Well, to tell you the truth, I thought this might happen, we've got a highly homobic high priest at the helm of the Vatican. He is apparently more extreme than Pope John Paul and is called "God's Attack Dog", this doesn't fill me with any great confidence about the direction of the Catholic Church or the Papacy in general. This Pope will doubtless continue to be silent about American Imperialism, AIDS in Aftica and do nothing to reach out to LGBT people. While the world is marred in injustice the Catholic Church is saturated by corruption and sits doing nothing accept proclaim its own centrality. It has for more than a thousand years turned inward and become utterly self-serving. It has lost all traces of Christian humility and merely exists to nurture its own power. Under John Paul, to quote my victar, "the papacy has become like a dictatorship". This is not likely to change in the future.As the reformer Martin Luther said,
"the Pope, from a power so false, mischievous, blasphemous, and arrogant, has done and undertaken. have been and still are purely diabolical affairs and transactions....For all his bulls and books are extant, in which he roars like a lion ...[crying out] that no Christian can be saved unless he obeys him and is subject to him in all things that he wishes".
This Pope will doubtless continue to lord his arrogence by declaring us as "morally disordered" and and because of this we are still banned from taking communion by the Church of Rome. He will I suspect be just as anti-progress, anti-women, anti-gay and anti-contaception as the last Pope. The election of this new ultra-orthadox hardman represents a sad moment in the Churches' history.
The Vatican, in my opinion, DOES have the right to have said the things that it has done. Personally, I'm the age-old adage that, 'I may not agree with what you say, but I will fight to the last for your right to say it'.
Sadly, (& as much as I, and many others wish), we will always have a right wing in the world. Ignorant, biased and ill-concieved opinions are commonplace in today's right. The way to defeat predjudice is simply to fight it intellectually. Challenge the ideals of the Church, which for so long have been stooped within dogma and debatable authority, that all sense of perspective and reasoning seems to have been lost.
The Vatican asks what justification is there for women priests? The reply? What Biblical justification can one find for the existence of the Vatican & the Papacy?
The Vatican condemns the homosexual act as evil & wrong. For Leviticus & St Paul consider that for man to lie with man, woman to lie with woman is abomination. Ask them for the Biblical condemnation for a celibate homosexual relationship. Ask them how the many contradictions of the teachings of St Paul can be resolved into a coherent moral message.
Ask them for a definitive viewpoint on the death penalty, with no recourse for contradiction. "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth", & "Thou shalt not kill", "Turn the other cheek". Can these be ever truly amalgamated as one coherent message?
Ask the Vatican why Roman Catholic Priests were once allowed to marry, until the Vatican decided it was too expensive. And the hypocrisy in which it now uses highly dubious moralistic dogma to justify it's stance.
Ask them how the election of the Pope can be performed under the wisdom and will of the Holy Ghost, when it can take up to three dozen votes, and then a "simple majority" will suffice. Is that too the will of God.
The bullshít that Catholicism comes out with sometimes astounds even me. But it can be fought against. Intellectually & rationally.
Thanks for listening if you've got to the end of this lengthy tome! I hope I didn't make too many errors. Steven xxx.
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CRAP? WHAT D'YA MEAN IT'S CRAP? THERES EIGHT BODIES AT THE END AND HE GETS TO SHAG HIS MUM!!
