What a coincidence! Just as hundreds of millions of people have been vaccinated and millions more to come shortly:

Quote:Pope Francis launches a month-long prayer marathon to hasten the end of the coronavirus pandemic with a prayer at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican before some 150 believers.

https://news.yahoo.com/pope-embarks-pray...33452.html

That the Pope and Church should descend into this sort of lunacy does not surprise me. 

Ha, ha! In your face, pope.

Quote:100 German Catholic Churches to Issue Same-Sex Blessings, Defying Vatican

This move goes against a document released in March by the Vatican's orthodoxy office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, that said Catholic clergy cannot bless same-sex unions because God "cannot bless sin." The blessings for same-sex couples at worship services will begin May 16 in Berlin and will be led by the Reverend Jan Korditschke, a Jesuit.

"I am convinced that homosexual orientation is not bad, nor is homosexual love a sin," Korditschke told the Associated Press this past Friday. "I want to celebrate the love of homosexuals with these blessings because the love of homosexuals is something good."

He said he was not afraid of possible repercussions by high-ranking church officials or the Vatican.

"I stand behind what I am doing, though it is painful for me that I cannot do it in tune with the church leadership," Korditschke, 44, said, adding that "the homophobia of my church makes me angry and I am ashamed of it."

Germany's powerful lay organization, the Central Committee of German Catholics, or ZdK, which has been advocating for gay blessings since 2015, positioned itself once more in favor of them.

The ZdK has been taking part in the "synodal path" meetings for more than a year with the German Bishops Conference. They are due to conclude in the fall. The meetings include talks about allowing priests to get married, the ordination of women and a different understanding of sexuality, among other reforms. The process was launched as part of the response to revelations of clergy sexual abuse.

"We're struggling in Germany with a lot of seriousness and intensive theological discourses for the right path," Mock added. "Things cannot continue the way they did—this is what the crimes and cover-ups of sexual abuse showed us."

https://www.newsweek.com/100-german-cath...0068?amp=1

(May 3, 2021 at 12:27 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote:

This is more American than an American flag bra wearing pair of sentient boobs wielding a Sawed-off Shotgun. XD

Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times, on the idea that Mother Teresa was a cult leader: “Viewed through a contemporary, secular lens, a community built around a charismatic founder and dedicated to the lionization of suffering and the annihilation of female selfhood doesn’t seem blessed and ethereal. It seems sinister.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/opini...eresa.html

On Deathbed, Catholic Priest Implies He Murdered Altar Boy in 1972

In 1972, a 13-year-old altar boy named Danny Croteau was found dead in a river in Massachusetts. At the time, the priest he worked for, Richard R. Lavigne, was a suspect — and for good reason, as explained by the Boston Globe:

The day after Danny's body was found, Lavigne was spotted walking alone along the riverbank as police surveyed the crime scene. When questioned, Lavigne posed a chilling question.
[...]

Law enforcement officials estimate that Lavigne molested more than 250 people from the 1960s through the 1990s, [attorney John] Stobierski said. During civil proceedings, it was revealed that secret files detailing complaints against Lavigne and other priests had been destroyed by two bishops, Thomas Dupre and Christopher Weldon, who were both later implicated in the clergy sexual abuse scandal, he said. Both men are now deceased.

https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021...y-in-1972/

In the New York Times, Jamie Manson, president of Catholics for Choice, lays out exactly what’s going on with the Church’s fierce opposition to reproductive freedom:

Quote:Unlike other religious leaders, members of the Catholic clergy, as an all-male, celibate group, do not have wives or daughters to give them a sense of women’s experience. Yet their pervasive theology shapes policies that cause women untold suffering. It’s the basis for the hierarchy’s demand that a woman be forced to carry a pregnancy to term, even one that resulted from rape or one that threatens her life. It’s also the specter that makes women forgo hysterectomies because, we are told, it’s better to endure suffering than lose the possibility of giving birth. Women, in other words, are reduced to vessels, one in which the potential, theoretical life that might be is privileged over the living, breathing person at risk.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/opini...rtion.html

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The Vatican caught stealing

Quote:2019, Rome street artist Alessia Babrow glued a stylized image of Christ she had made onto a bridge near the Vatican. A year later, she was shocked to learn that the Vatican had apparently used a reproduction of the image, which featured Babrow’s hallmark heart emblazoned across Christ’s chest, as its 2020 Easter postage stamp.

Babrow sued the Vatican city-state’s telecommunications office in a Rome court last month, alleging it was wrongfully profiting off her creativity and violating the intent of her artwork. The lawsuit, which is seeking nearly 130,000 euros ($160,000) in damages, said the Vatican never responded officially to Babrow’s attempts to negotiate a settlement after she discovered it had used her image without consent and sold it.

https://apnews.com/article/europe-busine...908fdb2301

Pro-lifers kill again

Quote:Indigenous Canadian group calls for Catholic Church apology after Canada mass grave of children find

Discovery of the remains of 215 children, some as young as three, found buried at the site of a former residential school has renewed calls for the Roman Catholic Church to apologize for its role in Canada's policy of the 19th and 20th centuries that saw Indigenous children removed from families to attend state-funded residential schools.

First Nation Chief Rosanne Casimir said in a later statement that more bodies could be uncovered as not all areas had been searched at the Kamloops Indian Residential School — which the Catholic Church ran from 1890 to 1969 before the Canadian government took over its administration until the school's closure in 1978.

The Roman Catholic Church has declined to apologize for its role in what Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission found in 2015 to be cultural genocide, despite Trudeau writing to Pope Francis to ask for one.

https://www.axios.com/canada-school-site...325e7.html