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real-human
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 Posted: Wed Oct 07, 2020 8:36 pm Post subject: |
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/06/pope-francis-encyclical-us-election-biden-trump-catholic-vote
How Pope Francis's encyclical could shake up the US election
| Quote: | Biden and Trump are chasing the Catholic vote. Will the popes warning against populism and nationalism hold any sway?
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| Quote: | They make up one of the most important constituencies of American voters, so its no wonder that Catholics have been specifically courted by both Joe Biden and Donald Trump during the US presidential campaign. Four years ago, according to the Pew Research Center, 52% of them voted for Trump, compared with 44% for Hillary Clinton. And with Biden himself being Catholic, you might expect substantial numbers of the tens of millions of American Catholics who possess a vote to consider switching sides to one of their own.
But now this Catholic vote has got a whole lot more interesting. This weekend, Pope Francis travelled to Assisi to honour Saint Francis, the saint he most admires, for his dedication to the poor, and to sign his new encyclical. Encyclicals are the key teaching documents of popes in which they often focus on global issues, not just the internal concerns of the church. In 2015, Francis produced Laudato Si, on the environment, where he put all his moral weight behind those advocating the need to take action against climate breakdown. This time round his new document, Fratelli Tutti, published on Sunday, describes a post-pandemic world, and the need for greater fraternity and solidarity. Its message means the pope has waded right into some of the key issues dominating the US presidential election.
Like British monarchs, popes are supposed to be above party political matters, and Pope Francis has certainly not done anything as crass as name names in his encyclical, although hes not above overt criticism. Ahead of the 2016 election, he described Trumps plan to thwart migrants by building a wall between the US and Mexico as not Christian.
In this weekends document he makes it clear that populism and nationalism of the kind Trump typifies are damaging, warning that a concept of popular and national unity influenced by various ideologies is creating new forms of selfishness and a loss of the social sense under the guise of defending national interests.
With Catholics making up such a large proportion of voters, about 20%, both Democratic and Republican campaigners are keen to appeal to them. Trumps camp stresses abortion and matters of religious liberty, while Biden has often spoken of the way in which his own Catholic faith has helped him in dark times, and hes not averse to making the personal political. The next Republican that tells me Im not religious, Im going to shove my rosary beads down their throat, the Cincinnati Enquirer once reported him as saying. His team stresses Catholic teaching that focuses on the poor and the vulnerable.
Pope tackles Covid pandemic and rising nationalism in third encyclical
Read more
So the Democrats may well be cheered by the popes warning in Fratelli Tutti that lack of concern for the poor and vulnerable can hide behind a populism that exploits them demagogically for its own purposes, or a liberalism that serves the economic interests of the powerful, noting that in both cases, it becomes difficult to envisage an open world that makes room for everyone, including the most vulnerable, and shows respect for different cultures.
Its also clear that Francis has seen through the neoliberal experiment and its alleged trickle-down benefits that have only served to create a class of the super-rich and left behind the people who are most in need such as people with disabilities and, indeed, those who rely on state-provided education and healthcare. If a society is governed primarily by the criteria of market freedom and efficiency, there is no place for such persons, and fraternity will remain just another vague ideal, he warns.
For Francis, fraternity is much more than an ideal, but a necessity if the world is to become a better place. But while his idealism sets Trump followers teeth on edge, he can also make Democrats on the left uncomfortable, too. There is no advocacy here of big government and welfare state narratives either. Instead, he is focused on the local and the small. And at the heart of his teaching in this document and all his papal pronouncements over the past seven years has been a strong stance on the right to life that takes him all the way from completely rejecting capital punishment to vetoing abortion, too.
Fratelli Tutti will make for awkward reading for Trump, and his gun-toting, pro-electric chair supporters, including prominent Catholic attorney general William Barr who reintroduced federal executions for the first time since 2003. Yet it will also be tricky for Biden and the large constituency of Catholic Democrats who have compromised on abortion. In that sense Fratelli Tutti cannot be classed as giving a wholesale papal imprimatur to Biden. But for those Catholics still thinking of casting their ballot for Trump, it should inspire them to question what Pope Francis would surely say is the most precious thing they possess: their conscience. This clarion call from across the Atlantic could well be an election clincher.
Catherine Pepinster is a former editor of the Catholic weekly, the Tablet
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real-human
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| Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2020 4:07 pm Post subject: |
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I think this is certainly a slap in the face to Trump and his racist rightys trump loves and demands violence from... Maybe a offset to the supreme court liar extremists ... I think she thinks she knows what god wants/represents more than the pope, as well as those racists on the right on this forum.
https://news.yahoo.com/pope-names-13-cardinals-includes-113121801.html
Pope names 13 new cardinals, including 1st Black US prelate
| Quote: | | Still, the timing of his rise to cardinal is noteworthy, coming in the thick of increased U.S. attention on racial injustice following the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man, in Minnesota this year. Gregory was publicly critical of U.S. President Donald Trumps visit to the St. John Paul II National Shrine in Washington a day after civil rights demonstrators were forcibly cleared from a square to facilitate the president's visit to an Episcopal church in the U.S. capital. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
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Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2020 4:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Teeth are gnashing in Virginia. |
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real-human
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| Posted: Tue Sep 28, 2021 1:14 pm Post subject: |
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Pope gets it... but the religious right hate the Pope for which he stands...
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real-human
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| Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2023 8:16 am Post subject: |
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/30/world/europe/pope-francis-american-conservatives.html
Pope Says a Strong U.S. Faction Offers a Backward, Narrow View of the Church
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In unusually sharp remarks published this week, Pope Francis said some conservative American Catholics wrongly ignore much of the Church’s mission and reject the possibility of change |
| Quote: | ROME — Pope Francis has expressed in unusually sharp terms his dismay at “a very strong, organized, reactionary attitude” opposing him within the U.S. Roman Catholic Church, one that fixates on social issues like abortion and sexuality to the exclusion of caring for the poor and the environment.
The pope lamented the “backwardness” of some American conservatives who he said insist on a narrow, outdated and unchanging vision. They refuse, he said, to accept the full breadth of the Church’s mission and the need for changes in doctrine over time.
“I would like to remind these people that backwardness is useless,” Francis, 86, told a group of fellow Jesuits early this month in a meeting at World Youth Day celebrations in Lisbon. “Doing this, you lose the true tradition and you turn to ideologies to have support. In other words, ideologies replace faith.”
His words became public this week, when a transcript of the conversation was published by the Vatican-vetted Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica.
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His comments were an unusually explicit statement of the pope’s longstanding lament that the ideological bent of some leading American Catholics has turned them into culture warriors rather than pastors, offering the faithful a warped view of Church doctrine rather than a healthy, well-rounded faith. It has become a major theme of his papacy that he sees himself as bringing the church forward while his misguided conservative critics try to hold it back.
In 2018, in a major document called an apostolic exhortation on the subject of holiness, Francis explicitly wrote that caring for migrants and the poor is as holy a pursuit as opposing abortion. “Our defense of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm and passionate,” he wrote. “Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned.”
He has urged priests to welcome and minister to people who are gay, divorced and remarried, and he has called on the whole world to tackle climate change, calling it a moral issue. Francis is set to travel on Thursday to Mongolia for a trip that will highlight interreligious dialogue and the protection of the environment — issues far from the top of the priority list for many American conservatives.
For nearly a decade, Francis’ conservative critics have accused him of leading the church astray and of diluting the faith with a fuzzy pastoral emphasis that blurred — or at times erased — the Church’s traditions and central tenets. Some U.S. bishops have issued public warnings about the Vatican’s direction, with varying degrees of alarm, and clashed with the pope over everything from liturgy and worship styles, to the centrality of abortion opposition in the Catholic faith, to American politics.
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In the preface of a book published this month, Cardinal Raymond Burke, an American former archbishop and Vatican official who is considered a leader of Catholic conservatives, wrote that Francis risked driving the church into a schism, a definitive rupture. The danger, he wrote, was an upcoming synod of bishops in October, convened by Francis to promote inclusivity, transparency and accountability, which will include lay people, including some women.
In the book, which suggests that the meeting will open a “Pandora’s box” of problems, Cardinal Burke wrote that such from-the-ground-up collaboration leads to “confusion and error and their fruit — indeed schism.”
Bishop Joseph Strickland, who heads a small diocese in East Texas and has become one of he pope’s loudest critics, has accused the pope of undermining the Catholic faith and has invited Francis to fire him. The bishop is under investigation by the Vatican over his leadership of the diocese.
In a public letter released last week, Bishop Strickland warned that many “basic truths” of Catholic teaching would be challenged at the synod, and hinted ominously at an irrevocable break. Those who would “propose changes to that which cannot be changed,” he warned, “are the true schismatics.”
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Conservative bishops have at times directly confronted American politicians, particularly Catholic Democrats. In 2021, they pushed to issue guidance that would deny the sacrament of Communion to Catholic politicians who publicly support and advance abortion rights, like President Biden — a regular churchgoer and the first Catholic president since the 1960s — and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
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Catholic bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, joins a protest against the Los Angeles Dodgers for honoring a pro-LGBTQ group, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, during Pride Night at Dodger Stadium in June.
Catholic bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, joins a protest against the Los Angeles Dodgers for honoring a pro-LGBTQ group, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, during Pride Night at Dodger Stadium in June.Credit...Kirby Lee/USA Today Sports, via Reuters
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops backed away from a direct conflict on that issue, after the Vatican warned against using the Eucharist as a political weapon. Francis has preached that communion “is not the reward of saints, but the bread of sinners.”
But some individual bishops have persisted. Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco, an outspoken critic of the pope, said last year that Ms. Pelosi would not be permitted to receive communion in his archdiocese unless she was willing to “publicly repudiate” her stance on abortion.
Clashes between the Vatican and conservative American bishops are often amplified and encouraged by conservative media outlets. Popular radio hosts and podcasters regularly question the pope’s leadership and raise questions about his legitimacy. Combative independent websites like Church Militant and LifeSite News cover Francis’ perceived missteps closely, and skewer church institutions they depict as corrupt and profane.
Many of today’s conservative leaders were promoted in the more doctrinaire church of Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. They have accused Francis, an Argentine, of being anti-American and anticapitalist, and leading the church away from its core teachings.
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But he has consistently argued in his decade as pope that the church was part of history, and not a fortress from it, and that it needed to open up and be amid the people to reflect and respond to their challenges.
Speaking to the Portuguese priests this month, he noted that over the centuries the church had changed its positions on issues like slavery and capital punishment.
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Portuguese cardinals wait for Pope Francis before a meeting with civic leaders and diplomats in Lisbon in early August.
Portuguese cardinals wait for Pope Francis before a meeting with civic leaders and diplomats in Lisbon in early August. Credit...Ana Brigida/Associated Press
“The vision of the doctrine of the church as a monolith is wrong,” he said. “When you go backward, you make something closed off, disconnected from the roots of the church,” eroding morality.
His comments were in response to a question from a Jesuit who said he was taken aback, when he spent a year in the United States, by harsh criticism of the pope from some Catholics, including bishops.
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To some people, “the situation of migrants, for example, is a lesser issue,” the pope said. “Some Catholics consider it a secondary issue compared to the ‘grave’ bioethical questions.”
But focusing on issues of sexual morality and downgrading issues of social justice, he said, clashes with his vision of the true church.
“That a politician looking for votes might say such a thing is understandable,” he added. “But not a Christian.”
Francis has steadily thinned out and isolated the most vocal, and in some cases aggressive, American conservative clergy, declining to promote some archbishops to cardinals and so denying them voting rights in the conclave that chooses the pope. In other cases he has simply waited them out and accepted their resignations when they reached mandatory retirement age.
But the American bishops’ conference remains a redoubt of Catholic conservatism, much more conservative than Francis and many of the other national churches.
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On a flight to Africa in 2019, Francis seemed to acknowledge a well-financed and media-backed American effort to undermine his pontificate, saying it was an “an honor that the Americans attack me” when asked about the American conservative-media complex.
On the return flight, he was asked about the sustained opposition from Catholic conservatives in the United States who had accused him of driving traditionalists to break with the church. Francis said he hoped it didn’t come to that, but wasn’t necessarily terrified at the prospect either.
“I pray there are no schisms,” Francis said at the time. “But I’m not scared.” |
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