> Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, April 21, 2025, at the age of 88 at his residence in the Vatican's Casa Santa Marta.
> Pope Francis has died at the age of 88, the Vatican has announced. - Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected to lead the Catholic Church in March 2013 after Pope Benedict XVI stood down.
> I express my closeness to the sufferings of Christians in Palestine and Israel, and to all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people. The growing climate of anti-Semitism throughout the world is worrisome. Yet at the same time, I think of the people of Gaza, and its Christian community in particular, where the terrible conflict continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation. I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace!
Tangentially related: why do so many people call for a ceasefire, when a ceasefire is generally temporary. It wouldn't resolve any of the underlying reasons for the war. He should be calling for surrender.
Who should surrender, though? At this point in time, if Hamas were to surrender, the Israeli occupation of Gaza would just get worse. That wouldn't be peace, or justice, for people of Gaza. I certainly don't support what Hamas has done, but Israeli rule will probably be pretty brutal for Palestinians.
israel literally are able to cut off food, water, electricity, internet at their own whim, they're doing it as we speak. They are actively blocking aid and food from going in. Read the news. There are many anti-zionist jews as well speaking up against the atrocities and war crimes israel has been committing for a very long time now.
I'm not even sure I'd go so far as to call them anti-zionist.
How long do people imagine Israel survives as a state with a brutally-oppressed population under its care?
It's a rational position to be pro-state-of-Israel and want them to find peace (and integration) with the Gazans because the consequences of perpetual animosity and aggression are the single biggest threat to the state's survival.
Given the history, I can appreciate their rage. The point stands that you don't get a state with long-term stability by just dropping a lid on a pressure-cooker. Solutions that lean in that direction start to look disquietingly like final solutions.
Timeline-wise, the Palestinians were there long before the Israelis in modern Israel. I don't think forcing them out is a reasonable starting point. At best, that becomes a perpetual shame like the US treatment of native Americans.
Personally, I look to Ireland and England as a potential model. People have been conflating Hamas and Gaza in this thread... At the height of the Troubles, more Irish supported the IRA than Palestinians support Hamas, and I don't think anyone ever suggested the solution was to relocate the Irish.
Wikipedia: Yasser Arafat[a] (4 or 24 August 1929 – 11 November 2004), also popularly known by his kunya Abu Ammar,[b] was a Palestinian political leader
Yasser Arafat was Egyptian. He was born there and his tribe is there. He's as Palestinian as every Turk or Houthi.
It's public knowledge.
Also Wikipedia is known for it's progressive stance. Can't trust it for anything that intersects with culture war issues where everything is a conspiracy.
He was Palestinian. It's public knowledge. Secondly, let's say he's from Mars, does that maean the rest of the millions of Palestinians are also all Martians? LOL
I'm sure I'm misreading you; you didn't intend to say you can't trust Wikipedia because it doesn't indulge conspiracy theories, but I'm having a hard time understanding your meaning in any other form. Can you clarify?
Ask the Arabs and Levantine Muslims where all their Jews are. Why Lebanon is Muslim. Why their states are Islamic and why they have issues with religious and cultural states that they aren't a majority of.
I'm sure you don't seriously intend to bring up American treatment of the Japanese in its territory as a positive example.
As you are not American, I forgive you your apparent lack of knowledge of the concentration camps, or the theft of property that was never returned to innocent Japanese Americans.
Go watch the many documentaries about Gaza, then tell us it is not brutally oppressed. The fact of the matter is that Palestinians have been treated atrociously for over 75 years now. The West Bank is not much better off either by the way.
I personally know such jews actually. We salute anyone standing against oppression of the Palestinians from the brutality they have been facing for over 75 years now.
That's not really been the standard the world holds itself to since World War II.
Yes, aggressors in a just war are expected to care for the civilian population in conquered territory. Starvation as a war weapon against civilians is a war crime.
In fact, the only place it's currently legal (though generally frowned upon) is in the context of a civil war, and if this is a civil war we're back to asking the question: how does Israel expect to find peace when 9 million citizens are oppressing 5 million with brutal military violence?
Gaza isn't a separate country, the Palestinians are still Israelis in terms of international responsibility and national membership, seeing as how Palestine is not a recognized independent nation.
How do we know this? Because Israel isn't under sanction for the activities they are undertaking that would be considered war crimes if done to another nation.
It is a long-standing civil war that a couple generations of national leadership have failed to find a long-term resolution to. The current resolution of trying to ghetto the Palestinian people into controlled territories ("reservations," if you will, a common strategy used by colonizers to "handle" the native population) doesn't seem to be bearing fruit other than intergenerational violence.
I don't know. Maybe I'm reading too much into it but it sounded like he was referring to something broader, especially given the explicit political references he made later.
... He's referring to "Christ is risen". That's way more broad (conceptually) and very in-character for the Pope, compared to some transient current events.
that fragment references Easter theology. at a fundamental level love is stronger than everything, including the unsurpassable frontier, death. nothing could kill Jesus, not slander, not hatred, not envy, not even the cross.
and btw, in that little collection of booklets we call the Bible, the story doesn't end all flowery and pink either. Jerusalem and the temple are destroyed, early disciples are martyred in troves and everybody is aware the story of that Jesus guy and Mary and Mary Magdalene and Junia and all the others just has begun.
and it's clear it has to be written by us...
so regarding the recent world events yes PP Francis was heavily displeased (he talks about several of them in the very text we respond to here) but the Jesus thing gives us confidence and hope and justification to actively do something about it and to nudge the world into being a better place, for all of us.
that's how I think PP Francis meant what he said. and it's definitively how I see it.
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
Thank you for sharing a text that I would not have seen/read otherwise.
The salient parts that support your view:
---
There can be no peace without freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of expression and respect for the views of others.
Nor is peace possible without true disarmament! The requirement that every people provide for its own defence must not turn into a race to rearmament. The light of Easter impels us to break down the barriers that create division and are fraught with grave political and economic consequences. It impels us to care for one another, to increase our mutual solidarity, and to work for the integral development of each human person.
I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear which only leads to isolation from others, but rather to use the resources available to help the needy, to fight hunger and to encourage initiatives that promote development. These are the “weapons” of peace: weapons that build the future, instead of sowing seeds of death!
May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions. In the face of the cruelty of conflicts that involve defenceless civilians and attack schools, hospitals and humanitarian workers, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that it is not targets that are struck, but persons, each possessed of a soul and human dignity.
> Nor is peace possible without true disarmament! The requirement that every people provide for its own defence must not turn into a race to rearmament.
The sentiment sounds great but I think we now see in the real world with Ukraine that if you rely [too much] on others (re: US), you have a real problem if they are no longer there for you. Peace through strength is real.
God bless him. Religion aside, his encyclicas covering more earthly subjects (Fratelli Tuti, Laudato Si) are really worth to be read. Download and read them as PDF in the language of your choice, no matter what your religious views are.
> May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions. In the face of the cruelty of conflicts that involve defenceless civilians and attack schools, hospitals and humanitarian workers, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that it is not targets that are struck, but persons, each possessed of a soul and human dignity.
"Think of those souls!" reads to me cynically close to "don't think of those who ordered and executed those strikes". Almost like a deliberate distraction. When you turn forgiveness into a carte blanche for serial sin, you're doing Christianity wrong.
I interpret it very differently from you. Modern warfare is directing drones at 'targets' based on 'intelligence' with little regard for the collateral damage. We see it daily in the news in various conflicts: children killed in strikes with the excuse being that bad guys were also in the vicinity - zero regard for the innocents. It' a reminder that just because you don't have to see the destruction you cause (thanks to modern technology) innocents are still being killed by your actions and you shouldn't forget that (and maybe should reconsider your actions).
I've always interpreted the line of message you refer to as an intent to reach the hearts of those responsible for commanding the violence, including those who assign responsibility to them. And if it did reach, and ellicited the intended emotion, then such violence would simply stop.
I do agree that narratives and morals matter. That said is hard for me to reconcile this statement with the late pope's stance on the Ukraine war. His narrative about this was that it is a regrettable conflict between brother nations and that the sides should somehow resolve their disagreement. He didn't once admit that Russia is the aggressor and is one sidedly pushing for war, not to speak about condemning the aggressor.
I understand that a leader of an organization that acts on historic time scale might be reluctant to take sides in contemporary conflicts. Nevertheless always washing your hands in every conflict is not morality, it is cowardice. It enables evil and is in direct conflict with "narratives and morals matter".
I'm not even a tin-hatter and that is immediately where my mind went when I saw the headline. Vance and his ilk are so incredibly near-sighted that it would bolster them to think they could plot such a thing and play it off as a coincidence.
That was a likable pope, non-christians and even non religious people tend to like the guy. I also enjoyed the memes about his lookalike in Game of Thrones. Rest in peace.
I wonder whether we will have another Jesuit Pope. Jesuits are supposed to be generally very education focused, more progressive (especially w.r.t science) and stand less on ceremony. I know nothing about how the College of Cardinals work, but if they're anything like other political voting bodies, one of two outcomes are possible: a swing to the Right (and toward tradition), recognizing the current balance of power in the world, or a swing even further Left of Francis, again recognizing the current trend but as a counterweight.
i think that is intendeded; it's not a movie about catholicism but about politics and human nature. What I meant is that it shows the internal workings of the papal election and the conflicts within the catholic church that may be unknown to laypeople.
On second thought I think you’re right. The layperson can become more aware of religious politics, because there is so little exposure.
I hope the next step is for people to understand that religious problems are actually people problems. And similar themes and tendencies appear in modern secular contexts.
Fully agree. It's going to get interesting - by numbers, the Church is shrinking in its core lands of Europe, and it's growing in Africa, South America and Asia, but that isn't even closely reflected in political realities and the amount and importance of cardinals.
this italian (venetian) reggae band has been predicting it since 97, this song regains minor popularity in italy every time there is a new pope election
There is almost no hope of an African pope being chosen. They are all too conservative. You can read that conspiritorially or take it as the recognized imprudence of fomenting European schism.
Starting from his chosen name, since Franciscans and Jesuits have not been very close historically (although the founder of the latter was inspired by St. Francis).
From what I read, it's exactly as you say: people expect either a reaction swing to conservativism or a a big swing towards modernity. Pope Francis was old and could not do much, but he tried to set a path for the latter, afaiu.
I would like to know more. My impression is that most Christian institutions have long ago disentangled from scientific debate - providing interpretative value rather than alternative science. This is part of a larger trend to focus their scope and mission in modern life. Have the last few popes made comments on scientific issues?
Ironically, Catholicism as an institution has a better track record of supporting science than many Protestant sects. Much of the "alternative science" comes from the Baptists and Evangelicals.
It's ironic because no matter how much science they embrace, they never come around to realizing their God is just as much make believe as every other.
oh. thanks for clarifying. I'd thought the irony lies in some image of being anti-scientific.
the fun thing, ironic itself, about dismissing religion in it's entirety is that most religions have long understood that G'd can't be proven, measured, captured with experiments. the irony in this is that while you can't prove G'd you can't disprove G'd either, so the lack of proof is no proof of a lack of "The Force". quantum physics did not not exist just because the was no proof for it.
one interesting train of thought in this regard was the conclusion of a book on the neurobiology of meditation, (the title escapes me right now): what if the only "instrument" to measure religious experience is the brain? we can measure effects of systematic religious practice on the brain, like meditation aka contemplative prayer. we can identify some aspects of states that humans describe as religious experience, in the brain, as they happen. why would we dismiss those as mere "brain formations"? while we accept equally measurable effects of sound or light on the brain as "real"?
Science doesn’t say we are the only intelligent forms in the universe. Science doesn’t say intelligent max’s out with humans. Science doesn’t describe concepts outside of time and space.
Indeed, that is exactly what it is. Mainstream catholics don’t really have a problem with science in general, but with moral consequences of some application of science. Broadly speaking, they are not saying that science is fake, more that there are some things we should not do.
A conversation with a Jesuit for example can be enlightening because they have intellectual and moral arguments, it’s not just castles built on the shifting foundations of a Bible verse.
This leads to different approaches compared to a lot of American Protestants. They don’t seek to undermine science.
Not sure if this is accurate. I was once a member of an astronomy club and its patron was a Catholic priest who was very much into the subject. And he wasn't even a Jesuit.
The Jesuits do indeed have a long tradition of research on the basis of a belief that understanding how the universe works gives a greater understanding of God's creation.
As such, they've traditionally been more open, and a disproportionately high proportion of Jesuits have been scientists. At one point about 1/3 of all members of the Jesuit order were scientists.
"The pope's astronomer"[1] is a jesuit, and the Jesuits have a long tradition in astronomy, with the result of numerous lunar craters (e.g. McNally) and several asteroids named after Jesuits. More than once, Jesuits have also tangled with the question of extraterrestial life, e.g.[2a] - a question fraught by the question it would raise about what it would mean for belief [2b].
Wikipedia also has a long list of Catholic clergy scientists[3]. When reading it, it's worth considering that if anything they had more influence as teachers (e.g. Descartes, Mersenne were both educated at Jesuit colleges), and that the order ranged from low thousands to a few tens of thousands during the centuries the list covers.
With respect to the last few popes, the most notable recent intervention is Pope Francis making clear that he saw the theories of evolution and the Big Bang as real[4]. But already in 1950, even the deeply conservative Pope Pius XII, while expressing hope that evolution would prove to be a passing fad, made clear that catholic doctrine officially did not conflict with evolution. John Paul II formally acquitted Galileo, and stated that "truth cannot contradict truth", when talking about evolution vs. catholic doctrine. [5]
Catholics don’t generally adopt the anti-science stuff. Their dogma around life has some walls around some areas of medicine.
I know several priests who are scientists or teachers/professors.
Evangelicals have a simpler dogma where the individual minister or church has more sway (hence the joke about the man on a desert island with a hut, a church, and a church he doesn’t go to). It’s a more populist form of worship, which has ups and downs.
I was always taught that relativity, evolution, an old universe and even a not too literal interpretation of the bible (some caveats to that last one) are perfectly compatible with Catholicism. My dad was taught by Jesuits and I was taught at a former convent school. The Vatican has an observatory and the pontifical academy of sciences is far from an "answers in genesis" type organisation.
I went to a Jesuit university. The way it was explained to me could be simplified to: God wouldn't lie to us, God made nature, so then scientific discoveries therefore teach us more about nature and God. When a new discovery threatens old teachings, the Jesuits convene and figure out how to incorporate this new understanding into their beliefs, strengthening them rather than threatening.
I found it inspiring. I'm genuinely sad about the Pope's passing. He was a man who followed the teachings as he understood them.
It always seems weird and ignorant for people to be labeling Catholic bishops as “left-wing” or “right-wing” or “liberal/progressive” or “conservative”.
Those are all political terms for politicians and their platforms or parties. They do not translate to Catholic doctrines or teachings. Y’all are simply parroting what the lamestream media wants to impose, a political veneer on non-politicians who are shepherds, pastors, teachers.
There very much is such a thing as a "progressive" and "conservative" wing in Catholicism, and the Vatican is well known to be very much a viper's nest. It's naive to imply that all those clergymen are simply "shepherds, pastors, teachers".
Catholic bishops and clergy like to meddle in politics.
In the US, reactionaries are dumping lots on money on the church, and many bishops have embraced right wing politics, stupidly aligning with evangelicals who deeply despise Catholicism in the process.
Some of the moves made are comically dumb. The archbishop of New York decided to make a big show about denying communion to the notoriously vindictive former governor of the state. That governor subsequently changed the look back period for civil sex abuse lawsuits, which has bankrupted or is in the process of bankrupting dioceses as they are forced to own up to their failures to protect children.
While "progressive", "conservative", etc. are commonly used as political labels, they are general terms that describe how a person wants to see the world work. All people, regardless of their job or function, can have these sorts of terms ascribed to them.
And the Catholic Church exists on the world stage, and is involved in politics. Its leadership can be and is political.
Francis spent the last couple of years creating new cardinals to stack the College in what - he hoped - was a more progressive direction.
But the College has a mind of its own, and there is going to be some furious horse trading happening behind the scenes to steer the result in one direction or the other.
> Francis spent the last couple of years creating new cardinals to stack the College in what - he hoped - was a more progressive direction.
I don't think that was necessarily what he was doing.
He tried to rebalance it to include a lot more cardinals from the developing world–who on average tend to be more conservative, at least on some issues. He arguably avoided the more outspoken conservatives, but he would have caught up a lot of quieter conservatives in the process.
Whereas, if he just wanted to stack it with progressives, he would have focused on adding cardinals from the developed world, where Catholic progressivism is arguably the strongest.
> According to Archbishop Diego Ravelli, Master of Apostolic Ceremonies, the late Pope Francis had requested that the funeral rites be simplified and focused on expressing the faith of the Church in the Risen Body of Christ.
Always struck me as a simple man and that likely contributed to people liking him more when compared to his predecessors. RIP.
He was, but John Paul II was traditionally conservative. I think Francis resonated with more people–Christian or not–because he emphasized compassion, humility, and social justice.
He spoke more openly about issues like poverty, climate change, and inclusion–his encyclical LAUDATO SI’ is a great read–, and he often used language and gestures that the "common man" could relate to.
Perhaps the way he dressed so simply–with the plain white cassock–also emphasized his overall approach: less focus on grandeur, more on service.
Yes and no. He was at the same time very open to being "part of the world" beyond the church, but also very conservative in ethics. In the end the former prevailed also in terms of progressiveness, but it wasn't a given.
I think it's interesting that PJII was very popular with Catholics and possibly less so with non-Christian. Despite or because being more conservative? He was also a very good man and humble.
JPII was a long running Pope. I would guess most people wouldn't know how conservative or not he was, or even what means in the context of the Catholic Church. He was the first Pope many of us knew, and the Pope who was with many of us the longest. He is probably most well known for the pope mobile.
He actively visited other countries and celebrated massive masses. I believe he was the first Pope to travel around the world bringing his faith. He also efficiently used the media.
JP was a great communicator. He understood what it meant for the church to talk to the people—first by traveling to many countries and in opposition to communist atheism, later with the organization of the Journee Mondiale de la Jeunesse. During the late 90s there was a pretty big Catholic spiritual movement towards boys and girls in their late teens or early 20s and it's crazy how big the JMJ was.
His trick was hiding the conservative positions behind the mask of the beloved communicator.
He also covered up sexual abuses, game power to the Opus Dei, and aggressively pushed the disgusting mandate against condoms in the middle of the AIDS pandemic. Yeah, not a fan.
no, it doesnt. What my point is, is that it would have done NOTHING, whereas the message he did send probably had higher chances, and is atleast something someone might listen to, even if they dont follow the advice.
(well except ofcourse the corrupt dictator in ukraine, so it naturally falls on deaf ears)
John Paul II is widely credited with helping Poland overthrow communism. While he won't change the world overnight, there are millions of people even in Russia who respect the Roman Catholic pope, even if they aren't Roman Catholics themselves.
Comdemning evil is an act with many purposes. Making the evil-doer change his mind is just one of possible benefit. Even if that is unlikely the other ones remain.
* People naturally imitate what they see others do. A condemnation can prevent others from imitating the evil act.
* A condemnation calls on others to resist and not facilitate the evil act.
* Condemning someone makes you enemies, in a way that is plain for everyone to see. This positioning can open up for alliance offers from others with similar beliefs.
Making someone an enemy comes with risks and drawbacks of course. You become less able to influence someone if you cut ties, hence why people suggest to try influencing in private first.
> telling Ukraine to "have the courage of the white flag".
If an aggressor attacks your country, it takes courage to surrender. Churchill was a coward it seems. He could have surrendered to the Germans and saved so many lives on both sides.
Pope Francis was the only Pope that resonated with me. I was really shocked that at how human his words were. The moment he came on the scene he seemed genuine and honest. I hope they find more like him.
There was an interview on NPR this morning with a high-level Jesuit in the Americas (former leader of the order in Canada and USA, IIRC).
He put it well... Pope Francis was always a pastor at heart. And he put the needs of the person in front of him ahead of strict doctrine. The interviewee likened it to triage in a field hospital - address the soul in front of you, worry about doctrine later (suture the wound, worry about cholesterol later).
JPII was also elected in a very different world. And he played a big moral role in taking down iron curtain and getting Eastern Europe back Europe.
Meanwhile Francis was quite the opposite. Especially as seen in the light of Russian aggression against Ukraine. For much of Eastern Europe that was like 180 turn. At least here both church goers and not seem to despise Francis while JPII has a warm place in the hearts both factions. Maybe it was different far away where Russia ain’t a hot topic.
Which would be bad, had he done so, but he didn't actually say that; the white flag comment was specifically and explicitly about being willing to directly negotiate with Russia, not about surrender.
> There were multiple occurrences when he doubled-down on his words after backlash.
He certainly called on multiple occasions for all parties to negotiate, but he was also consistent, both before Russia invaded, after the invasion and before the "white flag" comment, immediately after the "white flag" comment, and since that the invasion by Russia is (or "would be" before it occurred) unjustifiable, immoral, an act of aggression, and that Russia has the primary obligation to stop it.
I sincerely hope that at some point we can develop artificial wombs and use them to render this whole debate moot. Instead of abortion we can take the fetus out, put it into an artificial womb then let it be raised as an orphan or whatever. It should make both sides happy, IF they are both being honest about their motives.
Both sides present the most agreeable arguments for their position, while publicly omitting other motives, while simultaneously highlighting the least agreeable motives of their opponents and omitting or flat out denying their more agreeable motives.
I don't mind being candid (not least because I am not an important person and this is not an important discussion, the stakes are low so there is no pressing need to lie), so I'll say one of the quiet parts out loud for the side I mainly sit on: I think there is plausible social benifit to aborting pregnancies caused by rapists. Not only because rapists might carry genes for aggression, but also because rape circumvents the valuable social/physical fitness selection which women normally perform when choosing who to have babies with. Pro-choice advocates will almost never admit to believing anything like this, because it essentially validates the criticism antiabortion advocates have, that their opponents are eugenicists. To be clear, many pro-choice advocates aren't, and I don't think this particular argument would make or break the debate (it doesn't for me), but it is a potential source of contention pro-choice people might have with my artificial womb proposal.
If there's ever a disagreement or debate about anything, then there are literally always two sides.
You might disagree that the thing that the other side is prioritizing is as important (e.g. the lives of fetuses vs. the right to bodily autonomy for women), or that the thing the other side believes is even right (e.g. people who believe in racial hierarchies and other literally racist ideologies), but that doesn't detract from the fact that two sides do, in reality, exist.
In my experience, it's way more effective determining the thing that the other side cares about, then finding common ground if that's something that you also care about -- from there, it's a lot easier to make the case that while both priorities are good, your priorities might be more justifiable.
Shutting down the other side by saying their viewpoint is invalid has been productive for me literally zero times in my life.
(On the topic, this was a thing that Pope Francis was exceptionally good at: he actually listened to the concerns of people and spoke with them where they were at, even those who he vehemently disagreed with).
That is not my understanding of what “both sides” refers to. Both sides is when both sides are doing bad things, such as lupusreal claiming both sides are being dishonest.
> Shutting down the other side by saying their viewpoint is invalid has been productive for me literally zero times in my life.
When the topic at hand is one group wanting to exercise power over another group, there can never be a resolution. The only thing left is to sway those on the fences.
Your other comment was flagged before I could submit my response, so here it is:
> or you think women should not be in control of their bodies in some situations.
In almost all countries where abortion is broadly legal there are still limitations. For elective abortions without committee approval or medical necessity there's a limit of 24 weeks in the UK, 12 in Germany and Italy, 14 in France, 20 in Sweden...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Europe#Grounds_for...
Opinion polling in the US mirrors this nuance:
> "The same poll found that support for abortion being generally legal was 60% during the first trimester of pregnancy, dropping to 28% in the second trimester, and 13% in the third trimester."
Clearly there is plenty of room to quibble over the details without being some sort of Victorian boogieman. Having no limitations at all is a fringe position which most pro-choice people don't agree with.
[End of pasted response.]
By the way, this ties in with what I'm saying about both sides presenting the worst possible arguments of their opponents. Extremists on one side say that the others all want to perform "partial birth abortions", killing babies mere seconds before it is fully born (this is a lie.) Extremists on the other side frame all of their opponents (including anybody who supports abortion in principle but not unrestricted) as being religious extremists who want to lock up women and turn them into breeding cows.
The reality is that most of the population is in between these two extremes, and if our democracy wasn't so dysfunctional, undermined by extremists on both sides we could compromise on abortion being legal for somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 24 weeks, as it is in most of Europe, and that would make most of the American public reasonably happy. But you wouldn't accept that, because any compromise is " controlling women", and antiabortion people wouldn't accept it because its "killing babies."
End result is we're doomed to have these fruitless arguments from now until a comet puts us all out of our misery.
> But you wouldn't accept that, because any compromise is " controlling women",
Because it is. As your own link shows, later term abortions are for medical purposes. Any legislation restricting it is just adding liability for doctors, which results in harm to women because doctors are now second guessing themselves instead of focusing on the woman’s healthcare.
It is only politically popular due to disinformation and people liking the feeling of being morally superior to others. A tried and true strategy to winning votes.
> When the topic at hand is one group wanting to exercise power over another group, there can never be a resolution.
I actually agree here, but only insofar as a resolution needs to be the ideal for both parties: a resolution could totally be rules and doctrine that both sides find partially objectionable, but the best feasible option.
I do want to point out that your point about one group exercising power over another is almost always where these disagreements arise: each party thinks that they've identified an unjust exertion of power that should be prevented.
Are there any developed countries where there arent year long queues for those wanting to adopt infants? I doubt many of them (if they are healthy) grow up orphans.
The vast majority of abortions are performed because the pregnancy was unwanted, not because the mother’s life was in danger or what have you. But why was the pregnancy unwanted in the first place?
This is the question you must begin with, because the answer cuts to the psychological heart of the matter. The reason is that we have redefined sexual intercourse in terms of sexual pleasure first. We’ve demoted procreation to secondary status instead of recognizing it as the primary reason for sexual intercourse with pleasure characterizing it rather than defining its function. The absurdity of it is apparent given the anatomical, physiological, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of sex. All of that for pleasure? This is like claiming the digestive system exists and the act of eating exist for pleasure. We would typically associate with such things gluttony, bulimia, and other eating disorders.
Historically, sexual self-restraint has always been a problem for some more than others, of course. Some have more trouble with restraint with respect to food or drink or whatever. Addictions have always existed. However, the cultural norms surrounding such questions have varied. Some cultures have been puritanical. Some have been depraved. Others have managed to channel sexual appetite in healthy ways that respect the dignity of those involved (which, given its nature, aims toward spousal love and the flourishing of the family, including the parents as parents). Ours is not the latter. In the 1930s, we saw the beginning of the normalization of contraception, and this normalization had the effect of splitting the pleasure of sex from the entirety of the act and promoted it to the status of primary end. This opened the door to the sexual revolution and the sexual exploitation of others, especially women. Abortion, paradoxically, only becomes relevant in this context, because only in a contraceptive context is pregnancy conceived as aberrant and contrary to the nature of the sexual act. So contrary to a successfully waged misinformation campaign by people like Margaret Sanger, abortion rates only rise in a society with a culture that normalizes contraception where it becomes a “solution” for the failure rate of contraception.
Is that what we want? Do we wish to continue to dehumanize ourselves by by outsourcing our humanity? Technology extends human ability or fixes broken human function. Do we want to put the cart before the horse and reinforce that error by building a culture and a technological ecosystem around error instead, and in doing so, entrench ourselves in that error? Instead of technology truly serving the human good, do we want instead to abolish the human in service to a dystopian ideology? This is what addicts do. They serve their addictions and build their lives around them.
I certainly don't think creating unwanted babies to be "raised as an orphan or whatever" is preferable to abortion, or even good at all. Certainly something I'd never personally do. That sounds absolutely horrific.
I grew up unwanted, that shit stays with you forever. It's a lifetime of torture.
> Instead of abortion we can take the fetus out, put it into an artificial womb then let it be raised as an orphan or whatever. It should make both sides happy, IF they are both being honest about their motives.
I think very few people who have religious opposition to abortion would actually be happy about the advent of "artificial wombs". They might view it as a lesser evil, but not as a good thing. Because, while belief in the wrongfulness of deliberately killing an unborn child is an important motivator, it generally isn't the sole motivator – another important motivator is the belief that God has a plan for the process of human reproduction, and wandering too far off script is wrong in itself, with artificial wombs likely to be seen as going quite a long way off – at best maybe tolerable as a lesser evil in some cases.
Part of that though was that he was Polish, at a time when Poland and other Eastern European countries were Communist dictatorships. He represented in part a kind of "insurgency" against them.
The first non-Italian pope since the 1500s.
For comparison, note the 1968 movie The Shoes of the Fisherman, in which a priest from Russia unexpectedly becomes pope and provokes great political change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shoes_of_the_Fisherman_(fi...
His global appeal was real, but his decision to give Opus Dei and similar conservative Catholic networks special status under the Vatican had serious consequences.
Elevating Escrivá to sainthood and creating a personal prelature for Opus Dei handed them unmatched moral authority—authority they used to push back on women’s autonomy, justify discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, and quietly influence politics from Spain to Latin America.
Popularity doesn’t erase the impact of empowering hard‑right movements that have harmed lives across the globe.
The church is never going to be pro feminism or pro LGBTQ. I don’t think many, many people find that to be a dealbreaker especially in many developing nations where the entirety of the medical and schooling framework is solely provided by the church and cultural mores already line up with those perspectives.
JP2 was liked by catholics (the reasons are interesting and complicated enough that would warrant a long discussion). But Francis was generally well-liked even by the irreligious.
Since I see a lot of people commenting on this topic, I would like to offer a different perspective.
Pope JPII was for my southern European social democratic Catholic family much more polarizing than Pope Francis. Pope Francis had politics that are mainstream and not at all controversial in my part of the world. Whereas JPII was perceived as the guy who was buddies with Reagan and Bush and a general supporter of American foreign policy. To what extent that was a fair assessment, I do not want to comment, since he did try to speak against the invasion of Iraq.
None the less, it is not true that Pope Francis is more popular with non-Catholics (Reagan, Bush and most of the US were not Catholic and big supporters of JPII). It was also JPII that started the interfaith dialogue. It is also not true that Pope Francis is unpopular with Catholics.
There are Catholics all across the globe with vastly different opinions on all kinds of issues.
Notably, while Francis is sometimes considered liberal, there weren't (m)any notable changes to Church doctrine during his papacy.
He did have a habit (a good one, IMO) of speaking more off-the-cuff in interviews. Whether that was contrived, or just a natural part of his personality, I do not know. But, it was those comments that usually led to the "he's a liberal!" comments. And both sides of the political spectrum said similar things... "He's a liberal (like us)!" or "He's a liberal (unlike us)!" - so he was probably doing something right.
It’s important to note that The Two Popes was a drama, and not a true factual story.
It fictionalizes and sensationalizes some details; and that’s ok because its purpose is to make you feel exactly the way you feel about it.
Pope Francis was a wonderful steward of Christianity and espoused the virtues that anyone would want to see in their religious leaders: humility, grace, an openness to listen and a strong voice against even prelates in his own church that are xenophobic or nationalistic. He wanted us to welcome all and to live as the bible said Jesus did.
The fear I have is that each swing of the pendulum goes in two directions. He was far more “liberal” than the conservative Catholic prelates of the USCCB, and I fear his actions — including rightfully limiting the Latin mass, will force the church to swing in the other direction and give in to the illiberal forces that divide us.
Indeed; and when the Second Vatican Council decided Mass should be said in the vernacular, the obligation of the Church was to follow. Instead, the conservatives of the church ('conservative' here means those that emphasize adhering to tradition and are adverse to change) created a rift by eschewing this change and even heightening the importance of the Latin Mass, creating the impression that a mass spoken in the local language was somehow less of a mass.
If you’re Catholic, suggesting that a mass spoken in one language over another is somehow "less" takes away from the most important idea of the Mass: reenacting Christ’s Last supper commandment and the institution of the Holy Eucharist for what amounts to word games.
This divisive description of the mass increased over the decades, to the point that it threatened to cause a schism. As such it was the Holy Father’s duty to resolve the issue.
There are still groups(at least I'm aware of them in Poland, I've met people who are part of them) who believe exactly this, that the second Vatican Sobor was a mistake and the "real" mass is only the one conducted in Latin.
Also unlikely that Jesus intended for the ceremony to be conducted at times other than the evening of his death (replacing Passover). Up for interpretation, I suppose.
Once per year. He commanded his disciples to "do this in remembrance of me."
There is no mention of how often, but given Jesus allergy to ritual as opposed to genuine acts of worship, it seems reasonable that this would not be a commonplace thing.
We can get context for how the early Christians understood it by looking to additional sources from that period, e.g. the Didache and the early Church Fathers.
In the early centuries of Christianity, as it spread geographically, there developed distinct rites of worship that solidified and then were handed down to the present, retaining strong links to the spoken-written languages used to express them originally.
Oversimplifying greatly, but in and from Western Europe we have the Latin Rite, and in/from the East we have the Byzantine (Greek) Rite. There are others, not of less importance, see the link above.
There’s quite a lot of history involved in all this. But in Western Christianity it was Latin that became predominant for public worship and knowledge transmission.
> It was certainly not in Latin. It was either in Hebrew of in Greek.
I think it was very likely mostly Aramaic, possibly with some Hebrew mixed in (certain set prayers, with Torah readings in Hebrew followed by extemporaneous Aramaic translation). By the 1st century, Jews had abandoned Hebrew as an everyday tongue, a situation which didn't change until Zionists revived it in the late 19th century (which caused great controversy, since the traditional Jewish belief was that Hebrew is a holy language which should be reserved for religious purposes only, a position still maintained by most non-Israeli ultra-Orthodox to this day.)
Putting aside any claims of supernatural linguistic abilities, Jesus of Nazareth would likely have been fluent in Aramaic (his native tongue), competent in using Hebrew for certain religious purposes (but not as a language of everyday life), possibly some limited ability in Greek (but probably not fluent), maybe a few words of Latin (but very unlikely to be fluent).
> The focus on latin is a pure nitpicking and virtue signaling from the Conservatives (the irony!).
The majority of TLM (Traditional Latin Mass) adherents care more about keeping the traditional Tridentine (pre-Vatican II) liturgy than about Latin in itself – Catholic priests are allowed to say the contemporary Mass in Latin (subject to certain conditions), but there is rather little demand for it.
But we do have record that the cross' title was written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.
God certainly had a special plan for these languages: the language of God's Law, the language of human power, and the language of human wisdom. The presence of His name in all three languages left the situation unambiguous to whoever might have been in the area to read it. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, hung on that cross. When pressed about it, Pilate would not amend those words.
In this way, though maybe unnecessary thanks to the Gift of Tongues the Holy Spirit later gave to His apostles, the sign stood as a kind of Rosetta Stone, which no one could misunderstand. It shows that history itself, along with all human matters, belong completely to Him, and at the same time it made those languages new by virtue of that single title, grounding them firmly in the Truth Himself.
Latin and Greek, themselves originally vernaculars, continue to hold a special place in their respective churches, both Catholic and Orthodox. Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, continues to be used in many Eastern churches as well, again Catholic and Orthodox both. All three constitute especially venerable traditions—and to this we may add Coptic, since Jesus spent his early years in Egypt; Slavonic, for its very writing system's role in the conversion of the Slavs; and a handful of others I am more or less ignorant of. With each one, by entering into the language, you enter the mind of those first converts, who themselves entered the Mind of Christ.
In the Latin Catholic Church (that is, the Latin Rite of the Roman Catholic Church, or however you want to name it) we call the Latin language a "sacramental"—the same sort of thing as holy water, something which conveys grace to those who use it with an openness to those graces.
Demons hate it because of its legal precision, by which, in the name of the same Christ named in Latin on the cross, they are driven out of people, things, and places, fulfilling Christ's own prediction that His followers would cast out demons.
By forming one's faith life around one of these languages, one can more clearly ask those basic human questions that Christ is the answer to, without having to deal with the centuries of semantic drift and overloading that are scattered about the minefields of our modern vernaculars. The vernacular, of course, is no impediment to personal prayer, but as more and more people are gathered in one place the confusion of Babel threatens to set in.
On the other hand, every little Latin grammatical lesson, every new piece of vocabulary learned, reveals new wonders and opens the door to the great body of literature that was composed in the single Mind of Christ.
But we had this, and in the 20th century we let it slip through our fingers, not knowing what we'd been given. The problem is not that we don't know Latin. The problem is that, in broad cultural strokes, even when we did, we didn't care.
Vatican II opened the way for use of vernacular in the Mass while also directing "use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites".
In practice, after the overhaul of the Latin rites was completed and promulgated (published) in 1969, four years after the council ended in '65, the Latin language itself was dropped almost everywhere all at once and only translations were used. Many people rejoiced at that, some did not, but the vast majority of bishops, priests and laity alike, conservatives and liberals across the full spectrum, probably 99.999%, went ahead full throttle with Mass and all the sacraments in the vernacular.
There were hold-out contingents like the SSPX, led by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who stuck with the all Latin rites per the last round of small reforms in 1962, the same as used for the celebration of Mass, etc. during the whole time of the council from 1962-65.
It was over the next 40 years that discontent with the reforms of 1969, and their fallout, began to grow. There was increasing awareness that it wasn't just a switch from Latin to vernacular — the '69 reforms were "cut from whole cloth", outright replacing the traditional rites with syntheses of a commission of scholars. Long story short, many Catholics, some born before '69 and many born after (myself included), desire a return, and have implemented a return, to the traditional form of the Latin rites. Pope Benedict XVI gave it his blessing. But then Pope Francis was not a fan, believing it to be a retrograde movement that causes more harm than good and a kind of "saying no" to the Holy Spirit. It's hard to find middle ground on this matter, to be quite honest.
No idea why you're being downvoted, you're correct. There was and still is pushback against the liturgical reform even from pro-Vatican II priests and bishops
The issue ive heard with non-Latin mass is that it has lessened the feeling of global community among Catholics as they now do not all speak the same language (Latin).
Anecdatum, but I still feel like part of a community when I go to Mass in a language I'm not familiar with, because its rhythm and flow are the same more or less everywhere.
Disclaimer: I'm definitely not old enough to predate vatican 2, so I'm not from a time when Latin Mass was widespread.
It's complicated. Few people in the church, including the priests themselves, are fluent in Latin (there's a story told, I think by Francis himself, about an diocese in England that required priests to pass an exam to give a Traditional Latin Mass, and almost none of the requesting priests could pass). The TLM obscures what the mass is about, which creates space for practitioners to substitute in their own things, which, as it happens, tends to be idiosyncratically ultra-conservative stuff. The church is a top-down institution, and the TLM gets in the way of that and divides it.
(I like Latin! Took it in high school, reading Lingua Latina for fun; I think the TLM is neat. But problematic.)
My experience, and that of many of my fellow TLM goers that I’ve heard or read, is that we treasure solemn reverent worship that helps us focus on the Eucharistic sacrifice. If we were being distracted from “what the mass is about”, we’d take ourselves and our children elsewhere.
Here’s a video of yesterday’s Easter Sunday Mass offered by priests of the same religious order that operates the oratory where I attend Mass:
If you get an opportunity, maybe attend Mass one Sunday at a location of the ICKSP or the FSSP. I believe you’ll experience a welcoming community of Catholics passionate about Jesus.
Well, SSPX is a thing. I’ve never been to one of their chapels myself, though there is one here in St. Louis and some folks who now attend the local oratory run by the ICKSP used to be regulars there. As a group, they seem to have a bit of a chip on their shoulder (irregular communion and all that), which has not been my experience with the ICKSP and FSSP, who are in full communion with the local bishops and Rome, even if the most recent pope was not exactly gracious toward “trads”.
Regarding obscurantism, I don't know how one gets around that observation. It's striking to me that even many TLM celebrants aren't fluent in the language. You know why you're going and you seem to have a good reason for it, and I respect that. I think the rap on the TLM is that, in addition to reasonable people like yourself, it also attracts a lot of whackjobs, some of whom have unfortunately included priests.
I'd actually love to attend a TLM! But I'm not setting foot into a chapel run by an order whose officiants accused the Jews of orchestrating 9/11. (That's SSPX, of course, not FSSP.)
I hope my "it's complicated" gives me some cover from the idea that I'm a folk-group C&E Catholic just looking to dunk on some tradcaths. I mean, I may be that too; it's complicated.
Bishop Williamson, the source of that statement, was kicked from the SSPX partly due to raging and irrational antisemitism and misogyny. If that's enough for you to never set foot in a chapel, you shouldn't be Catholic at all, just take a look at what many popes and saints have said and done about jewish people, it's far worse
I don't think SSPX matters, really, but I'd encourage anyone curious about this particular controversy to simply Google [SSPX antisemitism]. There's a whole Wikipedia article about it (going back to the founder of the order), but lots more than that. Suffice it to say, we're just not going to agree about this.
TLM, don't TLM, but conservative Catholics had a beef with Francis about the Latin Mass, and this is important context to that beef.
When I was in high school ('91-95), I had quite a few friends involved in band and other music programs at the public school we attended. One of those programs was "choir", though it wasn't affiliated with a church, of course, because it was a public school. I remember being amazed at their performances of polyphonic music from the 16th Century, Palestrina and the like – my parents never played recordings of music like that at home and I had not heard it elsewhere. As a kid I was curious about most everything, and I found it interesting but puzzling that some of those musical pieces were described as parts of a Mass – "what does that mean? can you explain the context, I don't get it?" My family was Catholic, but I grew up in a predominantly Protestant area of the country (eastern Tennessee); neither Catholic nor Protestant adults that I talked to could provide a clear explanation and I didn't know the the music teachers so didn't ask them. I looked up what I could in printed encyclopedias, but it was a jumble to me, and it wasn't until years later that I acquired a bigger picture.
All around the world, there exists (or survives, sometimes only in parts) beautiful art and architecture and music that, with a little examination, is directly connected to the Latin Rite as it was celebrated for centuries. You can't really get the full picture of why those things are the way they are without knowledge of the classical Latin Rite. Likewise, a study of the Latin Rite on paper would be impoverished without knowledge of the historical cultural developments and artistic treasures that enriched it over the centuries.
"Rite is the liturgical, theological, spiritual and disciplinary heritage, distinguished according to peoples' culture and historical circumstances, that finds expression in each autonomous church's way of living the faith." — according to the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches (28 §1)[1]
It is remarkable that in the Western Church we have passed through a period from the mid 20th Century during which so much of our Latin Rite heritage has been ignored, forgotten, even tossed aside or rent violently. The term wreckovation[2] is used, and it's pretty accurate though it causes some to bristle.
The TLM movement is, in many respects, about recovering our Western Catholic heritage. That's not accomplished in equal measure everywhere, but the most vibrant communities around it place an emphasis on sacred music, restoring art and architecture as circumstances allow, and educating — catechizing is probably the better term — ourselves and our children so those efforts aren't merely about appearances or performance art, but an integral part of loving and worshipping God as we look to rebuild local Catholic culture.
So "obscurantism"? No, rather traditional expressions of the Catholic Faith given new sails (sometimes the winds are a bit stormy, to be sure). Some of us are learning Latin as we go along — the ordinary parts of the Mass are easy to pick up, and if you're coming from the Novus Ordo you already know what they mean even if you don't fully understand the Latin grammar. Certainly the priests of the ICKSP and FSSP study Latin in their seminaries, and many homeschooling families I know have Latin in their kids' curriculums. It's pretty amazing how quickly little kids pick it up when they participate in choir or serve as altar boys.
I want to provide one more response re: the SSPX/Williamson and whackjobs stuff, but I've already blown my HN comments time-budget today, so it will have to wait.
I don't think TLM is intended to obscure anything; I claim instead that it is used as a tool of obscurantism for a fringe movement within the church. Everything you're saying that's good about TLM, I agree with. I'm the weirdo on the thread that actually took Latin, and, thanks to a work experience with a Latin scholar (hey Jon!) currently reads a little bit of Latin for fun.
I would claim as well that most people who attend TLM services do not in fact have any fluency in Latin, and would in support of that argument (but not that much support because I'm not going to take the time to dig up the source right now) point out the English bishop's observation that TLM-enthusiast priests in his diocese couldn't pass a simple Latin test.
> I claim instead that it is used as a tool of obscurantism for a fringe movement within the church
When I read your use of "obscurantism" previously, I mentally substituted something like "anachronistic, deliberately so, with the effect of obscuring [what the Mass is about, etc.]".
Wikipedia tells us "obscurantism has been defined as opposition to the dissemination of knowledge and as writing characterized by deliberate vagueness." A dictionary hit in DDG gives "a state of opposition to human progress or enlightenment."
So maybe that's what you had in mind? You mention (also in other HN comments):
> the English bishop's observation that TLM-enthusiast priests in his diocese couldn't pass a simple Latin test
There is an anecdote like that regarding a US bishop:
There's also Francis' "nostalgic disease" comments from 2023 — I remember those well because of the physical pain in my stomach and flushing in my neck after I read them. I had a similar visceral reaction when the credits rolled after the final episode of the new Battlestar Galactica (2003-09), but I digress.
In my previous reply to you, I already outlined what I understand to be the true motives – recovering our Western Catholic heritage, treasuring it, passing it on to our children, building up local Catholic culture around it. I think Benedict XVI got that, per the quote above. We want orthodoxy (little "o"), beauty, reverence, faithfulness to the Apostolic Tradition.
The young priests not knowing much Latin while being gung ho for the TLM… well, that's not uncommon with young people, getting really enthusiastic about some big idea or thing while having limited knowledge and experience of the particulars and background. (How many exuberant Rustaceans fit that bill in recent years?) I don't see any reason to think those priests' motives were anything other than embracing something "sacred and great for us too".
> Few people in the church, including the priests themselves, are fluent in Latin (there's a story told, I think by Francis himself, about an diocese in England that required priests to pass an exam to give a Traditional Latin Mass, and almost none of the requesting priests could pass).
Strictly speaking, as well as the Tridentine Mass, one can also have the current Mass in Latin. From what I've heard (never been to one to experience it first hand), Opus Dei centres worldwide say it almost every day. Outside Opus Dei, I believe it is quite niche – but, strictly speaking, all Catholic priests (of the Latin Church, or Eastern rite with Latin faculties) are allowed to say the current Mass in Latin, and Traditionis custodes didn't do anything to change that. I think few are interested, and from what I've heard, to try to prevent people shifting from Tridentine-in-Latin to current Mass-in-Latin, bishops have been quietly instructed by Rome to disallow it in practice, even if it is still formally allowed on paper. However, if a priest wants to say the new Mass in Latin privately, or to a small group which isn't widely advertised and flies below the radar, I think that is both officially allowed and likely in practice too. But, the linguistic competence concerns you mention about Tridentine-in-Latin apply equally to current Mass-in-Latin.
Quite separately, there is a history of the Tridentine Mass being translated into other languages, both in some cases authorised by Rome, and also by external groups such as Anglo-Catholic Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox, Old Catholics, Polish National Catholic Church – I think all the cases of this in communion with Rome have all effectively lapsed through disuse. But still, it is another reason people ought to avoid equating Latin and Tridentine.
> The TLM obscures what the mass is about, which creates space for practitioners to substitute in their own things, which, as it happens, tends to be idiosyncratically ultra-conservative stuff. The church is a top-down institution, and the TLM gets in the way of that and divides it.
I think a big potential problem with what Pope Francis did – it made no difference to the quasi-schismatic SSPX, or the more explicitly schismatic groups to their right, who were very used to ignoring everything the Pope said (except maybe if they liked what he was saying on that occasion) – but it upset that minority of Catholics who were involved in the TLM within the Catholic Church proper, and potentially drove them into the arms of those more schismatic groups. Now, to what extent has that potential been fulfilled in practice, I don't have enough personal experience of this topic to say–but I'm sure it has happened in some cases, however many. And I know there are even quite a few conservative-leaning Catholics who weren't involved in TLM in practice, but found the decision upsetting, and it might increase the odds of them wandering off as well.
Of course, the people we are talking about are a small minority in comparison to over 1 billion Catholics worldwide. But most of that one billion are far from devout – people who rarely attend Mass. At the more devout end, at least in some geographies, those involved in TLM, or who aren't but were upset by this papal decision, are arguably much more significant. And much of the institutional strength of any religion comes from its devout minority, as opposed to millions of people who identify with it at some level but far more rarely actively engage with it.
So, I think even if one doesn't have any personal affinity for the Tridentine Mass, there are genuine reasons to question the prudence of this decision.
TLM participants are a tiny fraction of people who routinely attend mass. In fact, something you hear from TLM advocates is that TLM attendees tend to be younger.
You hear this a lot from TLM proponents. First, it's a category error to suggest that church doctrine has a goal of maximizing the number of people to that turn out to mass. But second, no, it really isn't. The idea that a great way to get lots of ordinary people to become practicing Catholics is to literally conduct services in a dead language nobody understands is an extraordinary claim.
> The idea that a great way to get lots of ordinary people to become practicing Catholics is to literally conduct services in a dead language nobody understands is an extraordinary claim.
Lots of religions have liturgical languages which are nobody's mother tongue any more. Orthodox Judaism has Hebrew (Reform/Conservative/etc too, albeit with variably greater use of vernacular): many diaspora Jews have limited Hebrew proficiency, and even for those who speak Modern Hebrew, the liturgy is in mediaeval Hebrew, which has significant differences. And some of the prayers (including quite important ones like the Kaddish and the Kol Nidre said on Yom Kippur) are in Aramaic. Most Muslims pray in Arabic despite the fact that less than 20% speak it natively, and even for those who do, modern vernacular Arabic has diverged a lot from the classical Arabic of the Quran and the prayers. The Russian Orthodox Church prays, not in Russian, but in Church Slavonic, which is a (somewhat Russified) descendant of mediaeval Bulgarian, which comes from a different branch of the Slavic language family. The Greek Orthodox liturgy is in mediaeval Greek, not modern Greek – many Middle Eastern Greek Orthodox have Arabic as their mother tongue, and many ethnic Greeks in Anglophone countries have quite limited Greek proficiency, yet still attend services in the language. The Coptic Church still uses Coptic, a descendant of ancient Egyptian, for its liturgy. The Ethiopian Church uses Ge'ez. The Syriac Churches use Syriac/Aramaic. (And what I just said of those Eastern churches is also true of many Eastern Catholics.) Many Theravada Buddhists pray in Pali. Many Mongolian Buddhists pray in Tibetan (there are many Anglophone Buddhists who pray in Tibetan too). Many Hindus pray in Sanskrit.
Having a special language set aside for prayer, a holy tongue (Lashon Hakodesh, as many Jews call Hebrew) is something a lot of people find spiritually beneficial, across numerous unrelated religious traditions. It can give people a sense of an encounter with the deep past of their own tradition. It can make a religious community feel more unified despite being divided between different mother tongues. And most Catholics, pre-1970, thought the same thing.
It wasn't like people couldn't understand it – they followed English-Latin parallel prayer books, just like people follow English-Hebrew parallel books in many synagogues today. Globally, very many Catholics have a Romance language as their mother tongue, which is historically descended from Latin, which helps with understanding some of the words. Even though English isn't, the heavy infusion of Latin (both directly and via French) into English helps achieve some of the same thing.
I think if I'd grown up Catholic with Latin instead of the vernacular, my understanding of Latin would be a lot better. I feel like I missed out on something there.
So one definitely doesn't have to be a regular Latin Mass goer – I've never been to one in my life, I've thought about doing it but its always just been too out of my way – to wonder if the Church has lost something by throwing away so much of its linguistic heritage. Personally, I'd be quite happy with a kind of compromise in which Latin was much more heavily used but the majority of Masses were still vernacular. Which I actually think is what Vatican II intended, I think the Council's original vision was closer to majority vernacular / minority Latin, than the almost-all-vernacular / almost-no-Latin which actually evolved afterwards.
And this is a separate issue from the Tridentine liturgy – you can say the Mass of Paul VI in Latin and you can say the Tridentine Mass in English (Roman Catholics never have, but some Anglican, Eastern Orthodox and schismatic Catholic churches do it)
You mistake me. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with saying the mass in Latin. I'd kind of like to go see one! Put my 4 years of Jesuit Latin to use! But no, I don't think that's going to be a big draw for ordinary people to join the church.
My Greek Orthodox friends growing up definitely spoke Greek!
It would definitely attract some people. An old friend of mine (from our Catholic high school), who almost never goes to Mass, told me he’d be willing to venture back if it were in Latin, just for the experience. We started looking into it, we were going to go together, but lost interest in the idea when we realised there weren’t any convenient to attend. I don’t know how common that attitude is, but I’m sure he’s not the only person like that.
And the fact is, if Latin doesn’t attract many ordinary people, will anything else? Catholicism (and Christianity more broadly) is full of grand evangelistic plans to “get people back to church”, the vast majority of which produce very little results. If anything, niche offerings such as Latin masses or Anglican Use or Eastern Catholicism at least have a bit of a ”it’s different” factor to draw people in with.
There are clearly people who are interested very specifically in the Latin mass. But even though the church is losing practicing members, it's still huge; normie Catholics dwarf tradcaths.
But again: drawing people isn't the point. Francis didn't crack down on TLM because he thought it was a bad way to get people to show up at mass! He did it because things in the church with TLM were getting weird. It's a doctrinal thing, not a marketing strategy.
> He did it because things in the church with TLM were getting weird.
What’s “weird” is in the eye of the beholder - a lot of stuff Francis saw as “weird”, JP2 and B16 may have seen as significantly less “weird”; conversely, JP2 and B16 may well have seen some of Francis’ own decisions as “weird”.
I know one of the big complaints against TLM communities is that many of them question the validity of Vatican II. But, given B16 as a young theologian authored his famous (in the rarified subfield of Catholic/Orthodox ecumenical theology) “Ratzinger proposal”, that reunion with the Orthodox should not require them to accept post-schism councils as binding - which implicitly downgrades the authority of all 13 post-schism councils from Lateran I to Vatican II inclusive, [0] maybe he’d view doubting Vatican II a bit more charitably than Francis ever could. And, among the more liberal/progressive-leaning Catholics (for whom Francis rather obviously had a significant degree of sympathy), there’s a long tradition of questioning the validity of Vatican I - and I suspect Francis was much more sympathetic to doubting the first than the second.
And then there’s also the Eastern Catholic followers of the late Lebanese Melkite archbishop Elias Zoghby, who rejected the ecumenicity of Vatican II (despite being one of its Fathers) on the grounds that a genuinely ecumenical council would require full Orthodox participation, hence denying that status to all post-schism councils - I suspect Francis would have seen that as much less “weird”, despite its superficial overlap with traditionalist views on Vatican II, since he’d be more sympathetic to the motivations behind it. Zoghby’s opposition to Vatican II’s validity wasn’t solely a matter of abstract theological principle, it was also about its substance - at it, he argued that Eastern Catholics should be allowed to observe the traditional Eastern leniency on divorce rather than being forced to conform to the Latin Church’s principled opposition to it, but he lost that argument-but yet again, likely something Francis had more sympathy for than the Latin traditionalist objections to the council’s substance
[0] there is also the problem of the 8th council, which is a pre-schism council; there are two competing claimants to the title of “Fourth Council of Constantinople”, the first in 869-870, the second in 879-880; Catholics accept the first as the 8th ecumenical council and reject the second as invalid; Orthodox reject the first as invalid and accept the second, but disagree among themselves as to whether to class it as the 8th ecumenical council or as sub-ecumenical; and then there’s also the Quinisext Council of 692 (aka Council in Trullo), which many Orthodox view as quasi-ecumenical, Catholics as local to the East; and then the fact that some Orthodox claim one of their own post-schism councils as ecumenical (the fifth council of Constantinople, 1341-1368) - Ratzinger’s proposal didn’t address these conciliar esoterica, but maybe they aren’t that important given so few get worked up about them
I'm just going to point out that it's not surprising that laypeople and clergy who reject Vatican II also have an unusual habit of faceplanting into antisemitism, given that Nostra Aetate was a product of Vatican II.
The Vatican first condemned antisemitism by name in 1928, so I don't think disagreeing even with Nostra aetate necessarily has antisemitism as a consequence. The perennial problem with antisemitism, however, is nobody (Jews included) can agree on how to define it, and how essential Nostra aetate is to ruling it out for Catholics may depend on how broad or narrow a definition of it you adopt.
>maximizing the number of people to that turn out to mass
Mark 16:15.
Hebrews 10:25.
The Church organisation is very distinct from the church. And anything that increases their participation is in line with scripture. Both growth and attendance are important.
There's already evidence it works. And it's something that sets the church apart.
Romans 12:2 indeed.
In Antioch [Acts 11:26] people were first called Christians. They weren't the regular people of that time. But people with something that made them visibly different from the Hoi Polloi.
What really is the point of a consecration that doesn't change you? What are you being set apart from?
I just find this sentiment really kind of funny, given how small the number of people who are passionately committed to it, vs. people who attend folk-group mass. But I'm not here to convert you!
For me it's not just about the in practice Latin suppression and the pretense it's not happening.
My reply is primarily about Church growth and the importance of fellowship.
Wherever you go, don't imagine this sentiment is American/Western only as many have claimed/alluded.
If Christ doesn't change you nothing really has changed.
Proselytizing by active action and being examples by our (different/changed post conversion) behaviour are duties of everyone in Christ. As is fellowship.
As exemplified by those who do it in countries and areas where it might mean death like where I live today.
The approach of some recently arrived evangelists has been slammed by some Aboriginal leaders, including Labor senator Pat Dodson.
"They are a type of virus that has really got no credibility," he said. "If they really understood the gospel then the gospel is about liberation.
"It's about an accommodation of the diversity and differences that we have in our belief systems."
He believes the destruction of traditional culture is "an act of bastardry".
"It's about the lowest act you could perform in trying to indicate to a fellow human being that you have total disdain for anything they represent."
compared to:
But the born-again Christian converts have defended their beliefs and practices, saying it is their decision to make, and finding God has brought them peace and happiness.
The Christian converts who are setting fire to sacred Aboriginal objects (2019)
The obvious objection would be that I linked to a story of poor behaviour from Tongan evangelicals rather than Catholics ... the counter being there's no shortage of truly appalling tales of Catholics destroying culture while expanding their flocks .. they are better known for other atrocities hereabouts though, eg:
Regardless of whether you who is outside the church see it as good or bad, it's a necessary part of Christian life for every believer. As is regular attendance in fellowship with other believers.
These new links are even more irrelevant from that perspective.
Imagine going to church every Saturday or Sunday and sitting through a 1 hour service that you don't understand. The conservative side of the church has decided that it hates change, and since the Latin services were mostly cast aside, that's a bad thing to them.
The dozen or so TLMs I've ever been to have had their readings in the vernacular. All the other parts are either the same every time (or have only a few variations) or are propers (specific to each day).
I never studied Latin, but I don't find it difficult at all to keep up. A lot of churches that have TLM have the missal booklet with Latin on one page and vernacular on the facing page.
While I do appreciate the richness of the daily propers and miss understanding them, it doesn't bother me enough to avoid the TLM.
Modern catholics and protestants are the exception in regards to "understanding" their rites. For centuries religions have maintained "sacred languages" or at the very least sacred dialects, with the intention of emphasizing continuity between generations.
Also, you don't really seem to understand how the Latin Mass works. The Ordo is repeated the same way every mass, so anyone that remotely cares knows what it says. The proper, including the readings, changes most days, but many are repeated throughout the year, like the mass of the virgins, and also repeats every year in the exact same way, so there's no reason for a concerned faithful not to buy a book with them if they care so much. Readings are frequently read in vernacular before the sermon, if pertinent, but they are not core to the mass so there's not much reason to care
His persona as being simple focus is just PR, no different than puff pieces about bill gates driving a Prius, or Warren buffet living in the first house that be bought.
>> According to Archbishop Diego Ravelli, Master of Apostolic Ceremonies, the late Pope Francis had requested that the funeral rites be simplified and focused on expressing the faith of the Church in the Risen Body of Christ.
As a kinda-sorta Christian (raised Catholic), I've long admired the Jewish approach to the Mourner's Kaddish prayer said when a loved one dies: It's not about the deceased, nor even about death — it's about G-d. It starts out (in English translation): "Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will."
And for political side - in Poland, he was seen as way too leftist/liberal for the conservatives in Church, and too pro-Russian for the liberals in it - he had not condemned Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This was a very interesting thing to witness. It seemed to indicate that politics is more powerful than religion, even in a country as religious as Poland.
I found this surprising and genuinely thought-provoking.
I had been talking with my conservative colleagues - they were deeply unhappy with him on stance of migration, LGBT issues, or even very recent - his talk with Vance, whom they support (American politics are just so big that it has effect on us even across the ocean).
Then, from religious point of view - they didn't really like his ecumenism approach, to them it was borderline of heresy.
I was born in, and currently live in Poland. It truly blows my mind that any Polish person could side with a foreign political party that openly sides with moscow over Ukraine and even Poland. Political alignment is truly the strongest drug for many people.
While I support Ukraine and would like to see a stronger, more unified front from the collective West, making this the only question that matters in Polish politics seems wrong. My 2c.
Also, while I think that barring a fringe part of society, everyone would agree, the fun part is, how do you get to people to agree who's pro-Russian or not ;) Of course, this is for local parties, but go to /r/Poland and /r/Polska and ask them, what parties are pro-Russian. Then to Wykop, both Mikroblog and frontpage, and see the reactions.
Anecdotally, my uncle just dropped by to thank me for the Easter flowers I had left at their place. He is pretty conservative, had always railed against this pope, and just called him a really good man. So at least today, religion and forgiveness won his heart.
The concept of Liberal in the US is different from liberal in Europe. In Europe "liberal" means supporter of low taxes, small govertment. The concept in the US has to do with sexual liberation and sexual freedom more than economic marxism.
Francis was not sexually liberal. He was marxist. He believed in liberation theology.
As someone who knew personally the man from a spiritual exercises' house in Spain(obviously when he was not yet Pope), I never liked the guy.
He was the friend of dictators. Loved so much Raul Castro, and Maduro, never criticised them, but criticised the affluence of western democracies. His business was the poor and he loved poor makers.
His support for Putin and not denouncing the takeover of absolute power was jarring for someone in his position.
You can be a leftist religious leader, but you have to report abuses when you see them, specially if the abuses are made by your friends. Of course you will lose them if you do.
Francis was too weak in character to oppose them. But as a Pope, that is your job.
> The concept of Liberal in the US is different from liberal in Europe. In Europe "liberal" means supporter of low taxes, small govertment. The concept in the US has to do with sexual liberation and sexual freedom more than economic marxism.
It isn't a purely US vs Europe thing though – you will find some Americans who call themselves "classical liberals", by which they mean "liberal" in largely the same sense as many Europeans do. It is just that "classical liberal" is somewhat of an obscure term in the US–you are only likely to know it if you are interested in or have studied economics, politics, etc–but among those Americans who know it there are definitely some who identify with it.
"Progressive" avoids this to some extent, in being a term which is closer to meaning the same thing in the US and Europe – although in a US context, "progressive" often means something in the same direction as "liberal" but going further.
Some people like to talk about two dimensions, social vs economic – so a person can be socially conservative but economically progressive (not an uncommon position among some conservative Catholics, for example) – although that still has the limitation that "socially progressive/conservative" is a selection of issues with an assumption that people's positions across them are correlated, but there are people who break the assumption, e.g. self-described "consistent pro-lifers" who oppose both legal abortion and the death penalty (unlike many "pro-lifers" in the US who oppose legal abortion yet are pro-death penalty), or certain radical feminists who support LGB rights but oppose transgender rights ("gender critical" as they prefer to call themselves, with "TERF" being the pejorative label applied to them by their opponents)
Some of these linkages are country specific – e.g. in the US, most social conservatives support the death penalty and oppose gun control, in some other Western countries you may find most social conservatives opposing the death penalty and supporting gun control, even while they agree with US social conservatives on other issues.
At one point Francis said "The Patriarch cannot become Putin’s altar boy", in reference to Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church [1]. Maybe Francis recognised that working to get Kirill to temper his support for Putin would be more effective than his own public condemnation, which might allow propagandists to whip up a Western vs. Orthodox religious frenzy to unify Russians behind Putin?
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> With all due respect, massacring civilians because “you have no other choice” is historically not an excuse holding up in courts.
The thing is, under the rules of war, protected installations (such as residential areas or even hospitals) lose their protection if they are being abused by a warring party for military operations. Otherwise, it would be an open invitation for anyone to do what Hamas did - force the other party between either risking getting shot at or violating rules of war.
No one forced Hamas to embed themselves among civilians. They did that on their own.
> protected installations (such as residential areas or even hospitals) lose their protection if they are being abused by a warring party for military operations
You should maybe research where key millitary apparatus of the Israeli state is located. The headquarters of the IDF for example.
I am familiar with IDF headquarters, they are located in a clearly marked base, you can see it on Google Maps. This is similar to French army's Hexagone Balard in Paris or the Italian and Dutch armies HQ for example, from a cursory search, ask your local LLM for more.
It's in a residential area. I'm pointing out the hypocrisy.
The whole area is heavily militarized, there are bases everywhere, citizens are automaticlaly enrolled into the IDF - every Israeli citizen in a certain age group can be considered a legitimate millitary target if you follow your logic.
The arguments you are using for attacking Palestinian infastructure and people are more than applicable to Israeli infastructure and population.
In international law people have the right to resist occupation through millitary means. In a small area under occupation then there is no means to create a millitary setup that matches what the 'good guys' consider to be legitimate.
If you want to be consistent then allow Palestinians to have a millitary, air space, airports, ports, navy, jets, nuclear weapons etc. And then you can fight them on equal terms.
The word massacre is loaded and does not represent the typical reality in Gaza. Most estimates place the ratio of combatant to civilian casualties within the range for armed conflicts, nevermind guerilla warfare settings.
> therefore, Israel must eliminate all Gazawis itself to guarantee its security
Guess why they're keeping the Palestinians on a run: to ransack the entire place for weapons caches or Gaza Metro entrances. And that's not eliminating the Gazan population, by the way.
I don't like it very much myself, but honestly, I do not see any other way of making sure Hamas does not rise up again.
> Will Israel kill millions to avenge the deaths of thousands?
Again: it's not about revenge any more, it's about preventing the repeat of 2006-2023 aka constant terror from Qassam rockets and other terrorism.
> Guess why they're keeping the Palestinians on a run: to ransack the entire place for weapons caches or Gaza Metro entrances.
Let's say Israel finds all caches and tunnels, while not disturbing the population of Gaza (besides blockade, forced displacement and destruction of their homes), and then lets the population back in. Israel cannot tell Hamas militants from civilians, so some measure of Hamas will survive the event -- indeed, it might even reinforce anti-Israeli sentiment. What then would stop these leftover Hamas members from rebuilding whatever smuggling routes and weapon caches they had?
> Again: it's not about revenge any more, it's about preventing the repeat of 2006-2023 aka constant terror from Qassam rockets and other terrorism.
According to OCHAOPT Israel suffered 138 casualties on its own territory (ie excluding Gaza and the West Bank) from Palestinian attacks from 2008 to the eve of October 7. Would you say the current Israeli response (which itself inflicts terror) has been proportionate? Where would you place the threshold where it would no longer be an acceptable response?
> What then would stop these leftover Hamas members from rebuilding whatever smuggling routes and weapon caches they had?
Disbanding UNRWA, for one, and replacing it with UNHCR which is responsible for every other refugee situation in the world. It's time for the end of the special treatment of Palestinians, and that includes getting rid of inheriting the refugee status.
Following that, there must be strict accountability on all aids and their eventual disbursement in Gaza and the West Bank. No more diversion of construction materials to Gaza Metro, no more diversion of food aid and then re-selling it.
The final important thing to do is stop funding Hamas, and that one falls squarely on Israel, where Netanyahu has covertly funded Hamas to keep Fatah in check. When there's no money to pay for smuggled Qassam parts, there won't be any more smuggled Qassam parts.
> Would you say the current Israeli response (which itself inflicts terror) has been proportionate?
Yes. Israelis had to live 17 years in terror of rockets from Gaza. There's no way calling this acceptable in any form. Hamas and those backing it knew that eventually, Israeli patience would end one day and there would be hell to pay for it.
I wonder what would have happened if the Americans had taken the same approach with the Iraqis and the Afganis. As someone said, if your enemy is carrying a baby, you don't punch him through the baby, you punch around it.
The staggering number of civilian casualties, deaths and literal executions that have been inflicted in the name of peace must give the acting populace a pause. In the name of humanity. The place is just rubble now. How much more security could one country want? No one else has done something like this since the first world war.
You used the word indistinguishable, the other person used "deep". You are factually wrong since the ratio of Hamas to Gazan casualties does not represent random targeting even by the worst estimates. You also ignore the possibility of Hamas eventually giving up or some other diplomatic solution being reached.
We are a highly technical community, we should be able to debug the situation and find edge cases rather than trivialize it.
> You used to word indistinguishable, the other person used "deep". You are factually wrong since the ratio of Hamas to Gazan casualties does not represent random targeting even by the worst estimates.
True, I apologize for the misrepresentation; but reasoning is the same. At some point Hamas is too deeply ingrained in Gazawi society for Israel to perfectly excise it.
Hamas is the civilian government of Gaza and therefore includes firefighters, doctors, policemen, teachers. Israel does count them as members of Hamas and relies on statistical methods to select targets (ie you are on the same WhatsApp group as a member of Hamas, therefore you are likely to be a member, see the "Lavender" target selection program).
For a point of comparison, after Nazi Germany collapsed the Western allies had German civil servants fill questionnaires to assess their level of involvement; of 3.6 millions surveyed, just 1% were charged as "main culprits" (Hauptschuldige), whereas a third were designated as "followers" (Mitläufer), who basically contributed to the regime's crimes but nontheless got to keep their jobs after the war. I'd argue the allies were way too lenient on Germany, but the current Israeli approach (kill them all) is too extreme and will not work because its objectives are unrealistic.
> You also ignore the possibility of Hamas eventually giving up or some other diplomatic solution being reached.
I sure hope peace will be reached but Israel is waging a war without clear conditions of victory, leaving only total destruction of the enemy as their strategic objective. Think of the US trying to eliminate all the communist Vietnamese by compiling kill counts.
My impression is the war will end either when Gaza is drained of all of its population, or Israel tires of the war and reduces its stated objectives (probably this would involve a shift in government).
> We are a highly technical community, we should be able to debug the situation and find edge cases rather than trivialize it.
We can't solve everything with tech principles. Even in our field, probably the biggest thing separating a senior from a junior is humility and ability to connect with other people.
> For a point of comparison, after Nazi Germany collapsed the Western allies had German civil servants fill questionnaires to assess their level of involvement; of 3.6 millions surveyed, just 1% were charged as "main culprits" (Hauptschuldige), whereas a third were designated as "followers" (Mitläufer), who basically contributed to the regime's crimes but nontheless got to keep their jobs after the war. I'd argue the allies were way too lenient on Germany, but the current Israeli approach (kill them all) is too extreme and will not work because its objectives are unrealistic.
You're comparing the Allies' actions after WWII concluded with Israel's actions in the midst of conflict.
Are you forgetting the Dresden firebombings?
Are you really suggesting that Israel will continue to "kill them all" if Hamas surrenders? That's not even what Israel is doing now, although they have the military capability to do so if they wished.
I'm comparing the stated goal of Israel (dehamasification) with denazification.
The allies' strategic bombing campaign was intended to destroy industry and infrastructure and was not aimed at any political group in particular, whereas Israel can and does target precise buildings associated with Hamas (see the "Lavender" program that provides bombing targets).
> That's not even what Israel is doing now
There's no real way to know since Israel does not allow journalists in Gaza, but the international court of justice found there was sufficient possibility that an investigation should be carried out. Are you so much better informed than them that you can be sure?
All that has been said under this thread, including the sibling comment to this one, could be true at the same time. I see dissenting stances where the opinions are not.
Did you really have to make this comment here on this post?
I think you intentionally wrote it to spark a fire as well.
"systematically massacring tens of thousands with the declared intent of ethnic cleansing"
You know yourself that so many people disagree with you about this and sees this as an outrageous claim.
It's very much not an outrageous claim, it is in fact the shared opinion of literally all non-partisan international organizations that have studied the conflict in any way - including the UN, the Red Cross, the International Criminal Court, Human Rights Watch, Doctors without Borders, and many many many others. And it is not unrelated to Pope Francis or his death, as he spoke about the humanitarian tragedy in Palestine just yesterday, in his last public speech.
>that is mostly made of misheard slogans and made up discriminations
Aside from legitimate concern about the genocide in Gaza, there's also been a rise in good-old-fashioned antisemitism, especially among young people: https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/46-adults-worldw... . For instance: 40% of those under age 35 affirm that “Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars” while it is 29% for those over 50, a remarkable 11 percentage point difference.
The argument that claims of antisemitism are exagerated is ridiculous, there are prominent figures with ties to the US government giving literal nazi salutes. That said, the reaction of the ADL to those figures leads me to question their integrity as well.
I believe you will find the majority of progressive Jews has said that Israel, and more specifically the government of Israel, does not speak for Jews worldwide. In fact many rabbis have written about the nauseating position of having Israel be considered a representative of all Jews by so many people
That's a generalization that does not help the vision of the world he had. Putin is the villain. Spreading the bad image of Russian people in general is not really helping anything. Even if the polls in Russia might show support for the war, it's mostly because everybody in Russia if afraid of speaking their opinion in public.
They're not afraid, they're disinterested in politics as long as it doesn't affect their day to day life, so food and fuel prices remaining manageable.
Putin is popular and has personal interest in remaining so, because otherwise Russian elites will find themselves a new Putin.
Putin is a product of Russian culture. To deny discussions about failed, catastrophic nurture equals handing the debate via silence back to the racist and nature.
Ignoring the patterns by paying attention only to conflicts with the west / clichees involved gets your ideas bankrupt .
Bergoglio was a South American intellectual. He could recognize a proxy war when he saw one. That's why his account of the war was a tad more complex and articulated than that of the average liberal Anglo.
I'm not liberal Anglo(or any Anglo), so let me explain - Russia attacked Ukraine, because it thinks it's imperium. Russia kills Ukrainians and destroys their country for their sick ambitions.
Fact that other countries use the war for their own politics doesn't change it in the slightest.
RIP, I have given Francis my prayers for his soul and his close ones and everyone who saw him as a leader and a holy figure. God can use anything for the good <3
I think he will be mostly remembered as a terrible politician, first alienating conservatives with progressive policy and then alienating liberals with very questionable opinions on war in Ukraine.
In the end, nobody was really happy with him. On the other hand, he definitely had a will and a spine to stick to his own opinions - I guess that counts for something.
A comment I'd heard some time back concerned a politician. The speaker (not a politician themselves, but recalling an interaction with one) had said to the politician something like "I suppose you want to win with the biggest majority possible". The politician responded along the lines of, "No, that would mean I wasn't doing my job; if I'm really pushing the limits of the possible I'll have just the barest majority."
People pleasing in politics means never pushing out of the public's comfort zone.
(And no, this isn't an endorsement of any current orange head of state, far from it.)
I do, according to christian doctrine Jesus sacrificed himself for humanity’s sins. That sacrifice wouldn’t be particularly meaningful if it came with expectation for everybody to follow through. As much as I am not a fan of this (or any other) religion, I’m pretty sure it’s not a suicide pact.
I think getting killed for your belief is exactly what Jesus was arguing for. It was also what all apostles did and the only cause for the next 300 years to be declared a saint.
Jesus' death was special, because he was without sins, he was the son of God (YMMV) and, because was walking around afterwards physically (i.e. capable of touching and eating, etc.) on earth. I am not sure, why you name it suicide, because he didn't killed himself, he got himself killed.
I do not think, that Jesus would defend "the agressor". But fighting in return is also not good, which is where "turning the other cheek" comes into play.
Suicide is a mortal sin, so I'm not sure, if we argue past each other.
> reframe Christianity
How is it reframing, when it is what it is all about? Can you elaborate about the counter arguments?
Of course dying is not the only method of worshiping God and promote the faith, but it is quite effective. And giving the other option is killing people it is definitely the preferred way.
Yep, as a sacrifice. Using this as a justification for aggressive war against a christian nation is not only extremely intellectually dishonest, but against the doctrine as well.
As with everything, it's open to interpretation, but you don't turn your other cheek expecting to be hit again; it's meant to signal defiance not resignation.
I guess, but "defiance" can mean anything, and the passage is telling you not to resist. It's about not participating in a violent conflict to begin with. It's definitely not "I f'ing dare you to try that again".
This is true if you live in a bubble. Most Catholics don't hold strong opinions on the Pope. The people who do are, as usual, the extremes on either side - not the majority.
Of course I am happily criticising pope from back seat, this thread is literally to discuss him as a public figure.
Already said that conservative and liberal are English words not necessarily connected to US political scene. I know plenty of people initially supportive of him who got seriously pissed when he broke the long standing tradition of supporting the attacked, not the attacker.
I would argue it’s a pretty common position in Europe.
Same here. Although I grew up a Catholic and am now an atheist, my father counselled me that there were few institutions in the world that look after the downtrodden. The Catholic church has often not done that, but under Francis moved more towards that goal than any other time in recent history.
this is terribly inaccurate. they teach gainst using birth control even in poor, AIDS ridden regions (see Mother Theresa in Africa), treat women as lesser beings (including not recognizing that marital rape is a thing), cause the mistreatment of queer and homosexual and trans people, etc etc
Plenty(well, some) Catholics in Poland had an issue with him for the exact same reason - just way too progressive for them. Although I do think that American Catholics are particularly.....fervent in their beliefs.
Look up some numbers, his approval ratings outside of America were rapidly declining (at least in Latin America). [1] Interestingly the US is the one place where his approval ratings didn't decline over time, probably owing to the perfectly divided nature of contemporary politics. As he lost support from one side he gained it in equal proportions from the other. But in places like Argentina, his birth place no less, his approval rating dropped 27 points as he got increasingly involved in Progressive stuff.
One data point, but I live in a progressive country in western Europe, and I have close family members who are in the "right wing / trumpist / christians" movement (which does exist in Europe too), and obviously they really disliked this pope.
On the other hand, lots of christians liked him because he was progressive (more than his predecessor, anyway). Catholics are not all fundamentalists and in general don’t have much in common with the catholics bishops in the US, who are for the most part downright medieval.
Rerum Novarum was the basis of catholic social teaching since, so...
But yes, one thing is statements another is actions, regarding the latter the Latin Church's actions have often not been in keeping with their lofty writings.
I'm not religious either, but was educated in a Jesuit school. He brought a well needed breath of fresh air to the church. He was a pope for our times. Let's see if the church will be able to make another strong selection to replace him.
> He riled many of his flock and hierarchy when he said that "even atheists can be redeemed".
Which is "interesting", considering how much of the New Testament is about redemption and reaching out to outsiders. Aren’t we all supposed to be God’s creation, and wasn’t Jesus supposed to teach us about salvation, redemption and forgiveness?
(And by "interesting", I mean that it is yet another of example cognitive dissonance amongst fundamentalists. If anyone can be redeemed, it implies that atheists can, as well.)
> I will always applaud a person who retreats — even just a little — from dogma and fanaticism.
Indeed. He was not perfect but he was better than most. I hope the next one won’t be a catholic version of patriarch Kirill.
Read up on him more. He's essentially former KGB that was originally assigned to keep an eye on the token remnants of the church in Soviet Russia. He's now saying the war against Ukraine is "holy and justified", signing up to fight is "guaranteed to wipe away your sins", etc. He's designed to manipulate a segment of the population. He's Putin's method to "religiously justify" whatever Putin wants.
The Russian Orthodox Church has been a Chekist front since Stalin revived it for nationalistic reasons during WW2. Kirill is just continuing the tradition.
The man declared Putin's war to be a literal crusade against the West:
> From a spiritual and moral point of view, the special military operation is a Holy War, in which Russia and its people, defending the single spiritual space of Holy Rus', fulfill the mission of the "Restrainer", protecting the world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West that has fallen into Satanism.
> After the end of the SVO, the entire territory of modern Ukraine must enter the zone of exclusive influence of Russia. The possibility of the existence on this territory of a Russophobic political regime hostile to Russia and its people, as well as a political regime controlled from an external center hostile to Russia, must be completely excluded.
He also said that russian men who die fighting in ukraine are guaranteed salvation. In orthodox theology this sort of thing has historically been recognized as a straightforward heresy. We do not claim to know in advance who will be saved, or by what specific acts. Not even bishops or metropolitans. So even from a strictly orthodox perspective he is dangerously divisive and has broken from one of our most important traditions.
(The recognition of saints is a little different, happening always after their death and depending on some degree of regional consensus. It's sloppy but whatever, it is actually not as similar as it might look.)
> Which is "interesting", considering how much of the New Testament is about redemption and reaching out to outsiders. Aren’t we all supposed to be God’s creation, and wasn’t Jesus supposed to teach us about salvation, redemption and forgiveness?
As religion has shrunk in participation in most of the west, it has become hugely susceptible to manipulation. My wife (now atheist, but grew up evangelical) often has to correct me when I make snide remarks about Christianity. Recently I made some comment about hypocrisy amongst Christians for supporting a multiply-divorced man who bragged about groping women for president (who has probably never read the bible), to say nothing of the people around him. She quickly snapped back at me that "they actually see themselves in him, have you not noticed all the sex scandals that happen in so many churches?" and then went on to list the "questionable" relationships in her own youth group. (I am NOT saying all Christians are like this, but religion is often used to cover up or excuse misdeeds).
It is not unique to Christianity or even Islam, though. You're seeing a lot of religion being used to justify many terrible things, including many smaller ones in Africa and Asia that have been used to justify atrocities and genocide.
I guess it's good to correct an incorrect accusation of hypocrisy. But it's not great when doing so takes the form, "People aren't being hypocrites in not condemning someone in power for the bad things he does, because they do those bad things too".
> She quickly snapped back at me that "they actually see themselves in him, have you not noticed all the sex scandals that happen in so many churches?"
I think she is right for some of these people. It is a human reaction, but it is still a moral failing. The proper Christian (well, Catholic, anyway) thing to do would be what is expected in a confession: recognise one’s failings, express regret, and accept consequences, including punishment. Then comes redemption.
Something that irks me fundamentally with most Christian religions is how they believe that they are Good People because they accepted God and rejected Evil. It’s all good as long as you play the part. Once you start looking for excuses, you failed twice: first, because of your behaviour, and then for failing to repent. If you support someone because he made the same error you did, then you fail yet again. This behaviour is understandable, but trippy incorrect from a religious perspective and very hypocritical.
In the grand scheme of things, it is very easy to get forgiveness, you just have to be sincere in your regrets (again, for Catholics, which is what I know).
My (and my wife's) background is protestant. In this realm, there's no forgiveness unless you totally repent and accept the whole christian shebang. In extreme cases, it's not the the sin itself, but the rejection of god/jesus that's the worst you can do. Taken to the extreme, you see this manifested very strangely, like Chick tracts where the secular lifetime do-gooder burns in hell, but the terrible multiple murdering rapist gets into heaven because they repent "in time".
I know there are wonderful ministers, christians, and people of all religions. But I've come to the conclusion that if said minister/church/religion gets involved in politics, there's a greater chance than not that it's being run by manipulative power-hungry people. And those people want strict control, making mistakes (often the way people learn best) is not tolerated by them. It's in some ways gotten worse, because they're now treating other people's refusals to follow (gay marriage, no prayer in schools, etc) as direct attacks on them.
Sorry I misinterpreted. Protestant denominations are convenient for politics, because there are so many of them and hey have so different positions.
> In this realm, there's no forgiveness unless you totally repent and accept the whole christian shebang. In extreme cases, it's not the the sin itself, but the rejection of god/jesus that's the worst you can do.
That’s fertile ground for extremism and reinforces the group dynamics, for sure.
> Taken to the extreme, you see this manifested very strangely, like Chick tracts where the secular lifetime do-gooder burns in hell, but the terrible multiple murdering rapist gets into heaven because they repent "in time".
I think Pascal wrote something about this behaviour. I won’t chase the source but IIRC the conclusion was that these people were hypocrites using religion to be terrible people and I tend to agree. Personally I find also weird to believe that God is so easily fooled, but that’s just me.
> But I've come to the conclusion that if said minister/church/religion gets involved in politics, there's a greater chance than not that it's being run by manipulative power-hungry people.
Definitely. It is too effective as a tool for control and coercion. At least the Catholic Church mostly retreated from this. They do some lobbying but nobody is asking for a Catholic theocracy anywhere that I know of.
> It's in some ways gotten worse, because they're now treating other people's refusals to follow (gay marriage, no prayer in schools, etc) as direct attacks on them.
Yes. It is the end of enlightenment and the end of liberal democracies if enough people behave that way. These people are functionally similar to the imams who keep babbling about the shariah, it’s time we see them that way.
> As religion has shrunk in participation in most of the west, it has become hugely susceptible to manipulation
That’s an interesting correlation. Do you have any ideas about the dynamics associated with it?
I do seem to remember experiencing my tradition as less manipulative when I was young, but have never been sure if that was me not seeing it. And if true, I’m not sure whether to attribute it to size, or the internet, or political influence, or something else.
It's funny you mention Kiril. I keep thinking about Pope Francis's (apparently deep and genuine) friendship with Bartholomew, Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church.
It is traditional for the EP to visit Rome on the patronal Feast of Saints Peter and Paul and for the Pope to visit Istanbul on the Feast of Saint Andrew, which is apparently when the friendship first formed. My absolute favorite story about Francis is his deciding to send some of the most precious relics in the Vatican to Bartholomew as a gift: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2019-09/pope-francis... (That sent some people into a fury).
Actually, it's my second favorite story. My favorite story is his insistence that he live in the Vatican guesthouse (and not the Papal apartments). Or perhaps the fact that as archbishop of Buenos Ares he insisted on taking the subway.
As an agnostic who spends a lot of time reading scriptures of several religions, trying to grasp the themes and motivations of others I share a world with -- those passages are particularly inscrutable.
> As an agnostic who spends a lot of time reading scriptures of several religions, trying to grasp the themes and motivations of others I share a world with -- those passages are particularly inscrutable.
I think the author's intent is to remind us that some things are simply beyond our ken (to which I'd add: For now).
It's pretty easy to parse if you understand that God isn't actually asking anyone for the dimensions of the Earth. It's more about proffering humility to Job by comparing his understanding of things to God's.
Absolutely, but Pope Francis said a lot of things that were absolutely core, canon, Catholic beliefs but still made a bunch of Catholics unreasonably angry.
> It's quite a bit above our pay grade to proclaim categorically who supposedly cannot be redeemed; it verges on blasphemy.
And the idea that atheists can be saved isn't novel in Catholic teaching – it is implicit in the Holy Office's 1949 condemnation of Feeneyism, [0] in which it declared that a person who doesn't believe in Catholicism due to "invincible ignorance" can be saved by an "implicit desire" for God. Although it didn't include the case of atheists, it didn't exclude them either – suggesting that an atheist who doesn't believe in God in their head (due to some intellectual issue) but nonetheless believes in God in their heart can be saved.
In Catholic theology, God is believed to be Goodness itself – in a sense, identical to Plato's Form of the Good (but going far beyond Plato's idea at the same time).
Hence, anyone who loves Good loves God... so a person who truly loves Good, but who due to some intellectual obstacle, isn't able to call that Good "God" – from a Catholic viewpoint, it can be said that they love God without knowing that it is God whom they love – and by that love they can be saved
Pretty much, although it also depends on your mind's reasons.
If you start from the assumption that Christianity is true, and some people know this, and others don't – you have to ask why the people who don't know it, don't know it. And this is where Catholic theology distinguishes between "vincible" and "invincible" ignorance - "vincible" means the ignorance is your own fault, "invincible" means your ignorance is through no fault of your own.
How to distinguish the two? Ultimately, it is up to God to decide – nobody else knows for sure what's going on in your head. At best, theologians would give some examples of hypothetical situations which could be said to be one or the other – but the real world is often much messier than any such hypothetical can capture.
Which is part of why, the traditional Catholic teaching, is that (with rare exceptions) you can't actually know where people are going to end up. The idea is that if you make it to heaven, you might be surprised to find a lot of people there you weren't expecting, and also maybe some people you were sure would be there aren't.
This is why they fire missiles at museums and libraries. This is why they steal Ukrainian children and ship them to Russia for adoption. This is why they deport Ukrainian citizens to Siberia and bring in Russians to replace them.
No, Ukraine should not surrender because if they surrender now the same argument can be made next time - and with Russia there will always be a next time. This is an existential fight for Ukraine and Ukrainians.
Assuming that you are arguing in good faith you should read up on some basic game theory. The outcome of this fight is not just about this war but about establishing the incentives of all future potential attempts at aggression by Russia (and other expansionist countries).
Where do you live? How much of your money and land are you willing to surrender to me? I think there's a real argument that it's the right thing to do.
if you showed up to my house with a gun and said "give me your living room or die" I'd probably do it, yeah. See the thing is, youre not at my house and you dont have a gun so the analogy doesn't work.
You should do it. Show up to my house with 6 of your friends and a tank, and then when you say "give me your living room or die" and then when I point out "this is bad, you shouldnt do this" you'll just leave? You'll realize the errors of your ways and go "you know, I was ready to kill for this but now I think I just won't".
Lets take this even further, youre openly threatening to kill me for my house. If my neighbors are going "hold on! Don't give in! Heres a gun, you got this!" are they helping or are they getting me killed? Do you think thats whats going to happen, or do you think the neighbors are saying "this psycho is going to kill you, give them what they want".
I'm dismissing it on its lack of logic (not smart enough), even though it has a superficial patina of logic (smart).
That is, I don't find it fundamental to our psychology nor history. To address your perspective.
It's an atheists view, sure. It assumes that if one god is real, then all gods must be real. Because in the mind of the atheist, all are equal in that they are imaginary or, at best, avatars of psychological phenomena.
It necessarily assumes the inverse logic that if 1,999 gods are fake, then 2,000 gods must be fake.
Again, because they are all fundamentally equal. And therefore it is the Christians that are illogical because they have dismissed 1999 gods as fake but couldn't quite get there for the Last God Standing.
I believe that's the sum of it.
Which is a statement that about illustrates the intellectual limit for atheism. I will give Ricky credit for that much.
Where Ricky's quip stops and Christian logic starts is that Christians know that their singular God is not imaginary nor an avatar, but is a living being. With the figurative 1999 additional gods indeed being either imaginary, psychological avatars, or worse.
Which is clear to the Christian, because he understands something singularly fundamental about Christianity's God that others may not. This fundamental characteristic, at minimum, is the difference between real and fake.
At which point the atheist would quip that there is no logic to see the Christian God as different from the other 1999 Gods, and as concrete.
The Christian would finish up with telling the atheist that their failure to see the difference is a failure in being able to interpret the Bible, a failure in being able to interpret the Christian religion, and a failure to understand their own nature including from where they come.
Some of this lack of understanding on the part of atheists is rooted in a lack of perspective that is otherwise glaringly true, and a lack of logical rigor. In other words, they take too many lies on faith.
The conversation frequently continues with a debate over supposed proofs rooted in belief (faith) for atheists.
With the Christian making more general appeals to their own faith that is rooted in Biblical and religious interpretation, ideally combined with their own verifying observations about the nature of the World.
Or, for those who have blindly committed based on instinct, then just appeals to faith alone. Which is also acceptable, because it is a correct instinct. Being a Christian doesn't hinge on knowledge alone. It hinges on faith. There are good reasons for this state of affairs.
What both sides will agree on is that he who believes in the least lies "wins" so to speak. The process of parsing being roughly parallel to discovering the rules of a game. The disagreement is over the substance of the lies. What Judeo-Christianity does is attempt to convey those rules in clear-enough language, even if the motivation to follow them is solely based on faith. With deeper Bible reading often being revelatory for greater insight.
Whereas the atheist dismisses the traditional rules out of lack of faith and lack of understanding, and often then devolves into inventing his own rules. Which is specifically against the rules, but does align with the atheist's chaos theory of his own existence.
He felt like a throwback to me, in a good way. He reminded me of a time when Christians weren't so afraid of being subsumed by the secular progressive mainstream, when they could still see love and forgiveness as the core of their faith.
>That is a great and underused method of evaluating moral judgments and I believe that it’s very suitable in this particular case.
It also dilutes the current and very real responsibilities of the 'effectors'. In saying 'they would have done the same' it becomes very easy to justify the unjustifiable.
It would be different materially. The rallying cry would be different for one.
No matter who did it, it would still be 'evil'. There would be 'good guys' and 'bad guys'. Specially when the labels would be applied to dead children and innocents under rubble. Everyone keeps forgetting them.
Just because you think they would do the same to you, does not justify your actions.
> [basically] What if in a different world Hamas had all the weapons plus the backing of the US while Israel only had shoddy weapons?
In a hypothetical world where Usain Bolt was raised on Greenland and became interested in competitive gaming: would he have become the fastest human? Probably not. Different timelines.
This Sam Harris exercise is meaningless. The goal is not to measure the level of evil in the hearts of <hamas> or <isreali government>. That’s impossible. Hypotheticals that have nothing to do with reality are also fruitless. The goal is to figure out what evil actions are being committed and stop them.
But the abuser only did those things because he was abused as a child for eight yea— What’s that got to do with the problem at hand?
> The goal is not to measure the level of evil in the hearts of <hamas> or <isreali government>. That’s impossible.
The goal of thought experiment wasn't to measure evil or good. It's to determine if the lines between good and evil are that far apart.
If Ukraine was way stronger than Russia, would it try to annex Kursk and other non-Ukraine regions? Would it commit as many atrocities? No. It would be constrained by its desire to join EU. Could it do it if it had 30 more people, more nationalistic populace, and near infinite ammo supply? Probably.
But a litmus test, just tells you rough acidity, not exact pH either.
If Israel wasn’t an ethnostate that treated Palestinians as second-class citizens (especially in the West Bank, especially in Gaza) would violent Palestinian factions have a political basis? No.
> The line between good and evil is very clear in this case.
> Edit: I mean Ukraine war.
Yes but it's not clear yet who will win, and the church cannot afford siding with the losing side, especially that now it's weakest it's been since medieval times.
HN focuses on fostering thoughtful discussion by curious people on anything those folks find interesting. Technology naturally bubbles up, but it is far from the only thing on HN.
This focus on people is to me, is WAY better than theme-based filtering (compare with many subreddit cesspools).
874 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 387 ms ] thread> Pope Francis has died at the age of 88, the Vatican has announced. - Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected to lead the Catholic Church in March 2013 after Pope Benedict XVI stood down.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/crknlnzlrzdt
His speech yesterday (he dictated it I guess) was very very political, not on the usual level, felt like a finally "all out" for me.
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/urbi/do...
How long do people imagine Israel survives as a state with a brutally-oppressed population under its care?
It's a rational position to be pro-state-of-Israel and want them to find peace (and integration) with the Gazans because the consequences of perpetual animosity and aggression are the single biggest threat to the state's survival.
Personally, I look to Ireland and England as a potential model. People have been conflating Hamas and Gaza in this thread... At the height of the Troubles, more Irish supported the IRA than Palestinians support Hamas, and I don't think anyone ever suggested the solution was to relocate the Irish.
The destruction of language and culture via Indian schools was completely justified and justifiable?
That's an opinion I and many others disagree with.
It's public knowledge.
Also Wikipedia is known for it's progressive stance. Can't trust it for anything that intersects with culture war issues where everything is a conspiracy.
Ask the Arabs and Levantine Muslims where all their Jews are. Why Lebanon is Muslim. Why their states are Islamic and why they have issues with religious and cultural states that they aren't a majority of.
I'm sure you don't seriously intend to bring up American treatment of the Japanese in its territory as a positive example.
As you are not American, I forgive you your apparent lack of knowledge of the concentration camps, or the theft of property that was never returned to innocent Japanese Americans.
Yes, aggressors in a just war are expected to care for the civilian population in conquered territory. Starvation as a war weapon against civilians is a war crime.
https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2019-11/BSG-WP-...
In fact, the only place it's currently legal (though generally frowned upon) is in the context of a civil war, and if this is a civil war we're back to asking the question: how does Israel expect to find peace when 9 million citizens are oppressing 5 million with brutal military violence?
How do we know this? Because Israel isn't under sanction for the activities they are undertaking that would be considered war crimes if done to another nation.
It is a long-standing civil war that a couple generations of national leadership have failed to find a long-term resolution to. The current resolution of trying to ghetto the Palestinian people into controlled territories ("reservations," if you will, a common strategy used by colonizers to "handle" the native population) doesn't seem to be bearing fruit other than intergenerational violence.
But Love him or Hate him. Rest in peace.
>> Love has triumphed over hatred, light over darkness and truth over falsehood.
This is interesting since I thought he was displeased about recent world events (e.g. Trump's election, shift towards deglobalization, ...).
and btw, in that little collection of booklets we call the Bible, the story doesn't end all flowery and pink either. Jerusalem and the temple are destroyed, early disciples are martyred in troves and everybody is aware the story of that Jesus guy and Mary and Mary Magdalene and Junia and all the others just has begun.
and it's clear it has to be written by us...
so regarding the recent world events yes PP Francis was heavily displeased (he talks about several of them in the very text we respond to here) but the Jesus thing gives us confidence and hope and justification to actively do something about it and to nudge the world into being a better place, for all of us.
that's how I think PP Francis meant what he said. and it's definitively how I see it.
— Gandalf
The salient parts that support your view:
---
---The sentiment sounds great but I think we now see in the real world with Ukraine that if you rely [too much] on others (re: US), you have a real problem if they are no longer there for you. Peace through strength is real.
Laudato si : https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/docu...
> May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions. In the face of the cruelty of conflicts that involve defenceless civilians and attack schools, hospitals and humanitarian workers, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that it is not targets that are struck, but persons, each possessed of a soul and human dignity.
Yes. I agree with you and hope so too.
(FWIW I'm atheist, always been.)
I understand that a leader of an organization that acts on historic time scale might be reluctant to take sides in contemporary conflicts. Nevertheless always washing your hands in every conflict is not morality, it is cowardice. It enables evil and is in direct conflict with "narratives and morals matter".
Please adhere to the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
In the Northeast we have Irish Catholics; they are very level-headed headed for the most part.
I hope the next step is for people to understand that religious problems are actually people problems. And similar themes and tendencies appear in modern secular contexts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh0O2Ah-qO4
Starting from his chosen name, since Franciscans and Jesuits have not been very close historically (although the founder of the latter was inspired by St. Francis).
From what I read, it's exactly as you say: people expect either a reaction swing to conservativism or a a big swing towards modernity. Pope Francis was old and could not do much, but he tried to set a path for the latter, afaiu.
I would like to know more. My impression is that most Christian institutions have long ago disentangled from scientific debate - providing interpretative value rather than alternative science. This is part of a larger trend to focus their scope and mission in modern life. Have the last few popes made comments on scientific issues?
(The exception is evangelical Americans.)
https://www.pas.va/en.html
the fun thing, ironic itself, about dismissing religion in it's entirety is that most religions have long understood that G'd can't be proven, measured, captured with experiments. the irony in this is that while you can't prove G'd you can't disprove G'd either, so the lack of proof is no proof of a lack of "The Force". quantum physics did not not exist just because the was no proof for it.
one interesting train of thought in this regard was the conclusion of a book on the neurobiology of meditation, (the title escapes me right now): what if the only "instrument" to measure religious experience is the brain? we can measure effects of systematic religious practice on the brain, like meditation aka contemplative prayer. we can identify some aspects of states that humans describe as religious experience, in the brain, as they happen. why would we dismiss those as mere "brain formations"? while we accept equally measurable effects of sound or light on the brain as "real"?
it's non-trivial...
Science doesn’t say we are the only intelligent forms in the universe. Science doesn’t say intelligent max’s out with humans. Science doesn’t describe concepts outside of time and space.
A conversation with a Jesuit for example can be enlightening because they have intellectual and moral arguments, it’s not just castles built on the shifting foundations of a Bible verse.
This leads to different approaches compared to a lot of American Protestants. They don’t seek to undermine science.
As such, they've traditionally been more open, and a disproportionately high proportion of Jesuits have been scientists. At one point about 1/3 of all members of the Jesuit order were scientists.
"The pope's astronomer"[1] is a jesuit, and the Jesuits have a long tradition in astronomy, with the result of numerous lunar craters (e.g. McNally) and several asteroids named after Jesuits. More than once, Jesuits have also tangled with the question of extraterrestial life, e.g.[2a] - a question fraught by the question it would raise about what it would mean for belief [2b].
Wikipedia also has a long list of Catholic clergy scientists[3]. When reading it, it's worth considering that if anything they had more influence as teachers (e.g. Descartes, Mersenne were both educated at Jesuit colleges), and that the order ranged from low thousands to a few tens of thousands during the centuries the list covers.
With respect to the last few popes, the most notable recent intervention is Pope Francis making clear that he saw the theories of evolution and the Big Bang as real[4]. But already in 1950, even the deeply conservative Pope Pius XII, while expressing hope that evolution would prove to be a passing fad, made clear that catholic doctrine officially did not conflict with evolution. John Paul II formally acquitted Galileo, and stated that "truth cannot contradict truth", when talking about evolution vs. catholic doctrine. [5]
[1] https://www.deseret.com/faith/2024/07/27/vatican-observatory...
[2a] https://aleteia.org/2020/08/28/jesuit-astronomer-calls-extra...
[2b] https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/men-black-belief-aliens-no...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scient...
[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pope-francis...
[5] http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/vatican...
I know several priests who are scientists or teachers/professors.
Evangelicals have a simpler dogma where the individual minister or church has more sway (hence the joke about the man on a desert island with a hut, a church, and a church he doesn’t go to). It’s a more populist form of worship, which has ups and downs.
I found it inspiring. I'm genuinely sad about the Pope's passing. He was a man who followed the teachings as he understood them.
Those are all political terms for politicians and their platforms or parties. They do not translate to Catholic doctrines or teachings. Y’all are simply parroting what the lamestream media wants to impose, a political veneer on non-politicians who are shepherds, pastors, teachers.
https://youtu.be/y0v0xQdiY7U
In the US, reactionaries are dumping lots on money on the church, and many bishops have embraced right wing politics, stupidly aligning with evangelicals who deeply despise Catholicism in the process.
Some of the moves made are comically dumb. The archbishop of New York decided to make a big show about denying communion to the notoriously vindictive former governor of the state. That governor subsequently changed the look back period for civil sex abuse lawsuits, which has bankrupted or is in the process of bankrupting dioceses as they are forced to own up to their failures to protect children.
This is a Catholic media group. It uses the words as above. Think Karl Rahner or Yves Congar.
Bishops and Cardinals are very much political animals.
And the Catholic Church exists on the world stage, and is involved in politics. Its leadership can be and is political.
But the College has a mind of its own, and there is going to be some furious horse trading happening behind the scenes to steer the result in one direction or the other.
I don't think that was necessarily what he was doing.
He tried to rebalance it to include a lot more cardinals from the developing world–who on average tend to be more conservative, at least on some issues. He arguably avoided the more outspoken conservatives, but he would have caught up a lot of quieter conservatives in the process.
Whereas, if he just wanted to stack it with progressives, he would have focused on adding cardinals from the developed world, where Catholic progressivism is arguably the strongest.
The world would be better off if many a leader these days, religious or otherwise, would be a bit more like him.
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14339a.htm
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_XVI>
> According to Archbishop Diego Ravelli, Master of Apostolic Ceremonies, the late Pope Francis had requested that the funeral rites be simplified and focused on expressing the faith of the Church in the Risen Body of Christ.
Always struck me as a simple man and that likely contributed to people liking him more when compared to his predecessors. RIP.
He spoke more openly about issues like poverty, climate change, and inclusion–his encyclical LAUDATO SI’ is a great read–, and he often used language and gestures that the "common man" could relate to.
Perhaps the way he dressed so simply–with the plain white cassock–also emphasized his overall approach: less focus on grandeur, more on service.
His trick was hiding the conservative positions behind the mask of the beloved communicator.
I think maybe it's just some progressives (and related groups) who liked Francis a lot for many of his positions.
Perhaps he should have told Russia to have the "courage" to stop murdering people.
(well except ofcourse the corrupt dictator in ukraine, so it naturally falls on deaf ears)
* People naturally imitate what they see others do. A condemnation can prevent others from imitating the evil act.
* A condemnation calls on others to resist and not facilitate the evil act.
* Condemning someone makes you enemies, in a way that is plain for everyone to see. This positioning can open up for alliance offers from others with similar beliefs.
Making someone an enemy comes with risks and drawbacks of course. You become less able to influence someone if you cut ties, hence why people suggest to try influencing in private first.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230326034459/https://www.reute...
If an aggressor attacks your country, it takes courage to surrender. Churchill was a coward it seems. He could have surrendered to the Germans and saved so many lives on both sides.
/s
He put it well... Pope Francis was always a pastor at heart. And he put the needs of the person in front of him ahead of strict doctrine. The interviewee likened it to triage in a field hospital - address the soul in front of you, worry about doctrine later (suture the wound, worry about cholesterol later).
Meanwhile Francis was quite the opposite. Especially as seen in the light of Russian aggression against Ukraine. For much of Eastern Europe that was like 180 turn. At least here both church goers and not seem to despise Francis while JPII has a warm place in the hearts both factions. Maybe it was different far away where Russia ain’t a hot topic.
Feel free to google for more details. There were multiple occurrences when he doubled-down on his words after backlash.
Which would be bad, had he done so, but he didn't actually say that; the white flag comment was specifically and explicitly about being willing to directly negotiate with Russia, not about surrender.
> There were multiple occurrences when he doubled-down on his words after backlash.
He certainly called on multiple occasions for all parties to negotiate, but he was also consistent, both before Russia invaded, after the invasion and before the "white flag" comment, immediately after the "white flag" comment, and since that the invasion by Russia is (or "would be" before it occurred) unjustifiable, immoral, an act of aggression, and that Russia has the primary obligation to stop it.
It's hard to blame all the catholics that are sighing in relief hoping for a better successor.
I don't mind being candid (not least because I am not an important person and this is not an important discussion, the stakes are low so there is no pressing need to lie), so I'll say one of the quiet parts out loud for the side I mainly sit on: I think there is plausible social benifit to aborting pregnancies caused by rapists. Not only because rapists might carry genes for aggression, but also because rape circumvents the valuable social/physical fitness selection which women normally perform when choosing who to have babies with. Pro-choice advocates will almost never admit to believing anything like this, because it essentially validates the criticism antiabortion advocates have, that their opponents are eugenicists. To be clear, many pro-choice advocates aren't, and I don't think this particular argument would make or break the debate (it doesn't for me), but it is a potential source of contention pro-choice people might have with my artificial womb proposal.
Because it’s insane. The reasoning explained above to preserve a woman’s rights is sufficient without delving into weird stuff like eugenics.
If there's ever a disagreement or debate about anything, then there are literally always two sides.
You might disagree that the thing that the other side is prioritizing is as important (e.g. the lives of fetuses vs. the right to bodily autonomy for women), or that the thing the other side believes is even right (e.g. people who believe in racial hierarchies and other literally racist ideologies), but that doesn't detract from the fact that two sides do, in reality, exist.
In my experience, it's way more effective determining the thing that the other side cares about, then finding common ground if that's something that you also care about -- from there, it's a lot easier to make the case that while both priorities are good, your priorities might be more justifiable.
Shutting down the other side by saying their viewpoint is invalid has been productive for me literally zero times in my life.
(On the topic, this was a thing that Pope Francis was exceptionally good at: he actually listened to the concerns of people and spoke with them where they were at, even those who he vehemently disagreed with).
> Shutting down the other side by saying their viewpoint is invalid has been productive for me literally zero times in my life.
When the topic at hand is one group wanting to exercise power over another group, there can never be a resolution. The only thing left is to sway those on the fences.
> or you think women should not be in control of their bodies in some situations.
In almost all countries where abortion is broadly legal there are still limitations. For elective abortions without committee approval or medical necessity there's a limit of 24 weeks in the UK, 12 in Germany and Italy, 14 in France, 20 in Sweden... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Europe#Grounds_for...
Opinion polling in the US mirrors this nuance:
> "The same poll found that support for abortion being generally legal was 60% during the first trimester of pregnancy, dropping to 28% in the second trimester, and 13% in the third trimester."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States#...
Clearly there is plenty of room to quibble over the details without being some sort of Victorian boogieman. Having no limitations at all is a fringe position which most pro-choice people don't agree with.
[End of pasted response.]
By the way, this ties in with what I'm saying about both sides presenting the worst possible arguments of their opponents. Extremists on one side say that the others all want to perform "partial birth abortions", killing babies mere seconds before it is fully born (this is a lie.) Extremists on the other side frame all of their opponents (including anybody who supports abortion in principle but not unrestricted) as being religious extremists who want to lock up women and turn them into breeding cows.
The reality is that most of the population is in between these two extremes, and if our democracy wasn't so dysfunctional, undermined by extremists on both sides we could compromise on abortion being legal for somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 24 weeks, as it is in most of Europe, and that would make most of the American public reasonably happy. But you wouldn't accept that, because any compromise is " controlling women", and antiabortion people wouldn't accept it because its "killing babies."
End result is we're doomed to have these fruitless arguments from now until a comet puts us all out of our misery.
Because it is. As your own link shows, later term abortions are for medical purposes. Any legislation restricting it is just adding liability for doctors, which results in harm to women because doctors are now second guessing themselves instead of focusing on the woman’s healthcare.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/04/raw-data-abor...
The “issue” being legislated against is non existent.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/04/raw-data-abor...
It is only politically popular due to disinformation and people liking the feeling of being morally superior to others. A tried and true strategy to winning votes.
I actually agree here, but only insofar as a resolution needs to be the ideal for both parties: a resolution could totally be rules and doctrine that both sides find partially objectionable, but the best feasible option.
I do want to point out that your point about one group exercising power over another is almost always where these disagreements arise: each party thinks that they've identified an unjust exertion of power that should be prevented.
Are there any developed countries where there arent year long queues for those wanting to adopt infants? I doubt many of them (if they are healthy) grow up orphans.
The vast majority of abortions are performed because the pregnancy was unwanted, not because the mother’s life was in danger or what have you. But why was the pregnancy unwanted in the first place?
This is the question you must begin with, because the answer cuts to the psychological heart of the matter. The reason is that we have redefined sexual intercourse in terms of sexual pleasure first. We’ve demoted procreation to secondary status instead of recognizing it as the primary reason for sexual intercourse with pleasure characterizing it rather than defining its function. The absurdity of it is apparent given the anatomical, physiological, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of sex. All of that for pleasure? This is like claiming the digestive system exists and the act of eating exist for pleasure. We would typically associate with such things gluttony, bulimia, and other eating disorders.
Historically, sexual self-restraint has always been a problem for some more than others, of course. Some have more trouble with restraint with respect to food or drink or whatever. Addictions have always existed. However, the cultural norms surrounding such questions have varied. Some cultures have been puritanical. Some have been depraved. Others have managed to channel sexual appetite in healthy ways that respect the dignity of those involved (which, given its nature, aims toward spousal love and the flourishing of the family, including the parents as parents). Ours is not the latter. In the 1930s, we saw the beginning of the normalization of contraception, and this normalization had the effect of splitting the pleasure of sex from the entirety of the act and promoted it to the status of primary end. This opened the door to the sexual revolution and the sexual exploitation of others, especially women. Abortion, paradoxically, only becomes relevant in this context, because only in a contraceptive context is pregnancy conceived as aberrant and contrary to the nature of the sexual act. So contrary to a successfully waged misinformation campaign by people like Margaret Sanger, abortion rates only rise in a society with a culture that normalizes contraception where it becomes a “solution” for the failure rate of contraception.
Is that what we want? Do we wish to continue to dehumanize ourselves by by outsourcing our humanity? Technology extends human ability or fixes broken human function. Do we want to put the cart before the horse and reinforce that error by building a culture and a technological ecosystem around error instead, and in doing so, entrench ourselves in that error? Instead of technology truly serving the human good, do we want instead to abolish the human in service to a dystopian ideology? This is what addicts do. They serve their addictions and build their lives around them.
I would love to believe the sexual exploitation of women started in the 1930s.
But for thousands of years, women didn’t have 10+ pregnancies with sky high maternal and infant mortality and morbidity rates because they wanted to.
The broader context of a woman being physically unable to protect herself and needing the protection of a man and the man’s allies played a big role.
I grew up unwanted, that shit stays with you forever. It's a lifetime of torture.
This comment is seriously disturbing, holy shit.
I think very few people who have religious opposition to abortion would actually be happy about the advent of "artificial wombs". They might view it as a lesser evil, but not as a good thing. Because, while belief in the wrongfulness of deliberately killing an unborn child is an important motivator, it generally isn't the sole motivator – another important motivator is the belief that God has a plan for the process of human reproduction, and wandering too far off script is wrong in itself, with artificial wombs likely to be seen as going quite a long way off – at best maybe tolerable as a lesser evil in some cases.
And trying to forcibly “cure” religion may potentially constitute the crime of genocide under international law
And I'm pretty sure I never suggested forcing anyone to do anything.
Elevating Escrivá to sainthood and creating a personal prelature for Opus Dei handed them unmatched moral authority—authority they used to push back on women’s autonomy, justify discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, and quietly influence politics from Spain to Latin America.
Popularity doesn’t erase the impact of empowering hard‑right movements that have harmed lives across the globe.
Also the + stuff.
The church has always influenced politics. See the fall of Communism as an example.
Pope JPII was for my southern European social democratic Catholic family much more polarizing than Pope Francis. Pope Francis had politics that are mainstream and not at all controversial in my part of the world. Whereas JPII was perceived as the guy who was buddies with Reagan and Bush and a general supporter of American foreign policy. To what extent that was a fair assessment, I do not want to comment, since he did try to speak against the invasion of Iraq.
None the less, it is not true that Pope Francis is more popular with non-Catholics (Reagan, Bush and most of the US were not Catholic and big supporters of JPII). It was also JPII that started the interfaith dialogue. It is also not true that Pope Francis is unpopular with Catholics.
There are Catholics all across the globe with vastly different opinions on all kinds of issues.
Notably, while Francis is sometimes considered liberal, there weren't (m)any notable changes to Church doctrine during his papacy.
He did have a habit (a good one, IMO) of speaking more off-the-cuff in interviews. Whether that was contrived, or just a natural part of his personality, I do not know. But, it was those comments that usually led to the "he's a liberal!" comments. And both sides of the political spectrum said similar things... "He's a liberal (like us)!" or "He's a liberal (unlike us)!" - so he was probably doing something right.
Even non-catholics like me could sympathize with the dismay of so many catholics at many of the positions/blunders of Francis.
It fictionalizes and sensationalizes some details; and that’s ok because its purpose is to make you feel exactly the way you feel about it.
Pope Francis was a wonderful steward of Christianity and espoused the virtues that anyone would want to see in their religious leaders: humility, grace, an openness to listen and a strong voice against even prelates in his own church that are xenophobic or nationalistic. He wanted us to welcome all and to live as the bible said Jesus did.
The fear I have is that each swing of the pendulum goes in two directions. He was far more “liberal” than the conservative Catholic prelates of the USCCB, and I fear his actions — including rightfully limiting the Latin mass, will force the church to swing in the other direction and give in to the illiberal forces that divide us.
- John 14:27
Why is that a political thing though? The mass of the roman church was for centuries (almost all it’s history?) in latin.
If you’re Catholic, suggesting that a mass spoken in one language over another is somehow "less" takes away from the most important idea of the Mass: reenacting Christ’s Last supper commandment and the institution of the Holy Eucharist for what amounts to word games.
This divisive description of the mass increased over the decades, to the point that it threatened to cause a schism. As such it was the Holy Father’s duty to resolve the issue.
There is no mention of how often, but given Jesus allergy to ritual as opposed to genuine acts of worship, it seems reasonable that this would not be a commonplace thing.
Again... interpretation.
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/holy-eucharist-in-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_particular_churches_a...
Oversimplifying greatly, but in and from Western Europe we have the Latin Rite, and in/from the East we have the Byzantine (Greek) Rite. There are others, not of less importance, see the link above.
There’s quite a lot of history involved in all this. But in Western Christianity it was Latin that became predominant for public worship and knowledge transmission.
The focus on latin is a pure nitpicking and virtue signaling from the Conservatives (the irony!).
I think it was very likely mostly Aramaic, possibly with some Hebrew mixed in (certain set prayers, with Torah readings in Hebrew followed by extemporaneous Aramaic translation). By the 1st century, Jews had abandoned Hebrew as an everyday tongue, a situation which didn't change until Zionists revived it in the late 19th century (which caused great controversy, since the traditional Jewish belief was that Hebrew is a holy language which should be reserved for religious purposes only, a position still maintained by most non-Israeli ultra-Orthodox to this day.)
Putting aside any claims of supernatural linguistic abilities, Jesus of Nazareth would likely have been fluent in Aramaic (his native tongue), competent in using Hebrew for certain religious purposes (but not as a language of everyday life), possibly some limited ability in Greek (but probably not fluent), maybe a few words of Latin (but very unlikely to be fluent).
> The focus on latin is a pure nitpicking and virtue signaling from the Conservatives (the irony!).
The majority of TLM (Traditional Latin Mass) adherents care more about keeping the traditional Tridentine (pre-Vatican II) liturgy than about Latin in itself – Catholic priests are allowed to say the contemporary Mass in Latin (subject to certain conditions), but there is rather little demand for it.
God certainly had a special plan for these languages: the language of God's Law, the language of human power, and the language of human wisdom. The presence of His name in all three languages left the situation unambiguous to whoever might have been in the area to read it. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, hung on that cross. When pressed about it, Pilate would not amend those words.
In this way, though maybe unnecessary thanks to the Gift of Tongues the Holy Spirit later gave to His apostles, the sign stood as a kind of Rosetta Stone, which no one could misunderstand. It shows that history itself, along with all human matters, belong completely to Him, and at the same time it made those languages new by virtue of that single title, grounding them firmly in the Truth Himself.
Latin and Greek, themselves originally vernaculars, continue to hold a special place in their respective churches, both Catholic and Orthodox. Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, continues to be used in many Eastern churches as well, again Catholic and Orthodox both. All three constitute especially venerable traditions—and to this we may add Coptic, since Jesus spent his early years in Egypt; Slavonic, for its very writing system's role in the conversion of the Slavs; and a handful of others I am more or less ignorant of. With each one, by entering into the language, you enter the mind of those first converts, who themselves entered the Mind of Christ.
In the Latin Catholic Church (that is, the Latin Rite of the Roman Catholic Church, or however you want to name it) we call the Latin language a "sacramental"—the same sort of thing as holy water, something which conveys grace to those who use it with an openness to those graces.
Demons hate it because of its legal precision, by which, in the name of the same Christ named in Latin on the cross, they are driven out of people, things, and places, fulfilling Christ's own prediction that His followers would cast out demons.
By forming one's faith life around one of these languages, one can more clearly ask those basic human questions that Christ is the answer to, without having to deal with the centuries of semantic drift and overloading that are scattered about the minefields of our modern vernaculars. The vernacular, of course, is no impediment to personal prayer, but as more and more people are gathered in one place the confusion of Babel threatens to set in.
On the other hand, every little Latin grammatical lesson, every new piece of vocabulary learned, reveals new wonders and opens the door to the great body of literature that was composed in the single Mind of Christ.
But we had this, and in the 20th century we let it slip through our fingers, not knowing what we'd been given. The problem is not that we don't know Latin. The problem is that, in broad cultural strokes, even when we did, we didn't care.
It didn't actually.
See Sacrosanctum Concilium: https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_coun...
Vatican II opened the way for use of vernacular in the Mass while also directing "use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites".
In practice, after the overhaul of the Latin rites was completed and promulgated (published) in 1969, four years after the council ended in '65, the Latin language itself was dropped almost everywhere all at once and only translations were used. Many people rejoiced at that, some did not, but the vast majority of bishops, priests and laity alike, conservatives and liberals across the full spectrum, probably 99.999%, went ahead full throttle with Mass and all the sacraments in the vernacular.
There were hold-out contingents like the SSPX, led by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who stuck with the all Latin rites per the last round of small reforms in 1962, the same as used for the celebration of Mass, etc. during the whole time of the council from 1962-65.
It was over the next 40 years that discontent with the reforms of 1969, and their fallout, began to grow. There was increasing awareness that it wasn't just a switch from Latin to vernacular — the '69 reforms were "cut from whole cloth", outright replacing the traditional rites with syntheses of a commission of scholars. Long story short, many Catholics, some born before '69 and many born after (myself included), desire a return, and have implemented a return, to the traditional form of the Latin rites. Pope Benedict XVI gave it his blessing. But then Pope Francis was not a fan, believing it to be a retrograde movement that causes more harm than good and a kind of "saying no" to the Holy Spirit. It's hard to find middle ground on this matter, to be quite honest.
Disclaimer: I'm definitely not old enough to predate vatican 2, so I'm not from a time when Latin Mass was widespread.
(I like Latin! Took it in high school, reading Lingua Latina for fun; I think the TLM is neat. But problematic.)
Well, opinions and all that…
My experience, and that of many of my fellow TLM goers that I’ve heard or read, is that we treasure solemn reverent worship that helps us focus on the Eucharistic sacrifice. If we were being distracted from “what the mass is about”, we’d take ourselves and our children elsewhere.
Here’s a video of yesterday’s Easter Sunday Mass offered by priests of the same religious order that operates the oratory where I attend Mass:
https://www.youtube.com/live/XshPZzdI0zk
If you get an opportunity, maybe attend Mass one Sunday at a location of the ICKSP or the FSSP. I believe you’ll experience a welcoming community of Catholics passionate about Jesus.
I'd actually love to attend a TLM! But I'm not setting foot into a chapel run by an order whose officiants accused the Jews of orchestrating 9/11. (That's SSPX, of course, not FSSP.)
I hope my "it's complicated" gives me some cover from the idea that I'm a folk-group C&E Catholic just looking to dunk on some tradcaths. I mean, I may be that too; it's complicated.
TLM, don't TLM, but conservative Catholics had a beef with Francis about the Latin Mass, and this is important context to that beef.
All around the world, there exists (or survives, sometimes only in parts) beautiful art and architecture and music that, with a little examination, is directly connected to the Latin Rite as it was celebrated for centuries. You can't really get the full picture of why those things are the way they are without knowledge of the classical Latin Rite. Likewise, a study of the Latin Rite on paper would be impoverished without knowledge of the historical cultural developments and artistic treasures that enriched it over the centuries.
"Rite is the liturgical, theological, spiritual and disciplinary heritage, distinguished according to peoples' culture and historical circumstances, that finds expression in each autonomous church's way of living the faith." — according to the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches (28 §1)[1]
It is remarkable that in the Western Church we have passed through a period from the mid 20th Century during which so much of our Latin Rite heritage has been ignored, forgotten, even tossed aside or rent violently. The term wreckovation[2] is used, and it's pretty accurate though it causes some to bristle.
The TLM movement is, in many respects, about recovering our Western Catholic heritage. That's not accomplished in equal measure everywhere, but the most vibrant communities around it place an emphasis on sacred music, restoring art and architecture as circumstances allow, and educating — catechizing is probably the better term — ourselves and our children so those efforts aren't merely about appearances or performance art, but an integral part of loving and worshipping God as we look to rebuild local Catholic culture.
So "obscurantism"? No, rather traditional expressions of the Catholic Faith given new sails (sometimes the winds are a bit stormy, to be sure). Some of us are learning Latin as we go along — the ordinary parts of the Mass are easy to pick up, and if you're coming from the Novus Ordo you already know what they mean even if you don't fully understand the Latin grammar. Certainly the priests of the ICKSP and FSSP study Latin in their seminaries, and many homeschooling families I know have Latin in their kids' curriculums. It's pretty amazing how quickly little kids pick it up when they participate in choir or serve as altar boys.
I want to provide one more response re: the SSPX/Williamson and whackjobs stuff, but I've already blown my HN comments time-budget today, so it will have to wait.
[1] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/la/apost_constit...
[2] tptacek ↗ I don't think TLM is intended to obscure anything; I claim instead that it is used as a tool of obscurantism for a fringe movement within the church. Everything you're saying that's good about TLM, I agree with. I'm the weirdo on the thread that actually took Latin, and, thanks to a work experience with a Latin scholar (hey Jon!) currently reads a little bit of Latin for fun. michaelsbradley ↗ > I claim instead that it is used as a tool of obscurantism for a fringe movement within the church tptacek ↗ I only just got to this 4 days after you wrote it; we have disagreements still, but I want to say I appreciate how carefully and well you wrote it.
I would claim as well that most people who attend TLM services do not in fact have any fluency in Latin, and would in support of that argument (but not that much support because I'm not going to take the time to dig up the source right now) point out the English bishop's observation that TLM-enthusiast priests in his diocese couldn't pass a simple Latin test.
When I read your use of "obscurantism" previously, I mentally substituted something like "anachronistic, deliberately so, with the effect of obscuring [what the Mass is about, etc.]".
Wikipedia tells us "obscurantism has been defined as opposition to the dissemination of knowledge and as writing characterized by deliberate vagueness." A dictionary hit in DDG gives "a state of opposition to human progress or enlightenment."
So maybe that's what you had in mind? You mention (also in other HN comments):
> the English bishop's observation that TLM-enthusiast priests in his diocese couldn't pass a simple Latin test
There is an anecdote like that regarding a US bishop:
https://thecatholicherald.com/four-reasons-francis-had-to-re...
There is something similar-ish from a meeting Francis had with Slovakian Jesuits in 2021:
https://www.laciviltacattolica.com/freedom-scares-us-pope-fr...
There's also Francis' "nostalgic disease" comments from 2023 — I remember those well because of the physical pain in my stomach and flushing in my neck after I read them. I had a similar visceral reaction when the credits rolled after the final episode of the new Battlestar Galactica (2003-09), but I digress.
https://www.laciviltacattolica.com/this-is-gods-style-pope-f...
So, your "tool of obscurantism" suggests perceived motive on the part of the trads. I think that's barking up the wrong tree.
"What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful." — https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/letters/2007/...
In my previous reply to you, I already outlined what I understand to be the true motives – recovering our Western Catholic heritage, treasuring it, passing it on to our children, building up local Catholic culture around it. I think Benedict XVI got that, per the quote above. We want orthodoxy (little "o"), beauty, reverence, faithfulness to the Apostolic Tradition.
The young priests not knowing much Latin while being gung ho for the TLM… well, that's not uncommon with young people, getting really enthusiastic about some big idea or thing while having limited knowledge and experience of the particulars and background. (How many exuberant Rustaceans fit that bill in recent years?) I don't see any reason to think those priests' motives were anything other than embracing something "sacred and great for us too".
The Latin-language requirements, following Summorum Pontificum, were given in Universae Ecclesiae: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_commissions/ec...
See section 20. The priest should be able to pronounce the words correctly and understand their meaning.
That's the same requirement as for e.g. an English speaking priest whose bishop asks him to prepare to ...
Strictly speaking, as well as the Tridentine Mass, one can also have the current Mass in Latin. From what I've heard (never been to one to experience it first hand), Opus Dei centres worldwide say it almost every day. Outside Opus Dei, I believe it is quite niche – but, strictly speaking, all Catholic priests (of the Latin Church, or Eastern rite with Latin faculties) are allowed to say the current Mass in Latin, and Traditionis custodes didn't do anything to change that. I think few are interested, and from what I've heard, to try to prevent people shifting from Tridentine-in-Latin to current Mass-in-Latin, bishops have been quietly instructed by Rome to disallow it in practice, even if it is still formally allowed on paper. However, if a priest wants to say the new Mass in Latin privately, or to a small group which isn't widely advertised and flies below the radar, I think that is both officially allowed and likely in practice too. But, the linguistic competence concerns you mention about Tridentine-in-Latin apply equally to current Mass-in-Latin.
Quite separately, there is a history of the Tridentine Mass being translated into other languages, both in some cases authorised by Rome, and also by external groups such as Anglo-Catholic Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox, Old Catholics, Polish National Catholic Church – I think all the cases of this in communion with Rome have all effectively lapsed through disuse. But still, it is another reason people ought to avoid equating Latin and Tridentine.
> The TLM obscures what the mass is about, which creates space for practitioners to substitute in their own things, which, as it happens, tends to be idiosyncratically ultra-conservative stuff. The church is a top-down institution, and the TLM gets in the way of that and divides it.
I think a big potential problem with what Pope Francis did – it made no difference to the quasi-schismatic SSPX, or the more explicitly schismatic groups to their right, who were very used to ignoring everything the Pope said (except maybe if they liked what he was saying on that occasion) – but it upset that minority of Catholics who were involved in the TLM within the Catholic Church proper, and potentially drove them into the arms of those more schismatic groups. Now, to what extent has that potential been fulfilled in practice, I don't have enough personal experience of this topic to say–but I'm sure it has happened in some cases, however many. And I know there are even quite a few conservative-leaning Catholics who weren't involved in TLM in practice, but found the decision upsetting, and it might increase the odds of them wandering off as well.
Of course, the people we are talking about are a small minority in comparison to over 1 billion Catholics worldwide. But most of that one billion are far from devout – people who rarely attend Mass. At the more devout end, at least in some geographies, those involved in TLM, or who aren't but were upset by this papal decision, are arguably much more significant. And much of the institutional strength of any religion comes from its devout minority, as opposed to millions of people who identify with it at some level but far more rarely actively engage with it.
So, I think even if one doesn't have any personal affinity for the Tridentine Mass, there are genuine reasons to question the prudence of this decision.
Lots of religions have liturgical languages which are nobody's mother tongue any more. Orthodox Judaism has Hebrew (Reform/Conservative/etc too, albeit with variably greater use of vernacular): many diaspora Jews have limited Hebrew proficiency, and even for those who speak Modern Hebrew, the liturgy is in mediaeval Hebrew, which has significant differences. And some of the prayers (including quite important ones like the Kaddish and the Kol Nidre said on Yom Kippur) are in Aramaic. Most Muslims pray in Arabic despite the fact that less than 20% speak it natively, and even for those who do, modern vernacular Arabic has diverged a lot from the classical Arabic of the Quran and the prayers. The Russian Orthodox Church prays, not in Russian, but in Church Slavonic, which is a (somewhat Russified) descendant of mediaeval Bulgarian, which comes from a different branch of the Slavic language family. The Greek Orthodox liturgy is in mediaeval Greek, not modern Greek – many Middle Eastern Greek Orthodox have Arabic as their mother tongue, and many ethnic Greeks in Anglophone countries have quite limited Greek proficiency, yet still attend services in the language. The Coptic Church still uses Coptic, a descendant of ancient Egyptian, for its liturgy. The Ethiopian Church uses Ge'ez. The Syriac Churches use Syriac/Aramaic. (And what I just said of those Eastern churches is also true of many Eastern Catholics.) Many Theravada Buddhists pray in Pali. Many Mongolian Buddhists pray in Tibetan (there are many Anglophone Buddhists who pray in Tibetan too). Many Hindus pray in Sanskrit.
Having a special language set aside for prayer, a holy tongue (Lashon Hakodesh, as many Jews call Hebrew) is something a lot of people find spiritually beneficial, across numerous unrelated religious traditions. It can give people a sense of an encounter with the deep past of their own tradition. It can make a religious community feel more unified despite being divided between different mother tongues. And most Catholics, pre-1970, thought the same thing.
It wasn't like people couldn't understand it – they followed English-Latin parallel prayer books, just like people follow English-Hebrew parallel books in many synagogues today. Globally, very many Catholics have a Romance language as their mother tongue, which is historically descended from Latin, which helps with understanding some of the words. Even though English isn't, the heavy infusion of Latin (both directly and via French) into English helps achieve some of the same thing.
I think if I'd grown up Catholic with Latin instead of the vernacular, my understanding of Latin would be a lot better. I feel like I missed out on something there.
So one definitely doesn't have to be a regular Latin Mass goer – I've never been to one in my life, I've thought about doing it but its always just been too out of my way – to wonder if the Church has lost something by throwing away so much of its linguistic heritage. Personally, I'd be quite happy with a kind of compromise in which Latin was much more heavily used but the majority of Masses were still vernacular. Which I actually think is what Vatican II intended, I think the Council's original vision was closer to majority vernacular / minority Latin, than the almost-all-vernacular / almost-no-Latin which actually evolved afterwards.
And this is a separate issue from the Tridentine liturgy – you can say the Mass of Paul VI in Latin and you can say the Tridentine Mass in English (Roman Catholics never have, but some Anglican, Eastern Orthodox and schismatic Catholic churches do it)
My Greek Orthodox friends growing up definitely spoke Greek!
And the fact is, if Latin doesn’t attract many ordinary people, will anything else? Catholicism (and Christianity more broadly) is full of grand evangelistic plans to “get people back to church”, the vast majority of which produce very little results. If anything, niche offerings such as Latin masses or Anglican Use or Eastern Catholicism at least have a bit of a ”it’s different” factor to draw people in with.
But again: drawing people isn't the point. Francis didn't crack down on TLM because he thought it was a bad way to get people to show up at mass! He did it because things in the church with TLM were getting weird. It's a doctrinal thing, not a marketing strategy.
What’s “weird” is in the eye of the beholder - a lot of stuff Francis saw as “weird”, JP2 and B16 may have seen as significantly less “weird”; conversely, JP2 and B16 may well have seen some of Francis’ own decisions as “weird”.
I know one of the big complaints against TLM communities is that many of them question the validity of Vatican II. But, given B16 as a young theologian authored his famous (in the rarified subfield of Catholic/Orthodox ecumenical theology) “Ratzinger proposal”, that reunion with the Orthodox should not require them to accept post-schism councils as binding - which implicitly downgrades the authority of all 13 post-schism councils from Lateran I to Vatican II inclusive, [0] maybe he’d view doubting Vatican II a bit more charitably than Francis ever could. And, among the more liberal/progressive-leaning Catholics (for whom Francis rather obviously had a significant degree of sympathy), there’s a long tradition of questioning the validity of Vatican I - and I suspect Francis was much more sympathetic to doubting the first than the second.
And then there’s also the Eastern Catholic followers of the late Lebanese Melkite archbishop Elias Zoghby, who rejected the ecumenicity of Vatican II (despite being one of its Fathers) on the grounds that a genuinely ecumenical council would require full Orthodox participation, hence denying that status to all post-schism councils - I suspect Francis would have seen that as much less “weird”, despite its superficial overlap with traditionalist views on Vatican II, since he’d be more sympathetic to the motivations behind it. Zoghby’s opposition to Vatican II’s validity wasn’t solely a matter of abstract theological principle, it was also about its substance - at it, he argued that Eastern Catholics should be allowed to observe the traditional Eastern leniency on divorce rather than being forced to conform to the Latin Church’s principled opposition to it, but he lost that argument-but yet again, likely something Francis had more sympathy for than the Latin traditionalist objections to the council’s substance
[0] there is also the problem of the 8th council, which is a pre-schism council; there are two competing claimants to the title of “Fourth Council of Constantinople”, the first in 869-870, the second in 879-880; Catholics accept the first as the 8th ecumenical council and reject the second as invalid; Orthodox reject the first as invalid and accept the second, but disagree among themselves as to whether to class it as the 8th ecumenical council or as sub-ecumenical; and then there’s also the Quinisext Council of 692 (aka Council in Trullo), which many Orthodox view as quasi-ecumenical, Catholics as local to the East; and then the fact that some Orthodox claim one of their own post-schism councils as ecumenical (the fifth council of Constantinople, 1341-1368) - Ratzinger’s proposal didn’t address these conciliar esoterica, but maybe they aren’t that important given so few get worked up about them
Mark 16:15.
Hebrews 10:25.
The Church organisation is very distinct from the church. And anything that increases their participation is in line with scripture. Both growth and attendance are important.
There's already evidence it works. And it's something that sets the church apart.
Romans 12:2 indeed.
In Antioch [Acts 11:26] people were first called Christians. They weren't the regular people of that time. But people with something that made them visibly different from the Hoi Polloi.
What really is the point of a consecration that doesn't change you? What are you being set apart from?
My reply is primarily about Church growth and the importance of fellowship.
Wherever you go, don't imagine this sentiment is American/Western only as many have claimed/alluded.
If Christ doesn't change you nothing really has changed.
Proselytizing by active action and being examples by our (different/changed post conversion) behaviour are duties of everyone in Christ. As is fellowship.
As exemplified by those who do it in countries and areas where it might mean death like where I live today.
"Take up your cross and follow me" indeed.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/the-christian-convert...
I don't know if I should bother pointing out why.
* https://kelsolawyers.com/au/paedophile_offenders/brother-kea...
* https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-29/child-sex-abuse-royal...
* https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/final-report
These new links are even more irrelevant from that perspective.
One does not necessarily imply or require or constrain the other.
I never studied Latin, but I don't find it difficult at all to keep up. A lot of churches that have TLM have the missal booklet with Latin on one page and vernacular on the facing page.
While I do appreciate the richness of the daily propers and miss understanding them, it doesn't bother me enough to avoid the TLM.
As a kinda-sorta Christian (raised Catholic), I've long admired the Jewish approach to the Mourner's Kaddish prayer said when a loved one dies: It's not about the deceased, nor even about death — it's about G-d. It starts out (in English translation): "Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will."
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/text-of-the-mourner...
If I were to say one pope that many have been fond of, it's probably John Paul II.
And for political side - in Poland, he was seen as way too leftist/liberal for the conservatives in Church, and too pro-Russian for the liberals in it - he had not condemned Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I found this surprising and genuinely thought-provoking.
Then, from religious point of view - they didn't really like his ecumenism approach, to them it was borderline of heresy.
Same thing will apply here.
Francis was not sexually liberal. He was marxist. He believed in liberation theology.
As someone who knew personally the man from a spiritual exercises' house in Spain(obviously when he was not yet Pope), I never liked the guy.
He was the friend of dictators. Loved so much Raul Castro, and Maduro, never criticised them, but criticised the affluence of western democracies. His business was the poor and he loved poor makers.
His support for Putin and not denouncing the takeover of absolute power was jarring for someone in his position.
You can be a leftist religious leader, but you have to report abuses when you see them, specially if the abuses are made by your friends. Of course you will lose them if you do.
Francis was too weak in character to oppose them. But as a Pope, that is your job.
Immigrants must be welcome as a moral imperative, but not in the Vatican!
Bigotry is wrong, except for the modern Marxist form!
Embrace the Progressive world view, but don’t talk about how we forcibly sterilized people!
Etc.
It isn't a purely US vs Europe thing though – you will find some Americans who call themselves "classical liberals", by which they mean "liberal" in largely the same sense as many Europeans do. It is just that "classical liberal" is somewhat of an obscure term in the US–you are only likely to know it if you are interested in or have studied economics, politics, etc–but among those Americans who know it there are definitely some who identify with it.
"Progressive" avoids this to some extent, in being a term which is closer to meaning the same thing in the US and Europe – although in a US context, "progressive" often means something in the same direction as "liberal" but going further.
Some people like to talk about two dimensions, social vs economic – so a person can be socially conservative but economically progressive (not an uncommon position among some conservative Catholics, for example) – although that still has the limitation that "socially progressive/conservative" is a selection of issues with an assumption that people's positions across them are correlated, but there are people who break the assumption, e.g. self-described "consistent pro-lifers" who oppose both legal abortion and the death penalty (unlike many "pro-lifers" in the US who oppose legal abortion yet are pro-death penalty), or certain radical feminists who support LGB rights but oppose transgender rights ("gender critical" as they prefer to call themselves, with "TERF" being the pejorative label applied to them by their opponents)
Some of these linkages are country specific – e.g. in the US, most social conservatives support the death penalty and oppose gun control, in some other Western countries you may find most social conservatives opposing the death penalty and supporting gun control, even while they agree with US social conservatives on other issues.
[1] https://www.wn.catholic.org.nz/adw_welcom/pope-says-kirill-m...
Before commenting, please take a moment to consider whether your comment is within the HN guidelines [1], particularly the first two:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
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Israel has enormous advantage over Palestinians and while I don’t mind them waging war with Hamas, indiscriminate bombing is not ok and never will be.
The thing is, under the rules of war, protected installations (such as residential areas or even hospitals) lose their protection if they are being abused by a warring party for military operations. Otherwise, it would be an open invitation for anyone to do what Hamas did - force the other party between either risking getting shot at or violating rules of war.
No one forced Hamas to embed themselves among civilians. They did that on their own.
You should maybe research where key millitary apparatus of the Israeli state is located. The headquarters of the IDF for example.
Can you say the same about Hamas?
The arguments you are using for attacking Palestinian infastructure and people are more than applicable to Israeli infastructure and population.
In international law people have the right to resist occupation through millitary means. In a small area under occupation then there is no means to create a millitary setup that matches what the 'good guys' consider to be legitimate.
If you want to be consistent then allow Palestinians to have a millitary, air space, airports, ports, navy, jets, nuclear weapons etc. And then you can fight them on equal terms.
"Everything Hamas does is forced by Israel's actions, nothing Israel does is forced by Hamas"
- Israel has to eradicate Hamas as its existence is too much of a threat ("there is no alternative")
- Hamas has embedded itself in the civilian population in Gaza so that they are indistinguishable
- therefore, Israel must eliminate all Gazawis to guarantee its security
So.. Will Israel kill millions to avenge the deaths of thousands?
Guess why they're keeping the Palestinians on a run: to ransack the entire place for weapons caches or Gaza Metro entrances. And that's not eliminating the Gazan population, by the way.
I don't like it very much myself, but honestly, I do not see any other way of making sure Hamas does not rise up again.
> Will Israel kill millions to avenge the deaths of thousands?
Again: it's not about revenge any more, it's about preventing the repeat of 2006-2023 aka constant terror from Qassam rockets and other terrorism.
Let's say Israel finds all caches and tunnels, while not disturbing the population of Gaza (besides blockade, forced displacement and destruction of their homes), and then lets the population back in. Israel cannot tell Hamas militants from civilians, so some measure of Hamas will survive the event -- indeed, it might even reinforce anti-Israeli sentiment. What then would stop these leftover Hamas members from rebuilding whatever smuggling routes and weapon caches they had?
> Again: it's not about revenge any more, it's about preventing the repeat of 2006-2023 aka constant terror from Qassam rockets and other terrorism.
According to OCHAOPT Israel suffered 138 casualties on its own territory (ie excluding Gaza and the West Bank) from Palestinian attacks from 2008 to the eve of October 7. Would you say the current Israeli response (which itself inflicts terror) has been proportionate? Where would you place the threshold where it would no longer be an acceptable response?
Disbanding UNRWA, for one, and replacing it with UNHCR which is responsible for every other refugee situation in the world. It's time for the end of the special treatment of Palestinians, and that includes getting rid of inheriting the refugee status.
Following that, there must be strict accountability on all aids and their eventual disbursement in Gaza and the West Bank. No more diversion of construction materials to Gaza Metro, no more diversion of food aid and then re-selling it.
The final important thing to do is stop funding Hamas, and that one falls squarely on Israel, where Netanyahu has covertly funded Hamas to keep Fatah in check. When there's no money to pay for smuggled Qassam parts, there won't be any more smuggled Qassam parts.
> Would you say the current Israeli response (which itself inflicts terror) has been proportionate?
Yes. Israelis had to live 17 years in terror of rockets from Gaza. There's no way calling this acceptable in any form. Hamas and those backing it knew that eventually, Israeli patience would end one day and there would be hell to pay for it.
The staggering number of civilian casualties, deaths and literal executions that have been inflicted in the name of peace must give the acting populace a pause. In the name of humanity. The place is just rubble now. How much more security could one country want? No one else has done something like this since the first world war.
We are a highly technical community, we should be able to debug the situation and find edge cases rather than trivialize it.
True, I apologize for the misrepresentation; but reasoning is the same. At some point Hamas is too deeply ingrained in Gazawi society for Israel to perfectly excise it.
Hamas is the civilian government of Gaza and therefore includes firefighters, doctors, policemen, teachers. Israel does count them as members of Hamas and relies on statistical methods to select targets (ie you are on the same WhatsApp group as a member of Hamas, therefore you are likely to be a member, see the "Lavender" target selection program).
For a point of comparison, after Nazi Germany collapsed the Western allies had German civil servants fill questionnaires to assess their level of involvement; of 3.6 millions surveyed, just 1% were charged as "main culprits" (Hauptschuldige), whereas a third were designated as "followers" (Mitläufer), who basically contributed to the regime's crimes but nontheless got to keep their jobs after the war. I'd argue the allies were way too lenient on Germany, but the current Israeli approach (kill them all) is too extreme and will not work because its objectives are unrealistic.
> You also ignore the possibility of Hamas eventually giving up or some other diplomatic solution being reached.
I sure hope peace will be reached but Israel is waging a war without clear conditions of victory, leaving only total destruction of the enemy as their strategic objective. Think of the US trying to eliminate all the communist Vietnamese by compiling kill counts.
My impression is the war will end either when Gaza is drained of all of its population, or Israel tires of the war and reduces its stated objectives (probably this would involve a shift in government).
> We are a highly technical community, we should be able to debug the situation and find edge cases rather than trivialize it.
We can't solve everything with tech principles. Even in our field, probably the biggest thing separating a senior from a junior is humility and ability to connect with other people.
You're comparing the Allies' actions after WWII concluded with Israel's actions in the midst of conflict.
Are you forgetting the Dresden firebombings?
Are you really suggesting that Israel will continue to "kill them all" if Hamas surrenders? That's not even what Israel is doing now, although they have the military capability to do so if they wished.
The allies' strategic bombing campaign was intended to destroy industry and infrastructure and was not aimed at any political group in particular, whereas Israel can and does target precise buildings associated with Hamas (see the "Lavender" program that provides bombing targets).
> That's not even what Israel is doing now
There's no real way to know since Israel does not allow journalists in Gaza, but the international court of justice found there was sufficient possibility that an investigation should be carried out. Are you so much better informed than them that you can be sure?
“We will implement the Trump Plan, the voluntary migration plan. This is our strategy, and we are ready to discuss it at any time," he added.
Aside from legitimate concern about the genocide in Gaza, there's also been a rise in good-old-fashioned antisemitism, especially among young people: https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/46-adults-worldw... . For instance: 40% of those under age 35 affirm that “Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars” while it is 29% for those over 50, a remarkable 11 percentage point difference.
Please adhere to the guidelines, particularly this one:
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Putin is popular and has personal interest in remaining so, because otherwise Russian elites will find themselves a new Putin.
Empires in all incarnations are pure evil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Russi...
Let me make this clear for you: Russia invaded Ukraine, and wants to erase the existence of Ukraine.
Russia steals Ukrainian grain and agricultural machines.
Russia destroys Ukrainian museums and any historical artefact related to Ukrainian writers.
Russia steals ukrainian children to raise them as russians.
Russia is engaged in open genocidal elimination of Ukraine. They speak about it openly, they write about it, they issue press releases about it.
There is no proxy there. Russia is doing all of this by themselves.
Fact that other countries use the war for their own politics doesn't change it in the slightest.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
In the end, nobody was really happy with him. On the other hand, he definitely had a will and a spine to stick to his own opinions - I guess that counts for something.
People pleasing in politics means never pushing out of the public's comfort zone.
(And no, this isn't an endorsement of any current orange head of state, far from it.)
Besides, Ukraine did turn other cheek after 2014 war, they just run out of cheeks to turn.
Back to main subject, I believe nothing weakened Pope Francis’s policies as much as his widely misunderstood position on this subject.
You know, what happened on Easter right?
Jesus' death was special, because he was without sins, he was the son of God (YMMV) and, because was walking around afterwards physically (i.e. capable of touching and eating, etc.) on earth. I am not sure, why you name it suicide, because he didn't killed himself, he got himself killed.
I do not think, that Jesus would defend "the agressor". But fighting in return is also not good, which is where "turning the other cheek" comes into play.
> reframe Christianity
How is it reframing, when it is what it is all about? Can you elaborate about the counter arguments?
Of course dying is not the only method of worshiping God and promote the faith, but it is quite effective. And giving the other option is killing people it is definitely the preferred way.
Link for others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turning_the_other_cheek
Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is true if you live in a bubble. Most Catholics don't hold strong opinions on the Pope. The people who do are, as usual, the extremes on either side - not the majority.
Already said that conservative and liberal are English words not necessarily connected to US political scene. I know plenty of people initially supportive of him who got seriously pissed when he broke the long standing tradition of supporting the attacked, not the attacker.
I would argue it’s a pretty common position in Europe.
I know a lot of people that are mad at him over that, it's extremely major.
gifted all women indissoluble marriage, which was practiced by the Roman aristocracy as "confarreatio".
This was trashed as soon as possible, and the trashing was billed as great progress.
Also the condom thing is false. Keep up to date.
lots of christians didn't like him, considering he was too progressive
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/26/how-peopl...
I'd researched popes' policies and statements toward the poor some years back, and he really had no peer going back centuries.
Partial exception in the late 1900s, under Leo XIII (1878--1903), in the encyclical Rerum novarum.
But yes, one thing is statements another is actions, regarding the latter the Latin Church's actions have often not been in keeping with their lofty writings.
I will always applaud a person who retreats — even just a little — from dogma and fanaticism.
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2013/05/29/187009384/...
Which is "interesting", considering how much of the New Testament is about redemption and reaching out to outsiders. Aren’t we all supposed to be God’s creation, and wasn’t Jesus supposed to teach us about salvation, redemption and forgiveness?
(And by "interesting", I mean that it is yet another of example cognitive dissonance amongst fundamentalists. If anyone can be redeemed, it implies that atheists can, as well.)
> I will always applaud a person who retreats — even just a little — from dogma and fanaticism.
Indeed. He was not perfect but he was better than most. I hope the next one won’t be a catholic version of patriarch Kirill.
Haven't really been paying attention. Wasn't he the one who got Russia into defending persecuted Christians wherever (Syria etc)?
> From a spiritual and moral point of view, the special military operation is a Holy War, in which Russia and its people, defending the single spiritual space of Holy Rus', fulfill the mission of the "Restrainer", protecting the world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West that has fallen into Satanism.
> After the end of the SVO, the entire territory of modern Ukraine must enter the zone of exclusive influence of Russia. The possibility of the existence on this territory of a Russophobic political regime hostile to Russia and its people, as well as a political regime controlled from an external center hostile to Russia, must be completely excluded.
https://www-patriarchia-ru.translate.goog/db/text/6116189.ht...
(The recognition of saints is a little different, happening always after their death and depending on some degree of regional consensus. It's sloppy but whatever, it is actually not as similar as it might look.)
As religion has shrunk in participation in most of the west, it has become hugely susceptible to manipulation. My wife (now atheist, but grew up evangelical) often has to correct me when I make snide remarks about Christianity. Recently I made some comment about hypocrisy amongst Christians for supporting a multiply-divorced man who bragged about groping women for president (who has probably never read the bible), to say nothing of the people around him. She quickly snapped back at me that "they actually see themselves in him, have you not noticed all the sex scandals that happen in so many churches?" and then went on to list the "questionable" relationships in her own youth group. (I am NOT saying all Christians are like this, but religion is often used to cover up or excuse misdeeds).
It is not unique to Christianity or even Islam, though. You're seeing a lot of religion being used to justify many terrible things, including many smaller ones in Africa and Asia that have been used to justify atrocities and genocide.
I think she is right for some of these people. It is a human reaction, but it is still a moral failing. The proper Christian (well, Catholic, anyway) thing to do would be what is expected in a confession: recognise one’s failings, express regret, and accept consequences, including punishment. Then comes redemption.
Something that irks me fundamentally with most Christian religions is how they believe that they are Good People because they accepted God and rejected Evil. It’s all good as long as you play the part. Once you start looking for excuses, you failed twice: first, because of your behaviour, and then for failing to repent. If you support someone because he made the same error you did, then you fail yet again. This behaviour is understandable, but trippy incorrect from a religious perspective and very hypocritical.
In the grand scheme of things, it is very easy to get forgiveness, you just have to be sincere in your regrets (again, for Catholics, which is what I know).
I know there are wonderful ministers, christians, and people of all religions. But I've come to the conclusion that if said minister/church/religion gets involved in politics, there's a greater chance than not that it's being run by manipulative power-hungry people. And those people want strict control, making mistakes (often the way people learn best) is not tolerated by them. It's in some ways gotten worse, because they're now treating other people's refusals to follow (gay marriage, no prayer in schools, etc) as direct attacks on them.
Sorry I misinterpreted. Protestant denominations are convenient for politics, because there are so many of them and hey have so different positions.
> In this realm, there's no forgiveness unless you totally repent and accept the whole christian shebang. In extreme cases, it's not the the sin itself, but the rejection of god/jesus that's the worst you can do.
That’s fertile ground for extremism and reinforces the group dynamics, for sure.
> Taken to the extreme, you see this manifested very strangely, like Chick tracts where the secular lifetime do-gooder burns in hell, but the terrible multiple murdering rapist gets into heaven because they repent "in time".
I think Pascal wrote something about this behaviour. I won’t chase the source but IIRC the conclusion was that these people were hypocrites using religion to be terrible people and I tend to agree. Personally I find also weird to believe that God is so easily fooled, but that’s just me.
> But I've come to the conclusion that if said minister/church/religion gets involved in politics, there's a greater chance than not that it's being run by manipulative power-hungry people.
Definitely. It is too effective as a tool for control and coercion. At least the Catholic Church mostly retreated from this. They do some lobbying but nobody is asking for a Catholic theocracy anywhere that I know of.
> It's in some ways gotten worse, because they're now treating other people's refusals to follow (gay marriage, no prayer in schools, etc) as direct attacks on them.
Yes. It is the end of enlightenment and the end of liberal democracies if enough people behave that way. These people are functionally similar to the imams who keep babbling about the shariah, it’s time we see them that way.
That’s an interesting correlation. Do you have any ideas about the dynamics associated with it?
I do seem to remember experiencing my tradition as less manipulative when I was young, but have never been sure if that was me not seeing it. And if true, I’m not sure whether to attribute it to size, or the internet, or political influence, or something else.
It is traditional for the EP to visit Rome on the patronal Feast of Saints Peter and Paul and for the Pope to visit Istanbul on the Feast of Saint Andrew, which is apparently when the friendship first formed. My absolute favorite story about Francis is his deciding to send some of the most precious relics in the Vatican to Bartholomew as a gift: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2019-09/pope-francis... (That sent some people into a fury).
Actually, it's my second favorite story. My favorite story is his insistence that he live in the Vatican guesthouse (and not the Papal apartments). Or perhaps the fact that as archbishop of Buenos Ares he insisted on taking the subway.
I believe that had mainly power reasons, because pope Paul II was pretty out of the loop, what the cardinals were doing.
And Francis likely expected to face opposition in what he was doing, so being closer to the "people" was likely helpful on having an eye on them.
It's quite a bit above our pay grade to proclaim categorically who supposedly cannot be redeemed; it verges on blasphemy.
Cf. Job. 38:
1. Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said:
2 “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge?
3 "Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.
5 "Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 "On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone—
7 "while the morning stars sang together and all the angels[a] shouted for joy?"
(etc.)
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%2038&versio...
Cheers! As I understand the term blasphemy, our presumptuous species has a great deal to assert about the unknowable. ^_^
I think the author's intent is to remind us that some things are simply beyond our ken (to which I'd add: For now).
Edited to add: this is a single passage with verse markings.
And the idea that atheists can be saved isn't novel in Catholic teaching – it is implicit in the Holy Office's 1949 condemnation of Feeneyism, [0] in which it declared that a person who doesn't believe in Catholicism due to "invincible ignorance" can be saved by an "implicit desire" for God. Although it didn't include the case of atheists, it didn't exclude them either – suggesting that an atheist who doesn't believe in God in their head (due to some intellectual issue) but nonetheless believes in God in their heart can be saved.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeneyism
I'm racking my brain right now dissecting what that even means. Believing there is no one but wishing it wasn't so?
Hence, anyone who loves Good loves God... so a person who truly loves Good, but who due to some intellectual obstacle, isn't able to call that Good "God" – from a Catholic viewpoint, it can be said that they love God without knowing that it is God whom they love – and by that love they can be saved
If you start from the assumption that Christianity is true, and some people know this, and others don't – you have to ask why the people who don't know it, don't know it. And this is where Catholic theology distinguishes between "vincible" and "invincible" ignorance - "vincible" means the ignorance is your own fault, "invincible" means your ignorance is through no fault of your own.
How to distinguish the two? Ultimately, it is up to God to decide – nobody else knows for sure what's going on in your head. At best, theologians would give some examples of hypothetical situations which could be said to be one or the other – but the real world is often much messier than any such hypothetical can capture.
Which is part of why, the traditional Catholic teaching, is that (with rare exceptions) you can't actually know where people are going to end up. The idea is that if you make it to heaven, you might be surprised to find a lot of people there you weren't expecting, and also maybe some people you were sure would be there aren't.
False. Russia has sought the cultural genocide of Ukraine for hundreds of years.
https://ukraineworld.org/en/articles/basics/linguicide-ukrai...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russian-history-of-subjugating-...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/23/russia-ukraine-cultural...
https://academic.oup.com/jicj/article/21/2/233/7197410
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/why-russias-war-ukrai...
This is why they fire missiles at museums and libraries. This is why they steal Ukrainian children and ship them to Russia for adoption. This is why they deport Ukrainian citizens to Siberia and bring in Russians to replace them.
Assuming that you are arguing in good faith you should read up on some basic game theory. The outcome of this fight is not just about this war but about establishing the incentives of all future potential attempts at aggression by Russia (and other expansionist countries).
Edited to remove the snark.
You should do it. Show up to my house with 6 of your friends and a tank, and then when you say "give me your living room or die" and then when I point out "this is bad, you shouldnt do this" you'll just leave? You'll realize the errors of your ways and go "you know, I was ready to kill for this but now I think I just won't".
Lets take this even further, youre openly threatening to kill me for my house. If my neighbors are going "hold on! Don't give in! Heres a gun, you got this!" are they helping or are they getting me killed? Do you think thats whats going to happen, or do you think the neighbors are saying "this psycho is going to kill you, give them what they want".
It doesnt work.
edit: this got flagged? why? Its pretty benign
That is, I don't find it fundamental to our psychology nor history. To address your perspective.
It's an atheists view, sure. It assumes that if one god is real, then all gods must be real. Because in the mind of the atheist, all are equal in that they are imaginary or, at best, avatars of psychological phenomena.
It necessarily assumes the inverse logic that if 1,999 gods are fake, then 2,000 gods must be fake.
Again, because they are all fundamentally equal. And therefore it is the Christians that are illogical because they have dismissed 1999 gods as fake but couldn't quite get there for the Last God Standing.
I believe that's the sum of it.
Which is a statement that about illustrates the intellectual limit for atheism. I will give Ricky credit for that much.
Where Ricky's quip stops and Christian logic starts is that Christians know that their singular God is not imaginary nor an avatar, but is a living being. With the figurative 1999 additional gods indeed being either imaginary, psychological avatars, or worse.
Which is clear to the Christian, because he understands something singularly fundamental about Christianity's God that others may not. This fundamental characteristic, at minimum, is the difference between real and fake.
At which point the atheist would quip that there is no logic to see the Christian God as different from the other 1999 Gods, and as concrete.
The Christian would finish up with telling the atheist that their failure to see the difference is a failure in being able to interpret the Bible, a failure in being able to interpret the Christian religion, and a failure to understand their own nature including from where they come.
Some of this lack of understanding on the part of atheists is rooted in a lack of perspective that is otherwise glaringly true, and a lack of logical rigor. In other words, they take too many lies on faith.
The conversation frequently continues with a debate over supposed proofs rooted in belief (faith) for atheists.
With the Christian making more general appeals to their own faith that is rooted in Biblical and religious interpretation, ideally combined with their own verifying observations about the nature of the World.
Or, for those who have blindly committed based on instinct, then just appeals to faith alone. Which is also acceptable, because it is a correct instinct. Being a Christian doesn't hinge on knowledge alone. It hinges on faith. There are good reasons for this state of affairs.
What both sides will agree on is that he who believes in the least lies "wins" so to speak. The process of parsing being roughly parallel to discovering the rules of a game. The disagreement is over the substance of the lies. What Judeo-Christianity does is attempt to convey those rules in clear-enough language, even if the motivation to follow them is solely based on faith. With deeper Bible reading often being revelatory for greater insight.
Whereas the atheist dismisses the traditional rules out of lack of faith and lack of understanding, and often then devolves into inventing his own rules. Which is specifically against the rules, but does align with the atheist's chaos theory of his own existence.
Edit parent meant Ukraine war, not the Israel conflict quote Pope had.
I do not have much hope that Palestinians would behave “better” according to any sensible measure of the word.
I would conjecture that many governments would position themselves differently and that criticism would face less obstacles.
In the end it would be as much of a catastrophe.
It also dilutes the current and very real responsibilities of the 'effectors'. In saying 'they would have done the same' it becomes very easy to justify the unjustifiable.
No matter who did it, it would still be 'evil'. There would be 'good guys' and 'bad guys'. Specially when the labels would be applied to dead children and innocents under rubble. Everyone keeps forgetting them.
Just because you think they would do the same to you, does not justify your actions.
> [basically] What if in a different world Hamas had all the weapons plus the backing of the US while Israel only had shoddy weapons?
In a hypothetical world where Usain Bolt was raised on Greenland and became interested in competitive gaming: would he have become the fastest human? Probably not. Different timelines.
This Sam Harris exercise is meaningless. The goal is not to measure the level of evil in the hearts of <hamas> or <isreali government>. That’s impossible. Hypotheticals that have nothing to do with reality are also fruitless. The goal is to figure out what evil actions are being committed and stop them.
But the abuser only did those things because he was abused as a child for eight yea— What’s that got to do with the problem at hand?
The goal of thought experiment wasn't to measure evil or good. It's to determine if the lines between good and evil are that far apart.
If Ukraine was way stronger than Russia, would it try to annex Kursk and other non-Ukraine regions? Would it commit as many atrocities? No. It would be constrained by its desire to join EU. Could it do it if it had 30 more people, more nationalistic populace, and near infinite ammo supply? Probably.
But a litmus test, just tells you rough acidity, not exact pH either.
The big issue was world powers of WW2 deciding to just bequeath land to Israel.
The Israel ethnostate predates Hamas.
You even call it an ethnostate.
> Edit: I mean Ukraine war.
Yes but it's not clear yet who will win, and the church cannot afford siding with the losing side, especially that now it's weakest it's been since medieval times.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
With that said I think that the pope dying is a subject worth discussing on HN.
It's unfortunate that it seems to be descending into a flame war about Israel though.
Hacker News was once a place focused on sharing news you wouldn't find most other places. Is it time to update the guidelines?
This focus on people is to me, is WAY better than theme-based filtering (compare with many subreddit cesspools).