Poor old Joe is in trouble again for wanting to cannibalize Jesus while being a supporter of women’s rights. Here he is making this long trip to be part of the pope’s installation and they don’t even want him to sup blood and dine on flesh because he thinks a woman should be able to choose whether or not she has a baby. Tempting to think this is just a few renegade anti-women priests in charge of anti-mother organizations but no the pope himself has made it clear in the past how he feels about the privilege of ritualized cannibalism as moral leverage.
Like Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, Francis has spoken strongly against abortion, and as the president of Argentina’s bishops when he was the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he warned against distributing communion to pro-abortion rights politicians.
Frankly, it beats the crap out of me how dining on an adult living body as real flesh and blood, miraculous realism, is any better than allowing a mother to actually have a choice in whether she wants to birth either a few cells or even a baby-to-be whatever its age. Seems like cannibalism for god is just murder of an adult, living god, in the flesh. Even symbolically the whole thing is repugnant from a hypocrisy and health viewpoint. I mean I personally don’t care if humans eat humans, especially in survival situations, but humans have rather nasty bacteria as such and should be cooked well and not eaten raw as in communion.
I better understood Germain Greer who said a woman hasn’t become free until she has tasted her own blood as a means of counteracting societies’ asinine ashamed and dirty attitude towards menstruation. Religiosocial concern making women unclean and emphasizing that women are not in control of their body–shouldn’t male wet dreams be reviled as well? Or defecating?
Taking this Catholic logic as valid with good premise and understanding that much birth control is the aborting of babies most Catholics shouldn’t be receiving communion, according to the pope.
Ironic that our new pope while praising the poor still believes that population issues or the mother’s right to choose birth has no influence on economic well being. Catholics really can have it both ways. Like the cardinal that insists that pedophilia is a disease and shouldn’t be punished as a crime. In which case the church is a treatment center and priests should be under regulatory authority as medical practitioners.
The pope coming from the land of magical realism can appreciate cannibalism and mother hatred not as hypocrisy but another of god’s amazing ironies to inspire us.
If the purpose of the church is to attract sinners, which we all are supposedly, to counteract moral turpitude and poor impulse control then you would actually want the mother supporters to attend in the trust that pneumocentric passion would inflame and inspire them to improve their lives. No, union is a reward that only the worthy can attend though no one is worthy by definition.
The only purpose I can see in forbidding old Joe to sup on uncooked blood and flesh is to shame him with emotional torture into renouncing having an opinion contrary to current dogma as a lesson to all the rest. I don’t think he shames that easily. But I am afraid that many people will be fooled by the faith of communion as earthly reward for following cosmic charlatan canon.
Whatever happened to the good old days of the Inquisition where you just tortured people until they pleaded belief in Christ and then killed them anyway knowing that the body was unimportant and they were now, finally, going to unearthly communion? The pagan urge to sacrifice animals for redistributive feasting just won’t go away.
I have a Suffolk Punch draft horse that has come up with Squamous Cell Carcinoma, a growth on her third eye lid that could cost her her eye. Her, Katherine (Katie Bug) operation is on Monday and I have got to make money to pay for it so today’s post is brief.
Francis for Francis of Assisi was a brilliant choice for the church. Out of country with Italian heritage. Homophobic, hater of contraceptive, yet living in one of the most cosmopolitan cites of the world, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Home of one of the most amazing writers ever Jorge Borges who was himself beautifully conflicted with intellectualism and spiritual, magical reality both as spiritual resolution and political commentary.
As a Jesuit, Francis’s job is evangelism. The Jesuits were created to spread the word through the world. The original Jesuit, Francis of Xavier, travelled the mideast and began the first Inquisition in India. He was disgusted with all of the nonChristian idolatry and demanded that any architecture, monument, image nonChristian be destroyed period.
The Jesuits were famous for self flagellating and bodily abuse to prove the body is irrelevant. Their vicious escalation of native abuse to build church after church larger than their neighbors led to some beautiful buildings at the cost of enough blood to flood the floors.
Their hatred of the body allowed them to abuse, punish, and beseech all in sight to seek god because they too were wiling to raise blood on their skin and wail in profound screams at the pain as a peon to come hither and see how good god must be if they are willing to tear their own flesh in surrender.
How could you possibly care whether or not Christ was crucified when you beat your own body to a pulp? And cherish the poor because they are really rich and should always remain poor or lose their richness.
So horrid were their antics that the movement was stopped for a brief period until a more kind and gentle observance could be meted to a cringing public.
Francis of Assisi on the other hand spoke to birds. Hmm, right. Supposedly Francis sought to most emulate Christ’s teachings whatever that means–peace, love, brotherhood, hatred of the body. Francis venerated the poor. They were blessed. More crap against the body. It’s not how you have fared in life it’s that your spirit lives in god. Poverty is good. It means you haven’t been seduced by the body, by worldly matters. You need nothing in life, only god.
Animals too. Blessed as stewards our duty under god is to care for the animals. Why can’t the animals care for themselves? This arrogance that we are boss of everything drives me crazy. It’s never about equality but hierarchy and the only question is about status, authority, and how to pretend that we have more power than anything else.
Luckily, in a bizarre, twisted way bacteria, viruses, and cancer show we are not the top of the food chain and pretending to diss the body and claim it is all spiritual denies the reality that nature supports and destroys us. We are part of the world not masters of it or superior to it because we are just spirits in a body on vacation on Earth.
Either way, Francis as a Christian, either one, is bastard philosophy born of untoward circumstances. But at least a real bastard had a loving mother–oh, wait she might have been prevented from using contraception or having an abortion. She didn’t want the child, she had to have it–there’s love for you–that’s why “fucked” is a pernicious degrading cuss word. She was fucked and too bad. How do you explain to an unplanned child it’s just spirit until conception then it is all body? But Christ loves you?
It doesn’t even matter as it’s all about controlling the body. No doubt born in the unresolved defiance at being poor or disenfranchised. If you can’t get what you need, create a phantasm that allows you to think that you are indeed the master and not the slave.
No one is either a slave or a master. We are born in contest to live as well as we can among others. We have it in our hands to change the world, change the stars, yet we spill our courage in pointless ephemerals of getting even as a spirit rather than fighting for justice here or spending time to learn what it takes to succeed here.
We used to joke at how monasteries were near nunneries for a reason–we joked because we thought the escapades volitional. With revelations of severe nun abuse, joking about Catholic sex is not funny. Boarding schools and orphanages are suspect. It had to be true that girls and boys were abused by nuns.
A commission investigating abuse of children linked to Dutch Roman Catholic institutions says girls were sexually abused by members of the clergy in their homes and in church, while they suffered physical abuse and intimidation at the hands of nuns at homes for young women.
The difference here is the Dutch are cleaning their own house. It may be because of the rampage of lawsuits but it’s still better to come forward.
The commission, led by former Hague mayor Wim Deetman, was funded by the Catholic church. In preliminary conclusions in December 2011 it estimated that up to 20,000 children were molested at Catholic boarding schools between 1945 and 2010, and “several tens of thousands” faced abuse of some kind.
Monday’s follow-up study focused more on Catholic girls and young women, who in addition to boarding schools were often sent to homes for unwed mothers run by nuns if they became pregnant without being married.
“In cases of physical violence without sexual abuse, both new and previous complaints point toward primarily female perpetrators, mostly nuns who worked as educators or caregivers,” Deetman wrote in his conclusions.
“In heavy cases of sexual abuse, the perpetrators were primarily male.”
Good grief, several tens of thousands!
In a response, the umbrella organization of the Dutch Catholic Church and religious institutions apologized.
“Not only the doers are blameworthy, but also those who were to ensure things went properly in the homes and institutions where the girls were sheltered,” they said in a statement. “Violating the physical and spiritual integrity of any person, especially that of children, is under all circumstances repulsive.”
They have committed forty million dollars to victims but how on Earth could they ever resolve more than a few cases?
The commission has already turned over to police only the handful of abuse cases it has uncovered that it thinks may be prosecutable. It recommends mediation for the rest.
This is not some Dickensonian cultural thing where we can say rape, abuse, and beatings were common way long before modern sensibilities. This is in our lifetime in so-called modern Europe. This culture of abuse, even by nuns was mocked in the movie Blues Brothers. It was far more than rapping on the knuckles with a stick. I only wonder why they would want to save the orphanage–is an abusive guardian better than no guardian at all? Is it like those stupid bad life and abortion-rape stories where abuse is better than dying and failed abortion means you lived, whoopee, and proves abortion is evil because otherwise you would have died (never been born)?
I once knew a woman who had been abused by Catholics and yet she still revered the church. She gave me a rosary of a famous Native American healer in the hopes that it would spark some sort of accepting guidance. It never did–too much like a blind person saying blindness caused them to learn the Blues, whoopee. It’s good to make best of a bad situation but that doesn’t mean it was really a good situation.
She still thought bringing Catholicism to the natives was more important than the abuse they received, along with her. Her faith comforted her and faith was true. For me it forced me to examine psychology to explain such things as capture bonding, inculcation, loyalty, personality development, role solidarity, and proved that however we are raised we tend to hold that dear. Those who escape and criticize are not merely courageous but conflicted.
“She taught me about theology, the Beatles, Carl Jung and social justice,” says Hidalgo.
And, she says, during overnight stays at Porte’s family home and the old Marianites of Holy Cross motherhouse on Woodland Drive in New Orleans, Porte taught her about sex, coaxing the 12-year-old into a physical relationship that lasted more than two years. Toward the end of the relationship, as Porte got more brazen, the contact occurred in the middle of the day at Porte’s Opelousas convent, Hidalgo says.
“It would generally start with her requesting that I rub her back or stomach,” Hidalgo says. “Then she would take over, guiding my hand over her body. When I would pull away from her, she would cry. In guilt, I would reach out to comfort her, and again the sexual contact would start.”
The grooming began inconspicuously, Hidalgo recalls: It started with a card that read, “You are special … as a student and a friend.” Then they began sitting next to each other during lunch, talking during recess and after school. Eventually, there were nightly phone calls, letter and poetry writing and gifts.
“The general assumption in the community was that she was mentoring me for religious life,” says Hidalgo.
The abuse was far and away more harsh than public institutions. It wasn’t just that way then.
Above all, they tell of a complete lack of love in institutions where bewildered children could not comprehend why they were being treated in such a way or why their families had left them in the hands of the nuns.
In the words of one man who had been put into a home after being abandoned by his family: “Some people say to me, ‘Well, that’s what it was like everywhere then’, but it wasn’t. I went to a strict local school and the belt was used frequently, but nothing like on the same scale that the nuns used to beat us.
“It could happen for any thing, any time of the night or day. They would use canes, sticks, the leather belts around their waists. You could be hit for talking in church. For messing about in church. For being late for prayer.
“Looking back, I think one of the reasons was that the nuns weren’t happy and decided we damn well weren’t going to be either. My time there has deeply affected my life. I’ve never found it easy forming relationships and had periods when I’ve had to go to hospital and had all sorts of problems.”
Another study shows Mother Teresa to have been a fraud, less interested in helping the poor than proselytizing and fighting abortion. There seems to be little new here but the vastness of Teresa’s positive image requires a little adjustment still. It’s not merely to expose her more but to show the horror of withholding money, medicine, and material in the certainty that poverty and illness are god’s will and should not be challenged, just smile, smile, smile.
She was “anything but a saint,” the Canadian study authors found, as Newser reports. In fact, she found beauty in watching people suffer, the authors say.
It being a snow day yesterday and a late school start here I took the opportunity to revisit Hitchen’s “The Missionary Position.” She did indeed believe the poor were blessed, “kissed by Christ.” Nor did she believe they needed to be cured. Though she had access to millions, 100 or so, she refused to provide drugs or tests to evaluate care and cure. She eschewed cures for proof that there will be poor and as proof that god intervenes when he wants and to those upon whom he decides. We should not judge, only smile. We have no right to judge god’s plan with human intervention. Better make them worse to garner sympathy that the only happiness lies in promoting god’s will as perfect, untouched.
The research paper claims that the celebrated nun had 517 missions in 100 countries at the time of her death, but that the majority of patients were not cared for properly and many were left to die, according to the university website. In addition, the Vatican is said to have ignored a doctor’s assertions when it concluded that a Mother Teresa miracle healed a woman who had tuberculosis and an ovarian cyst.
Two-thirds of the people coming to these missions hoped to a find a doctor to treat them, while the other third lay dying without receiving apt care.
I have an Aunt who does not believe in welfare, social, or economic programs for the poor. There will always be poor means you can’t eliminate poverty. Such a pointless effort that only individual solicitations are possible. Teresa did not use the money she had to alleviate suffering. She did not believe there was any material answer to their plight. Rather an ongoing mumble jumble about love and forgiveness. Don’t judge apparently means don’t triage the disease.
According to the study, the doctors observed a significant lack of hygiene, even unfit conditions and a shortage of actual care, food and painkillers. They say that the problem was not a paucity of funds as the Order of the Missionaries of Charity successfully raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Researchers said that when it came to her own treatment, “she received it in a modern American hospital”.
What a great way to save money. We don’t need medicine, doctors, or even a yard and a fence. Just some nasty building and cots. Let them live out their fetid lives in misery and then refill the cots. Maybe this was her secret way of reducing population? Naww, she early on demeaned any temperance of the debate on abortion by insisting that any and all contraception was abortion. That even the many women raped in mideast wars should bear their children. Orphanages were her answer to unwanted children. Yet, her small orphanage did little to alleviate the many many children that remain on the street in permanent destitution. God’s will. If he wants them to have homes, they’ll appear.
The researchers say Muggeridge had decided to promote Teresa. In 1969, he made a eulogistic film on the missionary, promoting her by attributing to her the “first photographic miracle”, when it should have been attributed to the new film stock being marketed by Kodak.
Following her death, the Vatican decided to waive the usual five-year waiting period to open the beatification process. According to the researchers, one of the miracles attributed to Mother Theresa is the healing of Monica Besra, who suffered from intense abdominal pain, after a medallion blessed by her was placed on Besra’s abdomen.
Larivee said, “Her doctors thought otherwise: the ovarian cyst and the tuberculosis from which she suffered were healed by the drugs they had given her. The Vatican, nevertheless, concluded that it was a miracle. Mother Teresa’s popularity was such that she had become untouchable for the population, which had already declared her a saint.”
So when they did give drugs and the patient survived it was a miracle. Couldn’t it have been the drugs? Maybe they thought there weren’t drugs, the doctor was using a placebo. Good enough. Poof proof.
One of the more prophetic stories in Hitch’s book is the secret commission of baptisms. They would ask a dying person if they wanted a ticket to heaven, if the answer was yes, they would wipe their brow with a wet rag, mumble the creed, and baptize the Hindu or Muslim without their knowledge of a ceremony having been performed–after all baptism is the ticket to heaven–they said yes. Teresa’s monument says “Today I am going to heaven.” I guess that’s the sine quo non of the good life and any cheat to get there will do. Well, it probably was whistling in the grave yard since her private papers evidence doubt, much doubt as to why the poor aren’t cared for by god.
God needs the poor in order for us to choose. That’s it. Unlike Jesus that just wanted to help the poor, faking a few miracles himself, god allows the poor that we might see goodness. She did not say AIDs was the scourge of god but she did say that it seemed like divine retribution for sinful sex. In the midst of religious disease all roads lead to god’s perfect goodness.
The Times of India, reporting on the controversial essay, wrote that the authors asserted Mother Teresa saw beauty in the downtrodden’s suffering and was far more willing to pray for them than provide practical medical care. Meanwhile, researchers say, the Vatican engaged in a PR ploy as it threw aside concerns about her suspicious financial dealings and contacts to forgo the five-year waiting period to beatify her.
Quick, the church is dying in Rome and moving to Africa and the America’s. They needed another Euro Saint quick. Of course John Paul created so many saints during his tenure the bar was very low. Who would pick on a little old lady that constantly spoke of love, forgiveness, and attended only to the poor? Miracles be damned, full steam ahead.
Pray your hate away yields to pray your disease away. Too bad the poor can’t sue or find enough pro bono lawyers to extract some of that fortune for malpractice, neglect, and abuse. No, it’s abortion that’s evil; now, there’s some materialism she can get behind. From her Nobel speech.
Today, abortion is the worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace.
Huhh? They wonder why we call her a crazy bitch.
One summer the sisters in a Rome novitiate chose to can their bounty of surplus tomatoes. Mother Teresa on a visit was displeased. Missionaries of Charity do not store things but must rely on God’s providence. This Jesuit and Franciscan attitude of going into the wilderness without concern and counting on god’s providence causes a lot of missionaries to die but the certainty of their supposed care converts many. It’s a great PR message if you suspend the need for sanity. Unfortunately this virus of faith causes others to assume they will be cared for and to deny any kind of material support–give em a bible and not a blanket. Seek death and be free.
It’s not over. I am betting on the new pope being a black man who is homophobic, anti contraception, and pro poverty.
Commentaries note that she inspired humanitarians. Isn’t that why they invented the devil? Let’s acknowledge that Teresa is satanic and then I can go on with how she inspires goodness–go the other way.
Here’s Hitch on the bitch. Just so we never forget.
Aaah, but he’s a closeted gay, fighting his sinful adulterous urges, not daring to act on them.
In a past column, Sullivan concluded that it “seems pretty obvious” that “the current Pope is a gay man,” albeit one who has not “explored his sexuality, or has violated his own strictures on the matter.” Detailing the close relationship between His Holiness and the papal right-hand man, Sullivan’s column cites Colm Tóibín’s tabloid-esque review of Angelo Quattrocchi’s book The Pope Is Not Gay.
The propinquity issues must be agonizing, a bittersweet agony. I chafe because they perpetuate their preference as a sin, though they agonize themselves. Would I pity a self flagellating Jesuit or Muslim or would I mock the religion that encourages the abuse?
From the review:
“When asked if he felt nervous in the presence of the Holy Father, Gänswein replied that he sometimes did and added: ‘But it is also true that the fact of meeting each other and being together on a daily basis creates a sense of “familiarity”, which makes you feel less nervous. But obviously I know who the Holy Father is and so I know how to behave appropriately. There are always some situations, however, when the heart beats a little stronger than usual.’
It’s a manly love, a sliding mark on the continuum of male sexuality.
Gaenswein’s proposed living arrangement is just more proof for Sullivan that the pope is closeted. “This man – clearly in some kind of love with Ratzinger (and vice-versa) will now be working for the new Pope as secretary in the day and spending the nights with the Pope Emeritus,” Sullivan wrote this week. “This is not the Vatican. It’s Melrose Place.”
The pope’s day begins with the seven o’clock Mass, then he says prayers with his breviary, followed by a period of silent contemplation before our Lord. Then we have breakfast together, and so I begin the day’s work by going through the correspondence. Then I exchange ideas with the Holy Father, then I accompany him to the ‘Second Loggia’ for the private midday audiences. Then we have lunch together; after the meal we go for a little walk before taking a nap. In the afternoon I again take care of the correspondence. I take the most important stuff which needs his signature to the Holy Father.
Having the pope out of the limelight will allow for some more sweet relaxing time. Romance originally was coined to describe inaccessible, distant agonizing true love.
Sullivan’s column is more grist for the Vatican’s gay rumor wheel, coming on the heels of a bombshell article in Italian paper La Repubblica, which claimed the pope’s resignation was influenced by a damning internal document that reportedly cited powerful lobbying influences in the Vatican, including a gay lobby.
50% of priests are gay? It’s like party time for repenting sinners that will never get cured.
Despite this, evidence from several studies has shown that there are higher than average numbers of homosexual men (active and non-active) within the Catholic priesthood and higher orders; estimates presented in Donald B. Cozzens’ book The Changing Face of the Priesthood range from 23–58%.[6]
It would be comforting to think that gay men entered priest hood to be able to be gay openly, more comfortably, but sadly they seem to be cloistering themselves in guilt and shame while still having to experience their feelings. Do they enter priesthood to fulfill closeted energy or to have access theotherapy against guilt? Sadly, religion is a lightning rod for sinners who seek the church for support.
Many will say the pope is not gay but well protected, well cared for. How on earth would an issue like sexuality be such a huge issue unless they were fighting the urges within themselves. So much so they overshadow any possible acceptance.
I could hope for a Catholicism, and Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, that didn’t hijack sexuality, and allowed all people to have loving relationships without fear. I eagerly await a time when I can write about something besides private lives, where I have to pry into sexual hypocrisy to dismantle religious oppression.
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Poor old Joe is in trouble again for wanting to cannibalize Jesus while being a supporter of women’s rights. Here he is making this long trip to be part of the pope’s installation and they don’t even want him to sup blood and dine on flesh because he thinks a woman should be able to choose whether or not she has a baby. Tempting to think this is just a few renegade anti-women priests in charge of anti-mother organizations but no the pope himself has made it clear in the past how he feels about the privilege of ritualized cannibalism as moral leverage.
