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The Wonderful World of Pope Francis
So Pope Francis has really got the media machine moving... merely because he exists.
I understand that a lot of it has to do with tapping into your expanded bases while leaving the ones that aren't working anymore, and that I shouldn't really be too surprised by how the Catholic PR machine but it's really infecting everything else.
Mostly; he's said he isn't judging gay people (and that was immediately corrected to "What I really meant was nothing." and even before that it was still a "So come on down, convert and be straight!" situation), still doesn't believe women have a place in the Catholic church, still believes divorce is not that much of a gray area as all marriages can work out or something and as the pièce de résistance, says individual Catholic churches should deal with their own pedophilia issues because Vatican City isn't an authority on them (but it's okay that they receive such cases and then cover them up instead of reporting them).
I'm just honestly very sick of all this. I mean, Rolling Stone put him on their cover and that wasn't too bad since they'll do anything but TIME did too and I kind of like my PR propaganda pop-tart-ey and not dangerous.
Comments
Tangentially related: I remember reading about some activists preferring Benedict to John Paul, because while both popes were of the same opinion on the relevant issue, the latter had always had a good rep so it was harder to argue against him.
Eh, TIME's Person of the Year lost me when they picked Barack Obama over Malala Yousafzai. Incidentally, Pope Francis does resemble Obama in public image compared to actual results.
One of the worst aspects of this, to me, is the Catholic Church's refusal to progress. Large, powerful organisations are bound to suffer from inertia, but it's gotten to the point of insanity; the Church would rather espouse its ideology than taking up its potential to be of service to the broader human population. A good example is the scandal concerning contraception in Africa. Catholic dogma might teach that contraception is wrong, and that's all well and good in a Western context without STD epidemics. It seems like a really simple calculation to me -- what does God like less? Contraception, or a multitude of deaths that could have been easily avoided with the correct measures in place?
While the Catholic Church is generally viewed as an organisation set in its ways, this was never quite so true as it has been in recent history. It's ironic; the Church's devotion to its current dogma is consigning it to eventual irrelevance and preventing it from being of much actual good. We're talking about an organisation that was once a supporter of arts and sciences, after all, and we can thank it for the preservation of any number of important historical documents. But in retreating from a world that's moving ever more quickly forward, it's failing to uphold some of the most relevant traits of its former self.
Not that the historical Church hasn't had its problems and major clusterfucks, mind, but it was once a partner of its times -- not exclusively an anchor to a previous one. But I suppose the Church was simply never designed for a globalised world. That's a shame, given the amount of money it has stashed away that could be used to contribute to the living conditions of many people. I get the tendency to hoard wealth, given that capital generates capital in our contemporary system, and that produces more money for potential altrustic ventures. But again, it's all kind of mad, as I said above; ideology must take a back seat to functionality, and the Catholic Church would be dead if not for the inertia of its influence.
This is the one thing that drives me nuts, stupid cognitive dissonance. I mean, when people talk of how the church is so dogmatic as to fail in the face of contraception and child abuse. All I can dig up in my catholic upbringing and jesuit schooling is "Help those in need." With a very big NO STRINGS ATTACHED neon light hovering over it. I mean, I'm really liking Pope Francis still but eh.
I think of it this way: Pope Francis isn't a non-asshole (wrt social issues). He's just less of an asshole than past popes.
Yet I see Tumblr, for example, acting like he's a savior of sorts, which is ironic considering Tumblr is home to various demographics that the RCC traditionally frowns upon (e.g. women, the LGBTQIA+ community).
this is my hetero cismale privilege talking but. What all those things after T in LGBTQIA+ mean? and why do they keep adding to it?
Queer*, Intersex, Asexual etc
Probably why they got rid of him in the first place.
For some reason I always believed Tumblr-style SJWs did lots of obsessive research before stuff. I'm kind of disappointed that that's not true.
It's kind of gotten too big to fail from anything it actually does at this point, because it's practically as big as Christmas when it comes to how we view the modern world and as I said PR can make anything look pretty nowadays (Compare Nigeria to Uganda; despite both of them having the exact same laws on homosexuality, Nigeria did not condone the "right" kind of child abuse, so everyone's okay with them doing whatever, and their laws didn't get much press coverage because the oil industry doesn't want any politicians making Nigerian officials angry).
*I will give you Queer as a hipster catch-all term unless it's specified to something like "Genderqueer", but the rest do deserve to be there.
Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual.
Intersex I get, Queer I get, but Asexual being a discriminated sexual orientation group? How does that work?
Apparently, people don't believe they exist.
Being ignored is also a form of discrimination.
The belief that it doesn't exist can be a tad more insidious than it sounds. There's the peer pressure to get laid or else you're a freak, and probably also parents who want kids that nag their offspring incessantly, and even lesbian/gay folks who insist the asexual person is actually closeted and doesn't dare to say it. Not really any systematic violence, but it can probably take its toll mentally.
"For some reason I always believed Tumblr-style SJWs did lots of obsessive research before stuff."
They probably did. Within their own echo chamber.
I think of Pope Francis as making progress, but still needing to make much more of it. It's 2014 and the RCC still has any number of beliefs that stopped making sense decades or centuries ago.