This Catholic anti-abortion organization wants you to suffer — and actually says so!

[AtheistCrusader]

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/this-catholic-anti-abortion-organization-wants-you-to-suffer-and-actually-says-so/

The American Life League mobilizes devout Catholics against medical options that, to their way of thinking, violate God’s will. If you should drive past a Planned Parenthood and see elderly women fingering rosary beads next to pictures of the Virgin Mary, or young men holding Bibles and praying, American Life League probably had a hand in their presence there. Ironically, ALL also spreads misinformation about birth control, for example via a Pill Kills campaign—which means they feed the line-up of Catholic women waiting for abortion services.

ALL promotes a passive, “let go and let God” approach to the dying process as well as family planning, so with ALL Euthanasia Suffering death with dignity approved by the California legislature (and validated across Canada by a Supreme Court ruling), the group is fighting back—by touting the benefits of suffering. “Suffering is a grace-filled opportunity to participate in the passion of Jesus Christ. Euthanasia selfishly steals that opportunity.” So proclaims an ALL meme making its way across the internet.

Mother Teresa – “The Kiss of Jesus”

This is not a fringe position in the Catholic Church, which has long extolled the spiritual virtues of suffering. Mother Teresa’s attraction to pain shaped her ministry to the dying, and one of the most serious criticisms of her Calcutta homes was that patients were denied modern medical care to relieve pain even when the Missionaries of Charity had the funding to do so. By her own report, Mother Teresa once told a woman to imagine that her suffering was kisses from Jesus. “Suffering, pain, sorrow, humiliation, feelings of loneliness, are nothing but the kiss of Jesus, a sign that you have come so close that he can kiss you.”

Rare when any of them will come out and admit it in daylight.

[trotsky]

1. The obsession with suffering, promoting it as a virtue...

is truly one of the most fucked up things about that theology.

If there was just one goal I could give the human species, it would be to MINIMIZE SUFFERING. Totally the opposite of what the RCC teaches.

[Dawson Leery]

2. The RCC is a sick institution.

The best decision I ever made was to officially leave the church (2007). It is a cult hellbent on achieving political power and oppressing the masses, inflicting pain on them to make them miserable. That is the plan. Make people hate this world and prepare them for the unproven "afterlife" floating with the male sky fairy.

This world can be made better and has been. Jehovah is unworthy of the time of the enlightened.

[rug]

3. "That is the plan."

I knew it! And the Templars are in on it!

[Starboard Tack]

7. These guys get funnier every day.

Now they're running with the woo. You really gotta laugh, especially when they take themselves so seriously. Reminds me of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

[rug]

8. Whatever it is, it's not the product of reason.

[Starboard Tack]

9. That's for damn sure.

Too much beach reading this summer.

[Warren Stupidity]

4. And yet we have our boosters here who attack anyone that objects to what the RCC is doing.

[beam me up scottie]

5. Because the RCC is the real victim.

[Warren Stupidity]

10. And the cavalry rides in to the rescue!

It is lonely out there being the only booster of homophobic misogynist religious institutions.

[beam me up scottie]

11. Right? I almost feel sorry for the apologists.

So much misogyny and homophobia to defend, so few volunteers.

Good thing all of us uppity women and lgbt folks have so many allies.

[mr blur]

16. I don't - they're even dumber and more selfish than Blank Frank.

[rug]

6. Not as many as those who object to hyperbolic bullshit.

So, tell me, warren, what is the RCC's "plan"?

[AtheistCrusader]

13. Prey on the weak.

Do you imagine your religion's financial success is due to anything else?

[rug]

14. I know it's not.

But feel free to engage in your own imaginings.

As to its "financial success", it is a very odd term for an institution that has endured 2,000 years through all sorts of political and economic systems in virtually every culture around the world. You can't measure its "financial success" in the same manner as you would Krispy Kreme. I'd like to see an economist discuss this with you.

As it is, it remains both an odd and simple-minded statement.

[AtheistCrusader]

15. The true wealth of the Roman Catholic Church is effectively beyond accounting.

Not because of it's spiritual immaterial value, but rather, the sheer bulk of its value.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/03/catholic_church_and_pope_francis_religious_institutions_are_exempted_from.html

You can't even account for the melt value of the works, property, monies and artifacts it possesses. Let alone the perceived value of samesaid gold and artifacts in historical and religious context.

You could auction off Crispy Crème for the book value of the company and no one would bat an eye. If you tried to do the same to the RCC, no nation on earth could afford it. We still don't even know the totality of the wealth JUST the Nazis stuffed down the church's pants as it collapsed, hoarded treasure, and escaped with Church help.

Our best window into the overall financial picture of American Catholicism comes from a 2012 investigation by the Economist, which offered a rough-and-ready estimate of $170 billion in annual spending, of which almost $150 billion is associated with church-affiliated hospitals and institutions of higher education. The operating budget for ordinary parishes, at around $11 billion a year, is a relatively small share, and Catholic Charities is a smaller share still.

Your church is a business. Period. One that operates completely free of the taxes and accounting rules that hamper even the wildly abusive corporate crony-laden capitalistic elements of our mixed market economy.

And that money spent on hospitals? Hardly charity. That's a hostile takeover of our health care system to constrain and eliminate abortion, physician assisted suicide, etc. Well documented.

http://crosscut.com/2014/01/washingtons-looming-catholic-hospital-takeover/

It's cute the way you try to paint your church as this poor, meager, frugal thing that just wardens the souls of its members, while it metastasizes into a 150-billion-dollars-a-year bid to take health care right out of our hands. We already know what the church will do with that power. We've seen it in Boston, where they abandoned adoption services altogether, rather than lose 4 million/year in state grants for delivery of social services, because your bigoted church couldn't bear the thought of administering adoptions to same-sex-couples as state law required.

You embarrass the legacy of your own avatar, sir.

[rug]

17. The bulk of its wealth is world heritage which it's preerved for centuries.

Since you mentioned the Nazis (and Godwin does apply here), maybe you should have mentioned the looting of the Goths in the fifth century. Or the spoils of Constantinople in the twelfth in your calculation of the wealth of the beast you despise.

Your rhetoric is very familiar:

Most of Rome's wealth has been acquired through the sale of salvation. Untold billions of dollars have been paid to her by those who thought they were purchasing heaven on the installment plan for themselves or loved ones. The practice continues to this day — blatantly where Catholicism is in control, less obviously here in the United States. No greater deception or abomination could be perpetrated. When Cardinal Cajetan, sixteenth-century Dominican scholar, complained about the sale of dispensations and indulgences, the Church hierarchy was indignant and accused him of wanting "to turn Rome into an uninhabited desert, to reduce the Papacy to impotence, to deprive the pope... of the pecuniary resources indispensable for the discharge of his office." 12

In addition to such perversions of the gospel which have led hundreds of millions astray, there are the further abominations of corrupt banking practices, laundering of drug money, trading in counterfeit securities, and dealings with the Mafia (fully documented in police and court records), which the Vatican and her representatives around the world have long employed. Nino Lo Bello, former Business Week correspondent in Rome and Rome bureau chief for New York Journal of Commerce, writes that the Vatican is so closely allied with the Mafia in Italy that "many people ... believe that Sicily ... is nothing more than a Vatican holding." 13

The Roman Catholic Church is by far the wealthiest institution on earth. Yes, one hears from Rome periodic pleas for money-persuasive appeals claiming that the Vatican cannot maintain itself on its limited budget and needs monetary assistance. Such pleas are unconscionable ploys. The value of innumerable sculptures by such masters as Michelangelo, paintings by the world's greatest artists, and countless other art treasures and ancient documents which Rome possesses (not only at the Vatican but in cathedrals around the world) is beyond calculation. At the World Synod of Bishops in Rome, England's Cardinal Heenan proposed that the Church sell some of these superfluous treasures and give the proceeds to the poor. His suggestion was not well-received.

https://www.chick.com/information/religions/catholicism/sevenhills.asp

You live up to your username, sir.

The post stands.

[AtheistCrusader]

19. Nice dodge. Addressing a strained interpretation of one part of my post

Isn't a rebuttal, sir.

[rug]

20. It's a dismissal.

[AtheistCrusader]

21. 150+Bn per year in the us isn't a legacy horde, sat upon as if by Smaug

And never spent or traded. That 150bn+ is a live, kicking portfolio, and it's being used to deny people access to medical care, in lieu of banning that care since it offends Catholic doctrine.

The Church is rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and it can't be hidden or explained away. Soon, it won't be obfuscated either. It will have to be accounted for.

[rug]

22. "$150 billion is associated with church-affiliated hospitals and institutions of higher education"

Did you miss that last part? Assuming The Economist's estimate is accurate.

By way of comparison, expenditures by U.S. universities directly on students, and nothing else, is nearly $500 billion per year.

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=75

As to that percentage (unreported) spent on Catholic hospitals, it is ludicrous to claim it is all, or even predominantly designed to be, used to thwart access to reproductive services.

The problem with hyperbole is that it leads you into untenable positions. (Although Smaug was a nice touch.)

[AtheistCrusader]

23. The church's activities in attempting to deny access to care is well known

At this point. Can't be hidden

http://crosscut.com/2014/01/washingtons-looming-catholic-hospital-takeover/

Year old. One more hospital added to the list.

[rug]

24. You've disarmed me with Smaug. Carry on.

[AtheistCrusader]

25. Feeble deflection.

[rug]

27. Lame riposte.

[AtheistCrusader]

29. Oh noes, you've resorted to smilies. I am undone, sir.

Quit wasting everyone's time, let me know when you want to deal with the data provided by the sources I supplied.

[Humanist_Activist]

12. Its called "Redemptive Suffering" an irredeemably evil belief...

Particularly when its imposed on others through neglect.

Look it up here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redemptive_suffering

[skepticscott]

18. I reject the notion of "redemptive suffering"

Which is why I keep certain posters on ignore.

[BlueJazz]

26. Don't get me started with that piece of cruel, nutty, trash, Mother Teresa.

I'm sure everybody knows when she was sick, she landed in some of the best hospitals in the world. One complete phony.

[beam me up scottie]

28. Word.