Do Your Part to Share the Selfie Francis Faith

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Is this our Faith?

Believer?

The mainstream media is really pushing these life-size cardboard Pope Francises.  Why?  Is it just because it’s fun, or funny.  Is it just for the money?

In keeping with previous papal visits, Pope Francis’ U.S. visit in September has spurred a mad dash among souvenir sellers. For $160, you can order an official, life-size “cutout” of the pontiff from the group organizing one of the events in Philadelphia.

Why is it so expensive?  Is it a collector’s item already?

Those 69-inch “standup” versions of Pope Francis, whose global popularity is perhaps the only thing larger than the replicas themselves, are being placed around Philadelphia so people can take selfies and share them on social media, the Associated Press reported.

So the point is not just to have a big Pope Francis around to bother you.  It’s to take a selfie with it and ‘share on social media.’

“Pope Francis is described as the people’s pope. So we have him in places where many people can see him,” World Meeting of Families digital content manager Nancy Caramanico told the news agency. “People are just really excited to be around him and are anticipating his visit to Philadelphia.”

Nineteen-year-old college student Jennifer D’Angelo will be in school when Pope Francis visits her hometown, the AP reported, so she took the opportunity to pose with a two-dimensional cutout of the pope on display at a food court.

“It seems like he’s trying to bring the Catholic Church together,” D’Angelo, 19, said. “I think he’s doing a great job. I’m just kind of sad that I’m not going to be in the city when he comes.”

Aren’t all the popes ‘people’s popes?’  Why just Francis?  Was Benedict only for rich fancy people?

Is Pope Francis bringing the Catholic Church together?  I think he’s just rallying non-Catholics, dissidents, media people, and dictators.  How many actual Catholics are excited to be around Pope Francis?  Are we thinking with our televisions?

For those seeking a less-grand papal presence, you can also order a variety of posters, a coffee mug emblazoned with some of the pope’s more notable quotations, and a 10-inch tall Pope Francis “plush doll” that is “surface wash only.”

Merchandising papal visits has a long tradition in the United States and elsewhere. In 1987, the U.S. tour undertaken by Saint John Paul II, then in the ninth year of his pontificate, inspired such items as a “Pope-Scope,” a cardboard tube with small mirrors at an angle, so people could see his motorcade over the heads of others. Other souvenirs included buttons, a T-shirt inscribed “Your Holiness, Welcome to Texas” and additional booklets, a selection of which was for sale via the online auction site eBay for $49.99.

Everything that happens in FrancisChurch is always framed as part of a long tradition but it’s not.  It just manipulates and morphs traditions.  It abuses them.

Six years later, mindful of such kitsch as “Pope-on-a-Rope” soap bars, Catholic leaders in 1993 prepared for another Pope John Paul II visit to America by hiring the Famous Artists Merchandising Exchange of Dayton, Ohio, to handle licensing of the pope’s image, according to The New York Times (paywall).

“More than 100 items were deemed acceptable, including those … approved to bear the Pope’s countenance: medallions, T-shirts, posters, postcards, lithographs, fanny packs and the Pope-Scope,” the newspaper reported.

Perhaps one of the most notable pope-related products emerged during a 1965 visit to New York by Pope Paul VI. It came during a newspaper strike, leaving journalists for The New York Times and other print outlets to cover a story they couldn’t distribute in those pre-Internet days. The answer? An “instant book” created by Times staffers and Bantam Books, a paperback publisher that released 500,000 copies of the story within four days of the visit. As the Times reported, Pope Paul VI “got his copy for free.”

Don’t be fooled.  A few vendors promoting and capitalizing off previous papal visits is nothing like the worldwide media/marketing efforts behind Francis today.

At the top of the article there is an enormous photo  of a man kneeling in prayer before his Pope Francis cutout and grasping its cardboard hand. Francis swag is not about fun or money.  It’s McKinsey & Company’s idea of worship, worship of their new catholicism.

If St. Peter lived in our time and had access to cardboard images and selfies, would he make sure the countries he evangelized were filled with life-size statues of himself first?  Is there going to be a single image of Christ anywhere near Francis next month?  I suppose one or two are unavoidable.

The Francis cutout is symbolic because his papacy really a contrived event.  It’s something orchestrated and Francis is just filling the life-size pope spot within it.

Real Francis is not flat.  He’s very round and so is the Church.  It has depth and it lives.  But FrancisChurch doesn’t.  It’s just a pasted veneer, a stage set.

 

 

New Sins In FrancisChurch Just Keep Accumulating

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A sin

Ruled as Insufficiently Compelling

Pope Francis has made his universally broad new environmental Catholic doctrine mandatory.  Obey or you’re not a true Christian!  You have no choice in the matter because I’m the Pope of course.

How do we specifically comply with this new teaching from God?  There are millions of media outlets, government funded institutions, and ‘Catholic’ establishments who will provide the necessary action items.

For two years I taught social studies at an inner-city high school; for six years I ran a Catholic Worker shelter for homeless families. Then, almost 20 years ago, I became a full-time animal advocate, confident that such labor is integral to Catholicism.

As one might expect, I received plaudits from fellow Catholics for my anti-poverty and educational work but less support for my animal protection work. Most Catholics I’ve encountered seem to think of such do-gooding as fundamentally removed from religious imperatives.

Yet Pope Francis begs to differ.

“Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork,” Francis wrote in his latest encyclical, “is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.”

Get out your FrancisChurch notebook.  Full-time paid animal advocacy fits the bill as being ‘essential to a life of virtue!’

On the day Francis released the encyclical, he tweeted, “It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly. #LaudatoSi.”

Leaving aside the modern method of transmission, this statement is not actually remarkable. It’s a quotation from the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

But what does it mean that we should not cause animals to suffer or die needlessly? Surely this admonition demands more of us than that we not personally injure and kill animals. I’m convinced that we are also obligated as Catholics to avoid paying others to kill or harm animals, absent some exceedingly compelling justification.

Is a chicken sandwich exceedingly compelling?  I’m not sure but I definitely feel guilty.  I was hungry but I wasn’t exceedingly compelled I must admit.  I wish I could ask Pope Francis but he probably just eats beans.

Put another way, “purchasing is always a moral — and not simply economic — act.” That line also comes from the encyclical, in a paragraph in which Francis applauds consumer boycotts focused on pushing corporations to engage in more ethical practices.

Thinking about consumer choices in the context of animal rights, consider that by far the most needless suffering comes at the hands of the meat industry, which kills about 9 billion land animals annually. These creatures are treated in ways that would warrant cruelty-to-animals charges were dogs or cats similarly abused.

Do you know why purchasing is always a moral choice in FrancisGospel?  It’s because he’s an anti-capitalist and his hackles rise when anyone is able to do something with money.  Making money a moral choice gives him jurisdiction over every tiny decision people make.  It robs those foolish enough to believe him of their God-given freedom.

Communists think you should get what they give you when they want you to have it and they think they should own everything you’ve got.  Pope Francis Communists (Liberation Theologists) are the same, but they pretend it’s Christian morality and not just pride, envy, and thievery.

Why does FrancisChurch seem to inevitably lead to putting left wing environmentalist pressure on every tangible industry in the world?  Miners can’t mine; Farmers can’t farm.  Ranchers can’t slaughter cattle.  We can’t eat the meat they sell us.  Nobody can have any money or property that someone else doesn’t, regardless of their choices or rights.  And if you have enough to do something really productive, then you’re really in trouble.

You’re money belongs to you, not to Pope Francis and his false preaching on moral choices.  Buying poison or a mafia hit is a bad use of money, not a steak, or a gun, or an acre of land. We used to understand this was foolishness and tyranny.  Why must we now pretend it’s our Faith?

 

 

 

 

FrancisChurch Gets Its First Holy Day

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Be in communion. No-one is unmercifully excluded Photo by Kyle Spradley | © 2014 - Curators of the University of Missouri

Merciful FrancisChurch communion.  No-one is excluded.

Since Pope Benedict abdicated due to weariness and in the stated belief that someone, anyone could do better than he could, we have been treated to one unthinkable and outrageous papal crisis after another, the most frightening being the unified hurricane of worldwide media spin behind Francis.  That enormous roar is the sound of money, lots of it.

In general these painful shocks have been limited to three main areas: Francis’s calculated heretical meanderings, his formal documents, and the sinister Synod.  There are actually two others problem areas which are indirect but no less destructive.  These are the license and backing given to unfaithful ‘catholics’ in the institutional church, and the close alliances with anti-Christian lawless political regimes and their players.

Now we have something worse.

Like their Orthodox brothers and sisters, Catholics formally will mark September 1 as the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, Pope Francis has decided.

The day of prayer, the Pope said, will give individuals and communities an opportunity to implore God’s help in protecting creation and an opportunity to ask God’s forgiveness “for sins committed against the world in which we live.”

Pope Francis announced his decision to add the annual prayer day to the Catholic calendar in a letter to Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and to Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

Aside from the unjust anti-capitalist planning Pope Francis continually trumpets as Catholicism, there is also a kind of pantheism, and with it a diminution of human nature – of the rights of man before God. The faux-scientific ranting of his Laudato Si Manifesto betrays a contempt for man’s true dignity, for his freedom, life, family, and material possessions.  Earth-worship and materialistic communism are one and the same. They share a spirituality founded on something that is inevitably dirt, on death.

The faithful pundits have responded with measured council to overlook the lies and accept the truths in the Pope’s letter, but doing so accomplishes little because FrancisChurch is all about hyper-propaganda.  Faithful Catholics are just in the way and will be ignored, managed.  The steamrollers will flatten Christian men and women like so many unarmed Chinese hoping to save their homes.

Francis doesn’t care that you’ve parsed his encyclical according to what is doctrine and what is fancy.  He’s treating the whole thing as if its the God’s truth and asking the entire Catholic world to spend a day begging forgiveness for sins against creation.  What was an erroneous encyclical now becomes a day of Earth-supplication.  What will happen next to all the other days?

Pope Francis said Christians want to make their special contribution to safeguarding creation, but to do that they must rediscover the spiritual foundations of their approach to earthly realities, beginning with an acknowledgment that “the life of the spirit is not dissociated from the body or from nature,” but lived in communion with all worldly realities.

It’s telling that the Pope’s call for our debased communion with the Earth coincides with his push to profane true Holy Communion.  FrancisChurch points down.

The ecological crisis, he said, is a summons “to a profound spiritual conversion” and to a way of life that clearly shows they are believers.

We must believe and demonstrate our belief here to something akin to animism in order to now be ‘Catholic.’

Quoting his encyclical, he said, “living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.”

Behold a definitive statement of Francis’s anti-doctrine.  He isn’t specific here about acts we must perform or avoid, but he is clear about the obedience we must show.  For specifics, just read Laudato Si. In the mind of Francis, its commands are neither ‘optional’ nor ‘secondary’  but ‘essential to a life of virtue.’

If you are still perplexed the new Church of the world will show you how to comply.  Witness California.

As the hollowed-out spaces of Catholic Churches fill with worldly prayers for communism and environmentalism, we are required to make an inhuman submission like the Christian bowing before the Islamist’s knife.  It’s not just a matter of disjointed papal sermons or misguided encyclicals. We must be made spiritually smaller, be degraded to accept FrancisChurch.