Conclave

[Alexander's Horse]

Originally posted by molly bloom

Converts have a great tendency to be even more ultra- whatever the prevailing tenets of their faith are

Ben Kenobi to note - which raises an interesting point - after conversion there should be some sort of novice period - come hither Grasshopper........

There is no doubt Paul had a few "hang ups" shall we say about sex because he talks about it a lot - Romans for example - whereas Jesus hardly talks about it at all. It could be said that Paul and others like him had much greater influence over church attitudes to sexuality than Jesus, as Molly points out.

Paul also does seems to have some very fond and close relationships with young male disciples, which he is quite open about. I'm not suggesting anything illicit but it does suggest something about his orientation. He hardly ever has anything good to say about women. Before he became a convert he also seems to have spent a lot of his time in the company of men as a pharisee, whose ritual cleanliness depended on avoidng or limiting contact with women.

Otoh Paul wrote some of the most soaring passages about love, Corinthians 13 for example, so it wasn't like he was like a complete misanthrope. And he did write quite tender letters, but as far as we know exclusively to men.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
I suggest you also look a little more closely at this particular bishop.

Recall this, also what Paul says:

Romans 1:24-7

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator–who is forever praised. Amen.

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.


We are always more inclined to look askance of our own sins, rather than the sins of others. That Paul so openly condemns these acts as perversion, is more evidence against this speculation that Paul had any of these desires.

Oh please, not another misunderstanding of Paul's letters to the Romans! Go back and read Romans 1 and 2 entirely. You'll find that Paul wrote them as a means of healing the rift between Jewish and gentile converts in the Roman congregation. They were not meant to be an encyclical against homosexuality. In fact, if you read just beyond the passages you cited you'll find Paul condeming violence, jealousy, bragging, pride, gossip and a number of other more mundane sins with equal alacrity, claiming that all of them deserve death. He then sets up the former Jews in the congregation by pointing out to them that the very pride they feel in their religion condemns them just as surely as if they were plowing the dirt road of the boy next door. Doing so he lowers them to equal status with their gentile co-parishoners and at the same time pronounces Christ's mission of salvation to both.

[Alexander's Horse]

well as a matter of fact I have my bible open because I'm not even sure its Romans is the part I was thinking of where he gets all hot and bothered about sex

[Alexander's Horse]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove

They were not meant to be an encyclical against homosexuality.

[Alexander's Horse]

ah yes, here it is, unnatural passions......

Hey Molly, you have unnatural passions son


uh huh...... men committing shameless acts with men.....

It rather makes it sounds like Paul was watching, he speaks with some authority

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by Alexander's Horse
ah yes, here it is, unnatural passions......

Hey Molly, you have unnatural passions son


uh huh...... men committing shameless acts with men.....

It rather makes it sounds like Paul was watching, he speaks with some authority

Hey, it was Rome. You know the old saying.................

[Alexander's Horse]

My bible has those cute little maps with the dotted journeys of Paul.

I always liked those, especially because Paul never seems to be able to go anywhere in a straight line and that fascinated me as a child.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

I thought this was a rather interesting evaluation of JPII and his impact on the church; From today's New York Times/International Herald-Tribune

The political pope: The price of infallibility
Thomas Cahill The New York Times
Wednesday, April 6, 2005

With the news media awash in encomiums to the indisputable greatness of Pope John Paul II, isn't it time to ask to which tradition he belonged?

Partisans unfamiliar with Christian history may judge this a strange question. Why, they may answer, he belonged to the Catholic tradition, of course.

But there is no single Catholic tradition; there are rather Catholic traditions, which range from the voluntary poverty of St. Francis of Assisi to the boundless greed of the Avignon popes, from the genial tolerance for diversity of Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century to the egomaniacal self-importance of Pope Pius IX in the 19th century, from the secrecy and plotting of Opus Dei to the openness and humane service of the Community of Sant'Egidio.

Over its 2,000-year history, Roman Catholicism has provided a fertile field for an immense variety of papal traditions.

Despite his choice of name, John Paul II shared little with his immediate predecessors. John Paul I lasted slightly more than a month, but in that time we were treated to a typical Italian of moderating tendencies, one who had even, before his election, congratulated the parents of the world's first test-tube baby - not a gesture that resonated with the church's fundamentalists, who still insist on holding the line against anything that smacks of tampering with nature, an intellectual construct far removed from what ordinary people mean by that word.

Paul VI, though painfully cautious, allowed the appointment of bishops (and especially archbishops and cardinals) who were the opposite of yes men, outspoken champions of the poor and oppressed and truly representative of the parts of the world they came from, like Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, who tried so hard at the end of his life to find common ground within a church rent by division.

In contrast, Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston rebuked the dying Bernardin for this effort because, as Law insisted, the church knows the truth and is therefore exempt from anything as undignified as dialogue.

Law, who had to resign after revelations that he had repeatedly allowed priests accused of sexual abuse to remain in the ministry while failing to inform either law enforcement officials or parishioners, must stand as the characteristic representative of John Paul II, protective of the church but often dismissive of the moral requirement to protect and cherish human beings.

John Paul II has been almost the polar opposite of John XXIII, who dragged Catholicism to confront 20th-century realities after the regressive policies of Pius IX, who had imposed the peculiar doctrine of papal infallibility on the First Vatican Council in 1870, and after the reign of terror inflicted by Pius X on Catholic theologians in the opening decades of the 20th century. Unfortunately, this pope was much closer to the traditions of Pius IX and Pius X than to his namesakes.

Instead of mitigating the absurdities of Vatican I's novel declaration of papal infallibility, a declaration that stemmed almost wholly from Pius IX's paranoia about the evils ranged against him in the modern world, John Paul II tried to further it.

In seeking to impose conformity of thought, he summoned prominent theologians like Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx and Leonardo Boff to inquiries and had his grand inquisitor, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, issue condemnations of their work.

But John Paul II's most lasting legacy to Catholicism will come from the episcopal appointments he made. In order to have been named a bishop, a priest must have been seen to be absolutely opposed to masturbation, premarital sex, birth control (including condoms used to prevent the spread of AIDS), abortion, divorce, homosexual relations, married priests, female priests and any hint of Marxism.

It is nearly impossible to find men who subscribe wholeheartedly to this entire catalogue of certitudes; as a result the ranks of the episcopate are filled with mindless sycophants and intellectual incompetents. The good priests have been passed over; and not a few, in their growing frustration as the pontificate of John Paul II stretched on, left the priesthood to seek fulfillment elsewhere.

The situation is dire. In the Western world, anyone can walk into a Catholic church on a Sunday and see pews, once filled to bursting, now sparsely populated with gray heads. And there is no other solution for the church but to begin again, as if it were the church of the catacombs, an oddball minority sect in a world of casual cruelty and unbending empire that gathered adherents because it was so unlike the surrounding society.

Back then, the church called itself by the Greek word ekklesia, the word the Athenians used for their wide open assembly, the world's first participatory democracy. (The Apostle Peter, to whom the Vatican awards the title of first pope, was one of many leaders in the primitive church, as far from an absolute monarch as could be, a man whose most salient characteristic was his frequent and humble confession that he was wrong.)

In using ekklesia to describe their church, the early Christians meant to emphasize that their society within a society acted not out of political power but only out of the power of love, love for all as equal children of God.

But they went much further than the Athenians, for they permitted no restrictions on participation: no citizens and noncitizens, no Greeks and non-Greeks, no patriarchs and submissive females. For, as St. Paul put it repeatedly, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; for all are one in Christ Jesus."

Sadly, John Paul II represented a different tradition, one of aggressive papalism. Whereas John XXIII endeavored simply to show the validity of church teaching rather than to issue condemnations, John Paul II was an enthusiastic condemner.

Yes, he will surely be remembered as one of the few great political figures of our age, a man of physical and moral courage more responsible than any other for bringing down the oppressive, antihuman Communism of Eastern Europe.

But he was not a great religious figure. How could he be? He may, in time to come, be credited with destroying his church.

Thomas Cahill is the author of ‘‘How the Irish Saved Civilization,’’ ‘‘Pope John XXIII’’ and, most recently, ‘‘Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter.’’

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Alexander's Horse
ah yes, here it is, unnatural passions......

Hey Molly, you have unnatural passions son

I've had them since I was three.Nothing unnatural about them as far as I'm concerned.


Me, I'll take the Roman dramatist over the anti-sex preachers any day:

"I am a man; and nothing human is alien to me."

Terence, 'Heauton Timoroumenos'

[Alexander's Horse]

yes Rufus - he was an utter disaster as a pastoral leader

the fact the Godless world loves him so much says a lot

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Alexander's Horse
yes Rufus - he was an utter disaster as a pastoral leader

the fact the Godless world loves him so much says a lot

Well, the fundies in Islam and the States seemed to like him. I didn't, but that's hardly a shock.

I think he was a good patoral leader if you were a conservative old fashioned Catholic but utter pants if you weren't.

[Alexander's Horse]

One thing that has been noted is he was quite the tolerant pluralist when it came to other religions but completely intolerant within his own flock.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Alexander's Horse
One thing that has been noted is he was quite the tolerant pluralist when it came to other religions but completely intolerant within his own flock.

Ahh, but that's the mystery and wonder of Roman Catholicism that other faiths can't understand.


Like how a Supreme Pontiff could sit by while a church hierarchy could actively shield people wanted in connection with war crimes in Rwanda/Burundi and child sex offenders, and yet get so worked up about family planning in Africa and homosexuality.

[DanS]

Especially for US priests because only 3% were involved but because the Hierarchy covered up, and the Vatican played a role in that, all American priests got tarred with the same brush.

It was the US conference of bishops that set up the policy. Unfortunately, the policy had wide currency among the bishops. The vatican didn't have that much, if any, input into the whole thing. This seems clear to me since the policy had not been replicated outside the US before the facade came crashing down.

[Colonâ„¢]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
Granted, the requirement of unmarried priests is one of tradition, but there are sound reasons behind this requirement.

It hearkens back to your earlier statement as to the theological basis. These issues have different roots, the celibacy rule rests on tradition, while the one forbidding female priests, upon theology.

In fact, one of the reasons I like the catholic church is that they deny men and women are interchangeable parts, rather each has their own function in the church.

Celibacy was introduced to stop clerical functions being passed from father to son, as those were heridetary in the medieval ages, breeding incompetence and corruption. It was a sound measure back then, but I don't think inherited offices are much of a concern in present society anymore.