Mo Rage: Pope

Showing posts with label Pope. Show all posts

Sunday, October 25, 2020

Rather Shocking Racist, White Catholic News Breaking Today

I couldn't believe what my eyes were telling me today. This broke a few hours ago.

Archbishop Wilton Gregory, right, celebrating Mass and blessing the badges of first responders in Atlanta in 2015.

Pope Francis Appoints First African-American Cardinal

Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, who led the Roman Catholic Church’s response to the sexual abuse crisis in the early 2000s, was among 13 new cardinals named on Sunday.

What the what??

This Pope, Catholics, appointing their FIrST African-American Cardinal??

Now?? October 25, 2020?? Now??

How long have they been in Africa? How many years? Hell--pun intended--how many CENTURIES??

So I searched it. From Wikipedia:

The Catholic Church in Africa refers to parts of the Catholic Church in the various countries in the continent of Africa.

Christian activity in Africa began in the 1st century when the Patriarchate of Alexandria in Egypt was formed as one of the four original Patriarchs of the East (the others being Constantinople, Antioch, and Jerusalem).

All that time, all these centuries, in fact, in Africa and you're only just now, in late 2020 APPOINTING YOUR FIRST AFRICAN-AMERICAN CARDINAL??

And check this out, too. In my research, I found a Catholic website and page and look at this little fact about Catholics and the people and continent of Africa.

Why is Catholicism so vibrant in Africa?

This:

A person recently moaned to me about the slippage in regular Mass attendance in this country and the drought in vocations. This person had a point. Regular Mass attendance on weekends quickly is becoming the exception, rather than the rule, in this country. Nuns are few and becoming fewer. Seminarians are not many, compared to the past.

This same person opined that celibacy has caused this decline in vocations to the priesthood, and if the pope and bishops had any sense, they would end mandatory celibacy for priests tomorrow.

I simply asked, what about Africa? Celibacy is required there, and they do not have enough seminaries despite the flood of vocations. (We see a sign of this phenomenon in this country: African priests are serving in almost every diocese in the United States, because they are sent here as missionaries!)

No way I thought it would take to now, today, literally, this day in 2020 to finally, finally have an African-American Cardinal. They've been all over the African continent for literally centuries and they're JUST NOW getting the first African-American Cardinal?

Bleached white religion much? Wow. That is some major chutzpah.

In the 60's, when there was so much racial strife and protests and killings and burnings, apparently the Catholics and their Church didn't think it necessary to maybe, just maybe, after all those centuries, of, say, elevating an African-American to the level of Cardinal in their organization. I find it extremely difficult to believe there was no candidate or were no candidates available that could have filled the role.

So now, as of today, this Pope and the Catholic Church finally, finally appointed an African-American for the post of Cardinal.

How good of them.

Bleached white religion there much, fellas?

Because, Hell, we know you're not putting yer wimmin' in charge.

Right?

And if you look at one at their own Catholic page websites, they're actually congratulating themselves for this announcement today.

Stunning. Seriously stunning. Shocking.

Racist and sexist, both. Those Catholics got it all goin' on.

I can't imagine how they aren't personally and collectively embarrassed by this.

Link:

Catholic Church in Africa

Friday, August 17, 2018

Catholicism: Sexual Abuse Over the Centuries

So one more time the story breaks. This, a few days ago.

Catholic Priests Abused 1,000 Children

in Pennsylvania, Report Says

Again.

One more time.

This one, below, was just last year.

Vatican Cardinal Charged

With Sexual Assault

This next one was from this July, before this latest Pennsylvania incident was reported.

Vatican meets #MeToo:

Nuns denounce priests who abused them

Not only have they abused children but they've abused nuns in the religion, too.

How long are we going to put up with this?

How long are we going to tolerate Catholic Priests abusing students, children and yes, nuns, too?

How long are they going to get away with it?

How long are Catholics going to sit in the pews, listening to these men, then giving them money and supporting them?

What kind of insane world is this?

Image result for catholic church and sexual abuse

This episode, just announced, goes back decades. It's been estimated it goes back about 7 decades, to be specific. Seventy years.

Seventy years of children being abused. Boys and girls. Students. Children.

But please, keep in mind, this has been going on, as said in the headline here, for centuries.

Centuries.

Hundreds of years. Literally.

Some reminders: This one especially resonated with me due to the numbers of children found who had died. Had been killed.

Mass grave of babies and children found

at Tuam care home in Ireland

Order of nuns that dumped up to 800 babies

into a septic

Tuam mass grave 'contains bodies of

800 babies' at site of Irish home

This sexual abuse of children has not only occurred through the centuries but across the globe, across the planet, nation to nation.

Catholic Church sex abuse cases by country

The Roman Catholic Church:

A Centuries Old

History of Awareness

of Clerical Child Sexual Abuse

How Long Has This Been Going On?

This was revealed this week, too.

Head of Catholic Bishops Paid Pedophiles to Disappear

Too frequently, repeatedly, in fact, up to now, this is what we've gotten in response, from the Church and its leaders.

When do we all, around the world, nation by nation, finally say and demand "Enough!"?

When do Catholics?

Link:

Prosecutor: Priests 'weaponized' the faith to abuse kids

Sunday, July 30, 2017

Religion and Its Evolution

Face it, accept it or not.

No automatic alt text available.

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Karl Marx --- And the Wall Street Journal?

There is what I think to be a pretty good, if brief and fairly light article in none other than Right Wing-owned, Rupert Murdoch's own Wall Street Journal, describing where America and Americans are today, financially and socially:

The Middle-Class Squeeze

Seeing it, I was pretty stunned.

It recognizes that America's middle class is struggling, shrinking, in fact, along with what got us here, where it stands in history and what we should maybe do to correct our financial, national problems. It begins with this sub-line heading:

Over the past few decades, the Western World has increasingly become a society of "have lesses," if not yet of "have nots."

They already had me right there, just with that opening, recognizing that the middle-, lower- and working-classes were being crushed with our economic system in that business-supporting rag. But then they go on to outdo themselves:

If Western countries want to disprove the dire forecasts of Karl Marx, we must think creatively about how to make the middle class more prosperous and secure.

They had me at "Karl Marx."

Some of the article:

In the U.S. and Britain, the percentage of citizens owning stocks or houses is well down from the late 1980s. In Britain, the average age for buying a first home is now 31 (and many more people than before depend on “the bank of Mom and Dad” to help them do so). In the mid-’80s, it was 27. My own children, who started work in London in the last two years, earn a little less, in real terms, than I did when I began in 1979, yet house prices are 15 times higher. We have become a society of “have lesses,” if not yet of “have nots.”

In a few lines of work, earnings have shot forward. In 1982, only seven U.K. financial executives were receiving six-figure salaries. Today, tens of thousands are (an enormous increase, even allowing for inflation). The situation is very different for the middle-ranking civil servant, attorney, doctor, teacher or small-business owner. Many middle-class families now depend absolutely on the income of both parents in a way that was unusual even as late as the 1980s...

The author asks an important question, an extremely important one;

What is the use of capitalism if its rewards go to the few and its risks are dumped on the many?

And here is where the under-rated, discounted and even disregarded, if brilliant Karl Marx comes in:

Where might one find a useful analysis of what is happening today in the market democracies of the West? How about this: “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.”

Or this: “Modern bourgeois society…is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the power of the nether world which he has called up by his spells.”

Or this: “The productive forces no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property: on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions…[and] they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.”

The celebrated bearded communists had argued that capitalism would reduce all of society to only two classes: the prosperous bourgeoisie, who owned the capital, and the impoverished proletariat, who contributed their labor.

Who, today, is able to say this isn't precisely what's happening and what's been happening here in America? Who can honestly deny this? It's incontrovertible.

Is that not what's been happening in the last at least 30 years? I can't count the number of articles and news segments pointing out how the "people at the top", the "1%", with hedge fund managers as the best example, have been getting many more millions upon millions of dollars and wealth and riches while, again, the middle-, lower- and working classes have seen their costs escalate but wages stagnate---shrink, in fact.

And here is where the article and the Pope's visit, this week, to our shores coincidentally converge:

The relationship between money and morality, on which the middle-class order depends, has been seriously compromised over the past decade.

I'm not advocating Communism here by any means. While I think Karl Marx was correct in his writing, I also know Mr. Marx didn't take into account the human factors, especially the factor of just sheer greed, let alone the love of power. Communism would only work in a perfect world. Would that we were so lucky.

But the fact is, what we have going on in America now and what we've had doing on financially, fiscally and economically is precisely what Karl Marx and Friederich Engels described in their famous-through-the-ages "The Communist Manifesto."

The author of the article ends it very well and correctly:

...Marx did have an insight about the disproportionate power of the ownership of capital. The owner of capital decides where money goes, whereas the people who sell only their labor lack that power. This makes it hard for society to be shaped in their interests. In recent years, that disproportion has reached destructive levels, so if we don’t want to be a Marxist society, we need to put it right.

What we need to do as a nation, through our government is get our government back for the people. We have to end the Supreme Court's Citizen United ruling and end campaign contributions--both--so we can then begin to put back into place the simplest of rules to keep corporations and the already-wealthy, and the greedy and power-hungry among them, from crushing these 3 classes (middle, lower and working) with rules and government that only works for them.

We have to get the government back for the people.

Links: Believe it or not: Karl Marx is making a comeback