There’s no wall preventing access to St Peter’s Square. The remainder of the city appears to be fortified, but these were last modified in the mid seventeenth century. Wouldn’t it be something if some treaty required that it be slighted?
I think it is the conflicting feelings around him. None of the candidates for pope had LGBT positive or pro-choice views, yet despite that Pope Francis has exceeded expectations by a long, long way. Some people may feel the need to focus on his negative aspects, but personally I’m going to enjoy having him around, trying to make the world a better place, until the next reactionary arsehole gets elected.
Some people clearly have a huge amount of baggage. Its rather as if there was an enormous, dysfunctional ship headed towards a gigantic iceberg, a new captain comes on board and promptly starts to move the ship out of the way and is instantly attacked because (a) he did not instantly turn it 180 degrees and (b) he’s a bit authoritarian and hasn’t replaced the chain of command with social democracy. Meanwhile he is fighting a disorderly crew, mutinous officers, obsolete machinery, broken control systems and people outside the ship using foghorns to tell the crew what to do.
Properly used the Catholic Church can be a force for good, with its hospitals, charities and development of social cohesion. If another reactionary succeeds him, it’s going to hit the iceberg and sink.
He’s doubtless far from perfect. So was Nelson, to pursue my analogy. Nelson was a deeply flawed personality. But possibly nobody else could have won his two crucial battles, at the Nile and Copenhagen, and laid the foundations for the defeat of Napoleon. The Pope is standing up against unregulated capitalism, and even if he was secretly a very bad man, it’s a good thing to do.
And your replies are entirely cherry picking. Papal indulgences did not gain any kind of promotion in the hierarchy; the medieval Popes were extremely bent but how many recent Popes and Cardinals got there by paying out millions of dollars (Scientologists have to buy their way up and Mormons tend to rise according to their wealth, which affects the tithe they pay the Church.) Opus Dei is not an inner group in charge of Catholic doctrine; it must be feeling pretty unloved at the moment. Antonin Scalia was neither a Catholic priest nor a theologian; Vatican II liberalised large parts of Catholic doctrine (I assume you have read all the documents? What a busy life you must lead) but the Church has always had a way to handle dissent, like the rise of the Franciscans. The election of the Pope is known to be by the College of Cardinals and the election procedures are laid down, unlike the leaders of cults who tend to name their own successors. Catholic theology says that the Bible can be interpreted in the light of tradition; as long ago as 4th century CE St. Augustine was arguing that parts of the Bible were metaphorical. Choosing one doctrine is just cherry picking. The Church has gone from an Aristotelian and plain Creationist world view to one which accepts Big Bang cosmology and evolution by natural selection, which many Protestant churches have not. Please note, since your grasp of logic is clearly defective, that to find one doctrine which has not been changed by science does not prove that doctrine is never changed by science [especially when several important ones have].
You have the gall to call me superficial, when your post just displays a general ignorance and the sort of casual Catholic-bashing arguments that I expect of a Protestant fundie from Northern Ireland or Kentucky. You clearly have almost no knowledge of church history and you select a few tired examples/conspiracy theories. I hope you’re not an atheist, because if you are it would almost embarrass me to admit to being one too, for fear of being seen as stupid by association.
[edited for clarity and a few typos - and apologies to others for the long post. I was going to ignore the Wittless post till someone upvoted it and I thought that perhaps that someone didn’t realise how supercilious, puerile and just plain wrong it really was.]
Fundamentalisms tend to be very similar. This is true if we’re talking about Christian fundamentalism, Free Market fundamentalism, Nationalist fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism…
Well, I wouldn’t say those groups in general necessarily share all that much in terms of particular positions, but the particular strain of American Christianity Trump’s simulating has a good deal of overlap with those groups, so we get the misogyny and homophobia of fundamentalist monotheism, unthinking nationalism, capitalism-worshipping prosperity gospel…
Hang on, a group of people who has spent the past eight years saying Obama isn’t the religion he says he is is now upset that someone is calling out Trump as not being the religion he says he is?
That whole superdelegatus thing introduced in Vatican II is still somewhat galling.
Have you read St. Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman ? Post-apoc novel massaged by Terry Bisson, but still very much a Catholic Fiction novel by Miller. The Papal elections are particularly amusing/fascinating.
Other than WMM, Jr and PKD, is there anybody else indulging in Theological Fiction?
Particular positions, no, but “the worst parts of the worst kind of American Christian” and what I might call the worst parts of the worst kind of Capitalist can be very similar, because they spring from a very similar place: that ideological purity is necessary and sufficient for moral good.
I didn’t realize until I saw some news stories last night that Trump started this. He called the pope a “pawn” for going to the Mexican/US border, and said it was a political move against him.
The pope provoked it in a way, but he didn’t just come out and start saying Trump was a bad person. Trump was diplomatically outmaneuvered here. It’s very easy to goad him into insults. Fortunately for Trump I don’t think his supporters are much for diplomacy.
No, I’m afraid. At my age I prefer not to read anything where I don’t know how it turns out in the end, in case I don’t get to finish it. So I stick to history.
If you’ve ever read any of Walter M. Miller, Jr’s heavily-Catholic SF stories (or the fix-up novel A Canticle for Liebowitz) I highly reccomend SLatWHW.
It rather ends the way you’d expect, and not the way you’d have hoped. As always.
And of course the Vatican is like about 100 acres or so, has just under 1000 residents, and doesn’t have people seeking work… not a miles long border between two countries with relatively normal relations seems a different kind of thing.
