86 thoughts on “As it turns out, the Pope is Catholic”

  1. We haven’t yet heard from the White House whether they assert the authority to kill the new Pope with a drone attack. “We have no plans to do that”, Jay Carney might answer.

    Also: the amount of Coca-Cola in those chalices? Less than 16 ounces.Report

      1. Except for contraception care for the ladies; one of the biggest health-care issues they face. I’m not really sure that constitutes ‘universal.’Report

    1. He’s 76. We’ll get to do this again soon. Heck, the “retirement” barrier has been broken. We might not even have to wait for him to die!

      Maybe the next one will support Abortion and/or SSM.Report

        1. Given that most Catholics are on board with birth control, it would be nice to see the Church catch up with them. It would also be nice to see them give women a larger role.Report

          1. liberal american catholics confuse me on this front – my wife is one of them. grape soda don’t taste like orange soda!

            why do people keep expecting last vestige of the roman empire to act like npr?Report

      2. You are aware, I trust, that conservative Catholics will insist that they are anti-abortion and anti-gay because they are pro-science.

        Right? I mean, you know that this is an argument, about the natural design of the body and whatnot?Report

    3. Have Popes in the last 100 years really been “anti-science”? (This is a partially serious question, but I was under the impression that the Catholic Church tended to embrace science much more than, say, evangelicals.)Report

      2. It’s a combination of “With God all things are possible even if they don’t make much sense to the average priest like quantum physics” and the total absence of the fundamentalist belief in the inerrancy of the Bible. Also no one wants to look heavy-handed after that whole Galileo episode.Report

          1. That probably sounded snarky. What I meant was, I didn’t quite understand what you were getting at in terms of whether it’s remarkable or not that this new Pope is “pro-science.” (A related question, not just to you but to everyone, is what does it mean to be “pro-science” in this sense.)Report

  3. The Blaze is worried that he might be a socialist redistributivist. Facebook condemns him for hating gay people.Report

      1. American Catholics care about the poor, they really do. Catholic Social Services actually does great work, though you may not know it. Tremendously effective organisation, flat, well-led, good finances, reaches out to people who genuinely need help.Report

      2. I’m not an expert on it, but it seems like the Catholic Church has been very good on poverty issues since Vatican II. Downright leftist compared to most of America. It comes of worshipping God rather than the Market.Report

      1. No. The Hitler Youth stuff was when he was a kid and had no consequences. The coziness with the Argentinian junta was when he was 41 and held a leadership post with the Jesuits, and resulted (at least) in two priests being kidnapped and tortured.Report

    2. Ne respìcias peccata nostra, sed fidem ecclesiae tuae

      == Look not upon our sins but upon the faith of your Church.

      Francis 1 is more of same. Yet another conniver with dictators, not the change the Church needs but a mere changing of the guard. Another feeble old prelate, stuck in his ways, totters up to the Lateran to be crowned. Hostile to progress, we shall see no good thing from this man.Report

      1. Less than 1% of Argentinians are indigenous. The vast majority of the country is European, though there has been some immigration from other South American countries over the past few decades.

        The idea that everything and everyone south of the Rio Grande is Mexican is really quite silly.Report

  6. I’m cautiously optimistic with this guy, which is a nice change from the vehemently pessimistic I was when the previous guy was elected. The question of his relationship with the junta is definitely troubling, but it seems like he may have at least partly redeemed himself with some of his subsequent actions in relation to the junta. And while he’s still severely homophobic, I’m guessing he is slightly less bad on that front than the competition.

    The much more important things about him seem to be that he’s got a healthy respect for civil institutions (he actually allowed a priest to be tried for a crime and sentenced to life in prison) and has an actual interest in the everyday lives of everyday Catholics. As a recovering Catholic, those strike me as important and welcome changes.Report

  7. I’m excited about the theological and social justice prospects of a Jesuit Argentinian who took the name of Francis; but, of course, as much as symbols and places of interpretation matter in Catholicism, his actions will define his papacy.Report

    1. Those Social Justice chumps up Guatemala way made a great many unnecessary martyrs and started palling around with some sinister ministers of their own.

      And do not confuse this guy with the Social Justice crowd. He is a colluder and conniver, a patsy and a mouthpiece, a weak-kneed bishop who saw evil and did nothing. Francis talks a good line but when the chips are down, he’s proven all too willing to let his own priests be hauled off to jail, where they’re found months later, drugged, naked and beaten.Report

      1. priests…drugged, naked and beaten

        Not that there’s anything wrong with that if that’s what one is into; but it sounds like a punishing regime of the same kinds of frankly-exhausting activities that inevitably made US religious figures like Ted, haggard.

        Also, the Sinister Ministers would be a great name for a band covering songs by The Fall.Report

      2. Francis talks a good line but when the chips are down, he’s proven all too willing to let his own priests be hauled off to jail, where they’re found months later, drugged, naked and beaten.

        Is it wrong my first reaction was “oh good, he’ll allow the bad priests to be arrested, then.”Report

        1. Per evangelica dicta / deleantur nostra delicta. == through the gospels / may our sins be erased.

          Hope does spring eternal when things are New and All That. Your sentiments are understandable. If ever there was a need for someone to clean out that speluncam latronum, that den (literally cave) of thieves described so well in Mark 11, it’s now.

          Don’t look for Francis to do it. He’s part of it. The Church has other problems beyond this kiddie-buggering business, bad as it is. The Vatican is up to its nates in a a huge cesspool of corruption and Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone is at the heart of it. The Vatican is a banana republic with the usual cast of characters we’ve come to expect in such situations. It’s just got better art on the walls.

          Et aperti sunt oculi amborum; cumque cognovissent se esse nudos, consuerunt folia ficus, et fecerunt sibi perizomata. == and their eyes were opened: they realised they were naked, and they gathered fig leaves and made for themselves aprons.Report

  8. I’ll take a wait and see approach. He said same sex marriage is a “machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God,” but he didn’t directly say that a lie should have a father and a mother, so I don’t see why he wouldn’t be at least open to the possibility of lies with two fathers or two mothers.Report

  9. Always two there are with the Popes, A master and an apprentice. No more, no less.

    But which has retired, the master or the apprentice.

    Hmmmm…Report

    1. Well, his selection shows that there’s a large faction in Rome that’s still seething over Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I, otherwise they wouldn’t have picked a pope from one of the few countries that’s in a bitter dispute with England. Fortunately the schism assures that England won’t respect a papal bull that declares the Falklands to be part of Argentina, so this move was just a slap in the face.Report

      3. It’s a tenuous connection, but both the Henry VIII/Falklands idea and Star Wars implied that there were ancient hatreds, very long-term plots, old grievances, and secret cabals seething away in the background, rotting the institution to the core. Was Pope Francis the hidden hand behind the failed Falklands War, like Senator Palpatine setting up the failed invasion of Naboo only so he could take power later?

        Yeah, it needs some fleshing out, but there are probably enough threads to work with for at least a page-length conspiracy, more if you include side-by-side photos of Popes and Star Wars characters.Report

  11. I’m not Catholic but I went to law school at a Jesuit university and always had a soft-spot for the social justice aspects of Jesuitism with the Berrigan brothers and all. The only prayer I remember hearing was at graduation and began with “God of Inclusion”.

    I’ve heard everything else that is already listed: Strongly anti-gay, possibly Junta loving, but also like many Jesuits, he is minded towards social justice in a liberal way and a possible “reformer”.Report

    1. That Social Justice Movement lasted right up until John Paul II sicced Bishop López Trujillo on them. There’s nobody left in the higher ranks of the Vatican who stood for social justice. When the name of Oscar Romero was bruited as a saint, (the Salvadorans already call him a saint) it was López Trujillo who shot that down.Report

      1. True but lowly priest Jesuits seem rather wonderful. At least the ones I have met and known and Daniel Berrigan*

        *I am pretty sure he is still a priestReport

        1. The Jesuits I’ve known were great scholars and intellectuals. Learned my Latin from a Jesuit.

          But I have a special place in my heart for the Congregation of the Holy Cross, the ones I met at Notre Dame’s Moreau Seminary.Report

  13. Yaaaaaawn. Or as my wife said, “With as much press that church is getting you would think everyone is Catholic and all this matters.”
    I would take a vow of poverty if I could live in a billion dollar house and wear necklaces worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unlike those psuedo christians with the big hats my problem would be that all the hungry people would bother me.Report

    2. Well, considering 1 out of 4 people in the US are self-identified as Catholic (whether lapsed or not), and the faster growing section of the US population are (overwhelmingly culturally Catholic) Hispanics, yes, it matters.Report

      1. Kolohe, Most of the catholics I know pay absolutely no attention to the pope. The women take birth control and none of them throw rocks at my lesbian daughter. I was dragged to church everytime they opened the doors when I was living with my parents. Now, the only time I go near a church is for weddings and funerals. So does it matter to which baptist is the big chief?Report

          1. It does matter to me. I believe the pope’s policies are doing a great deal of damage to women and children. I believe birth control for all women is a right, and considering the amount of people on this planet, an obligation. I believe that gays and lesbians should be free to love. I just wish that church would get somewhere near the twentieth century and give rights to all. I wish they would come clean about the true numbers of pedophiles they moved from parish to parish. I have a negative amount of respect for the catholic leaders.
            I did not mean to offend anybody, I just don’t believe they deserve all the press they get and until they start to live a moral life have no right to tell me how to live mine.Report

    1. 31313 —

      Hinesville, GA.

      Or the new Leggo Mindstorm gyroscope.

      It’s also an error code in a home-health care billing system that means the means the billing institution has a signed release to share information concerning a patient but that another field suggests the shared information can’t be used to resolve the medical claim; so the don’t agree with one another.Report

  16. Congrats to Francis and the rest of the nominees.

    Does this mean that I can now return to my regular scheduled not really being aware of pope-y stuff till we do this again?Report

  17. Every cardinal has a Wikipedia page with a quote about abortion and a quote about the poor. There was no doubt that whoever was elected would be seen as a “social conservative” with a strong concern for the poor. The press understands these things not at all.

    There are telling details about his character, I’m sure, but I don’t know what they are. I’m not going to guess based on his ethnicity or the political problems that have taken place in his country.Report

      1. We all come at things from our own perspectives. Me, I’m a Catholic because of beliefs. Not personalities, not sense of belonging, not tradition. So for me, the particular pope doesn’t have much meaning. And race and cultural pride doesn’t do anything for me, so I’m projecting my indifference onto the cardinals. So I’m sure I’m distorting things myself. But when we try to create a whole personality for a character based on a few facts, that’s the attitude I associate with my least favorite part of politics, and also with pro wrestling. Bush wasn’t a conservative cowboy with daddy issues; The Undertaker isn’t an undead biker; Francis isn’t whatever Blaise was accusing him of.Report

  19. This just in:

    Black smoke has been coming out of the White House, which means we still don’t have a budget.Report

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