The Pope resigns / New Pope discussion

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BEAL said:
I believe a Pope cares about the poor when he starts selling off the valuables in the Vatican to go to charity :)
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Like the Pieta and other works of art? Do you think they should be sold to museums?
 
The election of Pope Francis, previously Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, has resurfaced a decades-old controversy surrounding the kidnappings of two Jesuit priests.

Bergoglio was a high-ranking official in the Society of Jesus of Argentina when a military junta was installed in the South American country in 1976. According to the Los Angeles Times, priests Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics were kidnapped in May of that year by the navy. "They surfaced five months later, drugged and seminude, in a field," the Times reported. A 2005 lawsuit accused Bergoglio of unspecified involvement in the abductions. Reuters explains that "the military government secretly jailed [Yorio and Jalics] for their work in poor neighborhoods."

According to "The Silence," a book written by journalist Horacio Verbitsky, Bergoglio withdrew his order's protection of the two men after they refused to quit visiting the slums, which ultimately paved the way for their capture.
Verbitsky's book is based on statements by Orlando Yorio, one of the kidnapped Jesuits, before he died of natural causes in 2000. Both of the abducted clergymen survived five months of imprisonment.

"History condemns him. It shows him to be opposed to all innovation in the Church and above all, during the dictatorship, it shows he was very cozy with the military," Fortunato Mallimacci, the former dean of social sciences at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, once said.

Those who defend Bergoglio say there is no proof behind these claims and, on the contrary, they say the priest helped many dissidents escape during the military junta's rule.
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Pope Francis Kidnapping Controversy: Jorge Mario Bergoglio Accused Of Involvement In 1976 Abductions
 
As Fox and many other Catholic and ex-Catholic dissidents see it, Vatican II marked the moment when the church had the chance to reinvent itself as a flexible moral and spiritual force in a rapidly changing world. Indeed, it briefly seemed to do just that – and it’s important to understand that Bergoglio, like Joseph Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyla before him, was part of the right-wing counterrevolution within the church that aggressively rolled back those changes, crushed dissident thought and reasserted the absolute power of the pope and his hierarchy. Pope Francis is a longtime ally of Communion and Liberation, a fiercely conservative Catholic organization that insists on “total fidelity and communion” with the church leadership and is devoted, among other things, to battling European socialism and Latin American liberation theology. In Italian politics, CL has been closely tied to the party of Silvio Berlusconi, and its founder was an intimate friend of Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Benedict XVI.
If you engaged with the Catholic church in any way between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, you witnessed the limited effects of Vatican II on the ground: the Mass was in English and could partly be understood (more’s the pity); many dioceses were afflicted with faintly groovy young priests and nuns who played folk guitar; fish was no longer mandatory for Friday night’s dinner (an innovation resisted to this day by many older Catholics). But Vatican II was intended — at least by Pope John XXIII, who convened it, and the group of theologians who wrote and rewrote its central documents — to cover a lot more ground than Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.”
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Fox’s 2012 book “The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved” contains a list of 105 prominent Catholic theologians who have been silenced or expelled under the last two popes, including many influential figures of the Vatican II period and its aftermath. Fox himself is on the list; he was silenced by then-Cardinal Ratzinger in 1988 after publishing his New Age-flavored bestseller “The Coming of the Cosmic Christ” and expelled from the Dominican order five years later. (I noted during our conversation that Fox, who is now an Episcopal priest, consistently refers to the most recent pope — his particular nemesis — as “Ratzinger” rather than Benedict XVI.) This climate of inquisition, Fox says, “runs totally contrary to the entire attitude and teaching of Vatican II. In the Vatican councils, they defined the church as the people, not as the hierarchy. Under these last two popes, it’s all about the hierarchy.”
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Is Pope Francis a fraud? - Salon.com
 
Diemen said:
It's not promising, that's for sure. It's difficult to start a rational or meaningful conversation when the opening salvo is so openly derisive and dismissive.
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After reading through the entire thread, sadly, this quote is spot on. Years ago, this particular forum was a nice place to discuss spiritual issues...from U2 song lyrics to the state of the world. It now appears to simply be full of posters who are more likely to just degrade religion, period, especially Catholicism.

I don't get the hate. I certainly understand disagreeing with a church teaching(s), and there have obviously been tragic mistakes made by the HUMAN BEINGS who have been in positions of authority within the Catholic Church. I hope this new Pope focuses on humility, the sins of the recent and distant past, and opens up a path to forgiveness, healing, and justice for every single person who was ever hurt, in any way, by someone who was in any way a part of the Church.

The only thing I know about the new Pope is what I saw the night he was recently introduced. Before he gave the traditional "first blessing", he stopped and asked that everyone please pray for him instead. He simply held a moment of silence to let those in St Peters Square, along with millions of viewers, to do that in whatever way they saw fit. My prayer was simple and described in the paragraph above.

I hope this forum can still be a place where civil discussion and debate can be had on Spiritual issues that really do matter. If there is no one here interested in that, then to each his own, and I can find those discussions else where. And posters here are absolutely free to carry on any way they want to.

Not trying to change the "culture" of this forum...just wondering if there are any posters left who do, as Bono used to say, "Ask the Big Questions?" Just curious, as it's been at least 7-8 years since I used to visit this place and find some very interesting discussions. Maybe I have the wrong forum in mind...if so, I do apologize. May all of you have a blessed day.
 
It seems that FYM has always been political, not purely spiritual. Certainly religion and politics intersect, but I've always taken this particular part of Interference as a place where people debate the issues and events of the day. This is what it was like when I started posting in ... 2003?

Good gravy, has it been 10 years?
 
I've been lurking here for twelve years. And I can say, in all truthfulness, that it has changed only insofar as some old faces have gone and a couple of new faces have come. Probably the dismissiveness toward religion has gotten a little more in-yer-face, but nothing compares with the threads of doom immediately after 9/11.
 
I agree the tone towards religion is more unfriendly compared to when I started posting here. While I know that there are some who disagree with the idea of God, spirituality and such, I don't understand the snarky comments that give little to the discussion and are more self-serving. I know snarkiness is the nature of the Internet, but it's still off-putting to see them when it is possible to have a good natured discussion.

But like Kieran said, back in the day, there was a lot of tension here over the war in Iraq and terrorism, so there was snarkiness and snappy tones there too. I guess those aspects found another topic.

Wow, I said back in the day. I've been on Interference for over 10 years (I had another name before registering under this one). Clearly, I have no life.
 
I've gone through some of the (very) old threads, and what I found shocking was the homophobia and outright anti-gay attitudes by some of the regular posters (an AchtungBubba springs to mind). Melon was really alone back then.

I think what's also happened in here is that our "religious" posters present a very cartoonish version of Christianity, and this it's more easily mocked. It is true that FYM is a shadow of its former self, but that's due to Facebook and a wealth of other social media that didn't exist in 2004/5. And the fact that it takes U2 half a decade to record an album.
 
I think some of the difficulty comes in for many of the threads when the discussions have two opposing sides arguing broadly and tediously and repetitively ad infinitum as opposed to two kind-of-the-same sides arguing in a narrower, shaded and much more interesting and less predictable dialogue.

We've certainly had several religious present interesting arguments here so I'm always uncomfortable with a broad brush, although I suspect that Irvine's quotes around "religious" added a little additional commentary, narrowing the brush stroke some.

Me? If the discussion is good enough, I don't care whether I agree with it or not.
 
I don't know who writes this guy's material, but he deserves a raise


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"This is a symbol, it is a sign — washing your feet means I am at your service," Francis told the youngsters. "Help one another. This is what Jesus teaches us. This is what I do. And I do it with my heart. I do this with my heart because it is my duty, as a priest and bishop I must be at your service."
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Pope Francis washes feet of young detainees in ritual
 
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