The pope is ‘The Situation’ in white robes
Posted by John Reed on
I keep turning on TV to watch the news and instead I get the pope. I would say I have zero interest in the pope but zero does not adequately capture it.
He is nothing but a celebrity—a rellgion celebrity no less. I have more interest in what The Situation from Jersey Shore has to say about climate or economics.
The pope is from deep in the anti-capitalist Latin American my socialism right or wrong mind-set.
I was born CaTHOLIC, WENT TO CATHOLIC ELEMENTARY SCHOOL WITH NUNS IN HABITS 60 to A CLASSROOM AT ST. ANN’S IN WILDWODD, NJ FROM FIRST THROUGH 5TH GraDE. Starting around age 10, I concluded organized religion is so much hocus pocus.
One of my cousins was a Jesuit. He got out, after marrying my brother and his wife, and married his former girlfriend who had become a nun during the same years when he was a priest. So I have been around that stuff for many years. Some popes have been important, but the church’s history of involvement with politics, or non-involvement as in World War II, is a disgrace. They were damned near outlawed altogether in Mexico as a result of deciding they were ayatollahs there back in the day.
Catholicism’s canonization of the poor—all the poor—no matter how they became poor or why they remain poor—is a childlike departure from reality. Their hatred of capitalism while claiming to be for the poor, who have benefited infinitely more from capitalism than they have from Catholicism, is another exaltation of ideology over reality.
I was once complaining about the Army being like the Soviet Union when I was an Army officer—at a family picnic where the Jesuit priest cousin was in the conversation. He said the Catholic priesthood was the same and quickly related pertinent anecdotes like the church talking out of one side of its mouth when it wanted separation of church and state and out of the other side when it wanted money from the government. He went to law school at Fordham as a priest and worked somewhat as a lawyer in the church.
Ann Coulter’s current book has a subtitle about the Left wanting to turn America into a third-world hell hole. The pope is a socialist demagogue from the third-world hell hole.
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Links to WSJ articles do not work. They just ask you to subscribe. I do not remember the exact details of where it was.
Do you have a link to that WSJ article?
Re Bill Campbell: Apparently yesterdays’s Wall Street Journal said the recent Catholic shtick on economics is from The Enlightenment, a 1800s movement that was not Catholic—just some version of Marxism/socialism. In other words, socialism is not a core Catholic teaching. It just duped the church into adopting it in the 19th century. There is no God ,r Jesus or Sat. Peter or anybody behind it—just some nonCatholic writers in the 1800s and some Catholic editor latched onto it. There was a graph in the article showing Argentinians like socialism a lot more than Americans or British. The pope is an Argentinian more than he is a pope. I think all this talk of “the poor” and washing the feet of the poor annually by the pope is just what is called “positioning” in marketing. In the U.S. today, “the poor” have cell phones, AC, a flat screen, a car and a SNAP card and a Section 8 apartment. And they are typically drug addicted, alcoholics, grade school dropouts, teenage single moms, or a bunch of other unChristian things. The whole thing is designed to appeal to third-world people with shoe-size IQs and work ethic to match. I would not be surprised if, after the pope washes the feet of the poor, they are ordered to get the hell off Vatican property, at which time they hope in their Fiat and go home and watch their feet being washed on their flat screen. The real story is why anyone takes this clown seriously in 2015.
Re George: There is an old story in journalism about a reporter who wrote a story about bananas. He used the word banana several times but then felt he had to come up with a different phrase for the sake of variety. He chose “the elongated yellow fruit.” So perhaps we should be grateful there is a second word—or at least people think their is. Otherwise we might be getting things like the white-robed boss of all Catholic bosses. Then there was the reporter who complained that the pope did a lot of pontificating.
Popes are the greatest generators of non-news, but for some reason – perhaps nostalgia for monarchical institutions — they still command worldwide attention. Flash – the Pope is in favor of peace and love! Stop the presses!
The most annoying thing about the papal news coverage, however, is the “pontiff” rule, which apparently compels all journalists writing or speaking about the Bishop of Rome to use the word “pope” in their first references to him and, invariably, to use the word “pontiff” in their second references to him. Strictly speaking, although the Pope is also called the Supreme Pontiff, the simple word “pontiff” can refer to any bishop, so it is no more specific to Francis than referring to “the priest” or “the cleric” would be.