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"New Pope Elected" (info on new pope from Think Progress)
New Pope Electedby Igor Volsky at Think Progress
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/03/13/1714691/new-pope-elected/
"SNIP..........................................
Bergoglio has affirmed church teaching on homosexuality, contraception and abortion and is considered to be among the most conservative in Latin America. In 2010, for instance, Bergoglio stated that same-sex adoption is a form of discrimination against children and has said that same-sex marriage is “a scheme to destroy God’s plan” and “a real and dire anthropological throwback.” He strongly opposed legislation introduced in 2010 by the Argentine Government to allow for marriage equality, writing a letter warning that it would “gravely harm the family.”
However, Bergoglio has focused on helping the poor throughout his career, noting, “The suffering of innocent and peaceful continues to slap us, the contempt for the rights of individuals and peoples are so far away, the rule of money with his demonic effects as drugs, corruption, trafficking people, including children, along with material and moral poverty are big problems.”
In 2001, upon becoming cardinal, Bergoglio “discouraged people from spending the money to fly to Rome to celebrate with him and advised that they instead donate the funds to help alleviate poverty at home.” He lived in a simple apartment, cooked his own food, and traveled by bus instead of a chauffeured limousine.
However, Bergoglio has been criticized by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) for his behavior during the 1976-1983 dictatorship in Argentina, with some journalists claiming that he prevented human rights groups from finding political prisoners by imprisoning them in his vacation home.
.........................................SNIP"
4 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
"...some journalists claiming that he prevented human rights groups from finding political prisoners by imprisoning them in his vacation home." --from the OP
They really ought to source such serious accusations. From another thread I've learned that at least one of the journalists (if there really are "some"
is sloppy and unreliable. Bergoglio said he was saving the lives of a couple of Jesuits whom the regime was after. I don't know the whole story yet, but he apparently wasn't even a bishop then, and that "vacation home" wasn't his (belonged to the diocese). The two priests survived, one of them to later criticize him, saying that he put them in danger by NOT endorsing their work to the regime. (They were "liberation theologists" living with the poor in active resistance to the dictatorship, which may have involved arms--I'm not sure.) This seems a lame accusation but I DON'T KNOW much about it. I've seen nothing so far about the Jesuit Society itself criticizing him. What does "behavior" mean?
"Bergoglio has been criticized by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) for his behavior during the 1976-1983 dictatorship in Argentina...". --from the OP
Since the top Church officials and top Jesuits, according to some reports, WERE apparently complicit with the junta, the behavior that was allegedly "criticized" by the Jesuit Society could have been something quite different from what the sentence implies. I've seen no source for this (the Jesuit Society criticizing him). I dislike slippery accusations like this.
It looks to me like a possible "Schindler's List" situation--someone looking guilty but not being guilty--because of what he was trying to do. If we didn't know that Schindler had actually saved people, he would look in retrospect like a Nazi. For instance, Bergoglio may have given up the two Jesuits he was hiding on the promise that they would not be killed (and they were not killed, while many other people were). It's the sort of thing he wouldn't likely ever disclose--a horribly painful decision and risk, such as Schindler was forced into.
I just read the NYT version of this news item about the Dirty War and that is, generally, how Bergoglio describes what he did. He said he saved whom he could.
Can many of us living in Dreamworld USA really understand the pain and horror that torturing-murdering regimes such as our own MIC put people into? (Our own MIC, torturing and murdering now, and complicit in Argentina back then.) Why are people so quick to condemn this man, even if he is a Pope?
I have not yet read a convincing case against this man. I've read one, and it stunk, as a piece of writing and investigation. I'm trying to learn more.
The NYT mentions a number of accusations---involving coverup and not being sufficiently against the dictatorship (I assume, publicly). But the first, coverup, goes back about 1,500 years--it is endemic behavior by a very, very sinful Church on a very, very wrongful and unchristian path. It just IS, you know. It IS the Church and, if you want to get anywhere in the Church, you have to do it. It's a closed circle Old Boys Club and they would no more give each other up to state authorities (whom they don't really and truly, in their hearts recognize as being "over" them), whatever the crime, than the CIA would. Or at least that's how it's been.
JFK wanted to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces." Some may think that the Catholic church--or rather the Vatican and the hierarchy--should suffer the same fate. But I'm not sure that anyone who seriously tried to accomplish it would live as long as JFK. It's a bad, bad institution, very insular and corrupt, going back 1,500 years. They have a lot to cover up. At the same time, there is an intriguing undercurrent of something better (most evident in spiritual renegades like St. Francis--near Pagans) that doesn't go away, when you clean all the dross away from it--all the centuries and centuries of priests worshiping themselves and all the attendant sins and crimes.
I am not so concerned about prelates involved in coverups--it's the price of admission, believe me--for instance, in the massive child molestation scandal, as I am about bishops and cardinals and the pope reassigning child molestors to child venues. the former, to me is their culture--they almost can't help it; but the latter is justifiably described as the "work of the Devil"--the very phrase that Bergoglio (Francis I) used to describe the Argentine gay rights bill. Endangering gays' lives and safety, by using such rhetoric, is also the "Devil's work." His homophobia is neither here nor there to me--we all have prejudices; but his deliberate association of gays with "the Devil," even if he didn't mean it that way, doesn't show us much of St. Francis, the peacemaker and lover of all life.
I think this is a really important distinction in understanding the Catholic Church--or rather its hierarchy--if you want to do so. Their culture is their culture--insular, secretive, fetishistic, male-worshiping, for 1,500 years (dating to Bishop Cyril of Alexandria's murder of the philosopher Hypatia). Many of them cannot help this. They can't help who they are--they can't analyze it. They are blind--just as many of us are blind, say, to our consumer culture. It's all around us and in us; it brainwashes us. We don't see it.
That's why I don't especially blame Bergoglio for his participation, if any, in the Argentine Church spiriting a real bad actor, Rev. Christian von Wernich, out of Argentina, to avoid his trial for aiding torture and murder during the dictatorship. Bergoglio believes in protecting the Church's own, no matter how heinous the crime, because, a) in his view, they are dealing with an anointed of God, a man with special spiritual powers--whose crime, confession and redemption are the only things of real importance to them, and b) because they are the oldest of Old Boys Clubs and have developed a rigid sense of their "right" to protect it from infamy.
This may be changing, under the pressure of child molestation victims--and the whole thing deserves to be "smashed up," of course--all these monarchical pretensions, all this hubris, all this extreme exclusiveness--it is hardly a Church any more (at the top); it is more a sickness. But, back in the 1970s, in Argentina, it was going full bore and had been, in Rome and Europe and the Mediterranean for 1,500 years. Think of the weight of that culture on a youngish man, whose soul and conscience were then presented with the utter horror of the Argentina regime, and those figures duly crossing themselves, and wearing crosses, and kissing their crosses, as they took babies from the bodies of pregnant leftist women, killed the women and gave the babies away to be properly raised by fascists.
Such an experience--even if you didn't do all that you might think of as right and courageous--wouldn't necessarily make you a bad man, nor a criminal. I mean, what do you do in that situation? Do you leave the country and leave everybody behind, to their fates? Do you stay, and stand up against it and get murdered? (That is the very thing that the two Jesuits whom he saved were doing--literally fighting back and ready to die.) Do you do what you can (like Schindler)? Do you do something in between--part courage, part fear or ambition, hesitant, ambivalent (like Hamlet)?
Bergoglio wasn't the first to be in that situation; he won't be the last (as we know now, to our grief). Prevaricating, hiding what you really think, trying to do good at some moments, terrorized in others, perhaps confused and without recourse, certainly torn up, horrified--none of this makes you a bad man or a bad leader. Nor does the Church hierarchy's CULTURE of secrecy--REQUIREMENT of secrecy (for membership)--make you a bad man or a bad leader, per se--especially long before it was ever seriously questioned or questioned at all. You entered a convent in those days--you wore a habit. You became ANOINTED as a priest, you were initiated into a secret male society and its sacred mysteries that was a millennium and half old (they say back to St. Peter but they lie).
Well, this topic has given me a lot of trouble. How to regard this person who now calls himself after St. Francis, the most beloved saint of all time, but has this cloudy history, in a region of the world, Latin America, of special interest to me?
I owe this man no allegiance. They broke their promise to me long ago that I have a soul. They don't really believe that. I am a lesser being in their view--whom they simultaneously hold in contempt and greatly fear. I have no patience with their vicious denial of the Mother Goddess any more. They need to reform. They need to repent. They probably won't. I've left it to others to undertake that struggle. I applaud those strugglers! I know many of them. I have gone my own way, like a whole lot of other people who are disgusted with the Vatican's festishes and obsessions.
What I do know about all this--the corrupt top of the Catholic Church--is that wishing it to go away doesn't work--any more than wishing the CIA to go away isn't a workable scheme--and both have tenacious holds on power.
I also know that those who are struggling within that Church structure to reclaim the original message of Love that Jesus so eloquently brought to humanity and so relentlessly insisted upon, in every way, including NOT abiding religious powermongers--these people are noble beings and many are dear to me.
So I DO care. I want them to have a good Pope--a good-hearted man, an open-minded man--who will meet them half way. I don't see a lot of potential for that in Francis I, except in the name he chose. I don't do saint worship.* But if I did, St. Francis would be my idol. I've got a statue of him in my garden (doesn't just about everybody?), but it's not for me to worship him but for him to worship Nature and the Great Mother, as he surely did when he was alive. Lovely Francis! I hope this Pope doesn't sully your name!
The Corporate Media is jumping on the topic of Pope Francis' Dirty War cloudiness. Why? What do they care about fascist murderers and torturers? They are currently touting Dick Cheney as a credible national advisor!
Is it because Pope Francis I has a known, solid record of criticizing greed and war, and advocating for the poor?
---------------------
*(Some day I'll repeat the tale here about the Church's transformation of the woman they murdered--skinned alive--Hypatia, into St. Catherine of the Wheel, at the moment of the formation of this male monarchy. What a crock of gimcrackery it is! Worse than anything the Corporate Media has done--well, equally bad, anyway. Repent, Pope Francis! Repent!)
They really ought to source such serious accusations. From another thread I've learned that at least one of the journalists (if there really are "some"
is sloppy and unreliable. Bergoglio said he was saving the lives of a couple of Jesuits whom the regime was after. I don't know the whole story yet, but he apparently wasn't even a bishop then, and that "vacation home" wasn't his (belonged to the diocese). The two priests survived, one of them to later criticize him, saying that he put them in danger by NOT endorsing their work to the regime. (They were "liberation theologists" living with the poor in active resistance to the dictatorship, which may have involved arms--I'm not sure.) This seems a lame accusation but I DON'T KNOW much about it. I've seen nothing so far about the Jesuit Society itself criticizing him. What does "behavior" mean?
"Bergoglio has been criticized by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) for his behavior during the 1976-1983 dictatorship in Argentina...". --from the OP
Since the top Church officials and top Jesuits, according to some reports, WERE apparently complicit with the junta, the behavior that was allegedly "criticized" by the Jesuit Society could have been something quite different from what the sentence implies. I've seen no source for this (the Jesuit Society criticizing him). I dislike slippery accusations like this.
It looks to me like a possible "Schindler's List" situation--someone looking guilty but not being guilty--because of what he was trying to do. If we didn't know that Schindler had actually saved people, he would look in retrospect like a Nazi. For instance, Bergoglio may have given up the two Jesuits he was hiding on the promise that they would not be killed (and they were not killed, while many other people were). It's the sort of thing he wouldn't likely ever disclose--a horribly painful decision and risk, such as Schindler was forced into.
I just read the NYT version of this news item about the Dirty War and that is, generally, how Bergoglio describes what he did. He said he saved whom he could.
Can many of us living in Dreamworld USA really understand the pain and horror that torturing-murdering regimes such as our own MIC put people into? (Our own MIC, torturing and murdering now, and complicit in Argentina back then.) Why are people so quick to condemn this man, even if he is a Pope?
I have not yet read a convincing case against this man. I've read one, and it stunk, as a piece of writing and investigation. I'm trying to learn more.
The NYT mentions a number of accusations---involving coverup and not being sufficiently against the dictatorship (I assume, publicly). But the first, coverup, goes back about 1,500 years--it is endemic behavior by a very, very sinful Church on a very, very wrongful and unchristian path. It just IS, you know. It IS the Church and, if you want to get anywhere in the Church, you have to do it. It's a closed circle Old Boys Club and they would no more give each other up to state authorities (whom they don't really and truly, in their hearts recognize as being "over" them), whatever the crime, than the CIA would. Or at least that's how it's been.
JFK wanted to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces." Some may think that the Catholic church--or rather the Vatican and the hierarchy--should suffer the same fate. But I'm not sure that anyone who seriously tried to accomplish it would live as long as JFK. It's a bad, bad institution, very insular and corrupt, going back 1,500 years. They have a lot to cover up. At the same time, there is an intriguing undercurrent of something better (most evident in spiritual renegades like St. Francis--near Pagans) that doesn't go away, when you clean all the dross away from it--all the centuries and centuries of priests worshiping themselves and all the attendant sins and crimes.
I am not so concerned about prelates involved in coverups--it's the price of admission, believe me--for instance, in the massive child molestation scandal, as I am about bishops and cardinals and the pope reassigning child molestors to child venues. the former, to me is their culture--they almost can't help it; but the latter is justifiably described as the "work of the Devil"--the very phrase that Bergoglio (Francis I) used to describe the Argentine gay rights bill. Endangering gays' lives and safety, by using such rhetoric, is also the "Devil's work." His homophobia is neither here nor there to me--we all have prejudices; but his deliberate association of gays with "the Devil," even if he didn't mean it that way, doesn't show us much of St. Francis, the peacemaker and lover of all life.
I think this is a really important distinction in understanding the Catholic Church--or rather its hierarchy--if you want to do so. Their culture is their culture--insular, secretive, fetishistic, male-worshiping, for 1,500 years (dating to Bishop Cyril of Alexandria's murder of the philosopher Hypatia). Many of them cannot help this. They can't help who they are--they can't analyze it. They are blind--just as many of us are blind, say, to our consumer culture. It's all around us and in us; it brainwashes us. We don't see it.
That's why I don't especially blame Bergoglio for his participation, if any, in the Argentine Church spiriting a real bad actor, Rev. Christian von Wernich, out of Argentina, to avoid his trial for aiding torture and murder during the dictatorship. Bergoglio believes in protecting the Church's own, no matter how heinous the crime, because, a) in his view, they are dealing with an anointed of God, a man with special spiritual powers--whose crime, confession and redemption are the only things of real importance to them, and b) because they are the oldest of Old Boys Clubs and have developed a rigid sense of their "right" to protect it from infamy.
This may be changing, under the pressure of child molestation victims--and the whole thing deserves to be "smashed up," of course--all these monarchical pretensions, all this hubris, all this extreme exclusiveness--it is hardly a Church any more (at the top); it is more a sickness. But, back in the 1970s, in Argentina, it was going full bore and had been, in Rome and Europe and the Mediterranean for 1,500 years. Think of the weight of that culture on a youngish man, whose soul and conscience were then presented with the utter horror of the Argentina regime, and those figures duly crossing themselves, and wearing crosses, and kissing their crosses, as they took babies from the bodies of pregnant leftist women, killed the women and gave the babies away to be properly raised by fascists.
Such an experience--even if you didn't do all that you might think of as right and courageous--wouldn't necessarily make you a bad man, nor a criminal. I mean, what do you do in that situation? Do you leave the country and leave everybody behind, to their fates? Do you stay, and stand up against it and get murdered? (That is the very thing that the two Jesuits whom he saved were doing--literally fighting back and ready to die.) Do you do what you can (like Schindler)? Do you do something in between--part courage, part fear or ambition, hesitant, ambivalent (like Hamlet)?
Bergoglio wasn't the first to be in that situation; he won't be the last (as we know now, to our grief). Prevaricating, hiding what you really think, trying to do good at some moments, terrorized in others, perhaps confused and without recourse, certainly torn up, horrified--none of this makes you a bad man or a bad leader. Nor does the Church hierarchy's CULTURE of secrecy--REQUIREMENT of secrecy (for membership)--make you a bad man or a bad leader, per se--especially long before it was ever seriously questioned or questioned at all. You entered a convent in those days--you wore a habit. You became ANOINTED as a priest, you were initiated into a secret male society and its sacred mysteries that was a millennium and half old (they say back to St. Peter but they lie).
Well, this topic has given me a lot of trouble. How to regard this person who now calls himself after St. Francis, the most beloved saint of all time, but has this cloudy history, in a region of the world, Latin America, of special interest to me?
I owe this man no allegiance. They broke their promise to me long ago that I have a soul. They don't really believe that. I am a lesser being in their view--whom they simultaneously hold in contempt and greatly fear. I have no patience with their vicious denial of the Mother Goddess any more. They need to reform. They need to repent. They probably won't. I've left it to others to undertake that struggle. I applaud those strugglers! I know many of them. I have gone my own way, like a whole lot of other people who are disgusted with the Vatican's festishes and obsessions.
What I do know about all this--the corrupt top of the Catholic Church--is that wishing it to go away doesn't work--any more than wishing the CIA to go away isn't a workable scheme--and both have tenacious holds on power.
I also know that those who are struggling within that Church structure to reclaim the original message of Love that Jesus so eloquently brought to humanity and so relentlessly insisted upon, in every way, including NOT abiding religious powermongers--these people are noble beings and many are dear to me.
So I DO care. I want them to have a good Pope--a good-hearted man, an open-minded man--who will meet them half way. I don't see a lot of potential for that in Francis I, except in the name he chose. I don't do saint worship.* But if I did, St. Francis would be my idol. I've got a statue of him in my garden (doesn't just about everybody?), but it's not for me to worship him but for him to worship Nature and the Great Mother, as he surely did when he was alive. Lovely Francis! I hope this Pope doesn't sully your name!
The Corporate Media is jumping on the topic of Pope Francis' Dirty War cloudiness. Why? What do they care about fascist murderers and torturers? They are currently touting Dick Cheney as a credible national advisor!
Is it because Pope Francis I has a known, solid record of criticizing greed and war, and advocating for the poor?
---------------------
*(Some day I'll repeat the tale here about the Church's transformation of the woman they murdered--skinned alive--Hypatia, into St. Catherine of the Wheel, at the moment of the formation of this male monarchy. What a crock of gimcrackery it is! Worse than anything the Corporate Media has done--well, equally bad, anyway. Repent, Pope Francis! Repent!)
