F Rosa Rubicondior: Vatican
Showing posts with label Vatican. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vatican. Show all posts

Saturday 17 October 2020

Catholic Corruption News - What a Carry On At The Vatican!

Cecilia Marogna / Cardinal Angelo Becciu
Woman arrested amid Vatican financial scandal claims she worked in ‘parallel diplomacy’ | News | LifeSite

The mystery over the sudden sacking by the Pope of Cardinal Angelo Bacciu, amidst rumours of financial impropriety and misuse of Vatican funds, deepened yesterday with the announcement that a close female associate of his, Cecilia Marogna, 39 had been arrested in Milan and charged with embezzlement.

Until his abrupt sacking, Bacciu had been effectively number two in the Vatican; one of the few members of the Pope's inner cabinet with direct access to him without needing to make an appointment.

Marogana had been employed by Bacciu as a “security advisor”. According to this report in the Catholic-leaning LifeSite:

Saturday 30 September 2017

Child Porn Priest Rescued by Vatican

Monsignor Carlo Capella
"Downloaded child pornography using a Canadian church online address".
Lawyer says Vatican diplomat wanted for child porn offences should be sent back to Canada - Windsor - CBC News

Just about everyone must now be aware of Pope Frankie's loudly proclaimed determination to reform the Catholic Church and put a stop to the multiple child abuse scandals that were costing it money and members. No longer are these habitual abuses, routine cover-ups and tacit approval of them to be tolerated, so the way the church dealt with the latest child abuse scandal should come as no surprise.

When the Vatican heard that yet another Catholic priest was under investigation by the Canadian Police for child pornography offences, it lost no time in dealing with the matter in the interests of all concerned.

Saturday 3 October 2015

The Perfect End To A Perfect Week - For The Vatican Old Guard

Vatican acts after Polish priest reveals homosexuality - BBC News.

Oops! It'd been another bad week for 'Uncle' Pope Francis, the Pope trying to rehabilitate the Catholic Church after being rocked to its foundations as one scandal after another revealed the stinking cesspit the Vatican had become.

One of Hapless Frank's tasks was to make the Church look a little less bigoted and intolerant and a little more kindly disposed to women, homosexuals, non-Catholics, etc. Although little real progress has

Sunday 17 May 2015

Catholic Church's Exquisite Paradox

Cardinal Reinhard Marx, "Theologically unacceptable"
Top German Lay Catholic Group Pushes Communion for Civilly Divorced-Remarried and More - National Catholic Register.

The Catholic Church in Germany, as elsewhere, faces a nightmare paradox - give up being Catholic to retain members and a degree of authority, or remain Catholic and cease having any relevance to people.

The panic spreading through the Catholic Church as it crumbles under the assault of secular Humanist ideas and becomes ever less relevant to the lives of decent, ordinary people throughout the developed world, can be judged from what's going on in Germany, where the Catholic Church is teetering on the brink of collapse.

Saturday 28 March 2015

Moral Compass - The Catholic Church and Excommunication

Fr. Jose Mercau, Excommunicated
Last November, Pope Francis defrocked and excommunicated a convicted paedophile priest from Argentina. Of course, many priests have been excommunicated by the Catholic Church before, but the case of Fr. Jose Mercau was unusual; he is one of the only Catholic priests to have been excommunicated for sexual abuse (technically rape) of a minor.

Pope Francis was apparently trying to convince the world that the Catholic Church had recognised the error of its ways and would no longer tolerate, facilitate and protect priests and nuns who abused children and vulnerable adults and now took a dim view of these previously accepted clerical recreational pass-times.

More Fascist Catholics

Fr. Josef Tiso with his friend and role model, Adolf Hitler
In addition to their close involvement in creating the first fascist state in Europe in Portugal, and their support for Italian and Spanish fascism, the Catholic Church was actively involved in another even more extreme fascist regime in Slovakia.

Unlike Portugal and Spain which stayed out of World War II and have no history of sending Jews to Hitler's slave labour and death camps, Slovakia, under the leadership of a Catholic priest and fascist dictator, Fr. Josef Tiso, enthusiastically shipped around 60% of Slovakian Jews (over 52,000 of the population of 89,000) to the death camps, mostly Auschwitz.

Monday 16 March 2015

Pope Francis May Soon Throw In The Towel


And it's goodnight from him...
Pope Francis says he 'doesn't mind' being Pope but wishes he could go out for a pizza unrecognised - People - News - The Independent

Will the Catholic world soon have three popes in the Vatican?

That was the clear implication of Pope Francis' strong hint again that he might retire early like his immediate predecessor Benedict XVI. In an interview with the Mexican TV station, Televista, to mark his second anniversary he said he longed for anonymity and a private life and even hinted that his retirement might be very soon.

Saturday 28 February 2015

Vatican At War As Pell Lives it Up in Rome

Cardinal George Pell arrives for a morning session at the Vatican.
Photo: Alessandra Tarantino
Cardinal George Pell, the Vatican's financial watchdog, slammed for lavish spending

In a leaked document, Cardinal Pell, the former Archbishop of Melbourne who was put into the Vatican by Pope Francis to sort out its finances and root out the endemic corruption, has been accused of living a lavish lifestyle and handing out money to a chum in the form of an inflated salary.

But the real story here is the leak itself and what it shows is going on behind the scenes, as the Pope accuses the Curia of of suffering from fifteen 'spiritual diseases' including 'spiritual Alzheimers' and 'theological schizophrenia and Pell himself reveals that heads of departments in the vast Vatican bureaucracy had been salting away tens of millions in secret bank accounts, made possible because of shoddy bookkeeping and an almost complete lack of financial accountability with no records of where the money came from nor what it's to be spent on. The discovery of these large secret bank accounts potentially transformed the Vatican's financial position from precarious to very healthy.

Pell was put in soon after Pope Francis replaced the odious Pope Benedict who had done nothing to put a stop to the corruption revealed by his 'butler' in the 'Vatileaks' affair.

Sunday 19 October 2014

Slapdown For The Supine Pope

BBC News - Catholic synod: Gay rights groups 'disappointed'

Any illusions the 'reforming' Pope Francis may have been under that he is reforming the Catholic Church and bringing it into the 21st-Century by injecting a small dose of humanism into its doctrine were shattered today. The synod of bishops meeting in Rome put him firmly in his place and voted down his paragraph containing the mildest of calls to 'accept' and 'value' the contribution of homosexuals to society and replaced it with a reaffirmation of traditional homophobic Church dogma.

Monday 6 October 2014

It's All Someone Else's Fault - Vatican

Vatican accuses U.N. panel of sowing confusion

If you're expecting radical reforms in the Catholic Church, especially in its attitude to predatory paedophile priests and nuns, don't hold your breath.

In stark contrast to Pope Francis' protestations of regret and promises of reform with no measure spared to root out corruption and coverups and bring the abusers to justice, the reality is hand-washing that would do credit to Pontius Pilate, weedling excuses that would make a rogue market trader blush, and ducking down behind obscure, strict legalistic interpretations of International Law. Anything in fact

Tuesday 9 September 2014

Abuse-Aware Cardinal Brady Retires On Full Pension

Irish Cardinal Sean Baptist Brady arrives for a meeting at the Synod Hall in the Vatican, March 6, 2013.

Photo: REUTERS/Tony Gentile
Pope accepts resignation of head of scandal-plagued Irish church - Reuters.

In a demonstration of his determination to clean up the Catholic Church and show the world his remorse for the decades of institutional child abuse and systematic cover-up by senior clerics, Pope Francis has allowed Cardinal Sean Brady, "Primate of All Ireland", to retire quietly at the normal age of 75 when Cardinals are expected to retire, or at least to formally offer their resignation, anyway.

To save the poor man embarrassment by being sacked, he had been effectively on gardening leave for the past year while his duties as Bishop of Armagh had been undertaken by the specially appointed "coadjutor", Monsignor Eamonn Martin, who will now formally take up Brady's old job.

Cardinal Brady became notorious in 2012 when a BBC documentary revealed that he had known about, but had failed to warn parents, of the child-abusing priest, Father Brendan Smyth, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to 75 charges of indecent and sexual abuse of boys and girls over a period of more than 30 years. Brady always claimed the documentary was misleading, but apologised for his part in the scandal.

Friday 11 April 2014

Vatican Backs Code of Silence Over Child Abuse

Pope Francis "We will not take one step back..."
Italy's bishops pass Vatican-backed rule that child molestation does not have to be reported - Europe - World - The Independent

In stark contrast to what Pope Frankie claims to be doing to clean up the Catholic Church, the Vatican has been complicit in a policy adopted by Italian Bishops that states they are no longer required to report child-abusing priests and nuns to the police.

The 'speed' with which Vatican reforms are progressing can be gaged from the fact that only in the last few months has the Vatican seen fit to strengthen its laws on abuse of minors to include sexual abuse of children. Astonishingly, this was not even considered an abuse of minors when the law was first drawn up.

[I] personally ask for forgiveness for the damage [some priests] have done for having sexually abused children. We will not take one step backward with regards to how we will deal with this problem, and the sanctions that must be imposed.

Pope Francis
(Statement made on day of Italian Bishops' Conference statement)
This legalistic excuse comes from a treaty between the Vatican and the Italian state in 1985 which stipulates that priests are not obliged to inform the police of crimes learned of through their ministry. The Italian Bishops' Conference, which published the guidelines last Friday, say they came from a suggestion by the Vatican's office that handles sex abuse allegations.

Last month Pope Francis had complained that, "No-one else has done more [to tackle child sexual abuse]. Yet the Church is the only one to have been attacked."

[the Vatican is systematically placing the] preservation of the reputation of the Church and the alleged offender over the protection of child victims.

In 2010, to great publicity and in response to the growing world-wide outrage at these sexual and psychological abuses as more and more victims found the courage to be open about what they had suffered at the hands of predatory paedophile priests and nuns, the Vatican had instructed bishops to report these offences to the authorities - but only where required to do so by the local law. The Vatican has never seen it as the moral duty of Bishops to protect the vulnerable from predatory clerics by adopting a zero tolerance policy and reporting all such cases even when not required to do so by local law.

Now we see the Vatican office supposedly responsible for dealing with the problem, recommending a policy of strict legalism regardless of the fact that this gives a degree of protection to offenders and removes a little protection from the vulnerable. Obviously this offices sees it as dealing with the problem to prevent it being exposed.

The 'problem' is seen as one of embarrassment and damage to the Catholic Church, not damage to the victims of these abuses. The solution is a Mafioso-style code of silence or a 'no snitching' rule.

As reported on the BBC website, the long litany of Catholic Church abuse scandals includes:

  • Germany - A priest, named only as Andreas L, admitted in 2012 to 280 counts of sexual abuse involving three boys over a decade.
  • United States - Revelations about abuses in the 1990s by two Boston priests, Paul Shanley and John Geoghan, caused public outrage.
  • Belgium - The bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, resigned in April 2010 after admitting that he had sexually abused a boy for years.
  • Italy - The Catholic Church in Italy admitted in 2010 that about 100 cases of paedophile priests had been reported over 10 years
  • Ireland - A report in 2009 [The Cloyne Report] found that sexual and psychological abuse was "endemic" in Catholic-run industrial schools and orphanages for most of the 20th century.

BBC News - Pope Francis asks forgiveness for child abuse by clergy

These are the same people who claim to be guardians of our morals and who demand the right to be consulted on all legislation inasmuch as it related to a woman's rights to her own body, the rights men have over them, what consenting adults may or may not do in the privacy of their own bedrooms and who may form a legal relationship with whom.

'via Blog this'





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Wednesday 5 February 2014

Vatican Complains About Interference

BBC News - Vatican 'must immediately remove' child abusers - UN

Far from being open and putting the paedophile abuse scandals behind the Catholic Church, like Pope Frankie promised, the Vatican is still putting the interests of the predatory priests and the Catholic Church above the needs of the victims and the need to protect future generations from their predation.

And so the scandal which has seen church membership haemorrhage and the reputation of priests plummet from one of the most trusted members of society to being someone most people would avoid leaving their children alone with, continues to fester.

Sunday 7 July 2013

The Cult of Pope Worship

We spent a few days in Rome last month and took in the obligatory tour of St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican City to see the Michelangelo ceiling in the Sistine Chapel and the murals by Raphael in the Stanze di Raffaello - book in advance on line for speedy entry; the queues are frightening.

Apart from very obviously being a vast, highly organised money-making industry, the thing that struck us most was how central the figure of the Pope is to everything. Every stall (there is one every few yards) selling tourist tat and over-priced strings of coloured beads to the 'faithful' carried a huge assortment of pictures of smiling Popes in various forms of fancy dress, sometimes with humorously phallic headwear, making pious magic gestures with two fingers, or just grinning beatifically.

Most of them were of the current Pope (how quickly they must have got those to the printers and out onto the stalls in such quantities); quite a lot were of his predecessor, Benedict XVI trying hard not to look like a leering paedophile who can't believe he's gotten away with it, and a few were of the Polish Pope, John Paul II. Conspicuous by their absence were photos of John Paul I whose mistaken election is reputed to have been corrected just 33 days later when he was found dead, allegedly by a nun who was visiting his chamber early in the morning.

Outside in St Peters Square, almost the entire area is divided up with crowd-control barriers for the vast numbers of Catholics who descend on the Vatican whenever a planned papal manifestation is announced. A couple we met in our hotel were telling us excitedly how they had queued (no seats are provided) for hours in the shade-free square in temperatures approaching 35-40 degrees and had been 'rewarded' with a brief glimpse of 'His Holiness'. One could only sympathise. Nuns in various costumes, looking for all the world like devout Muslim women in a hijab, only dressed in white, blue or brown, with every hair, ankle and neck well covered lest they arouse uncontrollable passions in men, twitter excitedly like groupies outside the stage door of the latest boy-band, hoping for a glimpse of the Pope - even the hem of a disappearing white cassock or the wave of a hand from a window will induce raptures.

Some even believe the image of John Paul II will cure terminal illness.

What we both noticed particularly was how the proverbial visitor from outer-space would see Catholicism as Pope worship, with the Pope as a living god in just the same way that the Japanese Emperor was to pre-WWII Japanese and the way the Emperor was in the latter days of the Roman Empire. It looks for all the world as though the pre-Christian official Pontifex Maximus, or high priest of all the gods, had been transformed into the Christian Bishop of Rome.

Emperor Augustus 27 BCE - 14 CE,
Pontifex Maximus. The first Pope.
And this, of course, is precisely what did happen. The first Emperor to declare himself both Pontifex Maximus and a god was Augustus. As Pontifex Maximus he was uniquely placed to declare his elevation to the post of God-King to be the revealed will of God.

This explains why the Catholic Church is still rigidly hierarchical with the cult leader being the source of all clerical powers, the source of all religious dogma and the inerrant, infallible mouthpiece of God. To a devout Catholic, the Pope and God are as one. The Pope speaks the mind of God and announces His will. And with theological matters such as the existence of Limbo, and the qualifications for entry into Heaven, the Pope hands down policy to God.

Catholicism is the cult of Pope worship. The Pope is not the heir to an invented 'St Peter', but the heir to Augustus, the Roman God Emperor who died in 14 CE and whose title and role was passed down to the Christianised ruling god-king, the Pope, Papa or Holy Father.

If you want to see the last Roman god, Pontifex Maximus, a relic of a bygone age and the invention of a degenerate ruling class, go and stand for hours in the Roman sun - and remember to take plenty of money with you.

And women! Cover yourself up. God hates having to oggle at your bodies!





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Saturday 2 March 2013

How The Pope Opposed Democracy

Magna Carta is regarded as one of the most important documents in English legal and democratic history and in the legal and democratic history of most of the English-speaking world, including most of the USA. What is not generally acknowledged however, is how the papacy in the person of Pope Innocent III opposed this first tentative step towards democracy and reducing ever so slightly the absolute dictatorial power of the monarchy.

Understanding why this was may help people see the relationship the Christian Church still has with democracy, and so put a great deal of the history of the last few hundred years into context.

The background to the signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymead in June 1215 is complex and not really the point of this blog. If you wish to understand it there are on-line sources here, here and here. The result was that an increasingly autocratic King John was forced by the English barons to sign a document which both limited the power of the monarchy and guaranteed certain legal rights to the people. In fact part of it, the promise to surrender London to the King, was immediately reneged on by the barons, and John only ever regarded it as something signed under duress as a stalling action. The legal validity of Magna Carta comes from the fact that John's successor, Henry III, adopted it in order to unite the country against the French whom the barons had invited in to depose John - who saved the day by rather appropriately dying of dysentery on 18 October 1215.

Lotario dei Conti di Segni, Pope Innocent III
So where does Pope Innocent III fit into all this?

Innocent III had previously excommunicated John, partly to curry favour with the King Phillip Augustus of France, and partly as a reprisal for his taxing the churches. In order to bring the church back on side, John agreed to compensate the Pope and the Church with lots of money, and to submit to him as his feudal liege-lord, making Innocent III de jure titular ruler of England and the English possessions in France. The Pope in return declared Magna Carta null and void.

Innocent III was probably one of the more unpleasant characters to hold the title 'Pope' but at least as his regnal name shows, he had a sense of humour. He is notorious largely on accounts of actions which, if they were repeated today, would be rightly regarded as crimes against humanity:
  • He ordered the suppression and massacre of the Cathars of the Languedoc region of southern France, to help his protector, King Phillip Augustus control his southern barons, and because they had declined to pay tithes.
  • He ordered a crusade against Moorish Spain, which was then most of the Iberian Peninsula other than a couple of Christian kingdoms in the far north, and the subsequent massacre of the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants.
  • He ordered the Fourth Crusade against Egypt in which, when the Christian army reached Constantinople where it mistook the Orthodox Christian population for Muslims, it promptly sacked the city and massacred the inhabitants. Innocent III then declared this to have been the will of God in order to re-unite the Eastern and Western Churches, under Pope Innocent III, naturally.
It's maybe worth mentioning that a 'crusade' consisted of giving a rag-tagggle bunch of mercenary soldiers, under the nominal control of a handful of princes, kings and dukes, free licence to loot, pillage, rape and massacre their way across Europe, the Balkans and Asia Minor and into the Holy Lands with no regard to the religion of those they slaughtered and robbed. They were not paid or supplied but were expected to take what they wanted from the citizenry of any towns or villages they came across on their journey - something they did with enthusiasm, routinely massacring the entire population to the applause of the Pope who declared every death a triumph for Jesus.

Of course papal opposition to democracy is fully consistent with the Bible. No where in the Bible are democracy, human rights, the right to elect a government or regulate its powers ever mentioned. Political power in the Bible is only ever autocratic and absolute, the sole right of kings and emperors and those able to exert power through force of arms. If this is ever mentioned it is only ever to endorse it. The frankest outright endorsement of autocratic government, often quoted to support the 'divine right' of kings, was in Paul's epistle to the Romans where he leaves no doubt about his sect's fawning attitude to authority.
Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. [my emphasis] Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil.

Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.

Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake. For for this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God's ministers, attending continually upon this very thing. Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour.
No where in the Bible does any prophet or any apostle ever advocate government of the people, by the people and for the people nor do any of them ever decry its absence.

The concept of democracy and human rights for ordinary people was as alien to the founders of the Christian Church as it was to the authors of the Bible, both Old Testament and New. Not surprisingly the Christian Church, especially but by no means only, the Catholic version, is modelled on that same hierarchical concept of an absolute ruler accountable only to God and having total power over those beneath, who have no right to representation or even to be heard. The lot of the ordinary person is to receive wisdom from above and to meekly obey without question, and woe betide anyone who dares to. Fortunately, all civilised countries have turned their back on this, one of the nastier aspects of organised Christianity, and have adopted more or less democratic forms of government and abolished the right of the heads of the different Christian sects from re-establishing the theocracies which so blighted the development of Europe during the Dark Ages.

The conclave of unelected Catholic Cardinals will be bricked up in Rome soon to haggle and bargain and cut deals amongst themselves over which of them will inherit this absolute power.

So, which modern countries are now founded on those Christian Principles outside the Vatican City?

If Christian Principles are so great, why did the others abandon them over the last few hundred years?






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Thursday 14 February 2013

Saint Valentine

St Valentine Kneeling In Supplication, David Teniers III (1638-1685)
Saint Valentine is one of many similar legendary saints of the Christian Church who appear to have been invented or is at best based on highly embroidered and increasingly elaborated accounts of one or more ancient people.

He first makes an appearance as a saint in 496 when Pope Gelasius I designated February 14 as his feast day, saying of him, apparently without the slightest hint of irony, that he is amongst those "... whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God." In other words, they're great men who undoubtedly should be revered - but we just don't know what they actually did.

'Knowledge' without any evidence was just as common amongst religious people, especially clerics, in those days as it is today it seems.

There are various accounts associating Valentine or Valentinus with being executed by the Emperor Claudius II in around about 270. In fact there appear to be at least three claimants to the title.
  • A Bishop of Interamna (modern Terni)
  • A Roman priest
  • Someone called Valentinus who was killed along with several companions in the Roman province of Africa.

All these are reputed to have been martyred on February 14 but, as is often the case with church 'history', when a saint is designated as having died on a given date that becomes the date on which they died, so it's hardly surprising that all three contenders for the title 'Saint Valentine' are now said to have dutifully been martyred on the official date. How dare it have been otherwise? The first two are also claimed to have been executed by Claudius II outside the Flaminium Gate but, again, how much of that is official church 'truth' and how much is real truth is probably impossible to say.

It has been suggested by the eighteenth century English antiquarians Alban Butler and Francis Douce that the Feast of St Valentine may have been an attempt to supplant the mid-February pagan feast of Lupercalia with a Christian one.

Lupercalia, of which many write that it was anciently celebrated by shepherds, and has also some connection with the Arcadian Lycaea. At this time many of the noble youths and of the magistrates run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs. And many women of rank also purposely get in their way, and like children at school present their hands to be struck, believing that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery, and the barren to pregnancy.

Plutarch - Life of Caesar

So the connection with love and fertility may come from an ancient, even pre-Roman, pagan festival which subsumed the even earlier Februa from which we get 'February'.

Most of the traditions now associated with Saint Valentine's Day in the English-speaking world are believed to have come from Geoffrey Chaucer's Parliament of Foules which is set in the context of a fictional tradition. There does not appear to be any basis for associating Valentine with lovers and a fourteenth century French Vies des Saintes has Valentine overseeing the building of his basilica at Terni but makes no mention of him being a patron of lovers. Of course, a great deal also owes it's origins to the commercial interests of the greetings card and chocolate industries.

Like so many early Christian martyr and saints, Valentine seems to have contrived to die in a way which provided the hundreds of relics which are now scattered throughout the Christian world. Valentine's various body parts can be found in Prague in the Czech Republic, Rome in Italy, Dublin in Ireland, Glasgow in Scotland, Birmingham in England, Roquemaure in France, Vienna in Austria, and Balzan in Malta, where they continue to attract visitors with gifts of money to show their devotion and to buy the cheaply-made tacky and mawkishly sentimental souvenirs.

As with so much else about the Catholic Church in particular, and Christianity in general, the distinction between legend, myth, invention and fact is obscure, irrelevant and merely incidental. The important thing is to keep the people ignorant, credulous, superstitious, fearful and in awe of the priesthood as the only means by which they can hope for jam tomorrow whilst accepting the hopelessness of today, and allowing the priesthood to get away with it.





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Thursday 7 February 2013

Papal Bull

Readers of this blog will already be aware that it is read in the Vatican (see As Read In The Vatican). It seems we may already have an answer to the question I raised there. In that blog I pointed out that the Papacy had survived schisms, usurpation by gangsters, corrupt, gluttonous, debauched and homicidally psychopathic popes and allegedly even a female imposter, relatively unscathed, but it had never had to cope with a Pope who suddenly found he could no longer live with the lies and self-deception needed to be a Catholic priest, let alone Pope, and who decided to come out as an Atheist.

In short, how would the Catholic Church cope with the first recorded honest Pope?

If this press release is to be believed we may have our answer, although there are some doubts about its authenticity:








FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

In a surprise move yesterday, after a day or two reading the figures for the latest defection from the Catholic Church and yet more revelations of abuse by priests and nuns of children in their care and other vulnerable people, his Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, henceforth to be known as Herr Joseph Ratzinger, or Benedict Ultimum to his friends, issued the following edict.

ENCYCLICAL LETTER


NON FUIT MAEA CULPA

OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF BENEDICT XVI

TO HIS VENERABLE BROTHERS THE PATRIARCHS, ARCHBISHOPS, BISHOPS AND OTHER LOCAL ORDINARIES
IN PEACE AND COMMUNION WITH THE APOSTOLIC SEE,
TO THE CLERGY AND FAITHFUL OF THE WHOLE CATHOLIC WORLD, AND TO ALL MEN OF GOOD WILL.

LUDUM CONSUMMATUM EST. FINITUM EST PUERI.

Honored Brothers and Dear Sons,
Health and Apostolic Benediction.


The Supreme Pontiff hereby renounces all claims to moral authority and acknowledges that our claims were fabricated and without foundation, rendering us morally bankrupt. We made these false claims for reasons which were selfish and motivated by greed, a desire to protect our privileges and maintain our hold on the power which we have shamelessly used to put us outside the law and free to act as we pleased, with no accountability to anyone but ourselves.

We now accept that these actions were corrupt and immoral and a gross abuse of power and trust; the acts not of guardians of morality but of corrupt and amoral psychopaths. Accordingly we now accept that our claims to moral leadership were fraudulent. For this we are truly sorry and wish to make ammends.

We wish to make the following apologies to the people we abused throughout history and who suffered as a result of this disgraceful abuse of privilege and power. Our crimes against humanity have been frequent and far too numerous to list so the following is a sample of the major ones. We are no less sorry for all the others.

We are sorry for:
  1. Forging a book we deliberately misnamed The Holy Bible by compiling it from carefully selected, edited and amended documents, some of which we knew to be themselves forgeries, from various cults then common in the Eastern Roman Empire, and presenting it as the infallible word of a god.
  2. Brutally suppressing all the other cults and destroying their versions of the legends in case they took our followers away, and lest anyone used them to show the myths were the fanciful inventions of cult leaders with vested interests who were competing in a market place for members, and that some of them were frankly bizarre and rendered the entire 'faith' laughably absurd.
  3. Inserting wording into the 'Holy Bible' to make it look like a man-god had given his personal authority to the legendary founder of one of the above sects to have the sole authority to speak for this god, and for this protection to be passed on to his successors, so falsely insulating ourselves against the charge of being fallible, and making doubt a heresy.
  4. Editing historical records, notably that written by one Flavius Josephus, to make it look like the legendary man-god who gave us this authority had a basis in historical fact.
  5. Inventing the idea of eternal pain and suffering for doubt, for questioning the authority of priests and the truth of the 'Holy Bible' and for promulgating the idea that a magic, vindictive, man in the sky was reading even people's thoughts, to ensure unquestioned obedience so making it easier to control people and abuse our power.
  6. Promulgating the idea of an evil, malignant, demi-god who we could blame for planting doubt in the minds of people who thought for themselves and for planting inconvenient evidence to fool people, and to turn other people against those who dared to question our authority by threatening them with the stigma of being thought in league with this imaginary 'Satan'.
  7. Shamelessly using threats, fear of death, and purpose-built superstitions to control people.
  8. Brutally suppressing any dissent and giving ourselves the power of life and death and the right to use torture against anyone who raised questions or objections we found embarrassing or threatening, and so killing many tens of millions of people for our own selfish convenience.
  9. Delaying human progress by many centuries by suppressing the development of science for fear it would undermine the superstitions on which we relied and expose the lies we had been telling to the people, whom we had conspired to keep in ignorance, because knowledge and reason were the greatest threats to our power and privilege.
  10. Artificially creating a climate of fear when convenient to us by persecuting innocent and defenceless women as 'witches' to give the illusion that we were defending the people from Satan.
  11. Encouraging trade in human beings and treating some people as sub-human because it suited the greed of the rich and powerful and the expansionist ambitions of the colonial powers who were facilitating the spread of our cult.
  12. Encouraging racism, dehumanization and demonisation of people who subscribe to other cults and who had different labels pinned on them as children, and organizing frequent bouts of genocide, confiscation of property and denial of basic human rights against them on the pretext that we were defending people against the 'evil' we had invented for the purpose.
  13. Imposing guilt and fear on children before they were old enough to resist it, so ensuring they remained under our control for the rest of their lives, and accepted their position in life, any misfortune and any abuse we handed out, as just punishment for their unspeakably sinful nature.
  14. Promulgating the obscene idea that the ruling classes, who defend our privilege and tolerate our corruption in return, are appointed to their position by the legendary man-god who granted us infallibility and appointed us to lead, and who will punish severely, eternally and unimaginably painfully, anyone who questions his divine right to so appoint our rulers for us.
  15. Systematically sucking up the proceeds of their labour from the working people of the world and using it to buy privilege and a comfortable life for the clergy and to further the interests of the Catholic Church, and so helping to keep working people a position of poverty and dependency.
  16. Threatening poor people with eternal damnation if they planned their family size and so threatened the supply of large numbers of poor people to be inducted at an early age into the Catholic cult and so threatened this lucrative income stream and the large, poor, dependent population off which the Catholic Church and its clergy lives.
  17. Systematically demonising and mentally abusing women who demand equality with men and/or the right to control their own bodies and lay claim to reproductive rights because we found the thought of fifty percent of the people not being under the control of men a threat to our power and privilege and an affront to our institutionalised misogyny.
  18. Causing widespread famine, lingering deaths from preventable illness, and large numbers of orphans in the poorest parts of the world by lying to them about condoms and telling them that their use would result in an eternity of unendurable pain and suffering, just to ensure the continuing dependency of the people on the 'beneficent' clergy who help to keep them that way.
  19. Systematically using our power and authority over people to abuse them physically, sexually and psychologically and then shamelessly using the guilt we had inculcated them with to ensure their silence whilst we protected their abusers and gave them access to more victims.
  20. Lastly, we apologise to humanity for inventing the notion of Hell in order to justify creating it here on earth for most of the last two thousand years, to create the conditions in which we could wield unfettered power over people the better to serve our limitless greed and ambition.
The vast assets of the Vatican and the world-wide Catholic Church will be donated to the United Nations for promoting peace and understanding between all peoples and for the relief of poverty, famine and disease throughout the world.

Given at St. Peter's, Rome, on the 7th day of February, the feast of St. Ron the Protection Racketeer, in the year 2013, the seventh of Our pontificate (my how tempis fugit!)

Benedict XVI

END
I understand this was written on the side of a large pig which is currently flying round the world, spreading the good news that at last the Catholic Church has discovered the liberating effects of intellectual integrity.





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Friday 25 January 2013

Understanding Papal Infallibility

Some people seem to be having a problem understanding the idea of papal infallibility so this blog explains it in easy to understand terms, complete with a few examples of how the Pope uses it.

The important thing to understand is that it gives the Pope fantastic magical powers. Because he is infallible whatever he says becomes fact, automatically. Because he is the only person to have these powers, obviously he is the ultimate source of all truth because he literally creates it at will.

That's if you believe the official dogma.
Papal infallibility is a dogma of the Catholic Church which states that, in virtue of the promise of Jesus to Peter, the Pope is preserved from the possibility of error "when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church"

Infallibility - In general, exemption or immunity from liability to error or failure; in particular in theological usage, the supernatural prerogative by which the Church of Christ is, by a special Divine assistance, preserved from liability to error in her definitive dogmatic teaching regarding matters of faith and morals.

The teaching of the Vatican Council is to be found in Session III, cap. 4, where it is declared that "the doctrine of faith, which God has revealed, has not been proposed as a philosophical discovery to be improved upon by human talent, but has been committed as a Divine deposit to the spouse of Christ, to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted by her"; and in Session IV, cap. 4, where it is defined that the Roman pontiff when he teaches ex cathedra "enjoys, by reason of the Divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer wished His Church to be endowed in defining doctrine regarding faith and morals".
So there we are. The Catholic Church has 'proved', within the Catholic Church's definition of proof, that the Pope is infallible, merely by defining the Pope as infallible, therefore the Pope is infallible. QED.

Let there be facts!

So what has this meant for the world?

Earth as it used to be
Well, the most famous example was when the Pope declared that earth was no longer flat but was now a globe. At that instant earth must have changed from being flat to being a globe. Obviously this couldn't have happened before the Pope's announcement because, no matter how short, there would have been a period during which the Pope was wrong - which is obviously impossible, being infallible. Similarly, it couldn't have happened after the Pope's announcement for the same reason, therefore it must have happened exactly simultaneously with the Pope's announcement. It also follows naturally from the Catholic Church's 'logic' that there must have been such an announcement because the Catholic Church's official position changed and that can only happen when the Pope infallibly announces, as the spokesperson for God, that there has been a change in the 'truth'.

Curiously though, there doesn't seem to be a record of this momentous occasion. We just know that in the early Middle ages leading theologians like Diodorus of Tarsus, Severian, Bishop of Gabala and Cosmas Indicopleustes were proclaiming that earth was flat but by the late Middle Ages those such as Thomas Aquinas were proclaiming it to be spherical and none of them were declared heretical, so we are safe to assume that the infallible Pope changed his mind. Maybe he just announced the change in earth's fundamental shape to a few friends.

The Universe before 1820
The second major change was when earth stopped being the centre of the universe, with the sun and moon going round it and the stars being stuck on the dome over it, to being merely a small planet orbiting one of half a billion suns in one of half a billion galaxies in a vast expanding universe and the stars being transformed into remote astronomical bodies like suns, super novae and galaxies. (I wonder what happened to the dome over earth and all that water it was holding up.)

We can date this event a little better than earth's change from flat to spherical. It happened in 1820 when "...the Congregation of the Holy Office, with the pope's approval, decreed that Catholic astronomer, Joseph Settele was allowed to treat the earth's motion as an established fact." (Wikipedia - Geocentric model) and so repudiated the infallible papal decrees listed in The Pontifical Decrees Against the Doctrine of The Earth’s Movement and the Ultramontane Defence of Them. It's a shame the actual time and date in 1820 that the Pope gave his infallible approval for this decree isn't recorded, because that would have been the time it all changed. We could have a special 'Galileo Day' to celebrate it.

Barnacle Goose, Branta leucopsis
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No. It's a fish... er... duck (official!)
One example of a Pope changing the natural world by infallible decree is the case of the Barnacle Goose (Branta leucopsis). In the Middle ages Catholic bishops in Ireland had declared that Barnacle Geese were fish and thus could be eaten on Friday and during Lent, when consumption of flesh by Catholics was a sin. This was because, so they wrongly believed, Barnacle Geese don't reproduce by laying eggs like other birds; instead they emerge fully formed from barnacles - which are 'fish', obviously (actually barnacles are arthropods, related to crabs but let's not get pedantic, we are dealing with Catholic Church 'facts' here after all).

This all changed when Pope Innocent III declared at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 that Catholics were explicitly prohibited from eating Barnacle Geese during Lent because, despite their unusual reproduction (sic), they lived and fed like ducks and so were of the same nature as other birds.

So, at that point Barnacle Geese ceased being fish and became er... ducks. However, they continued to reproduce by growing in barnacles and not by laying eggs like other birds. This of course is still the case, because the infallible papal declaration of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 is still in force. People who believe that Barnacle Geese reproduce by flying to breeding grounds of which Medieval Catholic bishops were unaware and where they mate and lay eggs like other geese, should cease in that erroneous belief forthwith. It will remain an error until the Pope announces otherwise and has been an error since well before 1215.

Pope Pius XII, Euphoria
Elderly Catholics might still remember the day in 1951 when Pope Pius XII, in a moment of euphoria over Georges Lemaïtre proof of the Big Bang, threw caution to the wind and declared this to be the moment when God said 'Let there be light!' and so the biblical God was now proven by science (was there some doubt?) and so accepted that the universe began several billion years ago and took a long time to develop.
It would seem that present-day science, with one sweep back across the centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to the august instant of the primordial Fiat Lux [Let there be Light], when along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, and the elements split and churned and formed into millions of galaxies. Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, [science] has confirmed the contingency of the universe and also the well-founded deduction as to the epoch when the world came forth from the hands of the Creator. Hence Creation took place. We say: "Therefore, there is a Creator. Therefore God exists!"
Pope Pius XII, 1951
Following some discrete advice from Lemaïtre that tying the proof of God to a falsifiable scientific theory might not be the wisest piece of divine guidance he had received, in fact it was more a Papal Blunder than Papal Bull, Pope Pius XII decided to say no more on the matter, but the damage was done.

At that very moment of course, according to the dogma of papal infallibility, the universe had ceased being a few thousand years old and the product of a six-day special creation and had instantly become several billion years old and the product of a slow, scientifically rational process - and the whole of Genesis had been rendered false, probably mythical or at best merely allegorical. And with that, of course, Pius XII inadvertently abolished original sin, the need for God's forgiveness, and any meaning to Jesus' supposed sacrifice or indeed any purpose to his alleged existence. Oops!

Such is the danger of having the power to create reality by fiat but lacking the wisdom or understanding to apply it judiciously.

The same Pope Pius XII had earlier announced in 1950 that the way life on earth had been created was now, in all important respects, the way Darwin and Wallace had described it in 1859. Previously it had been created the way the Bible described it with all species being created exactly as they are to day by God.

Prior to that announcement, all the evidence supporting Darwin and Wallace, like geology, fossils, anatomy, physiology, etc., had either been put there by Satan to mislead and confuse mankind, or by God to test our faith. Immediately the Pope made his announcement however it all became proof of God's wondrous powers and wisdom in thinking up the process of evolution, setting it in motion and guiding it to produce mankind.

Curiously though, with the age of the universe not being changed from a few thousand years to many billions until 1951, for about a year we had a situation whereby the earth was not old enough for the slow evolutionary process, which was now a fact, to have taken place.

Luckily, another useful Catholic doctrine - that anything God has done which seems illogical, ridiculous, contradictory, or the act of a deranged madman or incompetent fool, is merely a mystery beyond our comprehension and thus proof of God's infinite wisdom - came into play to save the day. Phew!

One change which happened very recently seems to be important for Catholics but appears to have made no difference at all to the rest of the world. This was the abolition of 'limbo' by the Pope on April 7, 2007.

Until that date, because God couldn't stand the sight of the 'souls' of the disgusting little sinners, babies who died before they could be baptised went to a place called 'limbo' rather than Hell, because, although God was repulsed by them, they hadn't done anything wrong other than being born before they could 'accept Jesus as their saviour', so eternal pain and suffering seemed a bit harsh even for the god who had thought up the idea of sin, Hell and eternal pain and suffering in the first place.

So Pope Benedict exercised his infallible powers to change reality and henceforth God will tolerate them, despite their repulsive sinfulness, and 'limbo' has been abolished. It is not clear whether all the babies who were in limbo at the time simply ceased to exist as well or whether Heaven was swamped by a sudden deluge of the many centuries worth of accumulated baby 'souls' arriving instantaneously.

Pope Benedict was quick to point out that babies should still be baptised as quickly as possible though. This obviously had nothing to do with the need to pin a label on them so they could be counted as Catholics and so keep the membership numbers artificially inflated. It was clearly an ecumenical matter based on sound theology and a personal communication from God to Pope Benedict.

Another recent change in reality announced by Pope Benedict on 17 March 2009 was the change in the cause of AIDS. This used to be caused only by the Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) which can be transmitted during sexual intercourse, the risk of which could be reduced to a very low level by use of condoms. Now however, following a change introduced by the Pope, AIDS is also caused by using a condom.

This again is based on sound theology and a personal communication from God to Pope Benedict and has nothing to do with concern that using condoms routinely as a contraceptive might reduce the number of babies Catholics are producing to be counted in the world-wide Catholic numbers, and would also reduce abject poverty, suffering and hopelessness, the escape from which is sold as a reason to allow the Catholic Church control of your day-to-day lives and so keep the money coming in.

I hope this article has been some help in explaining the idea of papal infallibility and how the Pope can use it to change reality to suit the needs of the Catholic Church and its clergy people as and when required. What a good thing it was for humanity that the Pope had the infallible idea of infallibly defined his own infallibility and so granted himself these wonderful, magical powers so we don't need to concern ourselves with things like what's real and what isn't.

So there we are. Papal infallibility is not at all hard to understand. We just need to suspend disbelief, abandon rational thinking and believe what we are told to believe. Then we just need to obey all the rules and not ask so many silly questions.


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Saturday 29 December 2012

As Read In The Vatican

Closet Atheists can be hiding just about everywhere!


Just imaging being Pope and suddenly realising it's all been a lie. What would you do? Give up all that wealth, adulation and power, and the servants who come with the post, or would you be honest to yourself and to everyone else?

The Catholic Church had survived schisms, multiple papacies, corrupt gangsters, debauched gluttons and thieves, violent psychopaths, murderers and even (allegedly) a female imposter Pope, but could it survive an honest Atheist Pope, or would world-wide Catholicism shatter and crumble if an honest Pope told the world that he had come to realise that the 'faith' was founded on lies and that Jesus was just a myth based on Bronze-age superstitions and stories concocted for political purposes.

Or is an honest Pope just a dream too far?

[Update] A couple of weeks after I posted this, Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation, citing, amongst other things, "hard questions of faith". I'm sure it must have been a coincidence...


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