What about the charitable bakesale held at our work this week? or the clothes collection for Syrian refugees the week before? or the voluntary work done to create a sensory garden for the deaf and blind or the redecoration of the local hospice day suite? The food bank donations and science week mentoring?
I could go on, if you don’t see these things being done by ordinary people where you are then I’m glad I don’t live there.
Of course I see such things being done by “ordinary” people, in the sense of people without specially great position or resources. But not the average person. That is, most people don’t.
nm
Well pretty much everyone at my workplace was getting involved in one way or another. Maybe they are all above average?
Or maybe your rebuttal to this is that the pope is simply doing what an unspecified proportion of ordinary people do…yay pope! I guess. Not much of a headline when you put it like that though.
Those whose job description is to comfort the afflicted? Of course.
If you need a church to tell you to be kind to others, you’re not ever gonna understand why.
Not Catholic, married to a (long) lapsed one. I like this guy, but for reasons a bit different than most casual non-Catholic observers. Here’s one example.
Until recently my wife was on faculty at a small Catholic college run by a group of Franciscan nuns, people who actually do the work for the poor and sick and imprisoned and who strongly and loudly oppose war and capital punishment. This particular group was a bit more liberal than Francis. And of course that didn’t sit well with the local bishop, who was ingratiating himself with then-Pope Benedict. When he came to campus to try to intimidate the nuns (fat chance when these old ladies have stared down the barrel of a gun) he expected to be treated like a VIP. He submitted a report for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF)–once known as the Inquisition. I did not know this until doing some reading, but the CDF had big power under JPII and Ratzinger and went after nuns worldwide.
When Francis became Pope, he basically told the CDF to sod off…well, as much as a Pope can. He rebuked them five times in a short period, which I gather is quite unusual bordering on unprecedented. The local bishop got shipped off to the other side of the USA and was replaced by a guy who is much more in tune with Francis’ way of doing things. And this trip to the USA included a statement that women make an immense contribution to the RCC. To people without perspective, that looks like pandering, but I’m going to guess that nuns worldwide are no longer feeling threatened but rather emboldened.
Most agnostic or atheist types don’t like organized religion because of the religion part. I’m totally cool with that, it’s the organized part I don’t like. And there’s no religion more organized than the RCC. With organization comes dogma and inflexibility and hierarchy and power and that’s totally at odds with everything I read in the Gospels. When Francis says things like “who am I to judge?”, it has real repercussions within all of that hierarchy. And it looks like he’s following up words with action.
[
](http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_REL_POPE_US?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-09-28-10-31-04)Like I said: baby steps perhaps, but baby steps in the right direction.
ETA: Excellent post, jsquire. I tried to bring up that same sentiment in posts #47 and #50 but they seem to have slid under the radar.
Your degree of faith in how the “average person” would react to being in a high visibility position of power in one of the established power’s most establishy organizations is inspiring.
Not that such organization would let that sort of person get anywhere near the chair, of course…
The US made quite an impression on the Pope. He shared his thoughts.
here
and here
he’s such a down to earth and genuine dude.
I take the P.G. Wodehouse view of human nature. Probably apocryphal but rather than walk to the post box himself he’d throw the stamped, addressed envelopes out of the window believing that any normal human, finding such a letter would just pop it in the next post box they see.
I look at the people close to me now and, yeah, I reckon they’d do the obvious things like sell off the property and the finery and funnel the proceeds to the poor, allow the clergy to marry (gay or straight), allow women equal rights within the church, allow freedom of choice for abortion, promote condoms in HIV areas, hand over all evidence (current or historic) regarding child abuse and hand the relevant priests to the civil authorities.
Those things would be on day one’s to-do list for me, wouldn’t they be for most people?
Ya gotta introduce me to tour social circle. Those around me I suspect would not be above bringing back the stake.
Except for (straight) celibacy, turning over the abusers, condoms for disease prevention, I doubt you, I, or our children will live to see a Pope do those policy changes. And we’re highly likely to instead see more than one other who’s an abrasive and distant schoolmaster type.
A cure for death?
Don’t you realize what the effect of that would be on this planet?
It would not be a good thing. Do you believe it would be a good thing?
Would you like to live forever? What would you imagine would be the condition of your body and your senses after 200 years? Would the Catholic Church need to find a way to stop the human body from degenerating too?
Wouldn’t a better first step be to do something about all the priests that rape children and never get punished for it?
Francis is awesome. His genuine love for people is quite infectious and he has moved the church from focusing on abortion and gay marriage to caring for the poor. That he visited the prison in Philly was a great thing, too often we treat the prisoners as human trash.
The only thing I don’t like about him is when he speaks English he sounds like Vito Corleone.
The guy talks a good game, and he’s excellent compared to other popes (which, unfortunately, is not a high standard to exceed). But he’s still against LGBT rights, he’s opposed to marijuana legalization, he’s anti-abortion, etc.
And what has he done? I’m not talking about feeding and bathing the homeless, which is certainly admirable. But any parish priest in Bumfuck, Egypt can do that, and many do. This guy is the leader of the largest church in the world. A church guilty of many crimes. What has he done to make sure children aren’t raped by priests in the future? What has he done to encourage the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV in Africa? What has he done to encourage human rights for gay and transgender people? What has he done to prevent women from being forced to breed? What has he done to end the violent worldwide drug war? What has he done to allow people to move freely between countries?
The Catholic Church is powerful. He could actually be an important and influential force for good in the world. Instead he couches the same old dogma in more palatable terms. He has some good PR. And I believe he’s a good person, deep down, trying to do what he thinks is right. But the problem is that he’s indoctrinated into a belief system that holds grossly immoral positions. By being a good person according to the standards of his faith, he’s actually falling well short of being a good person by modern standards. Especially since he has the power to change the moral standards of the Catholic church, bringing in line with modern morality, but refuses to.
So, I agree with others. Meh. He’s better than Benedict, but that doesn’t make him “totally fucking rock”. It just makes him less terrible than his predecessor. “Not bad” doesn’t meet my standard of “really good”.
well heck, it may just be that in the UK we don’t really do conservative christianity, or that I choose not to hang around with people likely behave in a traditional “popey” manner.
alas, I fear you are right. And it may be that the small amount of liberal Catholicism doled out by the current pope may just result in a conservative backlash from the next one.
Better late . . .
The first single from his upcoming prog rock album: Wake Up! Go! Go! Forward!
The song is also embedded at the Rolling Stone link.
All-in-all, not bad. I can’t help thinking that they really should have gotten the folks from Lacuna Coil involved, tho.
…and now gay-marriage-license-denier Kim Davis is saying through her attorneys that she met with the Pope in Washington. Interesting.
If true, I see the value of supporting people standing up for their beliefs. I can also see how the optics on this seem off to many folks who have loved this US visit. Same with making Serra a saint - I know people directly involved with the Carmel Mission in CA who are struggling with the stress Serra’s beatification is having on the local community.
I’m not Catholic, but I don’t think the Pope should be fornicating with anything - including geological formations. It ain’t right, it just ain’t right.
All of these.
Sell the wealth, feed the poor, tend the sick. Jail the criminals.
Until then, he’s merely the leader of a very large cult with good PR people.
Also, he had no business addressing Congress.