Vatican Cardinal: Pope Francis Is ‘Ice-Cold, Cunning Machiavellian’

Asking the important questions: Is the Pope Catholic?

Is the Pope Catholic is not the question: is he Christian?

Pope Francis: 'There Is No Hell'

From Ace of Spades:

I'm not a Catholic, but seriously folks... Who honestly thought a South American Marxist would make a good religious head?

Christ died for our sins.  His followers through the ages have lived through persecution, even unto death.  It has survived and even thrived through bad leaders, but the faith lives on.

"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39 NIV)

And all the people said: AMEN.

Pope Francis grieves, prays for atheist revolutionary Castro

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis said the death of Cuba's revolutionary leader Fidel Castro was "sad news" and that he was grieving and praying for his repose.

Francis expressed his condolences in a Spanish-language message to Fidel's brother, President Raul Castro on Saturday.

The pope, who met Fidel Castro when he visited Cuba last year, said he had received the "sad news" and added: "I express to you my sentiments of grief."

Fidel Castro, who was a professed atheist, was baptized as a Catholic and educated in schools run by the Jesuits, the religious order of which the pope is a member.

Asking the eternal question : Is the Pope Catholic?

The same old Francis: Neither Cuba’s repressed nor victims of sexual abuse receive Pope’s support

The Pope left Mexico without meeting with any of the victims of sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic clergy. Relatives of nearly fifty indigenous children in Oaxaca, whose sexual assaults by a priest were documented by the Oaxacan Forum on Children, had asked to be received. A group of victims of similar events in San Luis Potosí also asked to meet with him. All to no avail.

In October of last year the Pope granted a plenary indulgence to the Congregation of the Legionnaires of Christ, founded by the Mexican priest Marcial Maciel, a notorious pederast. The congregation had been through internal investigations and asked victims for forgiveness, but few expected the Pope to be so indulgent.

The visits to Mexico by his predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict, were organized by the Congregation of the Legionnaires of Christ, one of the Church’s richest and most powerful organisations. Even before the Pope undertook his trip, with a stopover in Havana, the Vatican had ruled out any meetings with victims of sexual predators donning the clerical robe. In his speeches he condemned trafficking in drugs and people, and corruption and violence, but did not say a word about these victims and incidents.

Cubans recognise this Pope perfectly: he is the same man who refused to receive the “Ladies in White” and who failed to condemn the circumstances under which people languish on the island. He is the same Francis who forgets about these victims, but is quick to pardon those who wronged them.

Media Loses Its Mind Over Pope's Secret Visit with Kim Davis; So Vatican Expresses a "Sense of Regret"

Who does the Pope think he is?  The Almighty Liberal Press?

Holy water: Democratic congressman drinks from pope’s discarded glass

This is weird and more than a little disturbing.  These people are part of the Ruling class.

Representative Bob Brady, D-Pa., drinks out of the glass that Pope Francis drank out of during his speech to Congress Sept. 25, 2015. (ABC News, courtesy of Rep. Bob Brady)

Vatican has most restrictive immigration policy

Only about 450 of its 800 or so residents actually hold citizenship, according to a 2012 study by the Library of Congress. That study said citizens are either church cardinals who reside in the Vatican, the Holy See’s diplomats around the world, and those who have to reside in the city because of their jobs, such as the Swiss Guard.

Spouses and children who live in the city because of their relationship with citizens — including the Swiss Guard and workers such as the gardener — have also been granted citizenship. But that means few of the Vatican’s citizens are women.

Of course.  Do as I say, not as I do.

Pope’s encyclical on climate change reads like the Unabomber Manifesto

“The idea of promoting a different cultural paradigm and employing technology as a mere instrument is nowadays inconceivable. The technological paradigm has become so dominant that it would be difficult to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them without being dominated by their internal logic. It has become countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology, of its costs and its power to globalize and make us all the same.”

Pure Kaczynski, yeah? The next sentence could easily be “So that’s why I moved to a cabin in the woods and started mailing bombs to scientists.” Let me give you another: Unabomber or Unapapa?

“The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behaviour that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity. Of course the system does satisfy many human needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extent that it is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the human being.”

That one’s Ted - or have I switched them around?

PAKISTAN HEAT WAVE KILLS 1,000 - NY Times & Pope Francis are OK with it.

PAKISTAN HEAT WAVE KILLS 1,000: “By Thursday, the death toll from the oppressive heat wave in Sindh province topped 1,000,” CNN reports. “Daily power outages, as the city tries to keep up with the demands of 16 million residents, mean the cold storage unit that houses bodies is hot and sticky.”

Back in 2012, the New York Times tut-tutted from their air-conditioned Eighth Avenue skyscraper, “Is it a good goal for everyone in the world to have access to air-conditioning — like clean water or the Internet? Or is it an unsustainable luxury, which air-conditioned societies should be giving up or rationing?” So presumably, they’re OK with the death toll in Pakistan, right?

In sharp contrast, in her syndicated column this week Michelle Malkin writes, “Unlike Pope Francis [and Pinch Sulzberger’s cohorts – Ed], I believe that air-conditioning and the capitalists responsible for the technology are blessings to the world:”

There's nothing easier than averting your eyes from mass deaths as you sit in your air conditioned offices and decry the use of fossil fuels ... the kind that allow people to live.

The Scientific Pantheist Who Advises Pope Francis

St. Francis of Assisi’s hymn Laudato Si’ spoke of “Brothers” Sun and Fire and “Sisters” Moon and Water, using these colorful phrases figuratively, as a way of praising God’s creation. These sentimental words so touched Pope Francis that he named his encyclical after this canticle (repeated in paragraph 87 of the Holy Father’s letter).

Neither Pope Francis nor St. Francis took the words literally, of course. Neither believed that fire was alive and could be talked to or reasoned with or, worse, worshiped. Strange, then, that a self-professed atheist and scientific advisor to the Vatican named Hans Schellnhuber appears to believe in a Mother Earth.

Confirmation bias happens when a scientist manipulates an experiment so that he gets the outcome he hoped he would get. When Schellnhuber invites only believers in tipping-points-of-doom to characterize their guesses of this doom, his view that the doom is real will be confirmed. And when he publishes a paper that says, “Scientists say world is doomed” the public and politicians believe it. Scientists skeptical of the doom are dismissed because they are skeptics. This isn’t good science. It’s really bad religion, and a pagan one at that.

Global warming research is characterized by an insider’s club. If you believe, you’re in. If you doubt, you’re out. This is also so at the Pontifical Academies of Science where Schellnhuber was appointed by Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo. The bishop locked scientists with contrary views out of the process, scientists he has repeatedly dismissed as “funded by the oil industry.” Given this, how likely is it that the Holy Father was fully aware of the views of the chief scientist who advised him?

The Pope joins the EU in a sad world of make-believe

Stop the World , I want to get off!

When future historians come to look back on our age, few things will puzzle them more than the extent to which our politics became so dominated and bedevilled by two belief-systems, each based on an obsessive attempt to force into being an immensely complicated political construct which defied economic, psychological and scientific reality.

One of these was the peculiar way in which Europe’s politicians, with full support from the US, had set out to unite their continent under a form of supra-national government unlike anything the world had seen before. The other was the way those same politicians fell for the idea not just that human activities were disastrously changing Earth’s climate, but that by taking the most drastic measures they could somehow change it back again.

Although for quite a time these two belief systems seemed to carry all before them, each was essentially based on a fantasy view of the world; and it is in the nature of trying to act out a fantasy that it must eventually overreach itself, to the point where it collides unpleasantly with reality.

...We see it in the desperation of the Greeks to escape from the trap created by forcing them, through corruption and dishonesty, into the euro. ...

Similarly, the last desperate throw by the EU and the US to achieve a world agreement next December to “halt climate change” is not going to succeed, not just because the “science” on which it is based is so increasingly questionable, but because the emerging powers of the East, led by India and China, are simply not prepared to go along with it. If the West wishes to commit economic suicide, so be it. In their own national interest, they are not willing to follow.

The Pope and global warming

The Pope has pronounced global warming to be man-made and a bad thing.

The reaction is interesting.

Whose mind, exactly, is the Pope going to convince?

The people who are most vociferously cheering the Pope are non-religious humanists who have no use for religion except as a political weapon.

In place of an omnipotent God they worship themselves. Many have a childlike faith in “science.”

Will he convince academics for whom religious people are a distant tribe suitable for anthropological study?  Most are already true believers. 

Will Catholics who use birth control - against church teaching - be convinced that the gasoline that gets them from place to place is evil?

Will the Pope persuade Protestants who make up half of America’s Christians and who broke from Rome about 500 years ago?

At one time the Pope had political powers because the Christian world was Catholic and the Church could keep consign your immortal soul to Hell. Today the concept of Hell is so passé that it’s rarely even brought up in church. For many church-goers God is not a just God.  Instead He is "Love" - the Almighty Patsy.

The Catholic Church has temporal power when it speaks to spiritual matters. It speaks to a widespread universal yearning when it addresses issues like freedom.  That’s what gave John Paul II the moral authority to help bring down Communism in Easter Europe.

But when it enters into secular territory, even as it tries to couch its views in moral terms, the disguise is flimsy.  The Catholic church has no particular expertise in the realm of science and endangers it's claims to a higher morality when it enters disputes about the morass of competing facts regarding global warming.

The Pope calls for charity and the impulse to help the poor are universally admired.  The public, especially the American public remains incredibly charitable. Truly religious people have always railed against the rampant consumerism that is so much a part of modern, and need we say, Liberal culture. You will not hear a sermon in church at Christmas time to go out and spend money to buy stuff.  That's for popular - secular - culture.  That's a culture where money, goods, envy and the desire to divide the spoils is the real – but unadmitted - core of the issue of income disparity.

Liberals are happy to have found a Pope who agrees with them that fossil fuel is evil. They have also found themselves championing men who claim to be women and Caucasians who claim to be Black. They are also the champions of women of easy virtue who change their minds about sexual encounters and claim to have been raped. I’m really rather glad they are not on my side.

As for me, a Protestant Christian, I hope this Pope does not do too much damage to his brand of Christianity.