Reading Time: 9 minutes And the Pope said to the Confessor: It is done, you know. Popes do slip away into the night and dine at friends’ homes. I had a most exquisite dinner with Salvatore Marino and guests earlier tonight. Oh, the wine! The wine! The rain nearly conspired against us, but we got there. Sal is a […]
the Pope
Posted inSatire
The Pope’s first confession
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Pope hovered forty thousand feet above the coast of Africa, amid the wispy cirro-stratus clouds. Suddenly, all human languages spoke at once, not in cacophony, but in delicate, percussive synchronization. All of humanity, dead and alive, spread out above the Sea, on the Earth, and in the Sky of Africa, was calling upon the […]
Posted inUncategorized
Can The Pope Be Fallible?
Reading Time: 2 minutes This was written a few years ago before Pope Benedict resigned. Pope Benedict XVI, otherwise known as Joseph Ratzinger, is deemed infallible when it comes to matters of church dogma. According to the Church, God tells him what to say, and he cannot be wrong. Last weekend, Ratzinger lifted the excommunication of some pretty nasty […]
Posted inEthics and Morality
Are Catholic Clergy more Likely to Be Paedophiles than the General Public?
Reading Time: 7 minutes This is a question that has been kicking around ever since the child sex abuse scandal involving the Catholic church came to the fore. In around 2010, loads of articles came out, citing some data, that the priesthood was broadly in line with national averages, some people claimed it was actually worse in Protestant churches/organisations, and many […]
Posted inNews
Knights of Malta head quits after condom row with Pope
Reading Time: 2 minutes Grand Master Matthew Festing, 67, pictured above, has resigned after becoming embroiled in a public dispute with the Pope over a condom distribution programme. His resignation, according to this report, comes after German aristocrat Albrecht von Boeselager was dismissed over the condom programme last month. Festing had refused to cooperate with a Vatican inquiry into […]
Posted inEthics and Morality
Why is the Vatican a State?
Reading Time: 3 minutes [This was written a few years ago when the pedophile priest scandal was at its peak. The scandal seems to have died down, but the questions that were raised have not gone away.] The central office of the Catholic Church, The Vatican, is considered a nation. No other religion is accorded this honor. Why does […]
Posted inUncategorized
Populist Pope?
Reading Time: 2 minutes Pope Francis has become the darling of liberal media with his populist positions on climate change and economic inequality. This has caused some discomfiture among Right Wingers who would normally embrace anything the Pope says because of the Catholic Church’s adamant opposition to abortion and contraception. Now they are saying that the Pope should stay […]
Posted inNews
Car that ferried Pope around Philadelphia sold for $82,000
Reading Time: < 1 minute Will the cash raised in action this week for what has been dubbed the ‘Pope Francis’ Philly Fiat’ be used to partly reimburse taxpayers who forked out $8-million for Frankie visit to the city last year? Or will the money raised through the sale of the Fiat 500L be given to victims who suffered sexual abuse […]
Posted inUncategorized
Faith: Pretending to know what we do not know
Reading Time: < 1 minute http://youtu.be/la9RGZnGADQ Using Peter Boghossian’s analysis of “faith” from his book A Manual for Creating Atheists, this is part of a project to create a parody of Pope Francis’s June 2013 essay on faith, Lumen Fidei. The project is educational in nature, seeking to practice with the idea of replacing the term “faith” with the meaning […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Sex & Gender
Sex, Doubt and the Pope
Reading Time: 4 minutes Many liberal Catholics have been encouraged by Pope Francis’s comments about sexual ethics in a recent interview. His general point was that these are lesser matters, not to be emphasized at the expense of the church’s essential message of healing and salvation.