Damned Catholics

[Fake Messiah]

The artist Bordalo II entered, this Thursday, the restricted and strictly guarded space of Parque Tejo, in Lisbon, and extended a 30-meter treadmill stamped with 500-euro banknotes on the altar staircase where Pope Francis will be, within the scope of World Youth Day ( WYD ).

The work, called "Habemus Pasta", aims to be a social criticism of the country for all the money that has directed to this religious event that takes place in the capital next month. The action, which the artist published on the social network Instagram, is called "Walk of Shame" ( in Portuguese, Passadeira da Vergonha ).

https://www.cmjornal.pt/mais-cm/especiai...ar-do-papa

[Fake Messiah]

Sinead O'Connor 'made Ireland a different place' by speaking out about Catholic church abuse

A woman who suffered abuse in one of the same institutions as Sinead O’Connor said the singer “made Ireland a different place” by speaking out on church and state exploitation.

Sinead spoke openly about abuse she faced in a Magdalene laundry as a teenager, where she spent more than a year. A guard of honour was made for the late singer by survivors as her funeral procession passed by her former Bray home.

Maureen Sullivan, who came to see the funeral procession, said she was one of the thousands of women incarcerated in the institutions. She said she was put into the laundry at age 12 after being abused by a family member.

She added: “I’m a survivor of the Magdalene laundry ... and I done four years in these places, trafficked from one to the other.”

Some of those gathered at the funeral held signs highlighting the exploitation that many children faced in Irish church and state institutions. Sinead ignited vitriol when she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in 1992, in protest against abuse in the Catholic Church.

Ms Sullivan said the singer highlighting the problem so publicly in the face of such intense backlash gave survivors strength.

She added: “It gave us all courage, it gave us all strength. She gave strength to so many women. And the only thing I feel so sad about was the way she was treated in Ireland, I think that people should have supported her more. So my hope for her is that she has gone into the light, and I hope she’s in a better place because she deserves it.”

https://www.dublinlive.ie/news/celebs/si...t-27484044

[Fake Messiah]

Pope Blasts American Catholics for Putting Political Ideology Above Faith

He was responding to a Portuguese Jesuit who said that he had seen Catholics critical of the pope's leadership during a year-long sabbatical in the United States.

Francis has received criticism from some conservative sectors of the U.S. Catholic Church who oppose reforms, including making the church more welcoming and less judgmental towards some, including the LGBTQ+ community.

"You have been to the United States and you say you have felt a climate of closure. Yes, this climate can be experienced in some situations. But in this way, the true tradition is lost and one turns to ideologies for support. In other words, ideology replaces faith, belonging to a sector of the Church replaces belonging to the Church."

https://www.newsweek.com/pope-francis-us...th-1822802


And what exactly does it mean to be "welcoming and less judgmental towards the LGBTQ+" in the Catholic church? Does this mean that priests should allow them to be part of the congregation or does it just mean that priests should not hold hate speech against them? And what about Ratzinger's policy of not allowing gay men to become priests--is that still on?

[LinuxGal]

German Synodal Path has paved the way for reform of Catholic Church practices regarding same-sex couples and lay preaching

It is increasingly clear that the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church have a worldwide dimension. Victims have spoken out on every continent. And this has plunged the church into crisis in many regions.

[Fake Messiah]

Pope slammed for telling Russians to hold on to ‘legacy’ of a ‘great empire’

Pope Francis has come under fire after he encouraged Russian youths not to give up their “legacy” as heirs of a “great, enlightened Russian empire.”

During the speech, a clip of which was posted online, the pope also invoked former Russian emperors Peter I and Catherine II, two rulers who played key roles in expanding Russia’s conquests in Europe, and who are known as symbols of Russian imperialism.

“You are the heirs of the great Russia: the great Russia of saints, of kings, the great Russia of Peter the Great, of Catherine II, of that great, enlightened Russian empire, of great culture and great humanity,” he said.

https://www.politico.eu/article/pope-fra...cy-empire/

[Fake Messiah]

I was sent to a Magdalene Laundry when I was 12 – the abuse I suffered there was pure evil

Maureen Sullivan spent almost five years of her childhood in the notorious Irish institution. Now, at 71, she is speaking out, despite some defenders of the Catholic Church still wanting her to stay silent.

A priest was called, mystery conversations took place, and Sullivan was instead told she was going to “a lovely new school” in New Ross, Wexford, 34 miles away from home in Carlow, a school where she’d also be living. Her mother listened to the nuns and the local priest, and nervously took their instruction. Off Sullivan went.

That “lovely new school” turned out to be a Magdalene Laundry, also known as a Magdalene Asylum, an Irish institution run by the Catholic Church from 1922 to 1996, to house “fallen women”, an estimated 30,000 of whom were confined to these notorious homes, a dark past that Ireland is still reckoning with.

From that day in 1965 onwards, Sullivan, now 71, one of the youngest known survivors of a laundry, never saw her school books again. She says she was forced to clean clothes and scrub floors night and day, seven days a week for no pay, beaten, and prevented from speaking. Her hair was chopped off and she was given a new name, Frances.

She didn’t know this as a child, but now believes that names were changed so that the survivors would “never know each other on the outside, never find each other, so we’d have to stay silent, and the rot would be covered up.”

Sullivan also didn’t know at the age of 12, that other women around her were victims of rape and sexual assault – like her. There were also women deemed too flirtatious or promiscuous, some women with disabilities or special needs, many women deemed at odds with societal expectations.

These homes were similar institutions to the “mother-and-baby” homes for women who had babies out of wedlock, and another way that the Catholic Church and the Irish state regulated behaviour that was perceived as deviant. By the 50s, one per cent of Ireland’s population was contained in institutions of coercive confinement.

“The nuns watched me work to the bone,” Sullivan tells i, her gentle tone simmering with a quiet fury. “I was doing hard penance as if I was a sinner. I was ostracised in every way, punished for the crime my stepfather committed against me. He was left at home, in the family and in society still, to go on and abuse others. It was thought that abuse like I’d experienced should be covered up, hidden away.

“I was given no books, pens, or paper. I spent those years without having a conversation. I saw my mother a handful of times over the next five years,” she recalls. Sullivan and the fellow girls and women in the laundries were referred to as “penitents”: a person who seeks forgiveness for their sins.

“It was horrendous and cruel that I went from being abused, to more abuse,” says Sullivan. “What they did to me is pure evil. I can’t find any other word for it.”

“The laundry wasn’t a refuge, it was a prison, and we were treated as slaves. Everything we did was for the church’s profit, but we got nothing,” she says. “The laundry would pile in every day from hotels, restaurants and the armies, plus churches, and the priests. I cleaned, washed and ironed it all from morning until night.”

She remembers being slapped around the face when she dropped a bucket of water by accident, being dug in the ribs with a crucifix if she so much as looked at anyone else, and often went without being given water, so would have to drink what she could from the sink in the toilets.

“For a while I kept asking the nuns when I’d be going to school, whether I could have the pencil case back that my mother had given me, where the classroom was. I didn’t understand where I was, or why I was there. Nobody ever explained it to me.” After two years, Sullivan was, as she puts it, “trafficked” to another laundry – this time, an institution for blind women, where she was allowed to speak to the women, but was still working seven days a week without pay.

In 1993, Sullivan – who is still afraid of the dark and has lamps on in every corner of her home – saw the breaking news that 155 unmarked graves had been uncovered in the convent grounds of one of the laundries. “It gave me strength,” she says. She joined a laundry survivor group. “We began asking a lot of questions, and started talking openly, which of course the Church denied,” she says.

https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/sent...il-2579512

[zebo-the-fat]

The catholic church is simply evil at it's base

[Fake Messiah]

Pope on a tank with the letter Z: Polish weekly mocked Russian Federation's playing along on new cover





The reason for the mockery was the pope's speech, which he proclaimed in a teleconference with participants of the All-Russian Meeting of Catholic Youth in St. Petersburg.

In particular, the pontiff addressed Russian citizens, calling them "descendants of the great Russia" and urging them never to forget their heritage. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry reacted to these scandalous statements by the pontiff. The ministry expressed annoyance that the head of the Catholic Church promotes Russian imperialism.

"It is very disappointing that Russian great-power ideas, which, in fact, are the cause of Russia's chronic aggressiveness, consciously or unconsciously, are heard from the mouth of the Pope, whose mission, in our understanding, is precisely to open the eyes of Russian youth to the destructive course of the current Russian leadership," emphasized Foreign Ministry spokesman Oleg Nikolenko.

https://eng.obozrevatel.com/section-worl...-2023.html

[Fake Messiah]

Letter sent by Jesuit priest to Holy See in 1942 confirms Vatican was well briefed on Nazi genocide programme. Letter details 6000 Jews/Poles gassed daily and refutes Vatican narrative it couldn’t verify reports of atrocities to condemn them. ⁦

As you know, the silence of Pius XII in the face of mass crimes of the Third Reich has long been the subject of heated discussions between the critics and defenders of Pope Eugenio Pacelli: his beatification process is also at stake, started in 1967 and highly controversial within the Catholic Church itself.

An important turning point occurred on March 2, 2020, with the long-awaited opening of the archives: today all the documents relating to the pontificate of Pius XII, which lasted from 1939 to 1958, are available. The availability of that vast material has obviously allowed scholars to intensify their work to better clarify the events relating to the behavior of the Pope.

At this point, however, there is no doubt that during the Second World War, while more and more detailed information arrived at the Vatican on the atrocities carried out by the Nazis, Pius XII preferred to keep silent, or at best to express his punishment in general terms.

https://www.corriere.it/cultura/23_sette...6594.shtml

[LinuxGal]