The Pope
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As an aside, of course, some small farmers are tennants only, and so may well come round, but anyone with a freehold would be expected to oppose us on general principle.You're right, the key is association, and a worldwide association. We can't have a small farmer misusing land to frustrate a democratically agreed plan. We wouldn't need to send in cosacks to take their estates, the first step would be simply to make enforcement of property right impossible in law, followed by actively destroying the food market through production, using any large estates we (the democratic free association) have taken over. There'll be no need of grain seizures or troops to take over the farms.We are the propertyless working class, and our aim is to abolish the distinction between town and country, we can't do that by siding with property owners, whom the Pope is trying to keep onside with his encycle.
“And behind all this pain, death and destruction there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea called ‘the dung of the devil’ – an unfettered pursuit of money”, the Pope said.When money becomes a person’s god, he said, greed becomes the chief motivator of what people do, permit or support. In the end, he said, “it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and women, it destroys human fraternity, it sets people against one another and, as we clearly see, it even puts at risk our common home.”The Pope and the Catholic Church do not have a programme or “recipe” for solving the problems of injustice and poverty in the world, he said. But it is clear that the economy should be “at the service of peoples. Human beings and nature must not be at the service of money.” Pope Francis said the goal must be the creation of “a truly communitarian economy,“………..an economy where human beings, in harmony with nature, structure the entire system of production and distribution in such a way that the abilities and needs of each individual find suitable expression in social life,” he said. http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2015/07/10/capitalism-driven-by-greed-is-enslaving-the-poor-and-harming-the-earth-says-francis/
Dave B wrote:“And behind all this pain, death and destruction there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea called ‘the dung of the devil’ – an unfettered pursuit of money”, the Pope said.When money becomes a person’s god, he said, greed becomes the chief motivator of what people do, permit or support. In the end, he said, “it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and women, it destroys human fraternity, it sets people against one another and, as we clearly see, it even puts at risk our common home.”The Pope and the Catholic Church do not have a programme or “recipe” for solving the problems of injustice and poverty in the world, he said. But it is clear that the economy should be “at the service of peoples. Human beings and nature must not be at the service of money.” Pope Francis said the goal must be the creation of “a truly communitarian economy,“………..an economy where human beings, in harmony with nature, structure the entire system of production and distribution in such a way that the abilities and needs of each individual find suitable expression in social life,” he said. http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2015/07/10/capitalism-driven-by-greed-is-enslaving-the-poor-and-harming-the-earth-says-francis/That is all bullshit, they are the first center of money accumulation, the Vatican is a multinational corporation like any other, and he is one of the CEOThey are just trying to expand their clienteles in Latin America, .and to be forgiven for all the killing perpetrated by the Catholic church in Latin American against the natives, and to continue business as usual Bishop Romero had a better social view and they do not support him, on the contrary, they let him to be killed by the Salvadorian's death squad, and there were many others like Romero in the Caribbean that were expelled by them because they did not support any dictatorship, and several were killed too. He is just a chameleon
A golden thread links Pope Francis to Oscar Romero, the murdered archbishop whose beatification the Pope ordered to take place last weekend, to the rapturous acclaim of the people of El Salvadorand the wider world.The thread is that of liberation theology, the movement that swept through Latin America, and then other parts of the world, 40 years ago. It maintains that the Gospel contains a preference for poor people — and insists that the Church has a duty to work for political and economic as well as spiritual change.Conservatives in the Catholic Church do not like this. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-vallely/pope-francis_2_b_7443834.html http://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/dec/07/italy.theobserver Also Pope excommunicates Italian Mafia members http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/21/world/pope-mafia-excommunication/ the pope is probably positioning himself somewhere around the rightwing of the second century early christianity. Ie Tertulian’s AD 195 Apologeticus. With its ‘leftwing’; ………or because our brotherly love continues even to the division of our estates, which is a test few brotherhoods will bear, and which commonly divides the dearest unions among you……….But we Christians look upon ourselves as one body, informed as it were by one soul; and being thus incorporated by love, we can never dispute what we are to bestow upon our own members.Accordingly among us all things are in common,1excepting wives ; in this alone we reject communion.. http://www.tertullian.org/articles/reeve_apology.htm and the rightwing position summarised in wiki. ……for it is not in their power to give Caesar health, wealth and power. What they can offer to him they do through the use of prayer, because only God has absolute power and from him comes the emperor. He alone brings up empires and takes them down and only he is responsible for granting Caesar power, health and wealth; "We ask for them [emperors] a long life, undisturbed power, security at home, brave armies, a faithful Senate, an upright people, a peaceful world, and everything for which a man or a Caesar prays".[17]Tertullian affirms that by praying for him, Christians are effectively putting Roman interests in God’s hands as well as commending Caesar to God. In no way do their meetings endanger the state, nor do they involve plotting against the emperor, the senate, or the empire. Their treatment of the Roman Empireexhibits the same respect and well wishes that they display upon to their neighbor. Any other behavior would not be the sign of a good Christian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apologeticus Although obviously all ‘christian’ writers of the 2ndcentury were of bourgeois origin just by the fact that they could write and afford to publish- the cost of writing material then was quite astonishing. I seem to remember that in certain places and time (blank) ‘paper’ was used as a money commodity, talk about it not being worth the paper it is written on! The leftwing of the 2ndcentury early christianity seemed to be arranged around Marcion of circa 145AD. We probably know just as much about this Marcion person as we do about any other individual of the period thanks to the record of the obsessive interest of the more orthodox ‘early church fathers’. Perhaps strangely Marcion was a classic example of a 2ndcentury capitalist, or son of; a fleet of ship owner and thus de-facto merchant capitalist. He was clearly loaded anyway. [Fred said somewhere that if you wanted to look for examples of pre first millennia proto capitalism that was a good place to start.] The ‘Marcion’ kind of position was that an ‘evil’ or ‘flawed’ demiurge ruled the world and economic and political powers were in the control of his delegates and JC’s dad had nothing to do with it anymore that than shit that went on in the old testament in God’s name. Thus I think this Marcion like ‘dung of Satan’ thing never really totally went away until after 600AD. It is interesting reading this stuff because Tertullian in 200AD in attacking Marcion material written circa AD145 gives us an unusual perspective on the historical reliability of the gospel material. Apparently, according to Tertullian, the gobshite Marcion said that the gospels had been politically and ideologically meddled about with and thus John, Matthew and Mark could not be trusted and that Luke was better but still needed a more authentic and cleaned up version which Marcion provided. You can imagine Marcion’s positive take on Luke with its unique and ideologically important take on things re its temptation of christ and Satan being the dispenser of political and economic power. The dramatic opening chapter of John probably runs against formal gnosticism; textual analysis by Greek reading intellectuals suggest that that was added later as a preface. The last of the ‘orthodox’ Marcions were probably the cathars who were wiped out in another or even first holocaust.
“There are those who say, ‘I am very Catholic, I always go to mass, I belong to this and that association’,” the head of the 1.2 billion-member Roman Catholic church said, according to a Vatican Radio transcript. He said some of these people should also say “‘my life is not Christian, I don’t pay my employees proper salaries, I exploit people, I do dirty business, I launder money, a double life’.”“There are many Catholics who are like this and they cause scandal,” he said. “How many times have we all heard people say ‘if that person is a Catholic, it is better to be an atheist’.”https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/23/pope-francis-better-to-be-atheist-than-hypocritical-catholic
The Pope said that it is better to be an atheist than to be a bad Christianhttp://www.cnn.com/2017/02/23/world/pope-atheists-again/
What the Pope was saying is in fact out of the gospel as JC said or prophesised. Matthew 7;20- 22 20So then, by their fruit you will recognize them. 21Noteveryonewhosaysto Me,‘Lord,Lord,’will enterthekingdomofheaven,but onlyhe whodoesthewillof MyFatherinheaven.22Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’… http://biblehub.com/matthew/7-21.htm What JC allegedly said had several themes. Criticising the rich and the hypocritical organised religion of his time which provided the theological or ideological justification of the ruling class etc. 'Political support' for the poor and oppressed. Speaking ‘truth’ to power. Direct action against the financial class. For which he was punished by the lackey’s and collaborators of Roman imperialism etc etc. It is pity that Karl and Fred failed to prophesise neo-Leninists and state capitalist nomenklatura and that many would say; ‘Karl, Karl did we not prophesy in Your name, name big roads after you and in Your name drive out bourgeois capitalist class and perform many revolutions?’… There was loads of posters all over Berlin advertising it and they seemed to be showing it or about to at a cinema in Old East Berlin on Karl Alley. Which is anything but an alley. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Marx-Allee
the filmthe young karl marx. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Karl_Marx
The young, pre-socialist Marx was more openly opposed to religion than later. In fact, he came to socialism/communism via atheism.
Marx came to the conclusion that the critique of capitalism was also the critique of religion
And vice versa. That the critique of religion led to a critique of the social conditions that gave rise to religion and that therefore mere anti-religious argumentation (atheism) would not get rid of it as long as the social conditions that gave rise to it persisted.
Pope Francis is one of the most hated men in the world today. Those who hate him most are not atheists, or protestants, or Muslims, but by some in his own church. With more than a billion followers, the Catholic church is the largest global organisation the world has ever seen.one prominent English priest said: “We can’t wait for him to die. It’s unprintable what we say in private. Whenever two priests meet, they talk about how awful Bergoglio is … he’s like Caligula: if he had a horse, he’d make him cardinal.” Almost a quarter of the college of Cardinals – the most senior clergy in the church – believe that the pope is flirting with heresy. Last year, one cardinal, backed by a few retired colleagues, raised the possibility of a formal declaration of heresy – the wilful rejection of an established doctrine of the church, a sin punishable by excommunication. Last month, 62 disaffected Catholics, including one retired bishop and a former head of the Vatican bank, published an open letter that accused Francis of seven specific counts of heretical teaching. In 2015, American journalist Ross Douthat, a convert to Catholicism, wrote a piece for the Atlantic magazine headlined Will Pope Francis Break the Church?; A Spectator blogpost by the English traditionalist Damian Thompson threatened that “Pope Francis is now at war with the Vatican. If he wins, the church could fall apart.” The pope’s views on divorce and homosexuality, according to an Archbishop from Kazakhstan, had allowed “the smoke of Satan” to enter the church. Doctrine holds that the pope cannot be wrong when he speaks on the central questions of the faith; so if he is wrong, he can’t be pope. On the other hand, if this pope is right, all his predecessors must have been wrong. Francis’s cautious reforms seem to his opponents to threaten the belief that the church teaches timeless truths. And if the Catholic church does not teach eternal truths, conservatives ask, what is the point of it? To carry out its work all over the world, it depends on voluntary labour. If the ordinary worshippers stop believing in what they are doing, the whole thing collapses. Francis knows this. If he cannot reconcile theory and practice, the church might be emptied out everywhere. If all the church offers people is something they can manage without, Francis’s opponents believe, then it will surely collapse.The central dispute is between Catholics who believe that the church should set the agenda for the world, and those who think the world must set the agenda for the church. American cardinal Raymond Burke, who has emerged as Francis’ most public opponent. The Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, a group with about 600 members (men and women), had been placed under investigation by a commission in June 2012, under Pope Benedict. They were accused of combining increasingly extreme rightwing politics with a devotion to the Latin Mass.When the commission reported in July 2013, Francis’s reaction shocked conservatives rigid. He stopped the Friars using the Latin Mass in public, and closed down their seminary. They were still allowed to educate new priests, but not segregated from the rest of the church. What’s more, he did so directly, without going through the Vatican’s internal court system, then run by Cardinal Burke. The next year, Francis sacked Burke from his powerful job in the Vatican’s internal court system. By doing so, he made an implacable enemy. Cardinal Burke’s combination of anti-communism, ethnic pride and hatred of feminism has nurtured a succession of prominent rightwing lay figures in the US, from Pat Buchanan through Bill O’Reilly and Steve Bannon, It was Cardinal Burke who invited Bannon, then already the animating spirit of Breitbart News, to address a conference in the Vatican, via video link from California, in 2014. Among the bishops, between a quarter and a third are passively resisting the change, and a small minority are doing so actively. The leader of that faction is Francis’s great enemy, Cardinal Burke. Sacked first from his position on the Vatican court, and then from the liturgy commission, he ended up on the supervisory board of the Knights of Malta – a charitable body run by the old Catholic aristocracies of Europe. In Autumn 2016, he sacked the head of the order for supposedly allowing nuns to distribute condoms in Burma. This is something that nuns do quite widely in the developing world to protect vulnerable women. The man who had been sacked appealed to the pope. The outcome was that Francis reinstated the man Burke had sacked, and appointed another man to take over most of Burke’s duties. Burke had opened a new front, which came as close as he could to accusing the pope of heresy. Along with three other cardinals, two of whom have since died, Burke produced a list of four questions designed to establish whether or not Amoris Laetitia contravened previous teaching. These were sent as a formal letter to Francis, who ignored it. After he was sacked, Burke made the questions public, and said he was prepared to issue a formal declaration that the pope was a heretic if he would not answer them to Burke’s satisfaction. In February this year, posters appeared overnight in the streets of Rome asking, “Francis, where’s your mercy?”, attacking him for his treatment of Cardinal Burke. These can only have come from disaffected elements in the Vatican Full articlehttps://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/oct/27/the-war-against-pope-francis
http://www.dw.com/en/pope-francis-speaks-out-against-nationalism-in-europe/a-41155399Is this another sign of the Pope's radicalism or a reminder of the world universalism of his church.
Quote:Pope Francis has warned against 'particular and nationalist agendas' threatening Europe and called for solidarity, teamwork and shared sacrifice. Pope Francis has warned Europeans against creating new divisions and building trenches, the former a reference to growing nationalism across the continent and the latter a reference to the carnage wrought by World War I….he pope also appeared to warn against the dangers posed by anti-immigrant parties. "Extremist and populist groups are finding fertile ground in many countries," he said. "They make protest the heart of their political message, without offering the alternative of a constructive political project."Is the Pope a useful voice against the myth of over-population or a reactionary oppositionist to birth-control and abortion
Quote:The pontiff also lamented Europe's declining birth rate. The continent, he said, was suffering from "a period of dramatic sterility. Not only because Europe has fewer children, and all too many were denied the right to be born, but also because there has been a failure to pass on the material and cultural tools that young people need to face the future."Mixed messages, mezinks
alanjjohnstone wrote:http://www.dw.com/en/pope-francis-speaks-out-against-nationalism-in-europe/a-41155399Is this another sign of the Pope's radicalism or a reminder of the world universalism of his church.Quote:Pope Francis has warned against 'particular and nationalist agendas' threatening Europe and called for solidarity, teamwork and shared sacrifice. Pope Francis has warned Europeans against creating new divisions and building trenches, the former a reference to growing nationalism across the continent and the latter a reference to the carnage wrought by World War I….he pope also appeared to warn against the dangers posed by anti-immigrant parties. "Extremist and populist groups are finding fertile ground in many countries," he said. "They make protest the heart of their political message, without offering the alternative of a constructive political project."Is the Pope a useful voice against the myth of over-population or a reactionary oppositionist to birth-control and abortion
Quote:The pontiff also lamented Europe's declining birth rate. The continent, he said, was suffering from "a period of dramatic sterility. Not only because Europe has fewer children, and all too many were denied the right to be born, but also because there has been a failure to pass on the material and cultural tools that young people need to face the future."Mixed messages, mezinks
Do not place your trust on a Chamaleon
"Ever since his election in 2013, Francis’s efforts at reform have made him deeply unpopular with conservative Catholics, some in positions of influence within the Vatican itself….There are whispers in the Vatican loggias that the pope is a communist, a populist and not a proper Catholic."https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/18/pope-francis-attitude-abuse-scandal-catholic-church-critics
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