ICE won’t care. They’ll be fine with arresting and abusing priests, as well.
You ever notice how ICE is always turning up these “dangerous criminals and lazy bums” at Immigration hearings and job sites?
Many of these people in US concentration camps are catholic. The thing that’s crazy is how many insane catholics like JD Vance are cheering this on.
There are a lot of people who wear the label catholic because they always have, not because they identify with other catholics or believe that the pope is the earthly voice of god.
JD Vance is a fascist white supremacist who happens to be catholic. The fascism and white supremacy being more important to him than the catholicism…
Vance is part of a specific far right hyperpolitical faction of Catholics that he adopted via his patron Thiel.
He’s as Catholic as Trump is born-again evangelical. They are just pandering
Religious people are not mentally well.
They believe if they whisper hard enough that magic will fix their problems.
They believe if they follow some thousand year old undiagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder sufferers compulsions that magic will fix their problems.
They literally believe in magic.
They are all wackos.
Every single one.
There are no good religions.
Yeah and if prayer worked we wouldn’t need hospitals.
I honestly can’t see the point you’re trying to make.
What exactly is your take here lmao. The headline says nothing about prayer. It calls for actual physical action that is likely to positively impact outcomes for at least some immigrants. I personally consider this to be a huge net good, as it speaks respect and love for immigrants with a voice that a not-insignificant number of conservatives are willing to hear from. Did you just see the word “catholic” and wanna dunk on Christians?
That’s the point. We’re doing the heavy lifting, why do we need an invisible sky Santa? And why now? Kinda sucks if you were born 200 years ago, no? Was I supposed to pray for leeches back then? There is no god.
Time to put the security blanket away.
It’s not 2014 anymore
Many hospitals are also run by the church. Catholics believe in science - all recent popes say evolution is fact.
Catholics believe in some science. Their stances on abortion for instance are extremely barbaric.
None of those are prayer, they are materialistic! See, god is a redundant hypothesis.
No, catholics (generally) believe that worldly goals are accomplished by worldly methods. Worshipping god isn’t intended to accomplish anything in this life: it’s intended to secure a place in heaven.
Mind you, I’m atheist; I’m not saying it actually DOES secure a place in heaven. I’m just pointing out that for genuine believers, prayer is not intended, primarily, to accomplish worldly ends. It sometimes INCLUDES requests for personal worldly aid, but a priest would scold you if he knew that’s ALL you prayed for. You’re supposed to thank god for giving you existence, ask for the strength to live more virtuously, ask for leniency on your imperfections, etc.
If the catholic church somehow turns into a force for good this century that would be awesome. Its weird to think they might be the adults in the room in a lot of cases.
The church is large and complex and run by many different people. It has been a force for good and evil all along.
The catholic church has been a considerable “force for good” for centuries. Whether or not the bad they do outweighs that is a question of how much value you assign to the bad things they do and how much credit you give them for good intentions.
Sure, they’re anti-abortion and implicitly sexist, but they’re also pro-mercy, anti-war, anti-death-penalty, and possibly the most pro-science of all theistic churches. Bishops in the USA are obnoxious right-wing partisans, but in other countries they’re firmly in the local center or on the bleeding edge of the local left. (There’s a reason why the first American-born pop wasn’t a working priest in the USA.)
I have no idea what you’re basing this comment on.
The sins of the catholic church are many and global and as large and unforgivable as their wealth and reach and history:
From the very beginning they were antithetical to plurality - soon as they got power first order of business was the destruction of classical Hellenistic learning centres.
Then crusades, inquisitions, colonialism and forced conversions, complicit in slavery, the witch trials, and interference with politics all over the world.
Opposition to human rights, anti-science (dark ages anyone), support for dictatorships, residential school systems targeting indigenous children, and the ongoing sexual abuse crisis with institutional cover-ups.
And their worst crime of the modern era: their response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
Strict opposition to condom use (in fact actively lobbied against condom distribution and sex education) even as HIV/AIDS spread globally - particularly devastating in heavily Catholic regions like sub-Saharan Africa, the Philippines, and Latin America where the Church wielded significant influence over public health policy (as they still do). Millions of infections and deaths directly attributed to this crime against humanity.
But yes, “force for good”.
I’m basing it on an understand of history and nuance.
The roman catholic church is at least sixteen centuries old. I dare you to name any human organization of which endured for over a millennium and did not partake in something odious to modern sensibilities.
I could probably go point-for-point with a rebuttal to each bad things you noted, but the only one that really merits rebuttal is “dark ages”. The term is out-of-vouge in modern scholarship largely because it was essentially an anti-theistic smear from the start; the roman catholic church’s obsessive need to keep books and insist that the world was made by a rational intelligence laid the fundamental foundation for the renaissance, and the era between the fall of Rome and the enlightenment was far more advanced than the term you used implies.
Like I said, whether the roman catholic church is a net-good in 2025 is entirely based on how you weight the value of both the good and bad things they do. You’re free to assign them an arbitrarily high negative value because you have religious differences with them if you like, but pretending that they’ve never done anything good and aren’t doing anything good today is a position of willful ignorance.
Come to think of it, I doubt you can find a single organization that was even a century old which doesn’t have at least one black mark against them.
So you could go point for point for rebuttal but don’t and instead write 5 paragraphs of arm waving and whataboutism - “what about other old institutions” - I don’t care, we’re talking about the church.
The comment I replied to, you said “considerable force for good for centuries” now you want to limit it to 2025?
Go ahead and rebut how millions of lives were lost by actively sabotaging condom use and every other crime I mentioned.
I said they’re an overall negative, anti-human institution with a long well documented history of points to back it up.
I didn’t say “nothing good” has come out, beautiful flowers come out of excrement too.
You held on to the “dark ages” - but skipped over the destruction of knowledge that led to them and you wrote what you consider a rebuttal. So let’s talk about that:
They didn’t systematically keep fuck all.
Some scribes kept some books, the ones they could hide from the church. Most of the old writings of classical authors have been lost.
Between 500-1000AD the Church systematically destroyed classical libraries and learning centers. The burning of the Library of Alexandria and closure of philosophical schools eliminated centuries of knowledge in science, mathematics, and philosophy.
The Church controlled virtually all education, restricting literacy to clergy and limiting curriculum to religious doctrine.
Church prohibited dissection and medical research, leading to the loss of advanced Roman medical knowledge. Illness attributed to sin rather than natural causes, impeding medical advancement for centuries.
The Church burned books, destroyed manuscripts, and executed or exiled intellectuals who challenged religious orthodoxy.
It’s an obscene rewriting of history to thank the executioner for the rivers of blood that fed what came after.
Are you an atheist, a neo-pagan, or just a protesting with an anti-papal bias?
I ignored most of your anti-catholic bullshit because that’s what it is – anti-catholic bullshit. You asked where I got my assertion from, and I answered. If you want to get into more detail, sure, let’s do that.
Go ahead and rebut how millions of lives were lost by actively sabotaging condom use
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_HIV/AIDS
Condoms are very effective at stopping the spread of HIV, but they do fuckall to keep anyone infected with HIV from developing AIDS and dying. If the catholics are providing 25% of the world healthcare for people with AIDS, that means that there are “millions” of people alive today because of the roman church. And if celebrities like Princess Diana or Magic Johnson get credit for humanizing victims of the AIDS epidemic, so does the catholic church.
I don’t want to defend their wrongheaded opposition to prophylactics due to their family planning usage, but how much blame they get for the spread of HIV and how much credit they get for research and healthcare is, like I said. complex as fuck.
Between 500-1000AD the Church systematically destroyed classical libraries and learning centers.
To paraphrase wikipedia, “citation fucking needed.” Here’s some random links I found, starting with two biased statements.
https://churchandstate.org.uk/2023/01/christian-vandalism-of-the-classical-world/ https://www.christian-thinktank.com/qburnbx.html
The first is a pop-formatted article by a rather obviously biased author, who doesn’t seem to have any actual citations for his claims. The second is a more scholarly formatted article from someone with a more pro-christian bias, but numerous citations are included. Here’s a less biased take, whose short form is “no”:
The Church burned books, destroyed manuscripts, and executed or exiled intellectuals who challenged religious orthodoxy.
I’m going to infer that you’re alluding to the story of Galileo Galilei here. In short, Galileo was condemned by the church not because he was an “intellectual who challenged religious orthodoxy”, but because he didn’t even try and hide his anti-catholic bias. There’s a world of difference between telling the king he’s wrong and telling the king that he should abdicate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei
To paraphrase what I said before, if you want to assert as a matter of faith that Christianity in general or the roman church in particular are bad and evil, then there’s no way I could convince you otherwise. If your perspective is more religiously agnostic, however, I encourage you to do a bit more research before you repeat the biased accusations of others as if they were objective fact.
Its most likely the bias I have from only knowing Americas Catholicism then. Thanks for the info!
yeah, right. not like the pope knows anything about religion. /s
He went on to say, “especially the little boys, they need to be escorted the most.”
Don’t make me like you, kiddy diddler.
Sometimes working with people you dislike to do a good thing isn’t a bad idea. No True Scotsman fallacy is why America is where it is now.
It’s literally in their Bible… This should just be standard. Not special.
Yep. Also Catholic official “recommended ideology of state” was distributivism last time I checked, which is something of a holy mix (can’t be unholy mix in this situation) between anarcho-capitalism and anarcho-syndicalism with a conservative touch.
It has its downsides, but the upsides are that limiting immigration, legal inequality, racism and fascism are in theory not allowed there.
(Just in case someone thinks Peter Thiel and such people’s ideas are what Catholic church recommends, and they surely want to make such an impression, - no.)
It’s literally in their Bible…
So it literal genocide. Committed by the supposed “good guys”.
There’s a lot in the Bible, but laws for protecting immigrants are not contradicted with the genocide of ancient civilizations. The establishment of Israel as a nation was just as promised as it’s destruction.
Something something Jesus new covenant.
New covenant, who dis?
Lol, I should bookmark the “I came to fulfill the law” verse, I whip it out so much… They’re so predictable.
Bible is like the Constitution. Some people don’t read it.
Bible is like the Constitution. Some people don’t read it.
People only read what they want to take out of anything. Scientific reports, government policies, laws, philosophical essays, books, etc.
Saw it happen all the time. I use to work at the court house that was open to serve the public. We had at least 2 different signs that said “We are not City Hall. We do not do driver’s license, birth certificates, passports, etc…” Without fail, people would walk in and still ask about City Hall Services. People looked at the sign and saw Driver’s License, assumed that’s what we did.
Because they’d be atheists if they actually did. The ones who read it and stay Christians are just sociopaths.
It made me a leftist lol.
The old testament is all about a people who keep fucking up by adopting the shitty practices of the people around them, then being shamed into being better for a while. And then the person who called them out dies or leaves… But if they stay they get too comfortable with power and abuse it. Some of them are assholes the whole way through… It’s about history and notable figures, it’s not aspirational at all
Then the gospels are a how to guide to living under an occupying state.
No temples, we just share meals now. No relics, water is holy now. No leaders, we all serve each other. No money, no stock piles, no rich people - let the tax man have nothing to take. No open resistance to invite a crackdown, instead we’re going to just be really, really obnoxious to deal with through third path shit
It worked so well Rome straight up massacred the communes to stop the spread, and it was still spreading underground until Constantine slapped Jesus branding on the Roman religion.
Finally, I’m not sure what Revelations is about, but it has cool imagery
The Bible really hits different when you don’t have someone explaining each passage one by one going “oh, that wasn’t mutual aid, that was magic”
Well I’m glad you were able to look past all of the genocide and glorification of slavery, and pick and choose which parts of the book suit you… Err wait…
I didn’t look past that, it’s the whole point
It’s a shitty people becoming better. But it’s a people trying to be better. It’s people who believe they are better, and when it’s pointed out to them that they’re actually assholes they’re humbled enough to listen to the person calling them out. They glorified them as wise men blessed by their god
They were proud of themselves for treating their slaves better than the civilizations around them, they prided themselves on being conflicted about going to war. These are good things… But you’re not supposed to copy them. You’re not supposed to go back.
You’re supposed to also strive to be better
Catholics are discouraged from interacting directly with the Bible. Priests are supposed to be the mediators between the faithful and the doctrine.
This is completely false. There is a reading guide that Catholics are encouraged to follow every day. I think it traverses the entire Bible every 3 years in this manner, with everyone reading the same passages at the same time to encourage discussion.
You might be thinking old school, back when mass was in Latin.
The catholic church: “We’re better than everyone else, even the presence of a priest on your behalf will get you special treatment.”
No. No, it won’t. No, it shouldn’t. Ever.
Fuck religion and fuck those that support it.
Yea, let’s even bash them when they work for something good… good idea!
If youre in a position of power, why not use it for good? Yeah, they shouldnt have it in the first place but in a crisis those sorts of discussions are less important than protecting the vulnerable.
Jesus’ family were supposedly immigrants and asylum seekers. Priests should step up. So should real christians.
Another argument for renaming the “No True Scotsman” fallacy to “No True Christian” to make it more self-explanatory.
I know that the name of the fallacy comes from an example, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a scotsman invoke “No True Scotsman”. I’ve heard countless Americans invoke it though, and one side does it far more than the other.
“REAL CHRISTIANS”.
They’re all real christians, just some ignore the hate speech, and pretend it’s not part of the religion while most don’t ignore it at all. Fuck your hate religion, and the hate that it spawns.
The fascist people in charge of the deporting, the fascist militia, and the rest of the christians on the sidelines funding and supporting them - they’re ALL REAL CHRISTIANS.
Stop following their hate religion. Nobody on the outside thinks you’re part of anything but a hate religion, even if you have good intentions. You’re surrounded by people with bad intentions, and nobody can tell you apart.
Christians are supposed to follow the teachings of Christ. The old testament is just context. Jesus’s only extended story on what earns salvation or damnation is about the treatment of the poor, imprisoned, the sick, and foreigners.
Jesus also said that he did not come to abolish the old law but to fulfill it, essentially saying that all the old testament or Torah shit still stands. People like to overlook this when it’s convenient.
I’m an atheist. That doesn’t mean I can’t tell the difference between those who are claim to be christians and those who actually try. It’s probably 100:1 in favor of fake christians, if not more.
Way, way more.
What about pedophiles? How does he think they should be handled?
Likely with kid gloves
Shit like this makes me wish Lemmy had awards. Overall glad it doesn’t though. Bravo.
I dont know about the pope but i am a fan of:
If they have not wronged children: therapy
If they did: prison & therapyYou can’t cure it with therapy, and the Catholic church protects and habors pedophiles. I don’t give a damn what he says. The church is a cancer and needs to be destroyed. If you support the church you support pedophiles.
another day, another maximalist Lemmy take.
“If you work or buy anything, you support capitalism, therefore you support the destruction of the planet.”
Yeah, trying to cure it with therapy has the same deleterious effects as gay conversion therapy. Because (even if we socially consider it to be one) it’s not a mental disorder in the biological sense; It’s a sexuality. You can repress it with therapy, but repressed sexuality tends to end in disaster eventually.
I dislike the gay comparison for a variety of reasons, but it’s a very well-studied topic that gay conversion therapy simply doesn’t work. It’s abusive and only leads to self-hate or resentment. The unfortunate reality is that, for better or worse, you can’t control who you’re attracted to.
The big issue with pedophilia is that there is no ethical way to practice it. For most other sexualities, you can be ethical about it. Being gay or straight isn’t inherently unethical, because you can get a consenting partner. But being a pedophile is inherently unethical, because any potential partner cannot consent. At best, maybe they find a young looking partner, who is old enough to consent. But even that is just delaying the inevitable, as that partner will eventually start looking older. But practicing actual pedophilia will always be unethical, because there will always be a non-consenting victim.
Therapy is one part of treatment, sure. But it should be primarily focused on helping the pedophile come to terms with self-imposed celibacy. And even that has issues, as the church has proven time and time again.
It’s a sexuality.
No.
Is that where you stopped reading?
Ok. That clarifies it a bit better. It seemed like you were treating it like a valid premise.
Regardless of whether I agree with you or not, I disapprove of the mods removing your post.
Empty words from a horrible cult. When you have prosecuted and fired all the clergy that have sexually abused people, we might take you seriously. Hypocrites!
Praise when praise is due. Scorn when scorn is due. Hold on to your anger and give them double hell when they next fuck up, but weakening them while they’re in the swing of doing the right thing hurts us all.
It’d be better if Pope Leo deputized and trained additional Vatican Guards and deployed them at various locations. Also a priest.
Swiss Guards are active duty Swiss military iirc. Deployng them could be… Problematic on many levels.
They appear to just have to have undergone Swiss basic training (and be catholic Swiss men of a certain age and height)
Ha, thanks for the correction.
Police in riot gear with pepper guns and gas grenades vs Swiss Guards in blue, red and yellow with halberds. 🤘
I’ve done this in CIV and it didn’t work out that well…
Because Gandhi showed up and nuked everyone?
Good on the USB, got the religion right. You know who doesn’t? People who hate their neighbours, casted stones in the capitol and know compassion only for their own.
These people pretend to be religious, because it happens to be popular with conservatives, not because they understand religion
For all it’s sins the Catholic Church always took christian universalism to be incompatible with exclusionary nationalism.
This is where we find out which faith is stronger, organized religion or the MAGA cult.
None of them have faith, religion has been used to prior up racist, sexist ideas for over a century in the US. They left faith long ago, it’s just a tool for their hate.
How many Americans are catholics though? (And how many of those are hispanics anyways?)
It’s easy to ignore the pope, when he’s not even part of your denomination.
Please refer to this terribly colored pie chart for your answer.
It was more of a rhethorical question and I wanted to imply, that it’s not a significant number. But data (even if it’s somewhat poorly presented) is always appreciated.
I’m surprised to see that there are more catholics than I’d have guessed and one could argue that the pope is a religious icon whose word matters to many even if they’re not part of his specific denomination.
But on the other hand, a lot of people who represent as catholics may have been raised catholic but we don’t know how much of a role that plays in their life and their political views or how much they really follow religious authority. I was raised catholic myself and for loads of people who are part of that church, the word of the pope isn’t really their law to live by.
And then there’s also cognitive dissonance, that I imagine to play a big role with MAGA-hats.
All in all, I’d say the pope’s influence is fairly limited there.
At least the chart is in legend order, I guess.
Well some of them pray to the old donny boy
The Pope isn’t the American Christian icon you’d think. JFK was Catholic and it was a big deal.
American Christianity is dozens and dozens of sects and styles and flavors. Overall they roughly disrespect and respect the Pope about the same, he’s irrelevant really.
Modern American fascism has been claiming catholicism, see Vance. This is big for that reason. That and catholicism being the largest individual branch of Christianity in America
On the other hand, Biden is a Catholic too and that wasn’t an election issue. And Trump probably couldn’t tell you which denomination he pretends to be part of.
Two Corinthians
Western Christians haven’t cared about their religion for at least a century, probably more. Bets on MAGA.
If you’re following Maga you’ve long since started zany rationalization of your Christianity. Trump is an absolute caricature of the anti-christ incarnate. It’s absolutely laughable. This will not break the hippocrates.
I think you mean hypocrites but I do believe Hippocrates would shit himself if he could see what we’ve done to democracy.
True. It might actually break him.
They’re only doing this for one day, and only for 3 hours. MAGA signed up for 8 years of their shit.
The MAGA nuts are Christian nationalist protestants. They think the Pope is the antichrist (literally many of them do).
Mormons too, they’ve been screeching about Armageddon and the antichrist since we elected that black fellow
Which is complete bullshit, a long standing tenant of the Mormon faith was to “follow the laws of the land” but once we started actually making some social progress they started forgetting that more and more and more.
Well, that tenet only came about after all the fraud in NY, being kicked out of multiple Midwest towns for being so obnoxious no one could stand them, landing in UT with the BY in BYU immediately building a house for himself and another for all his wives next door, and Uncle Sam threatening to take away their tax exemption if they don’t allow black people in…THEN eventually god changed his mind
It’s always been “follow the law of the land, unless god tells you different then go ahead but don’t tip off the feds”
There have been a few shows/movies recently that have kind of explored this time and place in US history, and it’s some really interesting shit. Mormon militias and what not.
The whispered part of that is that members should run for office; that way they have the power to make laws conform to their ideology. I was surprised by the number of Mormons in Congress. They’re pretty over-represented for the population they represent.
People treat Mitt Romney like he’s not in an insane cult. Don’t get me wrong, he’s better than most of that lot, but not by a lot.
Yet many Catholics voted in line with the MAGA nuts, purely on abortion. The American Catholic Church has turned abortion into its defining political litmus test. Hopefully this new Pope can convince American bishops that there are other issues worth their attention.
Besides, the folks who run the US right now always need an enemy. Once they run through the immigrants, and LGBT people, who’s next? It’s entirely possible these christofascists start ostracizing Catholics. They never liked them anyway, they just liked their votes, and they probably think they won’t need votes anymore to keep in power.
My fucking parents voted for this asshole because of abortion. I yell at them about how many these fascists have already killed. Stopping aids aid from USAID alone is going to kill thousands (millions?).
Over one million from starvation alone is the figure I read.
At least the unborn are protected! (Abortion rates have stayed the same since Dobbs)
