Pope Francis Puts Caring for Migrants and Opposing Abortion on Equal Footing

[highplainsdem]

Source: NYT

Caring for migrants and the poor is as holy a pursuit as opposing abortion, Pope Francis declared in a major document issued by the Vatican on Monday morning.

Pushing back against conservative critics within the church who argue that the 81-year-old pope’s focus on social issues has led him to lose sight of the true doctrine, Pope Francis again cast himself, and the mission of the Roman Catholic Church, in a more progressive light.

“The other harmful ideological error is found in those who find suspect the social engagement of others, seeing it as superficial, worldly, secular, materialist, communist or populist,” Pope Francis wrote in an apostolic exhortation on the subject of holiness issued Monday morning. “Our defense of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm and passionate. Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned.”

The pope’s vision of holiness explicitly highlights migrants, whose plight he has sought to elevate to global attention perhaps more than any other issue.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/world/europe/pope-francis-migrants-abortion.html

[dembotoz]

1. don't hold your breath

[highplainsdem]

2. Yeah, I can hear RWers screaming already...

[haele]

4. What, he actually wants them to work...

It's great to rally around a mythical cause (saving the innocent unborn) while ignoring the reality of dealing with that fertilized egg once its born - or gets flushed out of the host body before the end of the first trimester, or fails in the womb at the end of the second/beginning of the third, or kills its host body... All they have to do is get together, drink coffee and eat pastries, and plan the next time when they're going to go out, hold signs, and shout and sinful women and curry favor with their local pastors. Oh, and collect money from the gullible for their cause. It would only be better if they could take stones with them, to stone the sinners.

But actually doing something; spending time or, heavens, money to get near "those people" and maybe get exposed to the cooties of poverty?
That's a personal insult, and blasphemous to boot. After all, the Prosperity Gospel and Calvin both proclaim that the poor are poor because they're lazy and sinful, and they must be punished - because God made them poor to punish them.

Haele

[brooklynite]

3. Where does discriminating against Gays fit in?

[niyad]

5. ahhh, yes the misogynistic pope photo op at it again.

[jes06c]

6. Still not a fan

but at least he's being consistent with Church doctrine. It makes me furious how Catholic bishops would threaten to deny communion to Catholic Democrats who supported abortion rights, but never seem to care about Republican Catholics who support the death penalty.

[Exotica]

7. whole lot of intersectionality over the past 2000 years w/ the Catholic church and the death penalty

That said, I am glad that the current Pope is stridently against it.