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?

 

 

 

 

Still good for 88 bucks a month.

Still good for 88 bucks a month.

The Canadian Catholic Register reports:

A Tuscany priest is offering a baby bonus of more than $2,000 to Italian Catholic families who have three or more children. But there are strings attached.

The gift to parishioners in Staggia, a village close to Siena, was announced online as an “extraordinary contribution” by Fr. Stefano Bimbi, the local Catholic priest.

The $2,210 (2,000 euros) will be handed over only when the children are baptized. Additionally, the offer applies strictly to Italian couples who were married in the church, are residents of the village and have three or more children.

Incentives to have more children are a good thing and this is a wonderful gift for young families open to life, but I must ask:

  • How did we get to a point where we were forced to pay people to do the right thing and to accept the gift of children?
  • Should we reward people simply for not sinning, for refusing to contracept or abort children?
  • Isn’t money generally the same incentive people have for thwarting childbirth?  Doesn’t that actually pay better?
  • Is this about money or about honor, duty, love, and Heaven?
  • Aren’t beasts the creatures who will do things for treats?

Nonetheless, Bimbi said the decision had the potential to help Catholic couples. “Our parish wants to give concrete help in this moment of crisis for families, that with courage accept the gift of a child!” he wrote in the announcement.

The language of reverse pastoral care permeates the Synod documents. The message of softness is immoral.  Childbirth is a moment of crisis?  Is caring for the family you created some kind of heroic courage or is it just decent?  Must we be paid not to be negligent or criminal?

Get up in the pulpit Fr. Bimbi and lay them straight!   Tell them there’s far more joy in raising a holy child with love than in being paid to sit there and shove food in their face like some government nanny.  And if they can’t hear you because they’re not at Mass, why are you giving them 2,000 euro?

The parish coffers are not all “roses and flowers,” the priest said, so its economic affairs council had allocated an unspecified limited sum for the baby project. Bimbi was not immediately available when contacted by Religion News Service to discuss whether anyone had yet taken him up on the offer.

The financial incentive follows a similar initiative by the Italian government, which promised low-income families $88 (80 euros) a month for each child under 3 years old.

Talk about baby factories!  If the Italian Gov’t could bump that up to about 1,000 euros there’s be some high living in those noisy houses.  What say you, Pope Francis?  It’s fine so long as there’s not too much soy in the formula and the diapers are sustainable?

 

 

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.