind of made them darlings of the religious right. But yeah, it’s not like it’s hard for them to turn their backs on a pope that doesn’t agree with them.
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It’s probably better to think of the Vatican less as a state and more as a forerunner to international organizations like the UN or the World Bank, which have sovereignty without controlling territory beyond their offices.
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Sorta, right-wing doesn’t necessarily equate to religious, there’s just a fairly large overlap.
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I might be more inclined to think that if the Vatican hadn’t been reduced to its current vestigial statehood from a much larger area of direct control(and even grander claims for which troops weren’t available) mostly by the fact that they kept losing, rather than by any agreement that playing nation state was in poor taste.
Even after losing Rome in 1870, the papacy pouted about their lost sovereignty for 59 years and did their best to broadcast refusal of Italian jurisdiction until Mussolini eventually granted them the current Vatican city holdings.
That would be somewhat like the UN, if the UN were a remnant of a former american colony that had once exerted substantial control over most or all of New York State, before eventually being overwhelmed by rising American nationalism and bombarded back to their HQ by the Continental Army.
Sure, they are basically just an NGO now; but that’s because they got there the hard way, not because it was the plan.
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ISIS from Archer maybe. Daesh, not so much.
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Officially by the Lateran Treaty, Vatican City is not a rump of the Papal States but instead one newly created in 1929. YMMV of course.
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If you listen closely you’ll hear the projectile vomit and excrement coming out of Trump.
I don’t know. I got a distinct feeling that Trump…did he just dare ISIS to attack the Vatican?
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The nit-picking part of me wants to argue about 1, 2 and 4. For one I would say we call things cults that are based around sex, suicide or other goals, not just money. For two I would say that it is odd to require cults to have documents of any kind. And for four, I would say CC passes, their method of choosing a leader is very opaque.
Still, I think anyone who is calling Catholicism a “cult” is going to probably be including nearly all religions as cults and has stretched the definition beyond any ordinary understanding.
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Opaque fading to translucent as it moves further away from the smokestack?
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I think part of the problem is that Francis and Trump just have irreconcilable worldviews on certain key issues.
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That’s a very classy response
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Irony? I grade every single one of those points as “pass” - perhaps not at this precise moment in time, but every one of those is historically known to have been a part of Catholicism at some point. And I don’t even think those are valid tests!
Functionally, a cult is a religion you don’t like. People with a vested interest in promoting their own taxonomy of hatred can pretend that being a cult isn’t a subjective evaluation, but unless you’re an outright bigot, at some point you’ll have to acknowledge that everybody who uses the label “cult” is using it to try to distinguish the beliefs of some group they don’t like from the belief systems of people they do like (or find it politically expedient to pretend to like).
Catholicism is one of the many Roman-era mystery cults that sprang up after the death of Yeshuah ben Joseph. It’s a heresy of Judaism. That doesn’t mean that everyone who believes in it is indistinguishable from a Hubbard cultist or a Moonie, it just means I personally think Catholicism is not a good religion (and I think that because it has a documented 1000 year history of child abuse, continuing into the present era.) What makes a cult is subjective.
I will pay to watch this. TAKE MY MONEY!
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He’s in a bit of a tough spot because of papal infallibility, though. He can’t officially, as the pope, contradict statements on matters of faith because then the pope would’ve been wrong on a theological problem, which makes all sorts of problems for all sorts of things. Because a previous pope condemned the idea of gay marriage (pretty sure,) he can’t say anything on the matter, at least as I understand it.
Well, the church has changed its position on things over time, and it will again if it continues to exist. Somewhere along the line someone contradicted someone else.
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Yeah, but you usually have to work around it in one way or another, don’t you? I’m no expert on these things. I feel like if you’re doing homosexuality you’re going to have a really fun time because of the long history of proclamations on it.
Aside: Is this technically still devil’s advocate…?
It’s only when the Pope is speaking ex cathedra that their opinions become officially infallible (according to the Church, anyway). Ex cathedra statements are when the Pope makes formal pronouncements of Church doctrine. Popes talk about a lot of things besides making formal pronouncements of Church doctrine so they can and do contradict each other.
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Yes, but I’m pretty sure we have stuff on this topic ex cathedra, don’t we? Even if we say he wants to make a statement unofficially, the pope openly stating that it’s his opinion that the infallible, perfect church doctrine is wrong is a bit off.
