Francis’s Holy War-secretly dividing the Catholic Churc
Aug 11, 2014 5:05:06 GMT
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Post by morningstar on Aug 11, 2014 5:05:06 GMT
This is like Reading the description in Revelation 13.
The Beast from the Earth
11 Then I saw another beast coming up out of the earth, and he had two horns like a lamb and spoke like a dragon. 12 And he exercises all the authority of the first beast in his presence, and causes the earth and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. 13 He performs great signs, so that he even makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men. 14 And he deceives those[e] who dwell on the earth by those signs which he was granted to do in the sight of the beast, telling those who dwell on the earth to make an image to the beast who was wounded by the sword and lived. 15 He was granted power to give breath to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak and cause as many as would not worship the image of the beast to be killed. 16 He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, 17 and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or[f] the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Medium.com
Francis’s Holy War
How this charismatic, radical pope keeps surprising the world—while secretly dividing the Catholic Church
By Alma Guillermoprieto
If you intend to be a proper Catholic priest, you would be wise to follow the little formalities of the church. When in Rome, for example, you are required to wear your cassock or at least a clergy shirt, and bishops and cardinals are expected to wear their flowing robes. But Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who was cardinal of Buenos Aires before he became known to the world as Pope Francis, hated pomp and ceremony and was not very proper at all. He kept his scarlet robes in a convent founded by an Argentine nun, so he wouldn’t have to carry the damn things back and forth to Vatican City. Before heading for a priests’ residence in central Rome he would stop by the convent, chat for a bit, and pick up the garments, which had been reverently pressed and folded for him by the nuns.
Bergoglio stopped at the convent one last time, last year in March, on his way to the historic conclave of 115 cardinals that would elect him the first Latin American pope and the first from the order of the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits. He must have had a very good idea of his chances. Little known beyond Argentina, he had nevertheless finished second in the vote that elected Benedict XVI in 2005. It was understood that he was an outlier, ascetic, unconventional to a fault, but he seemed to be the right kind of pope to clean up the world’s oldest and largest institution, hemorrhaging followers and riddled as it is with ancient vices, and bring it into the XXIst century.
What may not have been so clear to the cardinals who chose him above all others at that conclave is that Francis would enter the Vatican like Jesus into the Temple or a bull into a china shop, knocking over conventions and rules with abandon. And what stunned everyone was that, from the moment he stepped out on the balcony of St. Peter’s for the first time on that drizzly evening, he would channel a ravening hunger for change among millions of people all over the world. He certainly didn’t look like a world-changer. A mild-mannered, slightly stooped, grandfatherly old man dressed in simplest white—no lace and scarlet finery for him—he stood quietly contemplating the crowd for a very long minute before uttering a hearty buona sera! with a pronounced Argentine accent. The effort of bending forward to receive the people’s blessing made Francis’s back tremble slightly, and watching on a screen I, a non-Catholic, was moved, too.
A few weeks later, on a plane coming back from Brazil, he uttered his famous “who am I to judge” gays, and things started to move very fast.
What, really, can we make of this strange new pope? Hundreds of thousands of words have been written in the effort to understand him. He is without question the most popular human being alive today: Barack Obama gets an average of 1,300 retweets on his account; Pope Francis gets twenty thousand. Beyoncé, traveling from one city to another, fills an auditorium in each with twenty or forty-five thousand people. Francis, a 77-year-old who walks with a limp, has been filling St. Peter’s square every Wednesday morning with between eighty and a hundred thousand euphoric people.
“Who cares what that old man says?” a worldly friend of mine said recently. Well, a jillion Catholics do, not to mention a large number of Palestinians and Israelis who looked on in astonishment as Francis, with a series of shockingly simple gestures, preached a wordless sermon of tolerance in the Middle East in May. Smiling, kissing babies, embracing beggars, donning a fan’s baseball cap, saying plain things in plain Italian, scoffing at his own church’s obsession with sex, the pope seems to us intimate and sensible, affectionate, neighborly, instantly readable, radiating warmth. Jorge Mario Bergoglio is, no doubt, all of these things, and also, sometimes, positively odd.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL ARTICLE
Fair Use for Discussion Purposes.
The Beast from the Earth
11 Then I saw another beast coming up out of the earth, and he had two horns like a lamb and spoke like a dragon. 12 And he exercises all the authority of the first beast in his presence, and causes the earth and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. 13 He performs great signs, so that he even makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men. 14 And he deceives those[e] who dwell on the earth by those signs which he was granted to do in the sight of the beast, telling those who dwell on the earth to make an image to the beast who was wounded by the sword and lived. 15 He was granted power to give breath to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak and cause as many as would not worship the image of the beast to be killed. 16 He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, 17 and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or[f] the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Medium.com
Francis’s Holy War
How this charismatic, radical pope keeps surprising the world—while secretly dividing the Catholic Church
By Alma Guillermoprieto
If you intend to be a proper Catholic priest, you would be wise to follow the little formalities of the church. When in Rome, for example, you are required to wear your cassock or at least a clergy shirt, and bishops and cardinals are expected to wear their flowing robes. But Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who was cardinal of Buenos Aires before he became known to the world as Pope Francis, hated pomp and ceremony and was not very proper at all. He kept his scarlet robes in a convent founded by an Argentine nun, so he wouldn’t have to carry the damn things back and forth to Vatican City. Before heading for a priests’ residence in central Rome he would stop by the convent, chat for a bit, and pick up the garments, which had been reverently pressed and folded for him by the nuns.
Bergoglio stopped at the convent one last time, last year in March, on his way to the historic conclave of 115 cardinals that would elect him the first Latin American pope and the first from the order of the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits. He must have had a very good idea of his chances. Little known beyond Argentina, he had nevertheless finished second in the vote that elected Benedict XVI in 2005. It was understood that he was an outlier, ascetic, unconventional to a fault, but he seemed to be the right kind of pope to clean up the world’s oldest and largest institution, hemorrhaging followers and riddled as it is with ancient vices, and bring it into the XXIst century.
What may not have been so clear to the cardinals who chose him above all others at that conclave is that Francis would enter the Vatican like Jesus into the Temple or a bull into a china shop, knocking over conventions and rules with abandon. And what stunned everyone was that, from the moment he stepped out on the balcony of St. Peter’s for the first time on that drizzly evening, he would channel a ravening hunger for change among millions of people all over the world. He certainly didn’t look like a world-changer. A mild-mannered, slightly stooped, grandfatherly old man dressed in simplest white—no lace and scarlet finery for him—he stood quietly contemplating the crowd for a very long minute before uttering a hearty buona sera! with a pronounced Argentine accent. The effort of bending forward to receive the people’s blessing made Francis’s back tremble slightly, and watching on a screen I, a non-Catholic, was moved, too.
A few weeks later, on a plane coming back from Brazil, he uttered his famous “who am I to judge” gays, and things started to move very fast.
What, really, can we make of this strange new pope? Hundreds of thousands of words have been written in the effort to understand him. He is without question the most popular human being alive today: Barack Obama gets an average of 1,300 retweets on his account; Pope Francis gets twenty thousand. Beyoncé, traveling from one city to another, fills an auditorium in each with twenty or forty-five thousand people. Francis, a 77-year-old who walks with a limp, has been filling St. Peter’s square every Wednesday morning with between eighty and a hundred thousand euphoric people.
“Who cares what that old man says?” a worldly friend of mine said recently. Well, a jillion Catholics do, not to mention a large number of Palestinians and Israelis who looked on in astonishment as Francis, with a series of shockingly simple gestures, preached a wordless sermon of tolerance in the Middle East in May. Smiling, kissing babies, embracing beggars, donning a fan’s baseball cap, saying plain things in plain Italian, scoffing at his own church’s obsession with sex, the pope seems to us intimate and sensible, affectionate, neighborly, instantly readable, radiating warmth. Jorge Mario Bergoglio is, no doubt, all of these things, and also, sometimes, positively odd.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL ARTICLE
Fair Use for Discussion Purposes.
