5. Pope Francis

[Dr. Zorders 1,271]

And now his niece-in-law and two grand nephews have died in a car crash:

 

http://www.huffingto..._n_5690915.html

God might be sending him a message after the evil bastard showed his true colours with his endorsement of military action yesterday.

 

Erm.... what? Action to stop ISIS is evil? You joking or..... just taking anti-Americanism a bit far?

[Galento 24]

Did you see the ISIS man in the Barcelona shirt on TV....the cheeky bastard claiming all he was was a jihadist who was scared to speak out.

 

He was the only one I saw with the face uncovered on the TV coverage, strutting round like some heroic warrior.

 

Do with them like they are doing to others, but do it quicker

[Deathray 2,940]

And now his niece-in-law and two grand nephews have died in a car crash:

 

http://www.huffingto..._n_5690915.html

God might be sending him a message after the evil bastard showed his true colours with his endorsement of military action yesterday.

 

Erm.... what? Action to stop ISIS is evil? You joking or..... just taking anti-Americanism a bit far?

 

The intent may not be strictly evil but the strategy is... the public don't want boots on ground as that'll mean our boys in the armed forces who are paid to, and freely chose to, fight in war zones at the prospect of death could get hurt, but if we let the Americans fire air bombs onto areas in ISIS control; almost inevitably killing some civilians we are intended to help and who have no choice to be in the war zone by dropping the bombs then that's fine, in a few months we'll have drop bombs as well and all these aid missions we've been running will have been perfect practice for those runs; notice Cameron using the phrase "no boots on the ground" as opposed to "no combat role". That's not to mention the fact that we backed rebels, who turned out to be jihadists, in Libya a few years back with air support, during the misguided period of the Arab spring combined with our indifference to ISIS's breeding ground situation in Syria is one of the major reasons ISIS has managed to spread it's poison to Iraq. The extreme cynic would also question the convenience of ISIS emerging in the middle east, with few signs of life (life in this context meaning active attacks - someone in Bradford claiming to be a member is not important in this) outside of the region given the fact that America and Britain (the government's not the vast majority of people in either country, who didn't want to gain it in the first place) are about to lose a major strategic armed position for mobilisation elsewhere in the middle east, should the "need" arise, in Iraq with withdrawal from the Iraq War beginning now. The fact Iraq has been a state where America has more or less been at war with somebody since 1990. Furthermore it's worth remembering that the Kurdish people that the west are arming to defend Iraq from Isis are similar to the Syrian rebels, some of whom are aka ISIS, in that nobody really knows what they'll do with the reclaimed land or more importantly the weapons.

 

In summary the west should maybe have done something several years ago in a more targeted fashion, but even then it would have been an extremely dangerous proposition; we have now completely missed that boat and should leave the countries to sort out their own affairs, as per the point of withdrawal. We should accept that ISIS v Iraq is no different to Israel v Hamas, a terrorist insurgency and a state at war over terrorist hiding behind the façade of religion to go about the Neanderthal way of the world; war over inconsequential bollocks that only serves to alienate the people they claim to represent from wider society and ultimately provides a route for the much bigger threat than either side, the American backed western war machine, to roll into their internal affairs.

[Davey Jones' Locker 1,324]

Thanks Deathray; absolutely spot-on.

 

On a tangentially-related note, I came across this article that delves deeper into the Pope's possible role in the Argentine Dirty War a while back. Note though that this comes from a Communist website I stumbled across, so not the most untainted of sources!

 

 

That said, it is a deeply disturbing report. Extract:

 

 

 

Amid the pomp and ceremony Friday, the Vatican spokesman was compelled to address the past of the new Pope Francis—the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio. He dismissed the accusations against him as the work of “anti-clerical left-wing elements.”

 

That “left-wing elements” would denounce the complicity of the Church’s leaders in the “Dirty War” waged by the military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 is scarcely surprising. They accounted for many of the estimated 30,000 workers, students, intellectuals and others who were “disappeared” and murdered, and the tens of thousands more who were imprisoned and tortured.

 

But some of Bergoglio’s harshest critics come from within the Catholic Church itself, including priests and lay workers who say he handed them over to the torturers as part of a collaborative effort to “cleanse” the Church of “leftists.” One of them, a Jesuit priest, Orlando Yorio, was abducted along with another priest after ignoring a warning from Bergoglio, then head of the Jesuit order in Argentina, to stop their work in a Buenos Aires slum district.

 

During the first trial of leaders of the military junta in 1985, Yorio declared, “I am sure that he himself gave over the list with our names to the Navy.” The two were taken to the notorious Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA) torture center and held for over five months before being drugged and dumped in a town outside the city.

 

Bergoglio was ideologically predisposed to backing the mass political killings unleashed by the junta. In the early 1970s, he was associated with the right-wing Peronist Guardia de Hierro (Iron Guard), whose cadre—together with elements of the Peronist trade union bureaucracy—were employed in the death squads known as the Triple A (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance), which carried out a campaign of extermination against left-wing opponents of the military before the junta even took power. Adm. Emilio Massera, the chief of the Navy and the leading ideologue of the junta, also employed these elements, particularly in the disposal of the personal property of the “disappeared.”

 

Yorio, who died in 2000, charged that Bergoglio “had communications with Admiral Massera, and had informed him that I was the chief of the guerrillas.”

 

The junta viewed the most minimal expression of opposition to the existing social order or sympathy for the oppressed as “terrorism.” The other priest who was abducted, Francisco Jalics, recounted in a book that Bergoglio had promised them he would tell the military that they were not terrorists. He wrote, “From subsequent statements by an official and 30 documents that I was able to access later, we were able to prove, without any room for doubt, that this man did not keep his promise, but that, on the contrary, he presented a false denunciation to the military.”

Bergoglio declined to appear at the first trial of the junta as well as at subsequent proceedings to which he was summoned. In 2010, when he finally did submit to questioning, lawyers for the victims found him to be “evasive” and “lying.”

 

Bergoglio claimed that he learned only after the end of the dictatorship of the junta’s practice of stealing the babies of disappeared mothers, who were abducted, held until giving birth and then executed, with their children given to military or police families. This lie was exposed by people who had gone to him for help in finding missing relatives.

 

The collaboration with the junta was not a mere personal failing of Bergoglio, but rather the policy of the Church hierarchy, which backed the military’s aims and methods. The Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky exposed Bergoglio’s attempted cover-up for this systemic complicity in a book that Bergoglio authored, which edited out compromising sentences from a memorandum recording a meeting between the Church leadership and the junta in November 1976, eight months after the military coup.

 

The excised statement included the pledge that the Church “in no way intends to take a critical position toward the action of the government,” as its “failure would lead, with great probability, to Marxism.” It declared the Catholic Church’s “understanding, adherence and acceptance” in relation to the so-called “Proceso” that unleashed a reign of terror against Argentine working people.

 

This support was by no means platonic. The junta’s detention and torture centers were assigned priests, whose job it was, not to minister to those suffering torture and death, but to help the torturers and killers overcome any pangs of conscience. Using such biblical parables as “separating the wheat from the chafe,” they assured those operating the so-called “death flights,” in which political prisoners were drugged, stripped naked, bundled onto airplanes and thrown into the sea, that they were doing “God’s work.” Others participated in the torture sessions and tried to use the rite of confession to extract information of use to the torturers.

 

This collaboration was supported from the Vatican on down. In 1981, on the eve of Argentina’s war with Britain over the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands, Pope John Paul II flew to Buenos Aires, appearing with the junta and kissing its then-chief, Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, while saying not a word about the tens of thousands who had been kidnapped, tortured and murdered.

 

Source: http://www.wsws.org/...6/pers-m16.html

[Davey Jones' Locker 1,324]

Whilst we await the outcome of the Scottish referendum with bated breath, here is some diverting news... First of all, open factional warfare has reared its head in the Vatican again. First of all, a group of conservative cardinals, including Raymond Burke of the USA,, have written a book to counter Pope Francis' more moderate tendencies:

 

http://www.religionn...rriage-divorce/

 

The Pope has hit back by demoting Burke in an "unprecedented" snub:

 

http://www.catholicw...e_tribunal.aspx

 

Meanwhile, ISIS are allegedly planning to kill the Pontiff:

 

http://www.independe...ns-9736110.html

[Davey Jones' Locker 1,324]

Whilst we await the outcome of the Scottish referendum with bated breath, here is some diverting news... First of all, open factional warfare has reared its head in the Vatican again. First of all, a group of conservative cardinals, including Raymond Burke of the USA,, have written a book to counter Pope Francis' more moderate tendencies:

 

http://www.religionn...rriage-divorce/

 

The Pope has hit back by demoting Burke in an "unprecedented" snub:

 

http://www.catholicw...e_tribunal.aspx

 

Meanwhile, ISIS are allegedly planning to kill the Pontiff:

 

http://www.independe...ns-9736110.html

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-20/report-security-upped-at-vatican-over-attack-fears/5758216

[Davey Jones' Locker 1,324]

***Random off-topic factoid***

 

I suppose this is common knowledge but I only just learned that the current pope is a former nightclub bouncer.

 

 

***Back on topic***

He hasn't died yet.

[Cat O'Falk 3,290]

***Random off-topic factoid***

 

I suppose this is common knowledge but I only just learned that the current pope is a former nightclub bouncer.

 

 

***Back on topic***

He hasn't died yet.

***Back on off topic***

Years ago bookies received a flood of bets on the next pope will be a Newcastle United supporter; betting was suspended when they realised Cardinal Basil Hume was amongst the favourites for the papacy. He's dead.

***Back on topic***

[gcreptile 10,967]

Pontificates about his pontificate which, he believes, will be short:

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/13/us-pope-anniversary-interview-idUSKBN0M91IP20150313

 

He could imagine abdicating like his predecessor though.

[Magere Hein 1,400]

Pontificates about his pontificate which, he believes, will be short:

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/13/us-pope-anniversary-interview-idUSKBN0M91IP20150313

 

He could imagine abdicating like his predecessor though.

That's what that article writes: "he would be ready to resign like his predecessor rather than ruling for life." I have two thoughts about that.

• Good. Governments, like nappies, should be changed often and for the same reason.
• I hope he stays on for a few more years. He seems a decent bloke, as popes go.

[gcreptile 10,967]

 

Pontificates about his pontificate which, he believes, will be short:

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/13/us-pope-anniversary-interview-idUSKBN0M91IP20150313

 

He could imagine abdicating like his predecessor though.

That's what that article writes: "he would be ready to resign like his predecessor rather than ruling for life." I have two thoughts about that.

• Good. Governments, like nappies, should be changed often and for the same reason.
• I hope he stays on for a few more years. He seems a decent bloke, as popes go.

 

I agree, for a pope he's relatively ok.

[YoungWillz 21,037]

Busy Holy Week for Frank, he's washing the feet of prisoners...stay tuned for a veruca based death...http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-3022949/Pope-acknowledges-exhaustion-priests-_-including-himself.html

[Sir Creep 7,070]

Rogelio Livieres Plano, a former bishop in Paraguay who was revered by some for building a successful seminary but who was ousted by Pope Francis amid several controversies, has died. He was 69.

Livieres Plano died on Friday in a hospital in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from complications related to diabetes.

He was ousted in September by Francis, and the Holy See has never specified why. The bishop asserted he had been "persecuted" for his conservative orthodoxy by liberal parishioners and fellow bishops.

An Associated Press review in June found that the bishop made several questionable spending decisions during his tenure.

SC

[Bibliogryphon 9,573]

Breaking News - Pope Francis does not have brain tumour

[gcreptile 10,967]

One of his secretaries, Miriam Wuolou, found dead in her apartment. She was 7 months pregnant... by Francis?

 

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/pregnant-secretary-pope-francis-found-7430464

 

They say she had diabetes and her pregnancy was dangerous because of that.

[Bibliogryphon 9,573]

Announces that Mother Theresa will become a Saint on September 4th

[RadGuy 1,614]

Announces that Mother Theresa will become a Saint on September 4th

*all the leftists who were dumb enough to think Francis would be some kind of liberal even though he's an 80 year old fucking priest start freaking out*

[Magere Hein 1,400]

 

Announces that Mother Theresa will become a Saint on September 4th

*all the leftists who were dumb enough to think Francis would be some kind of liberal even though he's an 80 year old fucking priest start freaking out*

 

I don't know about that. I do know that she was intended to become Saint Witch well before Francis became pope.

[Davey Jones' Locker 1,324]

 

 

Announces that Mother Theresa will become a Saint on September 4th

*all the leftists who were dumb enough to think Francis would be some kind of liberal even though he's an 80 year old fucking priest start freaking out*

 

I don't know about that. I do know that she was intended to become Saint Witch well before Francis became pope.

 

Normally I'm the one savvy to Catholic machinations but I have to ask what has Theresa done to earn the epithet "Saint Witch"? I know Christopher Hitchens critiqued her heavily but is there anything else?

[Magere Hein 1,400]

 

 

 

Announces that Mother Theresa will become a Saint on September 4th

*all the leftists who were dumb enough to think Francis would be some kind of liberal even though he's an 80 year old fucking priest start freaking out*

 

I don't know about that. I do know that she was intended to become Saint Witch well before Francis became pope.

 

Normally I'm the one savvy to Catholic machinations but I have to ask what has Theresa done to earn the epithet "Saint Witch"? I know Christopher Hitchens critiqued her heavily but is there anything else?

 

 

For me she is, and will be forever, the Witch of Calcutta. Extracting large sums of money, quite a bit of it gained through crime, ostentatiously to help dying poor people but rather let them rot and use the money for private expense is such an evil that witch is a relatively mild appellation. It´s a shame there´s no hell, it should be invented for her.

[msc 18,439]

 

 

 

 

Announces that Mother Theresa will become a Saint on September 4th

*all the leftists who were dumb enough to think Francis would be some kind of liberal even though he's an 80 year old fucking priest start freaking out*

 

I don't know about that. I do know that she was intended to become Saint Witch well before Francis became pope.

 

Normally I'm the one savvy to Catholic machinations but I have to ask what has Theresa done to earn the epithet "Saint Witch"? I know Christopher Hitchens critiqued her heavily but is there anything else?

 

 

For me she is, and will be forever, the Witch of Calcutta. Extracting large sums of money, quite a bit of it gained through crime, ostentatioously to help dying poor people but rather let them rot and use the money for private expense is such an evil that witch is a relatively mild appellation. It´s a shame there´s no hell, it should be invented for her.

 

 

I have deeply religious members of my family who met her, and came to exactly the same opinions as yourself and Hitchens. She would deliberately help exacerbate health issues from people who came to see, for example, as she believed that "suffering = Godliness".

[ImNotHades 207]

 

 

 

 

 

Announces that Mother Theresa will become a Saint on September 4th

*all the leftists who were dumb enough to think Francis would be some kind of liberal even though he's an 80 year old fucking priest start freaking out*

 

I don't know about that. I do know that she was intended to become Saint Witch well before Francis became pope.

 

Normally I'm the one savvy to Catholic machinations but I have to ask what has Theresa done to earn the epithet "Saint Witch"? I know Christopher Hitchens critiqued her heavily but is there anything else?

 

 

For me she is, and will be forever, the Witch of Calcutta. Extracting large sums of money, quite a bit of it gained through crime, ostentatioously to help dying poor people but rather let them rot and use the money for private expense is such an evil that witch is a relatively mild appellation. It´s a shame there´s no hell, it should be invented for her.

 

 

I have deeply religious members of my family who met her, and came to exactly the same opinions as yourself and Hitchens. She would deliberately help exacerbate health issues from people who came to see, for example, as she believed that "suffering = Godliness".

 

Maybe he'll name Diana a saint, too. Elvis after that and MJ, too. Fuck it, let's all be saints.

[The Mad Hatter 1,092]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Announces that Mother Theresa will become a Saint on September 4th

 

*all the leftists who were dumb enough to think Francis would be some kind of liberal even though he's an 80 year old fucking priest start freaking out*

I don't know about that. I do know that she was intended to become Saint Witch well before Francis became pope.

Normally I'm the one savvy to Catholic machinations but I have to ask what has Theresa done to earn the epithet "Saint Witch"? I know Christopher Hitchens critiqued her heavily but is there anything else?

For me she is, and will be forever, the Witch of Calcutta. Extracting large sums of money, quite a bit of it gained through crime, ostentatioously to help dying poor people but rather let them rot and use the money for private expense is such an evil that witch is a relatively mild appellation. It´s a shame there´s no hell, it should be invented for her.

I have deeply religious members of my family who met her, and came to exactly the same opinions as yourself and Hitchens. She would deliberately help exacerbate health issues from people who came to see, for example, as she believed that "suffering = Godliness".

Maybe he'll name Diana a saint, too. Elvis after that and MJ, too. Fuck it, let's all be saints.

does anyone think the pope buckles to public opinion way too much.

[ImNotHades 207]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Announces that Mother Theresa will become a Saint on September 4th

*all the leftists who were dumb enough to think Francis would be some kind of liberal even though he's an 80 year old fucking priest start freaking out*

I don't know about that. I do know that she was intended to become Saint Witch well before Francis became pope.

Normally I'm the one savvy to Catholic machinations but I have to ask what has Theresa done to earn the epithet "Saint Witch"? I know Christopher Hitchens critiqued her heavily but is there anything else?

For me she is, and will be forever, the Witch of Calcutta. Extracting large sums of money, quite a bit of it gained through crime, ostentatioously to help dying poor people but rather let them rot and use the money for private expense is such an evil that witch is a relatively mild appellation. It´s a shame there´s no hell, it should be invented for her.

I have deeply religious members of my family who met her, and came to exactly the same opinions as yourself and Hitchens. She would deliberately help exacerbate health issues from people who came to see, for example, as she believed that "suffering = Godliness".

Maybe he'll name Diana a saint, too. Elvis after that and MJ, too. Fuck it, let's all be saints.

does anyone think the pope buckles to public opinion way too much.

 

He has to. The last one caused people to turn atheist so they needed a new "good" puppet so they can hypnotize and deceive people that religion is good so their precious sheep can worship them again. They know religion is dying so these are desperate measures. I'm not a conspiracy theorist or religious or anything primitive like that, I'm just intelligent and grown up enough to see what they are doing.

[Toast 16,137]

Diana who?