While the media loves almost everything the Pope says, not all Catholics see him as an astonishing beacon of wisdom of modern times. It's odd enough that the Vatican feels compelled to issue retractions so frequently when the Pope opens his mouth. Given that the Pope inherits his infallibility from his direct line to the Heavenly Father, it's a bit of a wonder that the Vatican would embarrass itself by negating the divine pontifications.
But Cardinal Raymond Burke at the Vatican considers himself a whistleblower or something, when he tells the media the Catholic Church has become a rudderless ship with the Pope Francis at the helm. It's also interesting that he says he's being ousted from the inner circle to a largely ceremonial position. It makes one wonder if he speaks out now embittered by his demotion, or if he is being demoted because he's embittered. Previously the only opposition to the Pope came from the Vatican, an entity without a face with no one to pin this rebellion on. At any rate, there seems to be an administrative clusterfuck high up in the Church as heads are beginning to roll, if only ceremonially rolling. There's trouble in Paradise.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/02/cardinal-burke-pope-francis_n_6083940.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592
The fact that His Popaliciousness has made the effort to bring the church into the 21st century has obviously rankled the old diehards. As far as his comments vis a vis being demoted, I'd say it is half part A and half part B. Clearly the Cog Dis of being a clergy full of pedophiles that has vigorously condemned homosexuality has brought that about. Francis is trying to sneak past that ugly fact by supposedly embracing the gay community and being more forgiving towards atheists and others. And don't forget he is a Franciscan versus the Dominicans that have traditionally been at the helm, so a sea change is almost inevitable.
How the fuck can the Holy See object to what the Pope says that has contact with God himself? It really shows that Catholicism is the work of man, and not divinely inspired. :madu:
The Pope â€" the world leader nobody listens to, even Catholics!
A coworker of mine practically worships the ground this guy walks on. While I'm sure being a halfway decent human being is a huge leap forward for the Papacy, it's actually not tremendously impressive when the institution itself is still utterly without reform or shame. And come to think of it, the guy has said a lot of stuff as a Pope that would get tomatoes tossed at you as a private citizen.
Anyone remember when he came down hard on owning pets and not having kids? (http://time.com/2814527/pope-francis-dogs-cats-pets/) Good stuff. Really speaks to the animal lover in all of us. Whelp as many children as you can! Cause that's what you're good for. And if you don't, you'll surely be lonely in your old age. Real progressive, 21st century thinking right there.
btw, all this is coming from a old guy who just so happens to not have any kids.
I wonder if this means they are going to elect a bigger shit-fuck of a pope the next time around because of this....
Quote from: PickelledEggs on November 04, 2014, 12:42:50 AM
I wonder if this means they are going to elect a bigger shit-fuck of a pope the next time around because of this....
Some of them would no doubt be delighted with another Ratzinger. And if they were fool enough make that happen, it would fast-track the institution to collapse, not that it's not slowly edging there anyway.
Quote from: Hydra009 on November 04, 2014, 12:50:28 AM
Some of them would no doubt be delighted with another Ratzinger. And if they were fool enough make that happen, it would fast-track the institution to collapse, not that it's not slowly edging there anyway.
I have a feeling that they are fool enough to make that happen.
Sent from your mom
It all depends on which directions the sheep knuckles point. Errr...I mean, it all depends on how the spirit of God moves them. Heh. Sheep knuckles. Can you imagine? I mean, how superstitious can you get?!
Hey, anyone up for taking Sacrament, visiting Lourdes, then praying away the gay?
Quote from: Hydra009 on November 04, 2014, 01:00:50 AM
It all depends on which directions the sheep knuckles point. Errr...I mean, it all depends on how the spirit of God moves them. Heh. Sheep knuckles. Can you imagine? I mean, how superstitious can you get?!
Hey, anyone up for taking Sacrament, visiting Lourdes, then praying away the gay?
Yeah. True. I mean... after thinking about it, I don't think it even matters what this pope does and how he is liked by catholics. If people keep leaving the faith like I've been reading via Dawkins and other similar facebook posters / twitter posters are reporting the numbers of, they are going to want to get someone that would try to push catholicism more. Kind of like the way religious folks dig their toes in when you even just ask them a simple question about their beliefs. They get butthurt and push back hard.... even if you aren't pushing
Quote from: PickelledEggs on November 04, 2014, 01:13:49 AM
Yeah. True. I mean... after thinking about it, I don't think it even matters what this pope does and how he is liked by catholics. If people keep leaving the faith like I've been reading via Dawkins and other similar facebook posters / twitter posters are reporting the numbers of, they are going to want to get someone that would try to push catholicism more. Kind of like the way religious folks dig their toes in when you even just ask them a simple question about their beliefs. They get butthurt and push back hard.... even if you aren't pushing
I have to wonder at what point the church is right now in the process of losing membership. The signs may be encouraging, but I don't think it's a cascade. Is the peak before us or behind us? I don't know. But once the outflow reaches it's peak, the church will be cleansed of the once a week Catholics, leaving a membership of hard core supporters causing the tide to stem. Also, as someone pointed out, a lot of these former Catholics are becoming evangelicals, so it's not as great a triumph for reason as many of us would like to see. And in the smaller and often much wilder Christian sects, there's still a whole lot of sinning, child molesting, scamming, and hypocrisy going on.
Quotehttp://www.newrepublic.com/article/120025/pope-francis-quotes-evolution-big-bang-are-nothing-celebrate
By Jerry A. Coyne
A famous anecdote from 19th century New England involves Margaret Fuller, an early feminist and ardent exponent of the spiritual movement of transcendentalism. Besotted by her emotions, she once blurted out, “I accept the universe!†When he heard of this, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle remarked dryly, “Gadâ€"she’d better.â€
While the story may be apocryphal, if you replace Fuller with Pope Francis and “the universe†with “evolution,†then Carlyle’s feelings are identical to mine. For, according to many media outlets (for example, here, here, and here), Pope Francis has just declared that he accepts the fact of evolution.
Gad, he’d better. Evolution has been an accepted scientific fact since about 1870, roughly a decade after the theory was proposed by Darwin in 1859. And there are mountains of evidence supporting it, as documented in my book Why Evolution is True, and no evidence for the religious alternative of divine creation. As Pope Francis tries to nudge his Church into modernity, it wouldn’t look good if he espoused creationism.
But if you parse Francis’s words yesterday, spoken as he unveiled a bust of his predecessor Benedict XVI, you’ll find that tinges of creationism remain. In fact, the Vatican’s official stance on evolution is explicitly unscientific: a combination of modern evolutionary theory and Biblical special creationism. The Church hasn’t yet entered the world of modern science.
The recent history of Catholicism and evolution is spotty. Pope Pius XII claimed that evolution might indeed be true, but insisted that humans were a special exception since they had been bestowed by God with souls, a feature present in no other species. There was further human exceptionalism: Adam and Eve were seen as the historical and literal ancestors of all humanity.
Both of these features fly in the face of science. We have no evidence for souls, as biologists see our species as simply the product of naturalistic evolution from earlier species. (And when, by the way, are souls supposed to have entered our lineage? Did Homo erectus have them?) Further, evolutionary genetics has conclusively demonstrated that we never had only two ancestors: if you back-calculate from the amount of genetic variation present in our species today, the minimum population size of humans within the last million years is about twelve thousand. The notion of Adam and Eve as the sole and historical ancestors of modern humans is simply a fictionâ€"one that the Church still maintains, but that other Christians are busy, as is their wont, trying to convert into a metaphor.
Quote from: Solitary on November 05, 2014, 02:06:56 PM
The notion of Adam and Eve as the sole and historical ancestors of modern humans is simply a fictionâ€"one that the Church still maintains, but that other Christians are busy, as is their wont, trying to convert into a metaphor.
Quote
Nice little essay. I had the same reaction to the Pope's pontification, which was basically, "La Dee Fuckin' Dah!"
The Roman Catholic church is dying in most countries of the world and in latin America the church membership is dropping at epic proportions. Many baptized Roman Catholics are converting to other religions or are leaving religion behind. Sadly the church is growing in Africa and Asia.
Quote from: leo on November 06, 2014, 09:44:02 PMThe Roman Catholic church is dying in most countries of the world and in latin America the church membership is dropping at epic proportions. Many baptized Roman Catholics are converting to other religions or are leaving religion behind. Sadly the church is growing in Africa and Asia.
According to one of my sources (http://www.pewforum.org/2013/02/13/the-global-catholic-population/), Catholic membership has been more or less steady worldwide. 17% of the world pop in 1910, 16% of the world pop in 2010. Not exactly dying, at least not for the time being, though it's not making any net gains.
You're correct, it has grown in Africa and Asia (and surprisingly, also in North America), which has offset its losses in Europe and Latin America. Given how subsaharan africa is neither particularly influential nor affluent, one can only wonder at the wisdom of such a move. Though I suppose a weak predator always prefers the easiest prey.
Quote from: Hydra009 on November 07, 2014, 12:04:08 AM
According to one of my sources (http://www.pewforum.org/2013/02/13/the-global-catholic-population/), Catholic membership has been more or less steady worldwide. 17% of the world pop in 1910, 16% of the world pop in 2010. Not exactly dying, at least not for the time being, though it's not making any net gains.
You're correct, it has grown in Africa and Asia (and surprisingly, also in North America), which has offset its losses in Europe and Latin America. Given how subsaharan africa is neither particularly influential nor affluent, one can only wonder at the wisdom of such a move. Though I suppose a weak predator always prefers the easiest prey.
The Vatican counts the Roman Catholic membership as the Baptized members and not as active members. In Latin America many Roman Catholics( baptized people ) are converting to protestantism and others are also indiferent to religion . So the practicing Catholic membership is shrinking. The vocations of priests and nuns are dropping at epic proportions. The Catholic church is very aware of this problem and they reported their problems in latin America. In United States the practicing membership is shrinking too. In Europe the Catholic church is pretty much a death religion. The baptized membership is about 1.2 billion but the active members are probably about half , maybe 500- 600 million tops. So Yep the Catholic church (with the exception of Asia and Africa) is slowly dying. If the Vatican don't do something about it , the Catholic Church will probably be a extinct religion in a century . Christianity will probably survive in the protestant form ( protestantism is growing worldwide) and the orthodox christianity form( orthodoxy is actually growing in some parts of the world).
Quote from: PickelledEggs on November 04, 2014, 12:42:50 AM
I wonder if this means they are going to elect a bigger shit-fuck of a pope the next time around because of this....
Cardinal George pell recently left Sydney for a position at the Vatican. He'd be a great choice if shit-fuck of a pope is the direction they wanted to go!