But of course they also pray for the Pope's health and recovery. Its a double whammy directed his way - prayers and good medicine.

But they also know he won't live forever so one of the other major prayers in this case is for a "happy death." We had a nun who taught my class algebra in the 7th and 8th grade who always had us pray for a happy death. Icky for a 13 year old.

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Originally posted by Papal_Bull:
100s of millions are praying for his well being. I'm pretty sure the Vatican's higher ups and most RC priests are praying for him to get better.

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Originally posted by RealityBites:
You'd think it would tell them something about God's opinion of them.

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On the sixth day God turned to Archangel Gabriel and said: "Today I am going to create a land called Canada, it will be a land of outstanding natural beauty. It shall have tall majestic mountains full of mountain goats and eagles, beautiful sparkling lakes bountiful with bass and trout, forests full of elk and moose, high cliffs over-looking sandy beaches with an abundance of sea life, and rivers stocked with salmon."

God continued, "I shall make the land rich in oil so as to make the inhabitants prosper, I shall call these inhabitants Canadians, and they shall be known as the most friendly people on the earth."

"But Lord," asked Gabriel, "don't you think you are being too generous to these Canadians?"

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Catholics believe that God helps those that help themselves. Much of the doctrine and teaching on this issue holds that medical professionals are instruments of God and His work is done through their hands.

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Which shows how wise the hierarchy of the RC church is.

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:
Hmm. So if you pray to God to not let you get pregnant for the fifth time, then is it OK to "help yourself" a little with a condom??

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I can hear Magoo groaning already.

I think the world's several billion poorest living on a dollar a day might as well pray for prevention. Will the capitalist economic long run ever kick-in for them ?.

A Pinko prayer for today..

I'm glad we don't have to think about why we hate the Catholics, we can just make fun of a senile old spokesman and then mock all Catholics simply because they're Catholics. What idiots.

Listen: I'm no defender of the Catholic church's behaviour against homsexuals, birth-control or the criminal actions of some of their clergy. But when someone starts a thread whos sole purpose is to mock the futility of prayer, something that billions (and not just Catholics, or even Christians) do every day, I call that hateful, misguided and ignorant.

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Listen: I'm no defender of the Catholic church's behaviour against homsexuals, birth-control or the criminal actions of some of their clergy. But when someone starts a thread whos sole purpose is to mock the futility of prayer, something that billions (and not just Catholics, or even Christians) do every day, I call that hateful, misguided and ignorant.

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I didn't find the OP hateful, misguided, or ignorant, just a little sophmoric. Like, I don't think too many Catholics are gonna have their faith shaken to the foundation because someone on a message board points out that prayer doesn't automatically make the Pope immune from illness. That's the kind of earth-shattering "gotcha" you come up with in Grade 6 catechism class.

[ 14 March 2005: Message edited by: voice of the damned ]

[ 14 March 2005: Message edited by: swallow ]

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We don't need your thought control. No dark sarcasm in the class room.

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So how about some more pictures of your cat, Magoo ?.

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I would, but this thread has nothing to do with cats, so it would be inappropriate.

[ 14 March 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

[ 14 March 2005: Message edited by: Rufus Polson ]

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Thank God another clear-eyed socialist progressive has started another thread on those stupid Catholics who have the ignorance, folly and sightlessness to believe in God. Damn those Catholics and their "love thy neighbour" crap. Damn them and their "forgiveness."

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In that I'm the 'clear-eyed socialist' referred to I'll answer this.

If you took the time to read what I said you'd notice that there was nothing there about stupid catholics. It was specifically about the hierarchy of the church. It wasn't about stupidity, it was about cynicism. On the one hand, they carry on as a pious group who are only there to serve the Lord, yet they won't let the Lord deal with the pope as he/she wishes.

I'll admit, as a person who was raised in a religious household, I got a few axes to grind with religion as it is practised, and that level of cynicism is one of them.

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I'm glad we don't have to think about why we hate the Catholics, we can just make fun of a senile old spokesman and then mock all Catholics simply because they're Catholics. What idiots.

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Again, before engaging keyboard, put brain in gear. In both posts I was clear that I was talking about the church hierarchy. There was no mention of rank and file Catholics, stupid or otherwise.

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Listen: I'm no defender of the Catholic church's behaviour against homsexuals, birth-control or the criminal actions of some of their clergy. But when someone starts a thread whos sole purpose is to mock the futility of prayer, something that billions (and not just Catholics, or even Christians) do every day, I call that hateful, misguided and ignorant.

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You forgot the RC treatment of women in the things you're not defending.

Again, if you bother to read the posts you'll see that it was aimed at the RC church hierarchy. The extrapolation to the rest of the religious world is your extension, not mine.

What is hateful is when a religious bureaucracy dons piety as a cloak, in the interest of furthering their own cause, when they clearly don't believe it themselves.

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Hating Catholics does not make you progressive. Unfortunately, too many babblers seem to think it does.

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:
Hmm. So if you pray to God to not let you get pregnant for the fifth time, then is it OK to "help yourself" a little with a condom??

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Silly Magoo. God doesn't answer BAD prayers. It's BAD to not want as many children as God can squeeze out of you.

Silly, silly.

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Silly Magoo. God doesn't answer BAD prayers.

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I think most adult Christians, while some have progressed much further than others in their theological journey, would see the question that opened this thread as begging the question.

Why would you assume that the best possible outcome would be for the Pope to get over this illness? Why would you assume that it's God's plan to make holy people live forever, or to be illness or suffering-free? What makes you think that just because you pray for a certain outcome, that God will grant it? Wouldn't that make God a slave?

No Christian I've ever met, beyond the five year-olds in Sunday School (and not even them) believe that God is a wish-granting machine, and that if you're good you'll never suffer. And no one believes that God will just let you live forever and that you'll never suffer the effects of old age and death as long as enough people are praying for you.

May Karol be a source of inspiration and PRIDE* for a long time yet!

From the president of the Indian Rationalist Society:

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"The richest order in the world is not very generous, as it wants to teach them the charm of poverty.

"The suffering of the poor is something very beautiful and the world is being very much helped by the nobility of this example of misery and suffering," said Mother Teresa. Do we have to be grateful for this lecture of an eccentric billionaire?

The legend of her Homes for the Dying has moved the world to tears. Reality, however, is scandalous:

In the overcrowded and primitive little homes, many patients have to share a bed with others. Though there are many suffering from tuberculosis, AIDS and other highly infectious illnesses, hygiene is no concern.

The patients are treated with good words and insufficient (sometimes outdated) medicines, applied with old needles, washed in lukewarm water. One can hear the screams of people having maggots tweezered from their open wounds without pain relief.

On principle, strong painkillers are even in hard cases not given.

According to Mother Teresa's bizarre philosophy, it is "the most beautiful gift for a person that he can participate in the sufferings of Christ".

Once she tried to comfort a screaming sufferer: "You are suffering, that means Jesus is kissing you!"

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The Rolling Road To Sainthood - Mother Teresa

Did Mother Teresa of Calcutta really perform miracles? Whatever your views about miracles of any sort, it is worth looking at how the Vatican set her on a fast track to sainthood.

This began on 19 October in St Peter's Square, Rome, where, in front of a congregation of more than 250,000, Pope John Paul II beatified Mother Teresa just six years after she died.

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Mother Teresa refuses to give pain killers because pain is the 'the most beautiful gift for a person that he can participate in the sufferings of Christ'.

The Pope beatifies her.

Does the pope believe his own pain is a 'beautiful gift'. Apparently not.

Guess what: if you are criticizing prayer you are criticizing those who do it, whether or not you take 'great care' in just mentioning the church hierarchy. The cynical glee with which you started this otherwise completely pointless thread does not target just the hierarchy, it targets anyone who is praying for the pope, and by extension, anyone who is praying at all. You didn't attack the pope based on his policies, and you didn't attack the hierarchy based on their criminal activities.

Criticizing or challenging the assertion that prayer works, or even that there is a God around that answers prayers is not the same thing as hating those who believe it. Sorry, dude, but if your philosophical skin is that thin, then maybe you should stay away from the grown-up conversations, and stick to your kindergarten Sunday School class, where nobody ever contradicts any Christian beliefs or challenges any points of theology.

[ 15 March 2005: Message edited by: Michelle ]

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Originally posted by Hephaestion:
Ummm... isn't Mother Theresa part of the heirarchy? (Or, I guess I should say, *wasn't* she?)

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re: "From: Toronto the Divine"

The point is the hierarchy decided to cash in on her fame without concerning themselves with the details of her 'care' giving.

The pope himself is certainly of the hierarchy, and would certainly have known Mother Teresa's views on pain and suffering.

Of course, maybe he just looked at the fact that when it came down to it, she took advantage of the wonders of medicine that she denied to others.

Why should he be any different?

The overall point is that the RC church is a political organization, not a religious one. It has a huge bureaucracy that operates in the same way bureaucracies everywhere - self preservation above all else.

This doesn't mean all Catholics are bureaucrats, but those that aren't often find themselves at odds with those that are.

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Oscar Romero gave his last homily on March 24 (1980). Moments before a sharpshooter felled him, reflecting on scripture, he said,

"One must not love oneself so much, as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, and those that fend off danger will lose their lives."

The homily, however, that sealed his fate took place the day before when he took the terrifying step of publicly confronting the military.

...Romero was a surprise in history. The poor never expected him to take their side and the elites of church and state felt betrayed.

...Romero already understood the church is more than the hierarchy, Rome, theologians or clerics—more than an institution—but that night he experienced the people as church.

"God needs the people themselves," he said, "to save the world...The world of the poor teaches us that liberation will arrive only when the poor are not simply on the receiving end of hand-outs from governments or from the churches, but when they themselves are the masters and protagonists of their own struggle for liberation."

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It is a fact that Monsignor Romero had enemies within the Salvadorean Episcopate. One of the bishops went so far as to accuse Romero in front of the Pope, during the latter's visit to Salvador in 1996, of being responsible for the death of 70,000 Salvadoreans ...

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It was just a year after Romero was murdered that Mother Teresa visited Haiti:

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In 1981, she flew to Haiti to accept the Legion d'Honneur from Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. In return, she declared that the Duvaliers loved their poor, and that their love was reciprocated. (Shortly thereafter, the Duvaliers were forced to flee Haiti and live out their days in exile.)

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Both of these events happened while the current pope was on office.

Who does he choose to beatify? Mother Teresa, of course.

[ 15 March 2005: Message edited by: maestro ]

Please point to me where on this thread maestro attacked, with support, any actual heinous actions of the church. You won't find me attacking anything like that, if it was the case. Instead, we see a smug, self-congratulatory burn on those fool hierarchy who don't seem to see the utter pointlessness of their religion.

Michelle, maestro, you don't seem to see the connection I'm trying to draw between the hierarchy who prays, and the followers who pray. Why are the reasons the hierarchy prays more foolish than the rest of the devout? It shouldn't take much to show you that they both pray for the same reasons. Thus, if I criticize the reasons of one, I criticize the reasons of the other.

Or, let me put it this way: If I illogically mock women Liberal politicians for having screeching voices because I have issues with some of the policies they have passed, I cannot just say that I would like to constrain my attack to these women. By extension, I have made a hateful remark not only against women of power in other political parties, but likely to women of power everywhere. I don't think you would call this philosophically thin skinned.

What concerns me about threads like this (the latest in a long line on babble) is how so-called progressives cheerfully line up to take shots at catholics. Often without reason, or actual argument. Again...please ask yourself why this thread is in "humanities & science." If it was a joke, I would imagine it would be in "banter." But, apparently maestro had a point to prove, and I remain patient as to what that elusive point may be.

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Your arguments are immature, ignorant, groundless and hateful. That's all.

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Catchfire 2:

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And, Michelle, in the future, I would appreciate less vitriol from you until I have directed such towards you.

I think I have been civil, and expect to be treated in kind, even on an internet message board.

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Please read post re: Oscar Romero and Mother Teresa, and differing treatment by hierarchy of church (specifically as their separate situations were addressed by the current pope).

Respectfully yours,

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Originally posted by Catchfire:
And, Michelle, in the future, I would appreciate less vitriol from you until I have directed such towards you. I think I have been civil, and expect to be treated in kind, even on an internet message board.

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Tough shit.

You wrote:

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Your arguments are immature, ignorant, groundless and hateful. That's all.

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Which is complete and utter bullshit. Which you spewed. I stand by my comments.

Throughout this thread, your main point seems to be how ignorant and hateful those who criticize the Catholic church hierarchy are. You repeatedly called someone's posts "hateful" - I called your post "bullshit". I don't give a damn whether you wrote it so politely that you decorated it with roses. It's like the Middle East forum - when people come along and call other posters anti-semites, it doesn't matter how prettily and politely they dress it up - bottom line is, they're still calling someone an anti-semite, and that's what makes it bullshit.

I suggest that if you don't want to be called on your bullshit, then maybe you should think twice before spewing it.

[ 16 March 2005: Message edited by: Michelle ]

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What concerns me about threads like this (the latest in a long line on babble) is how so-called progressives cheerfully line up to take shots at catholics. Often without reason, or actual argument. Again...please ask yourself why this thread is in "humanities & science." If it was a joke, I would imagine it would be in "banter." But, apparently maestro had a point to prove, and I remain patient as to what that elusive point may be.

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It seems to me that maestro's point is: the Catholic hierarchy are a bunch of poo-poo heads. Personally i think the opening post was fairly staightforward baiting, but the thread's had some good jokes. And a bad one by me (sorry, skdadl! mea culpa, mea maxima....)

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On beatification: i always thought it had something to do with rhythm in music. Keep the beat, Theresa of Avila! Shake it!

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Kinda reminds me of the SCTV skit where Andrea Martin is dressed up as a nun doing tours of the vatican, and doing a little sing-song schtick that is a take-off on what's-her-face, that "singing nun" that was well-known once upon a time...

"Souvenir-a nir-a nir-a,
Only 15,000 lire,
Oh you can get them
Here-a..."

(made me laff then; still does now)

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(I thought the same thing about the rhythm method, actually.)

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Well, isn't it a good thing that we don't have to worry about you using it as a contraceptive method! (which I understand is not that successful even if you are *not* trying to dance to it!)

Also reminds me of a few years ago in the Book of Lists they had the 10 Weirdest Letters Ever Received by Ann Landers (as chosen by Ann herself), and one of them was from a woman who was trying to learn all the latest dance steps and was wondering if Ann could help her track down info on the ellusive "rhythm method"...

*cocked eyebrow*

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Originally posted by Michelle:
Also, it's not "hateful" to disagree with the Catholic church about points of theology such as whether or not prayer works.

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This is certainly true, Michelle. But it is, however, hateful to mock it, especially with the implicit glee that opened this thread. It is immature to equate prayer with some sort of "wish-giving" power. It is ignorant to think that if you mock prayer of the church hierarchy and the reasons they do it, you are somehow not mocking everyone else who prays for the same reason. Somehow, you don't see this connection, or even address it. It is groundless to criticize a religion (that is not hateful: many of its practitioners are, including its hierarchy, but these are not the same thing: a point babblers repeatedly miss) on this faulty connection. My adjectives were accurate, though perhaps a bit ill-advised, seeing as how you seem to feel justified in calling them bullshit (without, once again, addressing the content of my posts.)

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Originally posted by Catchfire:
If the intent was to show what a bunch of homophobic, misogynist, powerhungry bunch of assholes the Vatican's inner circle are, or even an attempt to discredit Mother Teresa, perhaps there was a less insulting, more accurate way to start this thread.

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Problem is, it isn't just limited to "the Vatican's inner circle"...

[ 16 March 2005: Message edited by: Hephaestion ]

They are utterly cynical.

And when a real live christian shows up in their midst (Oscar Romero) they do their best to discredit and defame, not only the living Romero, but the dead one as well.

At the same time they find it politic to cash in on the 'fame' of Mother Teresa, even when they knew what a self-righteous loony bin she was.

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Originally posted by maestro:
Catchfire has apparently missed the point entirely.

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I dunno. I just don't think he was expecting a kind of Spanish Inquisition.

(JARRING CHORD)

(The door flies open and Cardinal Ximinez of Spain (Palin) enters, flanked by two junior cardinals. Cardinal Biggles (Jones) has goggles pushed over his forehead. Cardinal Fang (Gilliam) is just Cardinal Fang)

Ximinez:
NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise....
Our two weapons are fear and surprise... and ruthless efficiency....
Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...
and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope....
Our four... no...
Amongst our weapons... Amongst our weaponry...
are such elements as fear, surprise...
I'll come in again.

(Exit and exeunt)

Chapman:
I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.

(JARRING CHORD)

(The cardinals burst in)

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Originally posted by Lena:
It will be our collective loss when he joins the saints and martyrs in heaven.

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What if this place is just a learning phase of what is a larger scheme scheme of things for us ?. What if pain and suffering were unavoidable, even for, I dunno, "Her" ?.