UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
Cardinal George Pell has indicated recently he expects that the upcoming Final Family Synod in less than five months will “massively endorse” the Catholic Church’s traditional teachings. Contraception, abortion and homosexual love would then remain “mortal sins”; women would remain second class Catholics; the Church would remain a clerical dictatorship; and children would continue at unsafe risks of priest sexual abuse, it appears, despite the pope’s carefully staged spin to the contrary. Unless Pope Francis convenes a full ecumenical council before retiring, which seems unlikely, Catholics will have to look to their democratically responsive national governments to press the Vatican to reform, see my “Two Years In, Pope Must Call Council As John XXIII Did“.
Elements of this dismal and disappointing forecast are echoed in well regarded veteran Vatican journalists’ recent reporting, including by Sandro Magister in “The Closed Door of Pope Francis” here,
[Chiesa]
and by Robert Mickens in “Merciless zealots in defense of life and truth“, here,
See also my pertinent remarks, “What Do We Now Know About The Real Goal Of Pope Francis?”.
Pope Francis, instead of making real and permanent reforms, will likely continue with his diversionary media distractions, like a gratuitous climate change encyclical, unnecessary foreign media junkets, and the like, while real issues are avoided. For example, it appears that Pope Francis’ solution for facilitating women’s exercise of their reproductive rights is more of the same as has recently been announced. The pope plans to send an army of globe-trotting priests — his “missionaries of mercy” — to absolve from eternal damnation women who have had abortions. Just what Catholic women need — another chance to share their intimate and stressful sexual histories in a dark confessional box with a celibate and strange guy who never changed a nappy, as Ireland’s former president, Mary McAleese, so well put it.
Of course, these priests may also have some linguistic and cultural challenges in the USA due to the local US priest shortage. Most likely, this “priest army” will consist mainly of “mercenary missionaries” bid for by US bishops in the Filipino, African and/or Indian “priest markets”, no? Is the pope for real here?
And as the pope allies himself increasingly with US Republicans and their “low tax” billionaire backers in next year’s US elections, the US political party that has prevented comprehensive US immigration reform, the pope also is offering a “fix” for some of the millions of undocumented US Latinos. Many of these desperate immigrants have “indigenous American” genes that led to their being discriminated against in Central and South American countries of their birth, and many of whom fled to the US to escape some of these residual and failed countries that had been dominated for centuries by the partnership of landed Hispanic descendants and a right wing Catholic hierarchy. The pope will give them a Hispanic saint, Fr. Junipero Serra, who in the 18th Century helped the rulers from Spain forcibly subjugate the indigenous Americans in California. Pope John Paul II beatified Fr. Serra a few weeks before George W.H. Bush’s was elected in 1988, and now Francis will canonize Fr. Serra this summer, apparently to enhance the presidential prospects of GWHB’s son, Jeb. Fr. Serra is almost a Bush Family patron saint, no? Again, is Pope Francis for real here as well? Please see my, A Mess: Mexico & Electing Bishops & Jeb Bush Too .
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