Is Pope Francis…
…channeling Ted Cruz?:
Pope Francis has urged almost 70million Catholics in the United States to study and pray and ‘choose with your conscience’ when considering who to vote for in November.
The pontiff was questioned by journalists following a visit to Azerbaijan. In a diplomatic answer, Pope Francis failed to endorse any particular candidate, although he has serious problems with both the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton…
Pope Francis said: ‘You have asked me a question that describes a difficult choice because, according to you, there are difficulties with one and difficulties with the other.’
That’s certainly an understatement. Unlike the rest of us, though, the Pope is not going to have to choose.
One of my favorite quotes, from one of my favorite movies:
“It’s easy to be a holy man on top of a mountain.”
John Paul II he ain’t! I’m not Catholic, but my wife’s side is. Got into an argument with my sister-in-law when I made that same comment. She asked what I meant, and I said JPII was the pope in my lifetime I most respected, and this guy is nothing but a leftist/socialist. Therein the argument became about how JC was really a socialist… sigh….
Most of the Catholic Church’s money comes from the US. Most of that money comes white American Catholics who poll 50-46% in Trump’s favor.
I imagine Francis would like to meddle in this election but either he’s learned his lesson from earlier injudicious political remarks or he doesn’t want to anger conservative American donors.
I have a good friend who’s a serious Catholic and this pope has been a serious trial for him.
I strongly suspect that he strongly favors Clinton.
Geoffrey Britain:
He would almost undoubtedly favor Clinton but for one thing: abortion. The Pope is pretty firmly anti-abortion, and it’s still a very large issue for the Church and not a minor one.
neo-neocon Says:
“He would almost undoubtedly favor Clinton but for one thing: abortion. The Pope is pretty firmly anti-abortion, and it’s still a very large issue for the Church and not a minor one.”
He also, to my astonishment, just came out against “gender theory” as indoctrination to destroy the family and traditional marriage. That cuts a very wide swath through the feminist/queer theory that underpins a lot of the Marxist Party’s ideology:
Pope says gender theory part of ‘global war’ on marriage, family
I can accept abortion if the physical life of the mother is in jeopardy early in pregnancy. After that abortion IMO is unjustifiable homicide. Gender theory is nonsense. Yes, I think some people are confused when it comes to gender idenity, but they need help with a disturbing mental/emotional health crisis. Encouraging their illness does them no favor.
Has any research been done to determine if perhaps a hormonal imbalance exists in people that identify as the opposite sex?
I’m doubtful that it originates in some form of mental imbalance. Though over time, a mental imbalance would have to develop if internal and external reality conflicts.
There’s a philosophical problem for the Pope on this issue. Are they all lying? If not, then something has to be causal. Since we have no control over our actual sexual orientation, can a loving God punish innocents? Would a loving God just roll the dice and then turn to a soul to say, well that sucks, you lose…
Personally, I’m judeo/christian with a dollop of buddhist thrown in for good measure. So, I suspect that reincarnation may turn out to be true.
If so, I suspect that karma is the causitive factor on this issue. Balance is a determinative dynamic in buddhism and on a spiritual level, balancing yin and yang may be what’s going on here.
The Roman Catholics are infested with Leftists. They didn’t do much to purge the homosexuals they were “protecting” either, once they found out there were entire cliques of church hierarchy abusing their authority.
Leftists love a hierarchy, like the theological hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. If you can control the cardinals and thus by enough votes, elect a Pope from your side, you can steer the entire Catholic Church, by the Pope’s authority, to a political point of view. Which in this case is the combination of socialism and charity (which is not mutually compatible) or what people call Latin American Liberation Theology.
Then again, the Catholic Church has rendered themselves heretics and apostates ever since the Albigensian Holy War was declared by the Pope of that time. It didn’t get much better in the Protestant reformation.
Francis started out well but has been a huge disappointment.
On a Creighton basketball message board (off topic forum) I have been vilified on the CAGW scam because I disagree with the Pope.
GB – “There’s a philosophical problem for the Pope on this issue. Are they all lying? If not, then something has to be causal. Since we have no control over our actual sexual orientation, can a loving God punish innocents? Would a loving God just roll the dice and then turn to a soul to say, well that sucks, you lose…”
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. Everyone has desires that they’re not supposed to act on. There’s no punishment for being tempted, only for acting on temptation (or indulging in the temptation mentally, which is another type of action).
The Bible talks about punishment for homosexuals. In modern parlance, that term means people with a certain set of desires. In the old days, that term meant people who perform certain activities. Modern leftism defines people by their urges; traditional morality judges actions.
GB,
There often are hormonal issues involved. That can be resolved with hormonal therapy. But we have become a society that celebrates ‘transgenderism’ as worthy of a progressive medal of honor. Meanwhile, people experiencing gender dysphoria have high suicide rates, especially after gender reassignment surgery. These people, a teeny tiny minority, need compassion and therapy. They do not need medals.
GB: There was psychiatry professor, Dr. Ian Stevenson, at UVa who received a million dollar bequest from the inventor of the xerox copy process to research reincarnation. Stevenson’s approach was to collect thousands of cases of children who claimed to remember a past life and research the cases.
His results were sufficiently persuasive that a SciAm blogger, who admitted to serious eyerolling at the outset, wrote a summary:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/ian-stevensone28099s-case-for-the-afterlife-are-we-e28098skepticse28099-really-just-cynics/
Anyway one of the suggestions of Stevenson’s work was that a gender-confused child might be identifying strongly with a previous life as the opposite sex.
Another odd bit was these children were often males who died violently in their previous lives.
Most non-Catholics have the impression that Church has singled out gays for special censure. To an extent that’s true, but this ignores that to the Church all human beings are guilty of what the Church terms “disordered sex.”
The only sex the Church sanctions is between a man and a woman who are properly married and having sex as an expression of their love and without any barriers to procreation.
That’s it. So if you’re single, for instance, you don’t get to have sex without sin anymore than homosexuals do according to the Church.
Nick Says:
October 3rd, 2016 at 9:51 pm
GB — “There’s a philosophical problem for the Pope on this issue. Are they all lying? If not, then something has to be causal. Since we have no control over our actual sexual orientation, can a loving God punish innocents? Would a loving God just roll the dice and then turn to a soul to say, well that sucks, you lose…”
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. Everyone has desires that they’re not supposed to act on. There’s no punishment for being tempted, only for acting on temptation (or indulging in the temptation mentally, which is another type of action).
The Bible talks about punishment for homosexuals. In modern parlance, that term means people with a certain set of desires. In the old days, that term meant people who perform certain activities. Modern leftism defines people by their urges; traditional morality judges actions.
* * *
The second bolded part has an interesting history, which is well-described in the book “Coming Out Under Fire” about the way homosexuality USED to be dealt with in the military. IIRC (it’s been a while since I read it), prior to WW2, being cashiered for sodomy (lesbianism was pretty negligible at the time) required some fairly substantial evidence of the actual behavior.
During WW2, the psychologists/therapists were enlisted to “weed out” the mentally unfit, which by definition included sodomists, before they were mobilized (or at least earlier in the process), and so they began to look for potential problems (inclinations) rather than actual ones (behaviors). (Then, as now, most of the shrinks were leftists, but they had different priorities at the time, and hadn’t yet discovered that they could use this particular set of “victims” to further their agenda.)
By gathering up all the suspects in order to muster them out, they achieved the astounding feat of disclosing the wide scope of same-sex attraction to hundreds (thousands?) of men who, while at home in the far-flung communities, seriously thought they were only ones with their non-conformist desires. Once they learned otherwise, they stayed in the large cities and formed communities that otherwise would never have coalesced.
Not the first (or last) time the government and the professors created a greater “problem” than the one they set out to solve. Except now the left does it deliberately.
The first bolded part comports well with my understanding of God’s grace — whether the same-sex desires themselves are inborn/innate/DNA/hard-wired, or not, is less important than what one chooses to do about them.
The truly innocent are never punished, and He has a merciful leniency for the confused and desperate that we can’t begin to fathom. For the knowingly disobedient, willfully rebellious, predatory, and manipulative — not so much.
Personally, I don’t think one should do surgical violence to one’s body in pursuit of psychological consonance; however, if someone wants to “identify with” their preferred gender in dress and behavior (PS that’s inherently an expression of sexist stereotypes), then that’s their business.
Where I get off the train is when anyone attempts to make my own opinions of said choices a matter of either persecution or prosecution.
huxley,
Strictly from my experience serious eye rolling is in order whenever eyerolling is invoked. There are things we, you and me, can not understand; but that does not mean there is any reason or unreasonable explanation involved. The mind can invent an infinity of explanations. So what? What you see, hear, touch, smell, or think does not stop a tree falling in a forest from making a loud sound.
As far as the catholic church is concerned… one is free to believe as one chooses.
AesopFan makes an important point that Christianity is less concerned about the particular sin than what one chooses to do about it.
Christianity is not a reasonable religion, though most Christians live as though it were. It’s about loving God, serving God and going to heaven to be with God. That’s all. Sex is not a guarantee on that menu anymore than being rich or famous.
If you don’t have the sex or fame or wealth you want, that’s OK. It’s unimportant in the bigger scheme of things — eternal life and union with God.
I’m not saying I live that way or aspire to, but I understand it and I think Christianity gets a bad break for hating gays. It’s not that simple.
parker: Not sure of your point.
I find the Stevenson material interesting, but not conclusive. No more than that.
I was impressed that the Scientific American guy was willing to wonder if maybe he and his hard science kin were the being closed-minded and cynical, rather than open-minded and skeptical as they advertise themselves.
Did you read the link?
The term “disordered” or “objectively disordered” is worth a note. In English, it sounds like an insult. “Objectively disordered” sounds like “truly disturbed”. In philosophy (which is slightly different than English), order is often connected to the natural law. If something is being used as it should, it is properly ordered. The purpose for which a thing is used can be called its objective or its final cause. To say that homosexuality is objectively disordered is to say that its purpose doesn’t match the procreative purpose of heterosexuality.
There is as well a lingering sort of mismatch inherent in our phrase natural law, at least when we view those terms *natural* and *law* from the point of view of the ancient Greeks to whom we attribute the discovery of nature (phusis) in contradistinction to human law (nomos). That is, to say another way, from their point of view natural law may appear an oxymoron, a “sharp-dull” in the literal translation of their word oxymoron. Phusis and nomos stand in a manner of opposition to one another. Phusis isn’t the sort of thing about which human beings have much choice in a volitional sense, whereas nomos is all about human choice and human choices, albeit guided by the gods to the extent that the gods give guidance. Or, in place of the gods, then the priests and poets to whom the priests look for inspiration.
I am most at ease with the comments of Nick and huxley.
But as to Neo’s lead-in on Pope Francis, I think she should have added the request for all commenters to indicate their faith. Most seem non-Catholic, and as a fairly recent convert to Catholicism after prolonged formal study of the Church and faith through its RCIA program, I can say that being on the outside looking in, as I was, is simply looking in through prejudice-stained eyeglasses.
I remind all of C.S. Lewis’ famous and correct “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” It was that which began to open my eyes, years ago.
The Pope can clarify but cannot undo or modify any of Christ Jesus’ teachings. Period. As Bishop of Rome, he follows in the footsteps of the apostle Simon (Peter), whom Jesus designated as the Rock (Petros) upon which His Church was to be built. That is Francis’ charge and his duty.
That is Francis’ charge and his duty.
A duty imposed by humans on themselves now.
Lineage has to be unbroken from one prophet to another, for it to be true under God.
One example of this is that even after numerous Popes have dealt with the issue of divinity, I still see Democrat politicians steal the Pope’s water at a speech, drink it and get their families to drink it, because they think it is Holy Water and that it will bless them.
While individuals in the Catholic church and leadership in it can go any number of ways, once an organization goes off the righteous track of lineage, it isn’t going to get put back there by human hands.
An organization that cannot solve the problems of its own members and leadership, isn’t capable of inheriting or carrying out any divine missions.
I notice the Catholics do pretty much nothing about Christians in Alexandria, the Coptics, and other lineages fractured off. Mostly because of political power ambitions in the Catholic histories. Islam has always preyed on Christian pilgrims, and it took the Knights Hospitalers to actually do something about it.
A rock that would rather side with Islam in finding and assassinating Christian communities just because they are neither Orthodox, Chalcedonian, nor Catholic, is a rock all right. But it is not God’s rock now a days.
Ymarsaker-Pope Francis referred to the Coptics killed by Isis (among their first victims) as martyrs for the faith.
It’s simple. In a Pro-Choice society, abort them all, cannibalize their lucrative parts, and import their replacements.
Ymarsaker-Pope Francis referred to the Coptics killed by Isis (among their first victims) as martyrs for the faith.
The Catholics also canonized Jean of Arc, after their corrupt bishops and clerics were the ones who first put her to the torch.
That and a day at the Holiday inn will buy religious authority, but it won’t be a legitimate hand over.