FrancisChurch: Wealth is Greed and Greed is Sin

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"To my penthouse suites, driver."

“To to humble papal suites quickly, driver.”

Pope Francis has said something again that doesn’t sound right.  Then again, when you think about it, it just sounds really wrong.

If you give the key to your heart to greed, it will leave the door wide open to vanity, arrogance and all of the other vices, squeezing God out of the way, Pope Francis said at his morning Mass.

This on its face isn’t true.  Greed is one of the seven deadly sins.  Greed is not the worst sin; always giving way to pride or anger, lust or jealousy, etc.  Pope Francis is just making that up.

Wealth isn’t “a statue” that stands inert and has no impact on a person, the pope said June 19 during the Mass in the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae.

“Wealth has the tendency to grow, to move around, to take a place in one’s life and heart,” and once it moves in, fanning the desire to always accumulate more, the heart becomes “corrupted,” he said.

Wealth does not make you want more wealth.  You want more wealth no matter how little you have.  If you are able to gain wealth through hard work, sacrifice, or cunning, then you will be able accumulate it too.  It does not corrupt the heart unless you let it, but it can weigh it down and tempt you to shirk your Christian responsibility, to compromise and sin.  Hence vows of poverty.

Pope Francis is a rich man in every respect.  He has control of billions of dollars and a huge infrastructure at his command.  Every single priest, religious, and employee worldwide is obliged to him.

Pope Francis has power. Isn’t greed simply an inordinate desire for the power to possess or the power to command? If he chooses to live simply and give back it is a good example, but it can’t truly be said that he isn’t rich. So his blanket and indiscriminate attack on wealth is, much like his attack on weapons manufacturers, plain hypocrisy.

The pope focused his homily on the day’s reading from the Gospel of Mark (6:19-23), in which Jesus tells his disciples to “not store up for yourselves treasures on earth,” but rather “store up treasures in heaven,” because “for where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.”

Pope Francis said that deep down, people’s search for more is rooted in a desire for a sense of security, but there is a high risk that person will become a slave of wealth, accumulating it only for oneself and not in order to serve others.

If greed were rooted in a sense of security than it’s also cowardice.  But greed isn’t cowardice.  Cowardice is.

Soon, any sense of security gives way to vice and division, even in the family, he said, according to Vatican Radio.

This is gibberish.  ‘Any sense of security gives way to vice and division?’

“Also the root of war lies in this ambition that destroys, corrupts,” as so many wars are being fought because of “greed for power, for riches,” he said.

So if I’m cozy in my blanket until 6am, I’m inevitably causing war?  My security is my greed and my greed is my possessions, therefore the killing?  Is there some point to the Pope’s endless smoke and rambling about people having things and liking them?

It’s a war that can be raging in one’s own heart, he said, “because greed keeps going, keeps moving forward,” stringing the person along a path of vice one step at a time.

Greed “opens the door, then comes in vanity — to think you’re important, to believe you’re powerful — and, in the end, pride, and from there all the vices, all of them,” he said.

Greed is the king of every sin and its cause lies not in the heart but in the wealth you possess?

This FrancisChurch theology is really just all about money and power, not Jesus.

 

 

 

 

FrancisChurch: Dr. Woo’s Trinity is Way Too Earthy

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Serene Dr. Woo in her Dear Leader suit with a very mopey Jesus and Mary in the corner

Serene Dr. Woo in her Dear Leader suit with very mopey Jesus and Mary in the corner

Dr. Carolyn Woo, former Notre Dame Business School Dean and now head of Federal bureaucratic agency, Catholic Relief Services, was supposed to have been integral to the Pope’s enormous Global Warming Manifesto.

She was present and spoke at it’s unfortunate release.

Pope Francis asks us a very simple question in his encyclical: “What kind of world do we want to leave to those who come after us, to children who are now growing up?”

Surely this question resonates with almost everyone. It resonates with me as a mother and as someone who draws on business as a partner to eliminate poverty and as an educator of business practitioners. It is from the perspective of business that I speak today.

Business school academics know all about business, yes?  College historians know history, and most economists know how people live and work too.

Pope Francis poses other questions: “What is the purpose of our life in this world? Why are we here? What is the goal of our work and all our efforts?” Those answer are akin to the mission and vision statements businesses formulate to define themselves, to gain legitimacy from society, commitment from employees, and support from customers.

How is it that the Vicar of Christ himself must pose these questions?   Are not the answers to these questions the essence of the Christian Faith?  According to Dr. Woo, the ‘answers’ are the visions and missions statements that businesses worldwide have yet to create.

So, the most profound truths of our existence will be determined by corporate boards, then screened for compliance with the UN-FrancisChurch officials, I expect.  Is this Catholicism or some descending cage?

As businesses strive to find those answers, they should realize that the message of this encyclical to the business world is a profoundly hopeful one. It sees the potential of business as a force for good whose actions can serve to mitigate and stop the cumulative, compounding, catastrophic effects of climate change driven by human actions.

Did you see that?  Five ‘C’ words.  It’s not science but it’s scary.

One of the principal themes in this encyclical is that all life on this planet is bound together via three fundamental and intertwined relationships: with God, our neighbors and the earth. When one of these relationships is damaged, then the others are, too. So there is a connection between how we treat the planet and how we treat the poor, our neighbors. As Pope Francis puts it, we do not have two separate crises, social and economic, but “one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.”

This contrived trinity of God, earth, and mankind is not some principle.  It’s just a trap, a net to bind men so tightly with the Prince of this World that piety and virtue become extinct.  High can we fly to Heaven while our planetary rulers move to subjugate us to the Earth?

Don’t let them throw a rope around Christ’s Church and pull it down.

 

 

Synod: There’s a Working Tool in the Vatican And It Hates the Faith

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I prescribe a penitential path to sacrilege for these specimens.

I prescribe a penitential path to sacrilege precisely in these cases?

John Vennari has the scoop on the latest Synod abomination – the just-released compilation of a worldwide ‘listening’ crusade, the Instrumentum Laboris.  Doesn’t that just mean ‘Working Tool?’

If you have to remind everybody that you’re busy working with tools, you’re not really getting anything done, are you?

And after a second round of global consultation, here it is – at Roman Noon, the instrumentum laboris (baseline text) for October’s climactic Synod on the Family was released… for now, however – much like last year’s first volume – the full sequel is only available in Italian.

Stacking out at 147 paragraphs – some 20,000 words – the text is arranged around three pillars: the challenges families face, the “discernment of the family’s vocation,” and “the mission of the family today,” each of them slated to take up a week of the discussions at the 4-25 October assembly.

Among other highlights, the final portion of the framework deals with the proposed changes of practice cited by their supporters as necessary for the church to better respond to families in challenging situations amid current pastoral practice.

On the assembly’s most hot-button issue of all, the instrumentum speaks of a “common accord” among the world’s bishops toward “eventual access” to the sacraments for divorced and civilly remarried couples, but only following “an itinerary of reconciliation or a penitential path under the authority of the [diocesan] bishop,” and only “in situations of irreversible cohabitation.”

If I remember last October, that ‘accord’ wasn’t all that common; and just like gay sex habits, if ‘cohabiting situations’ were irreversible, they wouldn’t be sins.  Who do these irreversible FrancisVatican fools think we are, and how many could find their way down a ‘penitential path?’

The text cautions that the proposal is only envisioned “in some particular situations, and according to well-precise conditions,” citing the interest of children born in a second union.

Well, I’m satisfied.  They’ve promised to be precise, like the gears of a Porsche flying down the Autobahn to Hell.

On a related front, ample treatment was given to the state of marriage tribunals, with calls for a “decentralization” of the annulment courts and the floating of the “relevance of the personal faith” of spouses in terms of their understanding of the marital bond as a means for declaring the nullity of a marriage.

We could see that one coming.  His Holiness has been inclined to ramble about the impossibility of making an informed and binding marriage vow these days.  Maybe if we have online auto-annulments then the Sensus Fidei will really start to understand marriage is forever! Ever-forward and pedal to the metal.

In particular, the latter point echoes a longstanding line of the Pope’s – having quoted the impression of his predecessor in Buenos Aires, the late Cardinal Antonio Quarracino, that “half” of failed Catholic marriages there “are null” solely on the grounds of unformed faith, a papal commission formed quietly by Francis last summer is studying possible changes to the annulment process independent of the Synod itself. No timeline is set for its work.

Elsewhere, three paragraphs were devoted to pastoral ministry to families “having within them a person of homosexual orientation.” While reaffirming the 2003 CDF declaration that “there exists no foundation whatsoever to integrate or compare, not even remotely, homosexual unions and the design of God for the family,” the text urges that “independent of their sexual tendency,” gays “be respected in their dignity and welcomed with sensibility and delicateness, whether in the church or society.”

Haven’t most self-professed gay people already been subjected to enough ‘tenderness,’ so much so that they imagine an outsized ‘dignity’ in their rejection of marriage and true parenthood?

Perhaps most boldly – reflecting a key emphasis of one of the gathering’s three presidents, Cardinal Chito Tagle of Manila – the text emphasizes that “The Christian message must be announced in a language that sustains hope.

Watch out for these liberals like Cardinal Tagle, the future Pope of Hope and FrancisMercy.  They’re always ‘bold’ and courageous.

Stuff your evil old language, Catholic!  We’ll tell you what to say.