In general, decent religious leaders don’t attract a lot of fame.
That’s not the criticism. The criticism is she didn’t give a damn about eradicating poverty, all she cared about was converting Indians. She felt suffering was good for the soul. There was no attempt to actually cure any of the sick only basic health care (if that) was provided. Her fame brought in millions of dollars in donations but her missions could at best be described as spartan. When she got sick she wasn’t cared for in her facilities with the poor, she went to Scripps Clinic.
Nope. In the US, the Diocese of Chicago asked for permission to let girls be altar servers in the 1970s and received an answer of “ok, why are you asking for permission to do something which has never been banned?” and which other countries (such as Spain or Italy) had been doing for so long that nobody knows when the practice started. Some famous ladies which we know served regularly as altar girls between the 15th and 17th centuries: Isabel I of Castille, the Princess of Eboli, Magdalena Jaso Azpilicueta (St Francis Xavier’s favorite sister). Some non-famous ladies which we know served regularly as altar girls: over 300 years’ worth of students at the Company of Mary’s school in Tudela, founded in 1687.
Back to the OP, he seems to define “decent” as “has never done nothing wrong”. To which the traditional answer is “there was a perfect man once and we hung Him from a cross”.
Tradtional? Yes.
Accurate? Of course not.
People just like to pretend that some dubious accounts of reality are somehow more credible than contemporaneous and otherwise equally dubious accounts because some old men decided to keep only the best propaganda… I mean gospel.
He plagiarized portions of his PhD dissertation and was unfaithful to his wife. I’m not sure where that fits on the grand scheme of things, though it does tend to bother me that colleges take that day off rather than have say a “Civil Rights” day.
Regarding Pope Francis, it would seem that his alleged cooperation with the Argentinian dictatorship is just that - alleged.
There was the case of the two Jesuit priests who were arrested and almost killed in 1976, but although one of them (Orlando Yorio, who died in 2000) said in 1999 that “Bergoglio did not help us, but rather the opposite”, the other one (Franz Jalics) said on the record in 2013 that “<their> kidnapping was because of a former lay colleague who became a guerrilla, was captured, and named Yorio and myself when interrogated” and that “it is wrong to assert that our capture took place at the initiative of Father Bergoglio … the fact is, Orlando Yorio and I were not denounced by Father Bergoglio.”
There is testimony that says that, during his time as cardinal, he helped people flee Argentina. Alicia Oliveira, a former Argentine judge, has reported that Bergoglio helped people flee during the rule of the junta. Two dissidents, Gonzalo Mosca and José Caravias, have given accounts of how Bergoglio helped them flee the Argentine dictatorship.
Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Nobel Peace Laureate in 1980 and human rights activist, has said: “Perhaps he didn’t have the courage of other priests, but he never collaborated with the dictatorship … Bergoglio was no accomplice of the dictatorship.” Graciela Fernández, of the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights, also said that there was no proof linking Bergoglio with the dictatorship. Other people have come forward denying that the current pope was in any way complicit with or a collaborator of the Argentine Junta.
He may be not be particularly progressive (c’mon, he’s the freaking Pope, what can you expect?)… But it appears that he was not cooperating with the repressive apparatus of the Junta.
Yes; he was not openly resisting and he was not taking any kind of exceptional risks… but it definitely seems that he was not sending people to their doom at the hands of the secret police. Rather, the opposite. That marks him as a decent man in my book.
What about Fulton Sheen?
Franklin Graham never taught any such thing. You are thinking of Oral Roberts’ son, Richard.
No personal scandal. Conservative Catholic, which if you project his probably views of sexual morality (he died in 1979) to today, the SDMB Left would consider him horrible. Also very anti-Communist. Would have supported Pope JPII against Liberation Theology & the USSR.
All of which makes him great in my book.
The Dalai Lama is also critical / takes a conservative stance on mass migration into Europe. I agree with him here, but I would guess many liberals disagree with him:
So “decent” means “embraces the Sexual Revolution”?
Well, I just read on a blog chatting about HIMYM a startling:
2. Transphobic – I’m sorry, but if you’re transphobic you’re just a freaking garbage human
So, I’m gonna go with the idea the moderns demand total submission to whatever damnfool thing they’re thinking, so yeah.
The clerk of my quaker meeting seems ok.
I’ve always liked Dan Barker.
If historical figures are allowed, I’d nominate Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh Guru.
According to Sikh accounts at least, he willingly went before the Mughal Emperor to ask him to cease forced conversions - of Hindus. He was then killed, as he knew he would be.
This marks what I think is one of the very few occasions on which a major religious figure was martyred - for supporting the rights of people who worshiped an entirely different religion to freedom of worship.
This strikes me as noteworthy in terms of decency, though of course, I am not a Sikh.
The accounts we have are somewhat of a hagiography and may not be totally accurate …
http://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/Martyrdom_of_Guru_Tegh_Bahadur
And how many Calcuttans have you provided basic health care for? Like I said, she used her limited resources to provide a little bit of help to a lot of people.
No matter what anyone does or tries to do, there are going to be a heck of a lot of people in Calcutta suffering. If all you can afford to do for them is to give them a philosophy that might make that suffering a little more bearable for them, then that’s what you do. If you think there’s something more effective she could have done, then let us know how much it would have cost to do that for every single suffering person in Calcutta.
Thank you, Chronos.
Jonathan Sacks seems a decent sort.
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As far as Rabbis go, I very much admired the Rabbi of the congregation in which I grew up, Rabbi Gunther Plaut. He was head Rabbi at Holy Blossom in Toronto in the 1970s, when I was a kid.
I don’t accept everything he stood for, but I admired him greatly as a man of real integrity.
Yes. But you’ve never heard of him. He’s more interested in tending to his congregation, his community, his friends, and his family than he is in seeking personal fame.
He’s the pastor of a local evangelical Christian church who I got to know entirely outside of a religious context. He’s a very good person all around and funny as hell to boot. And no, he never tried to convert this atheist Jew. His friendship comes with no strings attached.