VATICAN CITY (CNS) – People who act shocked that a priest would bless a gay couple but have no problem with him blessing a crooked businessman are hypocrites, Pope Francis said.
“The most serious sins are those that are disguised with a more ‘angelic’ appearance. No one is scandalized if I give a blessing to an entrepreneur who perhaps exploits people, which is a very serious sin. Whereas they are scandalized if I give it to a homosexual – this is hypocrisy,” he told the Italian magazine Credere.
The interview was scheduled for publication Feb. 8, but Vatican News reported on some of its content the day before when the magazine issued a press release about the interview.
A less hypocritical Catholic Church would be nice. I wish Francis luck, he’ll need it to push the right wing of the church to be less shitty.
I am an (agnostic) atheist, but let’s be clear: not all priests are pedophiles, this is a huge exaggeration. But I still think they should be able to marry and have children, like normal people. And I believe that this would at least stop some of them doing pedophilic acts.
They started the Church of England so that the king could get a divorce. Now they’re probably gonna start the Church of New England to force their wives to stay with their toxic asses.
A less hypocritical Catholic Church would be nice.
Then we’ll have to wait for the next pope I guess. “Turn the other cheek” isn’t really compatible with victim blaming.
My family is super Catholic & conservative. They hate the Pope and it’s so weird - growing up in Catholic school, one good thing I’ll say is that we were educated in almost every aspect of that religion and its history.
So even though I can’t remember the last time I was in a church, I do remember shit like “the pope can talk to god”.
Now, of course it’s bullshit, but I have to assume that’s the premise we start from here. If so, shut the fuck up. He talks to god. End of story.
And somewhat related - they’re MAGA types. They like their dictators. Fuck off. This is what you get.
Yeah, before my grandma passed, she was a devout roman catholic, and even earned some award for her service to the church (she still volunteered in her mid 90s)
But, when the pope was criticizing Trumps border concentration camps, she said, “The pope needs to mind his own business.” It’s wild.
She wasn’t a Maga type, but she was absolutely a bigot and not a nice person.
The only moral [disagreement with the Vatican] is my [disagreement with the Vatican].
I think that many of these types see Trump as God himself (or Jesus maybe) so his views outrank the pope. That’s how much of an unhinged cult MAGA has become.
The force that pulls a society over the edge into a realm where fascists can seize power is that comfortable feeling of deciding one person or ideology is right and then just turning off your brain, end of conversation. Exhaustion can recede into a comfortable finality.
It makes sense why someone would find that particular kind of hate blanket comfortable, but that doesn’t make it any less pathetic or disgusting.
I don’t like that popes exist. I’m pretty sure if we took proper care of all people, religion would poof away in short order. That said, if popes have to exist this guy is a wonderful Pope. He’s not dismantling the place from the inside or anything but he is pushing them to be decent people. He’s pushing them to make more sympathetic decisions. We just look at this more shocking public statements and go well f*** yeah why doesn’t everybody say this, but for him in the position where he is he doesn’t have to and it’s kind of a big deal that he does.
He’s still calling birth control “morally unacceptable”, continuing the anti-condom and therefore pro-aids rhethoric of the church.
I’m not a religious person, but I think some views in this thread are coming off a bit narcissistic and ignorant. Religion has been a large part of humanity for literally forever, and people can’t expect it to just go away completely. People turn to religion for comfort, often when they won’t receive it in other ways. There will always be someone in the world who needs religion, and we all need to coexist. The important thing here is he is attempting to drive his members to be empathetic and improve moral compass. Just be grateful for that at least. People expect too much.
you never would have heard this come from the church, let alone the Pope 20 years ago. I don’t know why people can’t be happy that at least one religion is at least trying to be relevant and adapt to the times, and be more tolerant and inclusive. can’t say the same about every religion unfortunatly
I don’t want them to adapt, I want them abandoned and left in the Bronze Age.
Well we don’t always get what we want. Life isn’t fair like that I don’t mean to start an argument I’m not religious either and also get upset at people hiding their own bigotry behind religion but looking down on others for having different beliefs is in of itself biggoted no?
When God says something is incorrect, that doesn’t change because people have become modern and adapt to the times. An act of abomination is still an abomination. How few stand on the side of God today!
Not a Christian anymore, but I strongly remember being taught that Jesus said that through him all are saved.
Everyone.
Not, “everyone except Brian over there”.
E V E R Y O N E
I don’t care if the Bible says “gay=bad”; in my mind that’s just another sin on a mountain of shit because if Jesus, the son of God, says everyone is saved through him, then everyone is saved through him. No exceptions.
I believe Jesus also said
Matthew 7:5 Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
So maybe we should focus on our own paths in life rather than someone else’s life decision that has 0 bearing on whether you or I go to heaven or hell?
I mean why people are so obsessed with what people do in their own home, on their own dime, and their own time is beyond me.
Christofacists just want to control others. They don’t care what Jesus said. They don’t want to FOLLOW Jesus, They want to BE Jesus and tell others how to live.
and people can’t expect it to just go away completely.
At least 79% went away. Only 1% of my country’s population visited churches for christmas. For 20% of people who claim to belive in something other than sky fossil I have no data.
Millions of people is a pretty good dataset for statistical reliability. That country can be considered a useful example of what’s possible.
“People expect too much”.
Yeha, I expect an organization that protects pedophiles to be dismantled. Sorry if that’s expecting too much.
While I’m all for phasing out modern religions over time, currently they still hold giant influence on hearts and minds of people, and, like it or not, Pope is an influential person; moreover, he’s essentially part of conservative camp, where we need change the most.
Also, let’s finally separate pedophiles and child molesters, as it’s both essential to understanding the dynamic that leads to this happening in churches (celibate warping people’s minds and children being easiest to lean to non-consential sex more often than actual pedophilia), as well as to create two distinct and effective solutions at child protection.
Actual pedophiles often need to get therapy to avoid mental traps that lead them to accept offending behavior, and those with severe lust over everything (which constitute over half of all child molestation cases) need other kind of therapy to manage their desires in a healthy way.
In case of the church, it means dismantling institute of celibacy alone can have a strong positive effect on child safety, as there would be no barriers for those “underfucked” to maintain a sexual life that would keep their minds in order. Maybe there is a point in going for that first?
I mean… I don’t know if that’s gunna be the complete answer. The Boy Scout leaders had no expectations of celebacy but they had an endemic issue with child molestation. The idea that it’s the lack of adult access to sex that creates these situations ignores a lot of the realities of predators.
Personally I think the best thing to do is to actually mandate age appropriate sex ed. They piloted that program in our district when I was a kid. For a youngster of the tender age of 1st grade all this needs to be is "Here’s the proper names of the different genital types and if someone wants to touch in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable it’s okay to tell a parent, a teacher a doctor or an adult you trust where and how you have been touched to help make it stop.
You would be quite frankly shocked how many kids in the district blew whistles on adult some right out the gate from that first briefing. Preserving some nebulous children’s “innocence” isn’t worth even one child suffering in ignorance.
Or maybe if they stopped giving them immunity for their actions they would think twice before commiting a crime and ruining a child’s life.
I’m not a religious person, but I think some views in this thread are coming off a bit narcissistic and ignorant.
I encountered something similar in another Lemmy instance a couple of weeks ago with someone who believes all Christianity is bad, period.
The irony is, it’s the very same black-and-white thinking one would expect from a religious fundamentalist.
(Some Christian denominations are liberal, LGBTQ-friendly and not at all like that, such as United Church of Christ and Unity.)
Ditto. Not a particularly a religious person (spiritualist more generally) and generally pretty critical of the Church but bloody tired of people who have been religion burned taking it out on others who are just clinging to comfort to get by in a hard world. Lemmy has a rather large Christian Atheist community. You know the sort, the “I don’t believe in God but the God I very stridently don’t believe in is the Christian God” type of person. It does come across as fairly insecure at times. I am reminded of the way I used to behave as an angry teen.
I think we are seeing a historic waning of faith and a reassessment of cultural values…but looking at the cycles of things that generally means there’s a backlash which might be still building or we might be facing it right now. I think it’s far better for those traumatized atheists to build solidarity with people inside the faiths who are pushing for and building the foundations for changes as “enemy of my enemy is my friend” alliances. Sadly a lot of them seem way too busy trying to attain personal catharsis by just scalding anyone who treats religion with respect.
Religion has been a large part of humanity for literally forever, and people can’t expect it to just go away
Don’t crush my dreams like that.
Religion is a reflection of humanity. A lot of people are thinking that humanity is a reflection of religion.
This is a bizarre sort of logic. If humanity is a reflection of religion, then where does religion come from? Perhaps from an omnipotent force of some sort?
If you believe religion is a creation of humans, than any issue with religion is ultimately just an issue with humans. And yeah, people suck.
Methinks lot of weird anti-religious ideas come from people who once believed religion came from an omnipotent being, then were in some way negatively affected be religion and realized that even religious people suck sometimes too. But the disappointment from discovering religion isn’t what they previously believed remains. The thought patterns about religion being a reflection of God and not being a reflection of humanity also remains. Even when someone no longer believes in God, the religious thought patterns remain.
As a baseline I’d expect the major religions to clean up their own shit, but it seems like they’re never quite able to. I’d like my ancestor worhip to be a little less rapey and a little less reliant on an unknowable higher authority that mentally ill people think they can talk to.
still catholic. still the pope. no matter how progressive he may seem.
I mean…yeah? Did you think progress was going to come from the outside? Someone’s gotta make an effort to steer the ship the right way.
What do you think would happen if he just came out and blessed gay marriage?
Progress won’t come from any Christianity (and likely almost any religion, but I don’t know others well enough to comment). They will either need to denounce the book as being bullshit and decide to progress or they will continue to hold society behind.
It’s worth mentioning that during the dark ages, it was actually monks who preserved history and scientific knowledge, and advanced it. Even afterwards, Mendelian genetics was discovered by Gregor Mendel, a friar and abbot.
On top of that though, a lot of scientific knowledge and mathematics was preserved and cultivated by Islamic empires concurrent to the dark ages. They were in the middle of a golden age and progressed those fields further.
The problem isn’t so much religion in itself, but evangelicals and literalists who put it above everything else. Zealots ruin it all.
You really need to see what progress has come through Christianity to see how absurd your statement is LOL.
Fucks sake im so tired of you jaded militant shitbirds. It is constantly 120% with you fucks. Its always “agree with my personal breakdown of reality and morality or you are all complete garbage” nonsense. Progress doesnt happen on your schedule you shithead.
Nuance and context motherfucker. Do you understand it?
Man, I thought I was on crazy pills with the lack of nuance here. Everything is black and white with no room for gray or context…
I’m digging the past few days. There have been a number of posts and comments calling it out. The fact that your comment has positive upvotes is a good sign and surprising.
He is the current leader of a 2000 year old pedophile ring (the largest to ever exist) that owns its own gold plated city/country.
Fuck off with this defense of traditional bullshit. Progress doesn’t happen in tiny steps, it happens all at once with violence and bloodshed. Have you learned nothing from history?
There’s no progressive religion (I am not including Buddhism). They all say that their religion promotes peace and tolerance but they still believe in what written in their sacred book and won’t change a thing.
Im pretty sure even fighting in a war at gunpoint is not a Buddhist to thing to do. Genocide definitely disqualified you. Though culturally and religious Buddhist are two different things. The Buddha basically told everyone not to worship him and make him a religious figure and every sect of Buddhism just kind of turned around and did it anyway. Their justification is “lol”. So like. I dunno. Buddhism kind of accepts that everything anyone can or will do is something they’ve done. And existence is suffering. Freeing yourself from attachment and embracing the moment with love and kindness is a person thing, and sure genociders may be cenociding other people but ultimately through a Buddhist lens they’re harming themselves and straying further from enlightenment in the here and now.
Nothing really like MATTERS for a Buddhist in the big picture sense. We live, we do things, we die, ultimately none of it comes to anything. There’s no one watching over you to punish you or praise you, and nothing for you after you die but more of this through a different lens or to finally be done with the bullshit and leave it all behind…
It’s a doctrine for being happy NOW. Follow it, don’t, ultimately you’re the only person it matters to.
Faith is actually a mechanism to ensure change keeps happening. It suspends the “sealing off” of the mind that replaces sensory input with projected theory.
Buddhism uses presence for the same function abrahamic religions use faith. It’s a source of noise to keep the conceptual structure from gaslighting the adherent into being unable to see what’s in front of them.
Faith is actually a mechanism to ensure change keeps happening. It suspends the “sealing off” of the mind that replaces sensory input with projected theory.
Motherfucker. What do you think religious doctrine is and faith in it does.
Buddhism uses presence for the same function abrahamic religions use faith.
Buddhism, if you drill down into the monastic core, is introspective psychology. It has much more in common at that level with what’s considered philosophy in the western tradition, in particular Stoicism. It arrived at that knowledge during an initially productive scientific phase, meaning theorising and experimenting, later on alas it fell away from that and various groups fell back into that exact sealing off you mentioned, not investigating any more but accepting the map of the territory they read in monastery school as the territory. Religious innovation generally follows that kind of repeating pattern over quite long time-spans.
It’s a source of noise to keep the conceptual structure from gaslighting the adherent into being unable to see what’s in front of them.
You could also, you know, just be sceptical. Heck, even be a capital-S Sceptic them and the Stoics disagreed on like exactly one point which from a certain POV is semantics.
…not to mention that that’s not how the mind works. It’s not how life works. If you want entropy then it’s going to come from the outside, everything about life itself is geared towards minimising entropy on the inside, at the expense of accelerating its progression on the outside. (Yes the purpose of life is to hasten the heat-death of the universe, different topic). What may seem like internal randomness to you is merely your degrees of freedom doing their thing, the capacity to react to the same external stimulus in different ways depending on your internal state. It’s a chaotic system (and overall you are) but it’s definitely not noise, not from the POV of the organism itself: It is not subject to it, but is employing it.
If, OTOH, all you wanted to say is “hey I found a way to stop walking into lamp posts and I describe it like…” then first off congratulations, keep up the good work, but also I don’t care about your half-arsed theory. Maybe if you didn’t connect it up with the concept of noise it would’ve at least ended up being internally consistent. Keep not having theories if you want to see actual freedom from that conceptual stuff. Maybe investigate why you felt the need to to explain the experience instead of taking it at face value.
Don’t you think a progressive pope can do a lot of good though especially compared to a traditionalist pope?
