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| Pope Francis |
It's heartwarming when someone, like Francis, idolized and worshipped throughout the world, eschews the pretentions and perks of their office to act like the common person they actually are.
Pope Francis has also been rightfully credited for taking a firm stand against sexual abuse perpetrated by priests.
Now, according to an Associated Press article, the pope is taking on the Italian mob.
Here are the pope's words to the mob:
"This life that you live now won't give you pleasure. It won't give you joy or happiness. Blood-stained money, blood-stained power, you can't bring it with you to your next life.
Repent, there's still time to not end up in hell, which is what awaits you if you continue on this path."
Are the regular and intermittent geysers of Yellowstone National Park heated by hellfire?
If there is such a hot prison at earth's core, it means it was included in the original design of the planet. The Great Engineer evidently planned on this planet, Earth, having an eternal punishment facility before he ever set it in orbit around the Sun. Evidently, wickedness was part of the plan, too, or at least anticipated.
As a kid I also heard that Satan or Lucifer, the devil, is sort of the warden of hell. Deft with a pitchfork, Satan keeps hell hot by tossing pitchfork loads of dried vegetation onto the fire. So Hell, already hot, can be made hotter.
What's a bit puzzling is that this Satan individual, has always worked against God, but at this facility, is working for him, to punish the wicked, those Satan formerly admired. Now, Satan is God's most trusted employee, carrying out threats God made over two centuries ago in a book the Gideon Society puts in most hotel rooms. God executes the sentence. Satan enforces it.
There must have been something in Satan's personality God admired, at least enough for God to want Satan as an employee. Maybe it was Satan's perseverance, sticktoitiveness, that God liked. Perhaps, it was a mutual thing and they both tired of butting heads.
In any event, according to Pope Francis, Hell will need to expand enough to include the incoming Italian mob.
For two weeks, Rolando Vela begged every morning for a motel room. Last Friday, he got his wish. Vela, his wife, and their two young children were bouncing between two recreation centers that the city had converted to makeshift shelters for a swelling population of homeless families. The conditions weren’t good. While most homeless families slept in private rooms at several motels that have become de facto overflow shelters, Vela’s family shared a basketball court with a dozen other families, separated by movable partitions that did little to create privacy or block noise. Until their very last night at the rec center, there were no showers available. Some families were able to duck into a friend or relative’s home for a shower periodically, but others, like Vela, did their best to wash up at the restroom sinks. For most of their stay, the lights were on all night, making sleep difficult. Stephanie, Vela's wife, says she and their daughter were bitten by bedbugs. Residents accuse the staff of handling their dinners with bare hands, and Vela says that one night last week, there was no dinner at all.
ReplyDeleteThe truth is that the mob, is the closest competitor for the church business, actually they both use the same procedures to rip people out of their money, Intimidation, treats and extortion, The mob treats you with bodily harm or death, the church treats you with eternal bodily harm(Burn in hell) Extorts your money with promises of eternal life in heaven (tithing)
ReplyDeleteWhy does the Vatican have its own bank? Google Banco Ambrosiano and you will get an answer. Where was our friend Francis when his fellow Argentine military were tossing people out of helicopters over the South Atlantic?
ReplyDeleteThe Pope didn't seem to mention the drug cartels, does that mean the cartels donate more money to the church. I have heard that valley priests are more than willing to accept money from the cartels and ignore their "profession". In my opinion, the churches should not have tax-free status. Like UT System, the church has amassed great wealth on the backs of poor citizens/congregationers.
ReplyDeleteThe matter of whether Texas's dreaded red light camera tickets are legal is in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. Javier Arenas, a retiree from Rancho Viejo, has been challenging $980 worth of right-turn, red light camera tickets he received in last year. The Texas Supreme Court declined to hear the case in December. So that opened the door for him to take the matter to the highest court in the land, which he did:
ReplyDeleteHe filed a request for a "writ of certiorari" in the case of Javier Arenas v. Texas. What that means is that the court can decide to take the case by granting "cert," or not. It has until April 18 to do so. If it does decide to hear the case, then it could decide for or against Arenas. The Supreme Court declines to hear a vast majority of these requests, so we shouldn't get our hopes up. However, Arenas says the case reflects a constitutional question about this contemporary, flashbulb justice: The Fourteenth Amendment says you have the right to confront your accuser. But how can you do so if your accuser is a camera? "You have to have a confrontation with the person accusing," the 70-year-old said.
Does the Vatican okay use of condoms? Just asking.
ReplyDeleteDags
I am a little bughouse on the subject of the Iran-Contra scandal -- and especially on the fact that most of its principal architects -- including Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush -- were allowed to skate away from crimes that were an order of magnitude worse than the crimes that cost Richard Nixon the White House. Moreover, the utter lack of accountability in the wake of the Iran-Contra revelations was the seedbed for most of what has gone wrong with the balance of powers, American foreign policy, and the courtier media ever since. Because we punished nobody for these crimes, we learned nothing from the preposterous hijacking of the country's foreign policy by, among other people, a congenital liar like Oliver North. Because we punished nobody for these crimes, we allowed many of the players involved, and a lot of the people (like Dick Cheney) who participated in the combination of obfuscation and sabotage that prevented a proper investigation, back into the government under President George W. Bush. They brought with them the absolutist view of the Executive branch that had been the foundation of the cover-up. Torture, the barbering of due process, and the Iraq War were the results. Because we punished nobody for these crimes, a poison was released into the American political system that is still there today. Because the press essentially rolled over on the possibility of punishing these crimes -- Mark Hertsgaard's On Bended Knee is the essential text on that phenomenon -- the profession embedded in itself a deference to actual power that continues to afflict it. (That Bill Clinton actually was impeached over what he actually was impeached over is a kind of historical funhouse mirror in which to view the crimes of Iran-Contra.) Every institution that was supposed to act as a safety valve against rogue criminality in the government failed utterly. The country and its government, quite simply, has never been the same. There are two books to read that do the best job of explaining how and why. One is Theodore Draper's A Very Thin Line. The other is Firewall, by Lawrence Walsh. Walsh, the Iran-Contra special prosecutor, died this week at the age of 102. He did the very best he could have done, considering the bungling of the Congress, the deception practiced by his targets under the color of the offices of the public trust that they did so much to dishonor, and the fact that the elite press showed the white feather every time the investigation got close to the Oval Office.
DeletePope Francis, coolest pope, has not made a statement regarding a package of cocaine that was intercepted by German authorities in January, but the all-white getup is starting to make some sense.
ReplyDeleteThe package, which was simply addressed to The Vatican post office, was seized in January with an "unremarkable" amount of cocaine, about 12 ounces stuffed in 14 condoms coming from South America. With only 800 residents in the Italian mini-state, speculation begins on who were these nose clams intended for?
Coke pope, coke pope.