c’mon, if you have a monotheistic religion and you don’t believe it is The One, you might as well just ask people for money for no reason.
Ratzinger always was a hardliner, long before he was elected Pope. He believed in a smaller, tighter Church. That is what the Church chose when they chose him. No surprises here. JP2 was a crowd pleaser, Ratz is not.
He will continue to alienate group after group, until he has a monolithic church marching on step. It is up to each catholic to decide how to handle this transition.
That is his vision of what the Church must be and he is working on it. I say good for him, even if I don’t personally agree with him. I have seen the decay of too many institutions, from corporations, to internet forums, because in an effort to please everyone, they relax their standards and become a shapeless mob.
I think, too, some people are remembering John Paul II as being something other than he was. Certainly there were lots of threads about him over the years complaining about his inflexibility and conservatism.
Interesting. Here, the consensus is that the Pope is eeeeevil, while in the current Great Debates thread on the issue, lots of people are saying “what’s all the fuss?”
I went to a Church of Christ affiliated high school and heard the same thing for four years. I pissed off a lot of kids who tried hard as hell to convert me from the Methodist church. Their work was cut out for them since I don’t believe in God anyway.
As a Protestant, I toyed with the idea of being all offended a the Pope’s pronouncement, but then I realized I don’t actually give a shit what he thinks. That’s the beauty of not recognizing his authority.
To me, he may as well be declaring that the Earth is the center of the universe. It’s an unnecessary declaration, it’s factually incorrect, and it has zero relevance to my life.
The attitude I have always noticed from the RC Church when it comes to ecumenicism is that it requires everyone to become a Catholic. One of the reasons I got so exasperated with the CoE was hearing constantly that we couldn’t ordain women, we couldn’t bless homosexual marriages, we couldn’t do anything for fear of the effect it would have on closer relations with the RC Church. Not once did the RC Church ever consider how their pronouncements/policies would play with other churches. And to be honest, I kind of respect them for that. But it doesn’t mean I want to enter into “closer union” with an organization that represents beliefs I feel to be fundamentally wrong.
