Discussion for article #229424
I wanna kiss that man on the ring.
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Now the truly faithful will be known by their acts
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“They don’t understand that love for the poor is at the center of the Gospel,” he said. “Demanding this isn’t unusual, it’s the social doctrine of the church.”
Wow, a man of God who knows what he’s talking about?
That’s as rare as hen’s teeth.
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I hope he has a loyal food taster and stays away from light aircraft.
Party on Frank!
There is no doubt this man is forcing many of us who lost faith in their church to reconsider. The Jesuit exhibits a quiet courage and faith extraordinary in a time of anger and selfishness. There are a lot of people who will decry his message, but there is no doubt he is making them listen to a new voice.
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The Gospels pre-date the Communist Manifesto-- it’s not that the Pope is Communist, it’s that even Marx saw the wisdom of Christ’s teachings.
I’m an agnostic, and take any holy scripture with a large dose of salt, but that doesn’t mean I think people should be allowed to starve and suffer. (See: Al Franken’s “Supply Side Jesus” for more info.)
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Damn, the Pope is a follower of Christ. He has actually read the Gospels and thinks what Christ charged us to do is more important than the Old Testament fire and brimstone. Who knew?
The pope clearly is an admirer of Hélder Câmara:
“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.”
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The deafening silence from local Arch-Bishops shows what a long uphill battle Pope Francis has to reform his church.
“They don’t understand that love for the poor is at the center of the Gospel”
It takes a real act of will to fail to understand. I know it was pretty damn clear to me way back when my age was in single digits and I went to church with my parents.
And it is the part of the New Testament message that still appeals to me, even though I’ve long since become a nonbeliever. It makes me queasy when I think about the millions of Americans who make their Christian faith central in their lives and have somehow come to believe that they are following the will of Jesus when they dispense hate and fear and meanness like a Tea Party member.
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This is why the Benedictines, Dominicans and Franciscans have kept out a Jesuit pope for 2 millennia. Jesuits have always been considered the “radicals” of the Church for their unflinching support for the poor at the “expense” of the wealthy. That simply wouldn’t do for the other orders who were more interested in how much gold the tithes and the indulgences could produce for the Church coffers. Saint John Paul II and Benedict, in particular, formed much of the latter 20th Century Church dogma around moving away from the teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. This is evident in their declaring “Liberation Theology” a heresy and refusing to condemn the oligarchies that rule much of the world and refused sanctions on those countries that had such despotic heads of state, as long as the despots were oligarchs.
The abuse of the Indulgences, in particular, were one of the “95 Theses” that Martin Luther nailed to the door of the Cathedral of Wittenberg, taking the Church to task for the abuse of the sale of Indulgences. It was this general area, which constituted much of Luther’s writings, that led to his ultimate excommunication and the foundation of Lutheranism.
Lutheranism kept much of the core teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, including maintaining that the Eucharist was indeed the transmogrification of the wine and bread into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. Luther maintained a much closer reliance on the teachings of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount as Lutheran dogma, as opposed the the tenets favored by the Church of Christ’s charge that if the clergy (or anointed disciples) forgave sins on Earth, then they were forgiven in Heaven. just as the Jesuits do, until the present Pope.
Unfortunately, the modern Lutheran Church, particularly in the USA, has moved away from Christ’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, to a more rigid view that many of such teachings are “communistic.” This trend apparently began to develop in the very early 20th Century and accelerated after WWII.
Nevertheless, those of us who have yearned for a return to the teachings of the Jesuit Order were thrilled by the election of Pope Francis and maintained that, despite the early demeaning of his Papacy by the “liberal” segments of the Catholic Church. Those of us who admire the Jesuits and their long dogmatic teachings of the value of education and “liberal” view of the tenets of the church always maintained that this Pope was going to do things that rocked the Church, and therefore society, to its foundations.