Damned Catholics

[Fake Messiah]

How Catholic bishops fail their country

Two prelates played prominent roles at the inauguration of President Trump. One seized the opportunity to speak truth to power; the other did not.

Rev. Marian Budde minced no words, speaking directly to the new president seated just a few feet away.

But Budde’s courage stands in marked contrast to Cardinal Dolan’s silence, even after Trump fulfilled his pledge to go after undocumented immigrants, even in churches and schools.

The silence is nothing unusual. As a Catholic feminist, I’m ashamed to say that the voices of Catholic leaders, whose flock includes about 30 million Catholic voters, have largely been missing in the struggle to save America’s soul.

That’s because for too many Catholic bishops, the marginalized and vulnerable have one key failing: they’ve already been born.

Why didn’t the bishops raise the alarm much sooner when Catholic voters might have paid attention? Because the bishops are focused on one issue — opposition to abortion.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) made that clear in its 2024 voters’ guide. Candidates’ positions on abortion should be the “pre-eminent priority” for Catholics.

In 2024, more than six out of 10 devout white Catholics — 64% — preferred Trump over Kamala Harris. Latino Catholics voted for Harris, but by much smaller margins than for Joe Biden in 2020. Overall, 53% of Catholics supported Trump.

Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the head of the USCCB, issued a statement on the Trump executive orders that was the bare minimum one would expect from the Catholic Church. He deemed the executive orders on immigrants and refugees, foreign aid and the death penalty, “deeply troubling,” but praised Trump’s order recognizing two biological sexes, male and female.

Most prelates will go to bat for the “pre-born.” Their passion for life declines dramatically after delivery.

https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/01/25/h...r-country/

[Fake Messiah]

‘Disgusting’: New Orleans archbishop condemned over food bank firings

The way that the archbishop of New Orleans’ Roman Catholic archdiocese fired leaders at a church-affiliated food bank Thursday has angered many congregants of the bankrupt organization.

A statement released on behalf of some of the ousted leaders said they had been removed for refusing to send the archdiocese up to $16m to pay settlements for child molestation committed by Catholic clergy.

Like so many others in the community, retired political strategist Sidney Arroyo said he was livid when he heard the news. He said he had worked closely with Jayroe and others at Second Harvest to help raise $15m for the food bank over the years.

“And this is what the archbishop wants to dip into as a money pot for the pedophile priests? I think that’s not only unacceptable, I think it’s disgusting.”

Arroyo says Second Harvest is bound by contracts with its major donors, such as Feeding America and the MacKenzie Scott foundation, which recently awarded the food bank $25m. He said that money could be in jeopardy if it is used for paying abuse settlements.

James Adams knows a thing or two about serving on a non-profit board controlled by the archbishop. He was president of the Catholic Community Foundation – the New Orleans archdiocese’s fundraising arm – until 2020, when he said he was pressured to step down shortly after he filed a lawsuit alleging a priest sexually abused him as a child.

He went on to represent fellow abuse survivors in the archdiocese’s bankruptcy case. He says none of the 500 molestation claims filed in that case have anything to do with Second Harvest, so he always found it strange that the archdiocese listed Second Harvest among its affiliates that might have to contribute to settling the bankruptcy.

“Taking money that’s specifically given to help feed those who are the poorest among us, those who are facing food insecurity, those who are hungry, taking money that’s earmarked for that, and using it to pay for the actions of pedophile priests is absolutely in direct contrast to the teachings of Christ, direct contrast to what we should be doing as church,” Adams said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...-food-bank

[Fake Messiah]

Oh no, a man goes on a rampage in one of the basilicas and in just a few seconds breaks candelabra worth $31,000.

Rome - A man has caused minor damage at St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican after jumping onto the main altar and knocking over 19th-century candelabra, worth several thousand dollars.

The suspect is from Romania and the candelabra he knocked down are worth €30,000 ($31,000), Italian news agency Ansa reported.

A Vatican spokesman told the agency that the incident involved a person with a “serious mental disability, who has been detained by the Vatican Police and then placed at the disposal of the Italian authorities.”

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/08/trave...index.html

Jesus did warn them: "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal."

[Mister Agenda]

The world might benefit from some Robin Hoods evening things out between the RCC and the poor.

[Fake Messiah]

How did the Catholic church go so wrong?

A little-remembered gathering might have changed everything, a new book argues

To critics the Catholic church, which claims over 1.3bn followers, is irony incarnate. It was founded by a man who advocated poverty; yet its last pope, Benedict, wore filigree gold crosses and tailor-made shirts at several hundred dollars a pop. The Catholic church long declared homosexuality a “depravity”, yet a study published in 1990 estimated that perhaps a fifth of American priests were gay. It is run by celibate men, yet its priests find time to rule, in Latin, on everything from whether one should use condoms (non) to whether masturbation is a sin (ita vero).

What it did not find time to do was to stop the abuse of children by Catholic priests. A church founded by a man who instructed his followers to “suffer little children” is therefore now better known for making children suffer: in France alone an estimated 200,000 children were abused by priests between 1950 and 2020.

The classmates of Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), who died in 2022, used to play a parlour game: who was the worst pope? Was it Sergius III, who assassinated his predecessors, or Alexander VI, who held orgies at which prepubescent boys jumped out of cakes?

Modern histories pay less attention to popes, for many reasons. Partly it is because popes matter less. It is also a matter of taste: secular, modern histories tend to focus on secular, modern powers and on rulers whose reach is geographical rather than spiritual. Popes may also be ignored because they sometimes seem so silly. They wear dresses and funny hats. They travel in a popemobile. Until relatively recently the pope’s minions included two men whose job it was to follow him and fan him with ostrich feathers.

Though Vatican's bureaucracy might not be as riveting as misbehaving medieval popes, it matters. At the heart of the book is an ecumenical council, which convened in the 1960s, at the behest of a liberal and reformist pope, John XXIII, to consider “updating” the church. It was known as Vatican II. Had it succeeded it would have revolutionised the church’s attitudes to everything from birth control to divorce, homosexuality and heresy.

It did not. John died. The reforms that followed were footling, not revolutionary. Latin mass was ditched. New musical choices were allowed. As Tom Lehrer, a satirist, observed, Catholics could now “Do whatever steps you want if/ You have cleared them with the pontiff”. Though, as Mr Lehrer said, if the church “really wants to sell the product”, its reforms should have gone further. This gripping and damning book shows how, over the course of the next five popes, they did not.

https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/0...o-so-wrong

[Fake Messiah]

Here are some of the Catholic bishops who enslaved Black people in America

Less explored has been the involvement of the highest echelons of the Church hierarchy in the trafficking of human flesh from Africa to the New World. Indeed, many Catholic bishops were participants in the trade and exploitation of Black bodies, though historians are in many ways still picking up the pieces.

The first European contact with what would become the United States was in the Virgin Islands and in Puerto Rico. Enslaved Africans were brought in chains to the latter during the early 1500s. Slavery would continue on in Puerto Rico for nearly four centuries, with a number of prelates taking part.

The Spanish bishop Alonso Manso, who headed the Diocese of Puerto Rico from 1511 to 1539, was among them, as were his successors in Bishops Juan Damián López de Haro, OSST and Manuel Jiménez Pérez, OSB. Other Catholic prelates were also slaveholders in Puerto Rico, but records are not always clear on the specifics.

Bishop John Carroll, SJ was the first Catholic prelate there, appointed Bishop of Baltimore in 1789. He founded Georgetown University, supported the use of enslaved labor in building the school, and personally owned at least two enslaved African Americans, one of whom he later sold. His immediate successors as archbishop, Leonard Neale, SJ and Ambrose Maréchal, PSS, were also traffickers, as was Samuel Eccleston, PSS.

The Diocese of Bardstown, which covered all of what was then the United States west of the Appalachian Mountains, was also home to slaveholding prelates: Bishops Benedict Flaget, a Sulpician who later became Bishop of Louisville in 1841, and Martin John Spalding, who became Archbishop of Baltimore during the Civil War. Both were vocal critics of abolitionism and worked to justify slaveholding even on a moral and theological level.

The Diocese of Cincinnati was carved out from Bardstown in 1821, with the Dominican prelate Edward Fenwick as its first head. Near the historic St. Rose Priory in Springfield, Kentucky, he had previously run the College of St. Thomas Aquinas, where future Confederate president Jefferson Davis was one of the first students. Fenwick himself inherited enslaved persons from his father, later growing the number to at least 19. His successor, Bishop John Baptist Purcell, likely owned African Americans while serving as president of Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland.

Unsurprisingly, antebellum Catholic bishops in the Deep South generally supported slavery, though usually as a domestic reality rather than an international inevitability. Among them was Bishop John England of Charleston, who claimed to hate slavery but facilitated its endurance. His successors, Ignatius Reynolds and Patrick Lynch, continued the practice and enslaved people directly.

In the Spanish Diocese of Louisiana and the Two Floridas, Bishop Louis DuBourg likewise engaged in the slave trade even while unsuccessfully attempting to take his episcopal seat in New Orleans. Rejected by his flock, he instead anchored his cathedral in St. Louis, then a part of his ecclesiastical territory. Later recalled to France, he was succeeded in Missouri by the Vincentian priest Joseph Rosati, another slaveholder, who became Bishop of St. Louis in 1827. The enslaver Peter Kenrick became archbishop in 1847.

(The Vatican originally intended that Rosati be succeeded by John Timon, who is also believed to have been a trafficker. He rejected the appointment, however, and later became the first Bishop of Buffalo.)

Numerous Catholic institutions across the country continue to bear the names of Catholic bishops who directly participated in slavery, including universities, high schools, student halls, historical landmarks, and even a diocesan seminary. Some bishops have intervened to block historians from uncovering the full history of slaveholding in their diocesan archives.

https://www.blackcatholicmessenger.org/s...n-america/