Saw on Sky News that Pope Francis has urged US voters to consider the “lesser of two evils.” Namely, between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Said that he couldn’t tell Catholics how to vote but that they should look to their consciences. That’s good advice for everything. He might have stopped there. He didn’t.
He went to the issues. Not inflation. Nor the war in Ukraine and the Middle East. But to abortion and immigration. He was then able to say that both candidates were “against life.”
Now clearly one candidate wants women to have the unfettered right to kill their unborn babies, up to full term. And to leave them to die if, having been aborted, they somehow remain alive. The Pope rightly calls this “assassination.” Trump called killing babies born alive “execution.” The Pope and Trump seem to be on the same page, at least in part.
Trump has a nuanced position as do I do. But let’s be clear, unlike Harris and her ilk, we acknowledge that abortion is not about “reproductive rights,” it is about killing an unborn human being. And that must always be borne in mind when contemplating an abortion.
Why then does the Pope consider Trump to be against life? Well, apparently, not allowing millions of people to gatecrash your national borders and ruin the lives of many of your citizens is anti-life. Go figure. It is an “evil” and a “sin” to reject such “migrants,” according to the Pope.
Of course, Trump does not reject migrants at all, just illegal migrants. And, most particularly those of criminality and low character.
Imagine you lived in small-town Springfield Ohio and, in the space of a few years, 20,000 and more, the exact numbers depend on your source, Haitian “immigrants” descended on the town. Can your schools and hospital and medical centres cope? Do you feel safe sending your kids to the local store? Do you, personally, feel safe as darkness hits? Would the Pope feel safe? Maybe he should open the Vatican to 20,000 Haitians and see for himself.
It is incidental whether some Haitian ne’er-do-wells have eaten dogs, cats , geese or ducks? Trump was silly to go anywhere near that because he doesn’t have to. It distracts from the problem. And his media opponents are glad to shift the debate to fact-checking pet-eating. What a free kick for them.
Harris, with Biden, have let loose mayhem on American towns and cities. Meanwhile she is immune from ever having to live anywhere near illegal aliens. That’s the point. And I feel sure, despite Trump’s self-harming digression, that the American heartland gets it.
“One must choose the lesser of two evils. Who is the lesser of two evils? That lady or that gentleman, I don’t know?” The Pope reportedly said.
That simply shows the moral confusion which has characterised Pope Francis’s tenure. Returning uninvited interlopers back to their home countries is not remotely in the same ballpark as killing babies. Tony Abbott turned boats, carrying so-called asylum seekers, back to their port of embarkation. He didn’t kill babies. His actions were not evil. They were about safeguarding the rights of citizens to decide who can join them and share the bounty that they and their forbears have built. Giving alms to the down-and-out is one thing. It is quite another to be forced to share your home with them. Essentially, Trump will try to do what Abbott did. That is not evil Your Holiness. That is self-preservation.
Of course, the socialist Pope really favours comrade Kamala. Bringing in Trump’s immigration policy is simply a way to avoid singling out the lady’s enthusiasm for killing unborn babies. How could any Catholic worth his or her salt ever vote for that? How could any Catholic Pope be the least equivocal about that?
Abstinence and contraception are “reproductive rights”. In not all, but far too many cases, abortion is a “fix” for failure to exercise those rights.
The pope is a moral imbecile. The more he opines, the clearer this becomes.
Pope Frank seems to be an unreconstructed “Liberation Ethologists”, many of whom infest the Catholic Church with some very “Unchristian” ideas. Che Guevara in a cassock.
Oh well. At least it seems everyone agrees that the Catholic Church is the the voice of Christianity.
Far far worse than that.
Pope Francis: ‘All Religions Are a Path to Reach God’ (13 Sep)
You have to RTWT to get the full measure of his heresy. He’s not actually a Christian. There, I said it.
Trump “nuanced”? That’s mangling the English language more than somewhat…
Nice magpie!
Seen through the windscreen of a Miata.
Take your point.
Enjoy your freedom, Bob. It won’t last long…
It’s Digits!
We’re honoured, we really are.
Now piss off.
This Pope is not the full quid..or the real deal
Maybe Frank can be the first Pope to open the Treasures of the Vatican to feed the hungry border invaders ..That would be a positive move …take the heat OFF both Trump and Kamilla…signed ..once a RC…sarc.
What, mattmartinbob is back posting at ‘Russia Today’?
“He’s not actually a Christian. There, I said it.”
Dear me, i do recall asking you some time if you thought Catholicism was Christian and iirc you ventured that some of us might be.
Good to see you infallibly pronouncing who is and isn’t Christian
Rosie John 3:36 is very clear. Saying that all religions are a path to God is completely incompatible with this. Peter himself warned of false teachers in his second letter.
The catholic church has a history of protecting paedophile priests.
It has lost any right to the moral high ground.
Australian government education departments have a similar or worse history (the coverups still continue, so it is hard to tell which was worse).
Not so. Read P 81 of the Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse –
Survivors told us about sexual abuse occurring in 1,069 schools, of which 75.8 per cent were non-government schools and 24.9 per cent were government schools. We heard of many instances of abuse ‘clusters’ in non-government schools, where a perpetrator or perpetrators would abuse multiple students over time.
LOL, the get Pell and Abbott Royal Commission studiously avoided any close study of government schools.
The RC was open to submissions. It held 57 formal public hearings (case studies) during which it heard evidence about child sexual abuse within institutions, from 1,200 witnesses over 400 days of hearings, across Australian capital cities and in several regions. There simply weren’t many submissions from people abused in public schools. Why not?
Because the cover ups continue.
Have you looked at the results of the Tasmanian and Victorian inquires, or would that disturb your narrative?
I don’t have a “narrative”. I deal in fact.
Real fact or “your” fact?
All faiths lead to God: New controversy as Pope preaches religious pluralism on final day of tourCatholic Herald – Sept 13, 2024
The main question for all Catholics, lapsed and practicing: :Is this Pope a Catholic?
The pope is trying to be popular with people who hate Catholics and want them dead.
same as liberal party.
the pope needs to attune, catholic means universal, the catholic framework of the 10 commandments is how to live your life.
you live your life around the world in different countries with borders.
the Catholic Church does not interfere in the counties politics. It is the individuals democratic choice to vote against a candidate if they espouse something which is against your life framework.
The Christian framework is the most conducive for living a respectful non violent life.
1703599 – I can’t place my hands on an article about this report – it may have been reported in Quadrant – but the state wards were higher than the Christian church’s.
No they weren’t. Read the report – https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/sites/default/files/final_report_-_volume_2_nature_and_cause.pdf
1703599
https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/uncategorized/royal-commissions-sin-omission/
here is one link
Nowhere in Luck’s article is there any reference to state wards. He makes no comparisons. His claim is simply that the Catholic institutions were treated unfairly, a claim he makes without any evidence.
1735099
https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/uncategorized/catholics-sex-and-cardinal-pell/
here is the second article.
Betina Arndt comments are pertinent.
This article is irrelevant to the point I made above, which was to dispute an allegation that rates of abuse were higher than reported in state institutions. There is no evidence for that, and a full reading of the Royal Commission report makes that abundantly clear.
Because the royal commission from beginning to end was just a partisan hit job on institutions disliked by the Socialist Left,.and a protection racket for the Socialist Left’s constituency in the public-sector unions.
How could it reach any conclusions about state schools when it conducted no investigations (apart from a couple of cases of student-on-student abuse) into any of them? And that despite not only the truckloads of evidence that have subsequently emerged in official inquires in Victoria (despite Chairman Dan’s best efforts limit the inquiry) and Tasmania, but also despite the truckloads of evidence on the NSW government system discovered by Justice Wood in the 90s -which McClellan and co completely ignored.
Meanwhile here is the BBC exonerating itself from having Huw Edwards in its midst:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gegnqd4z3o
– a sympathy it and the ABC never extended to the churches.
BTW
i think these is a bishop in Nigeria or the bishop of Nigeria who should be pope.
against abortion, same sex climate change etc.
bring him in.
Pope encourages Singapore’s young to cultivate unity amid diversity
By Cindy Wooden – Sept 13, 2024
Cindy Wooden is the Chief of the Rome Bureau of Catholic News Service.
Only if consciences are properly formed and informed.
I dare say even a Catholic education doesn’t guarantee that these days.
Numbers
In case you missed this response to your initial post at 1329.
Note in particular that the Victorian inquiry was into only a small section of the state system, but found sufficient to cause concern.
NSW has also had adverse media reporting about the government system, but so far has resisted having an open inquiry.
The inquiries were not intended to provide ammunition in the culture wars. They were designed to help prevent child abuse, and in my (Catholic) parish post RC there have been safeguards put in place, so in that sense they were useful. Incidentally, these safeguards were already in place in the state system. I have worked in both across fifty years, so have a strong basis for comparison.
Splitting hairs there. The RC was designed to expose the evil religious, the Tasmanian and Victorian inquires to help prevent abuse? Sounds not that far apart.
Your comments please on CDL Pell’s work in Melbourne in the 1990s, and the establishment of the Melbourne Response. That far preceded the RC.
Pell did good work, but he was forced into it, after numerous abuses occurred on his watch. Pell-style clericalism is slowly destroying the church I love and have embraced during my 77 years.
The evidence that CDL Pell was “forced into it” seems somewhat lacking. By all appearances he acted as soon as he had sufficient authority to do so.
He was, and remains, well ahead of both state authorities and other religions in countering abuse. NSW, for example, still has its collective heads buried in the sand.
PS, why did your parish wait more than a decade after the Melbourne Response to put safeguards in place? The Melbourne Response was hardly a secret.
Bruce of Newcastle
September 15, 2024 6:56 am
I am a genuinely disinterested party to this, but I agree, if all roads lead to the same place, why pick the steep, winding and stony one?
Might as well join somet like Morrison’s happy-clappy crowd or the Buddhists, they seem to have few rules and lots of holidays.
Have we ever seen a Pope so Theologically challenged and confused?
Pope Francis has the habit, by now well established, of saying things that leave listeners confused and hoping he meant something other than what he actually said.
The bishop of Rome is the spiritual and institutional head of the Catholic Church worldwide. This means, among other things, that he has the duty to teach the faith clearly and preach it evangelically. Loose comments can only confuse. Yet, too often, confusion infects and undermines the good will of this pontificate.
The above excerpts from First Things here.
Related, is the use of BCE/CE instead of BC/AD official now?
A Vatican organisation used it.
It wasn’t the Papal observatory in Arizona, nor was there any official directive saying it should be used. Just a document that used the notation.
Ask those who use BCE/CE what is the singular event that separates the two eras
What if he’s not confused?
Jorge Mario Bergoglio is an Argentinian Jesuit, and an ex-bouncer. His father’s family left Italy in 1929 to escape the fascist rule of Benito Mussolini. He is essentially a pastoralist, a reformer, and perhaps represents the last hope of the Catholic church in its quest to remove the cancer of clericalism which has almost destroyed its viability in western societies.
Unless the church is reformed towards the authentic social developmental role it assumes in developing countries, especially in Africa, it has no future.
The Australian church I grew up in has become a clerical, rather than a pastoral institution.
This is best illustrated by an experience I had as a rifleman, a Catholic conscript, in Vietnam in April 1970. My dog tags were embossed “RC”.
We were halfway through Operation Finschhafen and were recuperating in FSPB Anne, when the Catholic Chaplain, Captain Keith Teefey, invited all ranks in my Company (B Coy) to attend mass. He invited all present to take Communion irrespective of denomination, providing they did so with respect.
Most did so. Piety is often a characteristic of soldiers in harm’s way.
I was impressed and wrote home telling my father about this. Dad was committed to Vatican 2 and was chuffed, to the extent that he told the local parish priest, a conservative, whom out of respect, I will not identify.
This priest became very angry, and reported Keith Teefey to the Bishop of the Toowoomba Diocese who incidentally had no jurisdiction in the situation.
Subsequently the Bishop dismissed the complaint, pointing out that Canon law made that invitation (to those in risk of death) completely appropriate.
By 22nd April, two members of that congregation had died, one killed by an RPG in a bunker contact, the other died of heat exhaustion.
The parish priest maintained his outrage and refused to talk to my father. Dad withdrew my siblings from the local convent and enrolled them at the local state school where he was principal at the time.
This example of the clerical hierarchy becoming indignant at an act of pastoral care was illustrative of the state of the church in Australia in 1970, and frankly it hasn’t improved much.
The greying of the congregation is clear evidence of that.
Bergoglio is attempting to return the role of the papacy to pastoral care.
The 2011 sacking of Bishop Bill Morris by Bergoglio’s predecessor, ironically enough in the Toowoomba Diocese, was the nadir of clericalism in Australia. Morris’ sin was an attempt to root out the insidious culture of child abuse in a couple of schools in the diocese.
He challenged that hierarchy and paid the price.
Unfortunately, Francis’ intervention may have come too late.
I’m not Catholic, but I have something to do with a devout congregation of such, and have also worshipped alongside them.
I am impressed with their devotion. For an Anglican it is a very different level of worship to what I was raised in, there is much more kneeling that my knees are used to.
I notice that they have the following concern, or reservations about the situation you describe.
They seem to want to preserve the special feeling of devotion and tradition, and see newcomers who are not raised in that tradition as a potential threat.
Which given the absolute death spiral overtaking mainstream Protestant denominations, I completely understand.
The Chaplain you had did a good thing, the right thing. He did so, no doubt, because like the father of that congregation I have interacted with, he had the intellectual training, the tradition and the wisdom to understand the job he had to minister to those young men, and to, maybe, explain the reason for doing so to those who might be a tad, (but understandably so) over zealous in protecting tradition.
In other words, it was from that very tradition that he mustered the strength to act.
The tradition, as you call it, has positive and negative elements. Devotion (or faith) is one of the positive elements. Exclusion is negative. The challenge for Christian churches in this age of untrammelled materialism is maintaining the balance between belief and practice in an age of self-indulgence. Perhaps rampant materialism and an obsession with individualism in this twenty-first century is incompatible with Christianity. The cross is a metaphor for self-denial, after all.
Devotion isn’t always an absolute good.
And exclusion isn’t always an absolute evil.
Unless you think you should devote yourself to an institution regardless of what it becomes, or include everyone in every activity.
What I am saying, is that I understand the caution involved in those who opposed what on the face of what you say, I think was a good thing.
You have to consider the motivation of those advocating caution. If this parish priest had the best interest of both the church and the chaplain in mind he could have challenged him directly. He didn’t. He reported him to a bishop with no capacity to intervene. From what I have learned since, the report was a product of clerical rivalry.
Morris’s sin was that he contradicted the pope’s teaching on Protestant orders and the ordination of women, proposing to use both Protestant clergy and RC women to address the shortage of priests in his diocese. No doubt he had pastoral concerns, but a bishop who contradicts official doctrine is asking for trouble.
He did not contradict teachings. He wrote a pastoral letter suggesting that discussion should take place about those teachings. He was attempting to solve a pastoral problem. Toowoomba diocese covers an area reaching west to the NT border, and he was grappling with ways and means of extending pastoral care to all. I was in a congregation when the letter was read. It was not controversial at the time, and only became so when he was reported to the Curia (over the top of local senior clergy) by the Vatican police – a group of ultra-conservative extremists in Toowoomba who were out to get him. At the time I was principal of a special school in Toowoomba. Morris contacted the school looking for advice on how the children with disabilities could be included in a programme so they could receive the sacraments in the same way as other children, and with his cooperation it was developed and is still in place. He was a pastor, and his attempts to include all members of his flock was not tolerable to the existing clerical hierarchy.
I read that letter at the time. I’m not a RC & I can see that it was controversial in the circumstances. I know he had also given permission for at least one woman preacher for services in Toowoomba. He was pushing the envelope and inviting trouble. You can’t be a Catholic bishop and go it alone; your standing depends on being in communion with the pope. Don’t like it? Join the Uniting Church.
I am a member of the congregation where that woman (Patsy Grundy) “preached”. She was the parish administrator, and her homilies were a high point of Sunday masses. She has retired, but last Sunday the current parish administrator (also female) gave the homily. It is uncontroversial, and always has been. The only people who have ever objected were the temple police who travelled miles to nail him. Here’s the full story – https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/toowoomba-bishop-william-morris-resignation-confirmed-by-pope-benedict-xvi-in-statement-from-vatican/news-story/eb01712bc7f09ac1645b8eb2b6ddae65
A brave man.
Archbishop Viganò: Bergoglio saying ‘all religions are a path to God’ is apostasy (16 Sep)