UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
And another King-day-themed posting: at his Christian Catholicism site, Jerry Slevin comments on Pope Francis’s encounter in the Philippines with a street child who poured out her anguish to him immediately before the pope gave a homily reasserting the papal ban on the use of contraception:
In “dreaming” about the pope’s encounter in the Philippines with the young “street child” on the eve of Martin Luther King’s US holiday, I had a dream! I dreamed that the pope told the young former street girl what the Vatican’s real strategy was. If he told her, I dreamed it would go something like this. Pope Francis would have said:
(1) I was elected by frightened cardinals to keep them out of jail for crimes related to child abuse cover-ups and financial corruption;
(2) My priority is protecting bishops, all 5,000 of them, while maximizing their wealth in their unaccountable lifetime positions; …
And, of course, as I read Jerry’s commentary, I think of his repeated warnings to those of us who may be inclined to view Pope Francis as a kind of Santa Claus, which, in turn, echo Sister Teresa Forcades’s observation (I cited it this morning) that Catholics need to ditch the notion of a “Pope Messiah,” and I become more convinced than ever that effective change of the Catholic church will come from the bottom of the church and not the top, from its margins and not from its (corrupt) center.
And certainly not from the media that dance so beautifully to the choreography presented to the media by that corrupt center . . . .
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