Pope Francis thread

Being a single thread to discuss swashbuckling exploits of Catholic church’s first Jesuit pontiff, elected 2013.

Most recent news item: Pope Francis dismisses all but one of Vatican’s bankers

Source: washingtonpost.com, excerpt below:

ROME — Pope Francis on Wednesday (Jan. 15) took his biggest step yet at cleaning house at the scandal-ridden Vatican Bank, replacing most of the institution’s advisers with fresh faces.

Among the new appointees: Vatican Secretary of State and Cardinal-designate Pietro Parolin; Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn from Vienna; Cardinal Thomas Collins of Toronto; and veteran diplomat Cardinal Santos Abril y Castello, a close friend of the pontiff’s.

French Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran is the lone cardinal adviser who was retained.

Francis’ move essentially undid a decree issued last year by his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, who confirmed the Vatican Bank’s supervisory body for another five years, just days before announcing his retirement. The most high-profile figure sacked on Wednesday was Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Benedict’s secretary of state and the face of administrative woes of Benedict’s papacy.

Officially known as the Institute for Religious Works, the Vatican Bank plays an essential role in helping facilitate the Vatican’s role in confronting poverty worldwide. But it has also been connected with widespread corruption and money laundering.

This is the first time in my life I have cared who the Pope is or been interested in what he is doing. This thing with the bankers shows that it’s not all marketing, good speeches and photo-ops, too.

You could have used this Pope Francis thread. Lots of good papal info there.

I like a good, clear thread title. This one gets my vote. And while I’m not the Pope, I have a feeling he would agree with me. I’m Popealicious.

I love this man. What a wonderful, amazing person.

I still don’t understand why everyone likes this guy. What has he really done beyond not clearly being an evil, senile, incompetent bastard? We might as well have stories about what a great person he is for not being a mass murderer. Congratulations for meeting those huge standards!

What major reforms has he pushed through? Does his church no longer support hating gays (and no, his previous statements that i’m aware of do not say this)? Is it more inclusive of women? Has he acknowledged and taken steps to rectify the church’s cover up of child abuse by church officials?

I feel like the only one who is not drinking the Koolaid here…

You’re far from alone.

But while I share your reluctance to sip the powdered water-additive until there are actual, demonstrative changes… the shift in rhetoric is still a shift. The pope is the one who creates new cardinals and assigns bishops to oversee large swaths of parishes. If he honestly believes the stuff he says, then his appointees will share his views and new cardinals creates during his reign will be close to his views as well. Despite all the radical changes in the Church over the last century, it changes course even more slowly than nation-states do; taking generations rather than election cycles to happen.

What Francis represents is a leftward course-correction that reverses the trend towards conservatism that John Paul II and his successor oversaw. The last half-century of papal rule (potentially starting with Paul VI and certainly under John Paul II and Benedict) can be seen as a conservative backlash against the Church’s leftward march under John XXIII and his predecessors.

Actually, he’s done a lot of that. What you can’t see unless you attend church functions is just how angry many Conservative Catholics are at him. He’s brought out the ire of Home Depot CEO (who I now despise and will no longer shop at Home Depot) and is threatening to cut off promised funding of Cathedral restoration if the Pope doesn’t soften his stance on “Greed is not good”. http://aattp.org/billionaire-home-depot-co-founder-threatens-to-stop-charitable-giving-because-pope-alienates-the-rich/
He’s considering women having more roles in the church, he’s considering (remotely) allowing priests to marry, he’s openly welcomed gay people into the church, he’s fired corrupt Bishops here in the U.S. and in Germany, one related to not doing enough about the abuse scandals, he’s fired 90% of the corrupt Executive Vatican banking staff as mentioned above. I was born and raised Catholic, and he’s keeps being branded a “Liberal & Marxist” by old hardliners and selfish goons in the church. The one thing I really want to see him do however, is say birth control is OK. He’s the anti-thesis of half a century of terrible leadership from the top all the way down to the bottom. The Catholic church moves at a snails pace. Remember it took 1,000 years to make the smallest changes to mass. Hundreds of years to respond to Calvin. He’s operating on the edge of what is tolerated by those with money and power and I’m concerned at what point there may be open revolt where some churches break off so they can practice their super hypocrisy. I could understand your comment as being much more applicable to Pope John Paul II. He was a nice guy and said nice things, but did nothing but allow cancers to grow in the church.

The immorality of deliberately undermining the fertility of a marital act – like the impossibility of ordaining women and the immorality of sodomy – has been irreformably decided by the ecclesial magisterium. Not even the Pope is free to change the answers given.

It’s true that Francis seems to have a fresh perspective on some political matters, and traditionalist circles, sadly, seem to hate him even more than the neo-conservatives; but theologically, no revolution is on the horizon. Francis has already confirmed – and will now create Cardinal – Benedict’s pick Müller as Prefect of the CDF.

The boy is cleaning house. He dropped a mystic fist on that cape wearing piece of shit Raymond Burke, who if you recall, was the cardinal grousing about Democratic candidates being allowed to take Communion. Burke was also in charge of choosing bishops. Not only was Burke in charge of that, he was also one of the heads of the Curia and substantially responsible for the way child molesting priests were shuffled around and not defrocked in the eighties and nineties. Not only did Burke do that, but in his bishopric, when priests were either too liberal or too well liked, he had a habit of replacing them with hardliners from other countries. He was, in short, the kind of Catholic that makes Catholics quit being Catholic. Raymond Burke also typified the arrogance of the entrenched support staff. When the fucking Pope told the people of Earth that he was going to reform the Church legal system, Raymond Verdamtes Burke actually had the balls to go on EWTN, a television network which the Pope controls, and tell everyone that the Pope was wrong. Two days later, the bitch be kicked to the curb.

To me, that is the first Christlike thing I have seen a Pope do in my lifetime. When Jesus entered the Temple and flipped his shit and started kicking over moneylenders’ tables, he was teaching by example. The new Pope is attempting to follow his example. He eschews riches and is trying his best to spread some Good News. I’m not a Catholic, but I went to Catholic school, and I met Raymond Burke when I was there and I despised him for what he did to people, his demeanor, and his dress (which was elegant silk), the prospect that the most powerful religious figure on the planet shared my reservations about that man is something I cannot ignore. You do not have to join a religion to respect a believer’s efforts to stop his brethren from continuing to hurt people. You also do not have to be right about every moral question in order to be a good person, but you have to try.

The man clearly tries.

Perhaps he wants the Church of the Holy Shrine of the Republican Revelation instead.

“I am a unique and beautiful person Whom God has sent to freely gather the riches of this world Unto myself without hindrance and without guilt. I was meant to be here, And I was meant to have a great deal of money.”

Yet Burke remains Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, the highest judge under the Pope and clearly a much more influential office than his membership in the Congregation for Bishops. That’s strange, if the Pope really wants to sideline him, as has been speculated.

Nezz, I feel like you’re fighting an almost impossible fight: Those who see what they want to see in Pope Francis can hardly be dissuaded, and the less they understand the Catholic Church (and that includes most mainstream journalists) the less likely they are to be dissuaded from fantasizing about some radical reform of the Church on all the contemporary political issues by which they judge it. By all accounts, Pope Francis’ first several months suggest some fascinating possibilities, but I’m with you: They almost certainly won’t be the ones that outsiders and the lapsed liberals salivate over. It was the same way with conservatives, who wanted to dismiss Benedict’s statements about the environment or against capitalism as the work of some curial committee.

Nobody is saying this to my knowledge.

It is the exact opposite. People from the outside are seeing people saying that he is the best pope ever and “This changes everything!” However, when they actually examine the real changes he has done, they can’t find any major changes he has done that supports the pope of change comments.

Talk is cheap, but it is certainly worth something that he has started on a note of speaking some of the right things.

I’m not a catholic, so i don’t have to be understanding about the political realities of changing an organization who is by its nature not accepting of change.

His actions put him in jeapardy, puts church funding in jeopardy, and alienates politically & financially powerful people. This in itself is groundbreaking and hasn’t been seen for generations. This speaks volumes even if he doesn’t say what everyone may want at this point.
I would like to see a lot more, see the Catholic Church evolve into the most inclusive, least bigoted, most loving, and most advanced religion in the world. I want to see the Catholic Church say gay lifestyle is not be considered wrong, birth control is ok, morning after pill is ok. But it can’t happen that fast. The fact the church has changed direction and said Catholics aren’t the only people who go to heaven, non-Christians and people who are good go too is huge. Many if not most powerful religions claim they, and they alone are right, and if you’re not with them you don’t go to heaven.

So one can’t just look at the little things, but from the organization itself. If there was a Republican Leader saying we need to take care of every person in this country because the life a person lives today is precious (not just the unborn), he would seem radical… Not because it’s a radical idea, (most Democrats and Europeans feel this way), but because you have to look at the organization he’s in and how that is drastically different ideology from everyone around him. It’s progressive and radical to the Fundamentalism that surrounds the hierarchy of power and money.

I’m not sure what I believe myself as I struggle with wanting to believe there’s a loving God and there is life after death, but my analytical mind and scientific background precludes me from taking anything at face value without double-blind studies and a mountainous pile of proof.

At the same time though, in your example, if the republican leader says that but during every vote, votes against it, i’m not going to say they are some great agent of change.

How is this behavior any different?

“Pope Francis refused a prosecutor’s request to extradite from the Vatican to the Dominican Republic an archbishop accused of molesting five Dominican boys.”

His firings do who intent and his own personal actions with the public do as well.

I was not aware of that and am very disappointed.

Here’s something to think about. The Catholic Church used to produce wonderful, dynamic, caring leaders like John F. Kennedy (though his father was the opposite). Maybe if there had been a better Pope we wouldn’t have so many of these types running around with distorted, bigoted views who seem to hate the poor and voiceless:

  • Bill O’Reilly
  • Rick Santorum
  • Paul Ryan
  • Newt Gingrich
  • Mel Gibson
  • Antonin Scalia
  • Clarence Thomas

Well, honestly, I’d want to see the details there, because, well, Dominican Republic. (If he’d refused to say America or a EU nation, well…)
In the meantime he’s still less-bad than his predecessors, which is a good thing. And I have no real use for centralised religion.

It could be that the church is investigating the issue themselves, and doesn’t believe that the Dominican Republic is capable of passing fair judgement.

I mean, you don’t just extradite anyone to any country that says they want to try them for crimes.