Hating Pope Francis

Hi everyone,

 

A two post night tonight.  This is the first one.

 

I've been looking at a bit of the coverage of Pope Francis' visit to the United States.  I should know better than to look at the comments sections of a lot of the stories, because where people can comment more-or-less anonymously, it seems to bring out the absolute worst in them.

I genuinely don't understand the enmity that makes people say things like -

Welcome to The Roman Catholic Church whose clergy have elevated child molestation to an art form and now under the direction of a Socialist/Communist Pope is about to issue a papal bull that will establish an ecclesiastical tribunal and sponsor an inquisition for the suppression of Globull Warming heresy.

...

You will be required to attend U.N. sponsored Roman Catholic Socialist/Communist Reeducation Camps administered by the self-ordained and self-anointed U.N.High Priest Maurice Strong and the most holy reverend AL Gore and their minions of "SELF-FELLATIATING" lunatics and fanatics of the "CATASTROPHIC GLOBULL WARMING ORDER" where you will be indoctrinated in the delusional ideologies and lunacy of Liberalism, Progressivism, Marxism, Socialism and Communism and be required to listen to the endless and mindless drivel of these lunatics until you acquiesce and succumb to their Lunacy and atone for you egregious heretical and sinful beliefs!

 

It hurts for an rusted-on right winger like me to say it, but there's a strain of opinion now that would reject Jesus Himself if He were to return today, on the grounds that He was insufficiently conservative.  For my own part, I have seen nothing in the things Pope Francis has said and written that is cannot be traced to a belief that every person - however sinful - is stamped with the image of God.

 

"Tend my sheep?"

 

Surely no doctrine and no dogma that human wisdom can create is good, if it doesn't assume every person is the living image of God, and doesn't assume that the whole world shows the fingerprints of our Lord.

 

I may have been thinking about these things a bit too much lately, but I'm getting to think that the command that we must love one another has nothing much to do with what that does for other people.  I think it's probably about what it does to ourselves.