Damned Catholics

[Fake Messiah]

The RCC could get them back with meaningful reform, but just keeping their donations coming doesn't advance the cause of reform.

Yeah why don't they reform to stop being lying egomaniac criminal club who wants to rule over people's lives and rape their kids?

But also if they tried to do some reforms that people are expecting them to do, like letting girls be priests or to allow gay people to get married then maybe they would lose more sheep than gain ones because there are many Catholics who wouldn't approve and go away, like after Vatican II reform which created Sedes Catholics who refuse to listen mass that is not in Latin, bow to Pope, and similar nonsense.
Not to mention that if women could be priests then a woman could be a Pope which would really drive out many sheep.

[Gwaithmir]

Catholic schools have faced tough times for years in the U.S., but closures are accelerating amid economic fallout from the coronavirus. The National Catholic Educational Association says about 100 schools have announced that they won’t reopen this fall. Number could more than double in the coming months.

https://apnews.com/4fe7bd56c238888d9842760236502453

Having had the better part of my childhood ruined by 12½ years attending Catholic schools, all I can say is, "Good riddance!" I hope every Catholic school in the country is forced out of business. 

[Pat Mustard]

Catholic schools have faced tough times for years in the U.S., but closures are accelerating amid economic fallout from the coronavirus. The National Catholic Educational Association says about 100 schools have announced that they won’t reopen this fall. Number could more than double in the coming months.

https://apnews.com/4fe7bd56c238888d9842760236502453

Awwww, my heart bleeds for them.

---

I don't see why Catholics who really do have an issue with the RCC's pedophile priest issues don't switch to a similar denomination with priests that have more accountability; like Episcopalians, or schism off an American Catholic Church with better safeguards against it. The RCC could get them back with meaningful reform, but just keeping their donations coming doesn't advance the cause of reform.

Because as we are rapidly finding out, pretty much all religious sects are finding they have the same paedophile problem as the rcc does.

[Fake Messiah]

Indiana priest slurs Black Lives Matter as ‘maggots and parasites’ trying to create a ‘new species of human’

Father Theodore Rothrock, of St. Elizabeth Seton Catholic Church in Carmel, denounced the civil rights movement and the destruction of monuments honoring Confederate leaders and other historic figures.

“They are wolves in wolves clothing, masked thieves and bandits, seeking only to devour the life of the poor and profit from the fear of others. They are maggots and parasites at best, feeding off the isolation of addiction and broken families, and offering to replace and current frustration and anxiety with more misery and greater resentment.”

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/06/indiana...human/amp/

[Fake Messiah]

Germany: Catholic Church sees record drop in membership

More than half a million people officially left the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany in 2019, new figures show. Just over half the population now belongs to one of the two main denominations.

Germany's top Catholic body said Friday that a record 272,771 people left the country's Catholic Church in 2019, and that the number of baptisms and weddings taking place in churches also dropped sharply.

The number compares with some 216,000 people canceling their membership in 2018, and beats the previous record of around 218,000 in 2014 by a large margin.

The chairman of the German Bishops' Conference, Georg Bätzing, said the statistics could not be made to look good in any way and that the drop in baptism and wedding ceremonies showed the "erosion of a personal attachment to the church" particularly clearly.

Churches in Germany also suffer financially when they lose members, as a church tax is deducted from people's incomes if they are registered as being either Catholic or Protestant.

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-catholic-c...a-53959392

[Fake Messiah]

This is a good chronicle how certain figures are used to oppress people by erecting their statues and people's fight against it. This time it's a statue of a catholic saint who oppressed Natives

Toppling the Myth of saint Junípero Serra

That evening, protesters pulled down a bronze statue that had stood 30 feet high over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for more than a century, spattering it with red paint.

The 1907 monument was a tribute to Father Junípero Serra: the 18th century Franciscan priest who presided over the colonizing Spanish mission system in California that resulted in the decimation of the Indigenous population, and who was made a saint by Pope Francis in 2015. Monuments to Ulysses S. Grant and Francis Scott Key, who both enslaved Black people, were also pulled down in the park that night.

And this past July 4, another statue of Serra was torn down in Sacramento’s Capitol Park by protesters following a day of peaceful marches by demonstrators aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement. The same day, Indigenous activists joined forces with Black Lives Matter organizers for a march in Los Angeles, calling for unity and decrying the historical 'sins' of the United States.

As statues of colonizers are brought down around California — mirroring actions against Confederate monuments further east — Serra remains a particular focus. And for years, he's been a reviled figure among many Indigenous people for his leadership over a system that resulted in the incalculable loss of Native lives, and forever altered the Indigenous way of life in California.

When it comes to Serra, this is a fight that has been sustained by Indigenous activists for decades. 

In 1768, Serra traveled north to California, and founded a string of missions stretching from San Diego to San Francisco.

If members of a nearby Indigenous tribe were baptized, they were then brought into a mission where they were ordered to abandon many aspects of their culture and customs, and forced into labor — and prevented from leaving. Anyone who tried to escape the mission was subject to being hunted down and brought back.

The Native people in Serra’s missions were subjected to physical punishments like whippings and beating, which Serra himself justified in 1780, writing "that spiritual fathers should punish their sons, the Indians, with blows appears to be as old as the conquest of [the Americas]; so general in fact that the saints do not seem to be any exception to the rule."

Thousands of Indigenous people in the missions died from exposure to European diseases and from the brutal labor they were forced to perform. It was the discovery of the missions’ birth and death rolls — and the revelation that more Native people died under Serra’s system than were born — that sparked a more widespread re-evaluation of his legacy in the 20th century.

"Here we were enslaved in the missions, and whipped and beaten," says Greg Sarris. "Up to 90% of the population [was] decimated, from which we never really recovered."

The missions “were concentration camps,” said Corine Fairbanks of the American Indian Movement Southern California in 2015, ahead of a protest at Serra’s canonization at the Carmel mission. “They were places of death.”

“Serra did not just bring us Christianity,” said academic Deborah Miranda, a member of the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation and author of “Bad Indians”, in 2015. “He imposed it, giving us no choice in the matter. He did incalculable damage to a whole culture.”

In 2015, Pope Francis announced his decision to make Junípero Serra a saint. The news was met with outrage in California, with protests taking place in San Francisco’s Mission Dolores, Mission Carmel and Mission San Juan Bautista.

An Indigenous-authored petition urging the pope to reconsider the canonization received over 11,000 signatures, stating that “it is imperative he is enlightened to understand that Father Serra was responsible for the deception, exploitation, oppression, enslavement and genocide of thousands of Indigenous Californians, ultimately resulting in the largest ethnic cleansing in North America.”

A week after the canonization, a statue of Serra in Monterey was decapitated. Two years later in Santa Barbara, another Serra monument at the city's mission was also decapitated and covered with red paint.

https://www.kqed.org/news/11826151/how-d...pero-serra

[Gwaithmir]

I can recall when the Postal Service issued a Junipero Serra commemorative stamp in 1985. Even back then I couldn't help thinking that maybe they should issue one featuring Adolph Eichmann too. 

[Fake Messiah]

This just gets crazier and crazier as you read it, as is usually the case when it comes to Pope and his idiots living in the Vatican

Vatican-recognized exorcists’ group offers guidelines for ‘quality control’

ROME – A Vatican-recognized group of exorcists has issued a new handbook for practitioners of the Church’s ritual to combat demonic possession, among other things insisting that authority to perform exorcisms belongs exclusively to priests assigned by their diocesan bishop and no one else.

According to figures from the group, the move comes in response to a perception that there are too many rogue operators, both clerical and lay, who claim to perform exorcisms but who aren’t authorized to do so.

The decision to make the guidelines public, according to the statement, was motivated by a desire to “bring order to the questions about diabolic action and liberation from it, in order to avoid falling into dangerous deceptions and illusions.”

The guidelines warn that unauthorized priests and laity who attempt to perform exorcisms without authorization actually may open the door to further demonic influence over the people they’re trying to help.

The guidelines also cite particular behaviors which may become the occasion for demonic influence over people, including superstition and the practice of witchcraft.

https://cruxnow.com/church-in-europe/202...y-control/

[Abaddon_ire]

This just gets crazier and crazier as you read it, as is usually the case when it comes to Pope and his idiots living in the Vatican

Vatican-recognized exorcists’ group offers guidelines for ‘quality control’

ROME – A Vatican-recognized group of exorcists has issued a new handbook for practitioners of the Church’s ritual to combat demonic possession, among other things insisting that authority to perform exorcisms belongs exclusively to priests assigned by their diocesan bishop and no one else.

According to figures from the group, the move comes in response to a perception that there are too many rogue operators, both clerical and lay, who claim to perform exorcisms but who aren’t authorized to do so.

The decision to make the guidelines public, according to the statement, was motivated by a desire to “bring order to the questions about diabolic action and liberation from it, in order to avoid falling into dangerous deceptions and illusions.”

The guidelines warn that unauthorized priests and laity who attempt to perform exorcisms without authorization actually may open the door to further demonic influence over the people they’re trying to help.

The guidelines also cite particular behaviors which may become the occasion for demonic influence over people, including superstition and the practice of witchcraft.

https://cruxnow.com/church-in-europe/202...y-control/

Fit right in with the RCC attempts to arrogate authority for itself over everything and anything. It's what they do. It's what they want. Back in the day, one would tug the forelock and say "Yes, sir".

Now it is "Piss off with that lunacy". Exorcisms and demonic possession? Cop on with that crap.

Somehow, the various priests, Rabbis, Imams and what have you failed to realise that their authority is spent. Their "flocks " are all wandering off into a desert of individualised peculiar beliefs over which they have no control and they have no clue how to deal with that.

Although it is amusing to watch them make the attempt.

[Gwaithmir]

Catholic doctrines and practices are so stupid that nothing the Church does surprises me anymore.