The true people’s Pope!
We attend a United Methodist Church in our area here in southern Illinois and we were interested to see our new, progressive pastor include in his sermon a picture of Pope Francis kissing the head of a man who had an almost unpronounceable disease that made him very ugly to look at. The Pope apparently did this during one of his many visits to places and people since he took the papacy early last year.
Francis has done many things differently than his predecessor, Benedict the sixteenth. In point of fact, there could not be any bigger difference between the two men if they tried. Benedict was a rigid ideologue who did his best to reverse as many of the last truly progressive Pope--John the twenty third’s--policies as he could in the time that he was in the shoes of the fisherman. It is our firm belief that Benedict was forced out of the papacy due to his ties to the pedophilia scandal that engulfed Germany as it did much of the rest of the Catholic world, although we have no way to really prove that fact except that Benedict was the first Pope to resign in over five hundred years. John-Paul the second proved to the entire world that the suffering of a Pope before his death is a vital part of a papacy and the fact that Benedict did not participate in that leads us to the conclusion that we just previously made about his forced exit. No one has ever exhibited suffering better than Jesus the Christ.
And, Benedict’s exit could not have come at a better time. He was doing nothing to help the deteriorating church’s situation and was, in fact, helping that deterioration along. Francis has, in his first few months on the chair, almost totally reversed what Benedict had done as has already made remarkable strides toward both making Catholics proud of their faith again, and, demonstrating to the entire world what true Christianity is all about.
Those on the far right of American thought and politics have, as Rush Limbaugh did, labeled Pope Francis as a Marxist because he opposes their winner take all approach to the vulture capitalism that they espouse and promote almost daily in print and on the nation’s fractured media airwaves. Limbaugh even went so far as to spout that Time magazine had given its Person of the Year award to Francis just to spite Limbaugh himself. It takes a fair degree of hedonism to make a statement lime that. But that it what most right wing neoconservatives are: hedonistic and self centered to the max.
A recent Thomas Cahill observation reprinted in the on line magazine Raw Truth, notes that most conservatives who preach the winner take all approach confuse Marxism with true Christianity when it comes to the Pope. And that it because they really have no other line of approach except to try to create some sort of wedge to try to separate the pontiff from the people that he is so affecting both inside and outside of the Catholic world. True Christians will tell you almost to a person that Jesus Christ was a true counter culture figure and that could not be more true today with the type of materialistic culture that so many on the right espouse. To these people, the poor are poor due to their own devices and all it would take is for them to find some ten dollar per hour job to set everything right. The poor are to be discarded and left totally behind to die quick or not so quick deaths if they encounter disease or other misfortunes such as hunger which the right attacks annually when they cut further back on the SNAP programs which provide food for the poor and less fortunate of this world. If the right had been providing the food for the five thousand that Jesus feed that day when he preached, everyone would have had to have left because the right would have taken the loaves and fishes to feed themselves, depriving both the child who offered them and everyone else of a nourishing meal.
Pope Francis is a definite threat to the conservative ethos and there is no doubt about that. True conservatism died a long time ago and what we face now is what Cahill calls as follows:
“I’ve come to the conclusion that there are only two movements in the world, “One is kindness, and the other is cruelty. I don’t think there’s anything else, really.”
If that kindness versus cruelty thesis be true, then we are facing a very rocky future because those who espouse cruelty seem to have a great deal of the monetary worth in this world and are clamoring for more of it every day that we live and breath.
Pope Francis is in his upper seventies and has perhaps ten to fifteen years in the pontiffs seat while these evil people have been around for decades and show no signs of ever going away. It is the classic battle and the good have definite disadvantages while the evil are at it each and every day and are planning ahead for a future that would make what we got a glimpse of in the Christmas movie “It’s a wonderful life” look like a picnic. In that film, a dejected and outmaneuvered George Bailey attempts to commit suicide by jumping off of a bridge and is shown what his town would look like if he had been successful in his attempt. People, in their singularity and in their collectiveness, can make a difference but their will always be the greedy and hateful around ready to capitalize on any opportunity for gain and people mean nothing at all to them. The average individual is merely a tool for the rich and, like at the Sears and Roebuck Craftsman tool display, can easily be replaced when they are broken or worn completely out.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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