Comments

1
Change is good.

Just think how bad the last two Popes were.
2
while he's in there, his piety will have a calming effect on the media and the planet in general. soon we will forget and go back to sleep.

the church knows how this works, they've been doing it since the roman empire. nothing essential changes.
3
It almost makes us all forget his role in the Argentinian Dirty War.
5
Liberal take note. This is how stupid y'all look when you and the mainstream media genuflect to the inning golfer.

[lisping] Oh, what is Michelle wearing today...OOOOOooo. She is so elegant, and those feminine hands of his man... M-M-M." [/lisping]
6
He's saying it's wrong for people to exercise independent moral judgment.
7
This speech is so general, you can interpret it to mean almost anything. It's basically junk food for the brain. It would be great if *any* leader would speak in specifics.

5, I dare you to make less sense.
8
The man who backs down from dictators, covers for pedophiles, and literally sits on a gold chair is telling us we're spiritually poor.
9
Please, please let him take that dare.
10
"Grinning Golfer", sorry. Bad spellcheck job.
12
I don't need a complete reversal of church teaching and acceptance of gays and sex and everything else. All I want is for the church to focus on following Christ's teaching about helping the poor as their primary job with less time money and energy invested in those other things that Christ never talked about. If he did that I would consider him the greatest pope in history. I still wouldn't go back to being Catholic but if he did that I would regain a lot of respect for the organization.

Well, that and stop raping kids.
13
Since when was not supporting same-sex marriage considered a "war against homosexuality"?

14
Less spirituality; more money!
15
@5: on the 10th anniversary of the iraq debacle, it is far better a grinning golfer than a giggling murderer.

btw, what's wrong with grinning, golfing, or grinning while golfing? every president golfs. st. eisenhower belonged to Augusta National where the Masters is played.

get back to the pope.
16
The legacy of Pope Francis will be who he appoints.

JPII and Benedict purged the church of liberals. There was no way any pope would get appointed who didn't give the party line on doctrine.

But-- old men die. If Francis is a closet liberal, he will appoint social liberals. They will have the power to choose a pope one day.

17
Man what must be in that red book that they needed such a distraction to make us forget the last guy already?
18
Talk is cheap. Symbolic gestures are symbolic. However, if the Church wants to do any good, they need to actually do stuff.

Can you imagine what could be accomplished if the Church took just 10% of their liquid wealth and distributed it to Doctors Without Borders, UNICEF, medical schools, scholarship funds for girls in third-world countries, and other NGOs on the ground doing relief work?

It's fine to talk about being a poor church concentrating on the plight of the poor, but fucking do something to make that happen. kthxbai.
19
Instead of daring to claim our "own rights" based on our "own criteri[a]" such as individuality, conditions, and predicament, we should just let the church and that-motherfucking-power-hungry-self-aggrandized-bigot-in-the-stupid-fucking-hat determine our rights based on "the nature" as they deign to define it for us all (based on what god whispers into their ears, no doubt)!!
20
OK...here we go.

"Spiritual poverty" is the marquee and it draws people into the theater thinking the play is going to be about feeding the poor and taking care of one another. Then the play starts and it's about gays acting upon their sexuality being evil and women being subservient and contraception being unnatural, etc.

Catholics, how many times will you fall for this crap?
21
Boys and girls...there are no more Pope John XXIII coming back to the papacy anytime soon. John Paul made damn sure of that.
22
Yep, that "dictatorship of relativism" quote pretty much clinches it.

That quote refers to Benedict the Quitter's philosophy that Catholics, by fretting over how backward the Church appears to others, are a risk to the Church itself.
23
@18, The Church may not be in as good shape financially as all the gold trappings might suggest. Check this Economist analysis, and keep in mind that the red book's most dynamite scandals are said to be monetary:

http://www.economist.com/node/21560536
24
@23 Thanks for posting that link. There is some appalling stuff in that article.

I'm particularly irritated by the revelation that over 60% of the funding for Catholic charities is actually public money, provided by direct government agency program funding. Yes, I know they probably can do a more "efficient" job of distributing funds, but I'd rather see fair-minded/impartial/accountable civil servants controlling that process, rather than church-employed functionaries.
25
I think The Pope was right generally in that speech. There is a spiritual poverty in the west. We DO need to live by truth and not relativity. And truth IS essential to peace. The problem of course is that the church in general, and Catholicism in particular, is as great a source of the relativistic thinking that leads to spiritual poverty, as any of the usual suspects.
So a good, if potentially hypocritical speech.
26
Attack organized religion. Attack the family unit. Attack the traditions of society.

This is the blueprint for advancing communism. Replace the existing traditions with the State.

Why? Because a State-dependent human makes for a profitable human. Today, 162 privately owned central banks lend every government private wealth (at interest), just so they can operate.
27
@26 You seem severely confused. For starters, "communism" and "profit" are generally not compatible. You should look them up and try to understand what each of them means.

I'd like to make three other observations:

1) "Tradition" sometimes gets trotted out as an argument when there are no rational reasons for doing something.

2) Criticizing a particular organized religious leader, denomination or institution for perceived offenses is a reasonable thing to do if those institutions have committed offenses. Throwing one's hands up in exasperation after reading of the offenses of a number of religious institutions and railing at the entire class of institutions may be technically illogical, but it's not irrational.

3) Wanting to expand the number of unrelated consenting adults who are allowed to form potentially-successful legally-recognized family units does not in any way "attack" any existing families, nor the future rights of those who are already allowed to form families.

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