I'm going to wait until his visit is done before I say much more about the Pope. Suffice it to say we'll see a lot of coverage about his global warming remarks but not much about him visiting the Little Sisters of the Poor.
So you can be the president
(You can be the President)
(Kick it)
I'd rather be the pope
(Rather be the Pope)
(I wanna be, so happy)
You can be the side effect
(You can be the side effect)
I'd rather be the dope
(You, you, you)
(You can be the dope)
The Pope
9 comments:
i came here looking for 'Saga- pt 4', not a pope no-post. now, my whole day is ruined...
Sorry, Gino - I'm hoping to have that done on the weekend. Hate to ruin your day....
It is certainly instructive how the media is trumpeting the Pope's comments on global warming, capital punishment, and capitalism, but not his comments about abortion, contraception, and the like. If one didn't know better, one might suspect they were in the bag for the left and would be refusing to print stories that made the President look bad.
Is an anti-abortion, anti-contraception pope news?
Nor is a Pope against capital punishment or the exploitation of the poor, if I'm reading things right, and John Paul II and Benedict also made pronouncements on global warming. Paul VI is said to have made a major push for the environment as far back as 1971.
So not a whole lot new that Benedict is saying, but it is interesting how the media is looking at whose toes are being stepped on.
This is all Vatican II stuff. Francis will almost certainly be the last Pope we'll have who spent the formative years of his priesthood in the immediate aftermath of Vatican II. The next Pope, who will probably arrive within five years, will have come of age in the time of JP II. That change will be huge.
I'll probably say more about this later, but all we've really learned at this point is that Francis is, quite decisively, an Argentine. And he's not been able to get his political thinking past Juan Peron. I would also say this — his true legacy won't be these political pronouncements, but whether he is successful in flushing out the Curia. That's what matters.
Mark, I'd love to hear your take on where Francis could take the church in terms of his "Peronism" as you call it. Heard somewhere that some things he says are pretty binding and some aren't, and it strikes me that if he can get away with binding the church to Mr. Evita, things could be pretty bad.
And if I remember well what you've said about the Curia, I wish him the best of luck with that one.
Bubba, I don't mean he's personally a Peronist. Far from it. I suspect he sees moneyed interests as fundamentally corrupt, because that's how things were in Argentina under Juan Peron. No matter what else we learn, our formative years have an impact.
He can't, and won't, bind the Church to Peronism. The idea of papal infallibility is a huge misunderstanding for most people. There's nothing about Francis, or Benedict, or JP II, that made them personally infallible. The idea of infallibility comes from a Pope speaking ex cathedra. It's exceedingly rare; the last Pope to speak ex cathedra was Pius XII, in 1950, concerning the Assumption of Mary.
Don't worry, I was not trying to suggest that anyone was trying to pull Rome to Peronism in toto--it just seemed like an apt way of hinting at the general direction people perceive the Pope as having.
Post a Comment