Here was not only a god, but the God who loved humanity, rather than one
who toyed with them as pawns like the Greek gods and goddesses. In
Christianity, humanity was not disposable; and Jesus died for creation,
as opposed to the people dying to please the gods. In this way, the
Christian God was radically different.
If only it were so simple.
As myths telling tales of disposable humanity go, the reality has been that since the time of Christ a staggering number of human beings, roughly 50 billion, have died on planet Earth.
What has been the purpose of all those lives and of all those deaths? Have those been radically different in comparison with the more than 50 billion who lived and died before Jesus ever arrived on the scene?
One can argue convincingly that our lives have been better on balance, but hundreds of millions have come and gone in the Christian era itself who have suffered just as miserably as those who had come and gone before. And in the world right now the leading cause of death is abortion, some 70 million every year. None of them will ever be impressed by our home decor, and we will be disposed of as surely as they have been, but not soon enough for our crimes.
People recoil from reality and tell themselves tales to explain it and cope with it. Christians have been no exception, and have done the very same thing with their own religion. They have shunned the real content of their own scriptures which tell a different tale from the one encapsulated by the simple promise of everlasting life in John 3:16.
That was the tale of the good news for the few and the bad news for the many.
Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. ... Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. ... Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able.
... There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham,
and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God, and
you yourselves thrust out.
-- Luke 13:3,5,24,28
And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man.
They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in
marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the flood
came, and destroyed them all.
Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded;
But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all.
Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.
-- Luke 17:26ff.
This exclusive tale failed, and the world went on living and dying as before.
To cope with the failure, the Christians themselves replaced the way of the few with the inclusive way for the many which we now hear everywhere at Christmas since the first century. The former was falsified by events, but the latter is unfalsifiable because it is by definition beyond our ken. Some die and go to heaven. Some die and go to hell. It cannot be proven, but it also cannot be disproven. It is therefore the best of myths. It is durable. It helps people cope with the ugly facts of life and death. It gives hope to one third of the world's population, 2.38 billion people, the world's largest and most widespread religion, or so Artificial Intelligence tells me.
And if somehow I am wrong and this tale is in fact found to be falsifiable in some way some day, I am confident we will replace it again, because we are nothing if not myth-makers. We are not radically different, even if our God is. We are deceitful above all things.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that
whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
-- John 3:16
I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the
faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.
The miracle at the French Marian shrine actually occurred in 1923, but what is important, you see, is that the Lourdes Bureau confirmed it in 1926. But because of communication difficulties, the Archbishop of Liverpool never got the necessary documentation until now.
The subject had lost use of his right arm, suffered from epileptic seizures, and had partial paralysis in his legs due to "medical treatment" after being wounded in 1915 during the Great War. He was "immediately, instantly" cured by immersion in the waters of the spring at Lourdes, on the third day of a pilgrimage, of course.
“And John Traynor is the first case of healing of an English-speaking
patient,” de Franciscis said. “Most of the miracles are French. There
are Italians too, a Belgian and a German. But there were not any English
speakers yet.”
“I am personally sensitive to this,” the doctor
concluded with a smile. “I myself am Italian, born in Naples, but of an
American mother, from Connecticut!”
A Brookings analysis earlier this year by University of Pennsylvania professor John DiLulio noted that Hillary Clinton lost theoverall white Catholic voteby 33 points in 2016, but four years later, Biden cut that deficit in half, losing by only 15 points.
The story never once mentions that J. D. Vance, Trump's running mate, is a 2019 convert to the Catholic faith and might represent as big a challenge for Harris as her abortion advocacy and her grilling of "a Catholic judicial nominee about whether he could remain impartial due to his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a respected Catholic fraternal organization".
I was expecting a juicy exposé of 2019 Catholic convert J. D. Vance's radicalism in Paul Elie's "J. D. Vance's Radical Religion" for TheNewYorker, here, but all you get is disappointment and dark insinuation.
If you are hoping to find out if Vance fasts for Lent, makes pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guadalupe, or goes to daily Latin Mass, you won't.
It's mostly an essay specializing in ideological assumptions and guilt by association, written from the sneering point of view of the illiberal ethos which can't believe there is still a religion in America which is thoroughly pro-life in its commitment to the unborn and the elderly, and committed to the sanctity of marriage between men and women.
For example, Paul Elie insinuates that Vance is a "conservative Catholic" just like Supreme Court justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, but never tells us exactly how. Therefore we should be afraid of a coming "top-down ordering of society . . . enshrined through regime change" if Vance advances to the executive branch and cooperates with this Supreme Court cabal.
We're not told what kind of Catholics are justices Roberts and Gorsuch, either, not to mention Sotomayor, or how the other four form a conspiracy against the American nation.
For Paul Elie, what it seems to come down to is that Vance is too buddy buddy with people like Patrick Deneen, whom he asserts to be anti-democratic without evidence:
In 2023, Vance took part in a discussion at the
Catholic University of America with the Notre Dame political scientist
Patrick Deneen, an advocate of “post-liberalism,” which, he explains in
his books “Why Liberalism Failed” and “Regime Change,”
is the view that liberalism has become an “invasive progressive
tyranny” and so must be replaced by “a conservatism that conserves.”
Vance greeted Deneen with a bear hug; during the discussion, Politico reported,
Vance “identified himself as a member of the ‘postliberal right’ and
said that he views his role in Congress as ‘explicitly anti-regime.’ ” ...
For Deneen, post-liberalism involves elevating “leaders who are part of
the elite but see themselves as ‘class traitors’ ready to act as
‘stewards and caretakers of the common good’ ”—and to enact their views
on abortion, marriage and divorce, euthanasia, the free exercise of
religion, and other issues without the constraints of legal precedent or
the democratic process. Evidently, Vance fits the bill. After learning
of Trump’s choice of running mate, Deneen, in a statement, called Vance
“a man of deep personal faith and integrity, a devoted family man, a
generous friend, and a genuine patriot.”
I'm not a fan of the Catholic integralists, nor of the broad influence of Catholicism at the expense of the nation's historic conservative Protestant character either, but I'm not particularly afraid of them, just as I am not afraid of the Christian nationalists.
Mostly they are amusingly grandiose.
These groups represent a reaction to illiberalism, which is what this is really all about. The radicals are the so-called liberals who like to read Paul Elie and subscribe to TheNewYorker, who want to suppress speech and suppress religion and its influence and suppress everything about this country's past. This country is about freedom, and freedom is really messy, which is why ideologues of the left and right have so, so much to say against it.
Freedom really ticks them off.
I'm thoroughly confident that these idealists can blather on all they want and that the American people are still not going to submit to their religious tests for citizenship on the one hand, let alone to their pope on the other.
"If you can be convinced that you cannot defeat Donald Trump, will you stand down?" Stephanopoulos asked. "It depends on -- on if the Lord Almighty comes down and tells me that, I might do that," Biden said.
Like Joe's so important God himself would come down so to instruct him in the first place, and Joe could still say no.
At midday, O king, I saw in the way a light from heaven, above the
brightness of the sun, shining round about me and them which journeyed
with me. ... Whereupon, O king Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision: . . ..
Cardinal Robert Sarah, who formerly served as the Catholic Church’s
Prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of
the Sacraments, gave a lecture
titled “The Catholic Church’s Enduring Answer to the Practical Atheism
of Our Age” at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.,
last week. During his remarks, Sarah echoed the analysis
of Cardinal Wilton Gregory of the Archdiocese of Washington by
describing Biden as a “self-identified Catholic president” who amounts
to a “cafeteria Catholic.”
Sarah, a Guinean prelate who has emerged as one of the more outspoken
conservative voices within Catholic Church leadership, suggested that
the phenomenon of “cafeteria Catholics” extends beyond the president and
applies to many other “Catholic public officials.”
In Brazil, a boy named Mattheus was healed from a serious birth defect
called an annular pancreas after he and his mother asked Acutis to pray
for his healing. ... Mattheus was born in 2009 with a serious condition that caused him
difficulty eating and serious abdominal pain. He was unable to keep any
food in his stomach, and vomited constantly. ... Fr. Nicola Gori, the priest responsible for promoting Acutis’ sainthood cause, told Italian media what happened next: “On October 12, 2013, seven years
after Carlo's death, a child, affected by a congenital malformation
(annular pancreas), when it was his turn to touch the picture of the
future blessed, expressed a singular wish, like a prayer: 'I wish I
could stop vomiting so much.' Healing began immediately, to the point
that the physiology of the organ in question changed,” Fr. Gori said.
When Matheus got home, he ate beef and French fries and did not vomit
afterward. His mother later testified that this was the first time in
his entire life that this happened.
At the next ultrasound scan, the
doctor confirmed that the morphology of the pancreas has completely
changed and become normal. One doctor declared that it was now a
textbook pancreas, an organ that was so perfect that it looked unreal.
When Father Tenório saw Matheus’ tests, he reported the facts to the
postulator of the beatification of Carlo Acutis.
An abdominal X-ray of a patient with an annular pancreas will show the double-bubble sign, indicative of duodenal obstruction. Ultrasound, which is the first-line examination in the investigation of abdominal pain in children, reveals a fluid-distended duodenum and can identify the second duodenal portion incarcerated by pancreatic tissue. On computed tomography, pancreatic tissue surrounding the duodenum can also be seen. In most cases, endoscopy is also performed.
However, it should be borne in mind that even if the radiological and endoscopic findings both suggest an annular pancreas, the definitive diagnosis is established only during surgery. In patients with symptoms of obstruction, laparotomy can reveal a band of pancreatic tissue surrounding the second portion of the duodenum, supporting the diagnostic hypothesis, which can be confirmed by examining the resected specimen.
John of God 'monster' making millions with barbaric surgery and 'blessed' pills
Mark Saunokonoko
Dec 18, 2018
The
controversial John Faria has worked as a celebrity faith healer for the
last four decades in a small town in central Brazil, becoming widely
known as John of God.
He became famous for conducting "psychic surgeries" that he said could
cure diseases, including cancer. Thousands of Australians, many
terminally ill or suffering from debilitating sicknesses, have
reportedly visited Mr Faria's compound deep in Brazil's interior.
Mr Faria's critics have argued the faith healer is nothing more than a
charlatan, fleecing the vulnerable for millions of dollars.
One of the accusers is Mr Faria's adult daughter, Dalva Teixeira. She
called him a "monster", while others have claimed he molested them as
children. Mr Faria has strenuously denied the allegations of more than
300 accusers.
Oprah Winfrey famously visited Mr Faria in 2012 to feature him in an
episode of her massively popular worldwide syndicated show. Afterwards,
Mr Faria's questionable star rocketed to dangerous new heights.
In a since-deleted column on oprah.com,
Winfrey wrote that she was overwhelmed by the experience of seeing Mr
Faria cut into the breast of a woman without anaesthesia and that she
left feeling "an overwhelming sense of peace".
Yesterday, in a statement to Reuters, Winfrey said: "I empathise with the women now coming forward and hope justice is served."
Oprah's peaceful experience watching Mr Faria wield his scalpel was
markedly different to Australian reporter Michael Usher, who along with a
60 Minutes crew was invited inside the self-styled healer's compound in 2014.
Usher said it was hugely unsettling to watch Mr Faria use scalpels to
slice open peoples' flesh or scrape away at their eyeballs, none of it
done with an anaesthetic. That Mr Faria would shove scissors down the
noses of ill people who sought his help left Usher distressed.
"John of God is not a surgeon, he is not a trained doctor," Usher said after the 60 Minutes segment aired.
"Yet he is presented with a tray of medical instruments, scalpels and
all sorts of scissors. He takes a scalpel and scrapes eyes. He sticks
knives and scalpels of some sort down the back of people's throats. He
shoves scissors down people's noses, and he claims he is getting to
tumours. He claims he is getting to the root of people's illness. He
claims he is getting to what is making people ill or sick. None of it is
done with an anaesthetic and you don't even know if what he is using is
sterile."
According to 60 Minutes, Mr Faria's
faith healing compound, which has been visited by supermodel Naomi
Campbell and Brazilian footballer Ronaldo, has made tens of millions of
dollars. In 2014, a Fairfax report stated 18,000 Australians had
journeyed to see Faria. The self-styled healer has claimed to have
treated millions of people.
John of God has boasted he is blessed with healing powers from a divine
"Entity". He claimed the entity can cure the blind, the paraplegic, the
cancer-stricken and other illnesses.
"I can understand why people search for spirituality," Usher said of the
thousands flocking to Mr Faria, despite long-circulating rumours of
sexual abuse and his unscientific and barbaric medical techniques.
"I can understand people's faith. I understand how powerful hope is.
What I cannot tolerate is someone like John Faria taking advantage of
people who only have hope left."
Located in Abadiania, 130km south-west of the capital city of Brasilia,
Mr Faria's compound, Casa de Dom Inacio, is filled with people from
Brazil and hopeful visitors from around the world wearing all white.
Neutral clothing makes the wearer more open to healing energy, according
to believers.
Usher said there were no miracles to be found in the compound, just exploitation.
Meeting John of God is free. But he has built a multi-million-dollar enterprise through other strategies.
On the compound he prescribes his visitors sessions on crystal beds,
which cost $25 per session. The crystal beds, which appear to be a kind
of sunbed projecting light through crystals, are believed to earn Mr
Faria $1.8 million a year.
Blessed water is sold for $1 in standard plastic bottles. From a
Faria-run pharmacy, blessed herbal pills are selling for $25 a bottle.
It is estimated the blessed pill generates $40,000 a day, more than $14
million in a year.
An Australian doctor who travelled with 60 Minutes tested the pills, which he found to be simple passionflower herbal supplements.
When Usher sat down with Mr Faria, several of the faith healer's minders
stood close by. Asked if his practice was more about money than
miracles, the interview was quickly shut down. Walking away from the
cameras, Mr Faria ignored questions about alleged sexual abuse.
The most recent allegations which led to Mr Faria handing himself into police surfaced last week.
Several individuals appeared on Brazilian Globo Television show
to recount charges that he had been sexually violent with them or
relatives. After that, authorities were contacted by more than 300 other
accusers, including de Faria's adult daughter, Dalva Teixeira.
In an interview published by Brazilian magazine Veja,
Ms Teixeira said that under the pretense of mystical treatments he
abused and raped his daughter between the ages of 10 and 14.
She said her father stopped after she became pregnant by one of his
employees. Ms Teixeira said she was beaten so severely by her father
that she suffered a miscarriage.
"My father is a monster," she said.
It is unknown how many Australians, if any, may have lodged complaints
with Brazilian police or could have been potentially abused by him.
One of Mr Faria's biggest supporters is an Australian man named Robert Pellegrino-Estrich.
In 2000, Mr Pellegrino-Estrich wrote The Miracle Man,
a book documenting the supposed healing powers of Mr Faria. The book,
said to be available in 16 languages, is seen as being instrumental in
raising awareness of Mr Faria around the world.
Mr Pellegrino-Estrich currently lives in Brazil, and he has for many
years been paid by Australians who use his travel advisory services to
assist their visit to Faria's centre.
Nine.com.au contacted Mr Pellegrino-Estrich for comment, but he did not respond.
Australians have not always had to make the pilgrimage to Brazil to meet Mr Faria.
In 2014, despite concerns from NSW Fair Trading, the John of God
roadshow rolled into Sydney, where an estimated 6000 people paid $295
for a day ticket, or $795 for the full three-day experience.
Candida Moss, here for the Jesuits, thinks that the biblical hell begins as a relatively late product of Greek influence from the time of Alexander the Great, and that in keeping with later Catholic reflection is a temporary place of punishment and purgation, not of eternal damnation.
Evidently Hitler does go to heaven, but he will be the very last one out of hell, on that you may rely.
Her essay does a better job of explaining how the later Catholic idea of purgatory reflects the actual awful material conditions of Roman penal and slave experience in late antiquity than it does of explaining the gospels' language. In the end the pope's hope that hell one day will be empty is "surely right", according to Moss.
In the middle of those Greek and Roman historical bookends, however, lies the New Testament language about hell. And it is just weird how Moss is so perfunctorily dismissive of that language. She hardly treats of it at all. For her it is simply "obscure" because it is usually parabolic or "evasively symbolic", a point of view which is oddly reminiscent of long-standing Protestant dismissiveness of "the hard sayings of Jesus". The Protestants find the hard sayings problematic in the main because they contradict the universal gospel to the Gentiles. In this case, a Catholic finds them problematic because they contradict the universalism implied by purgatory. For neither could it be possible that those sayings reflect an actual historical message, being so stern and radical as to be unthinkable. They must be an anomaly: "eschatology straight up, without the diluting effects of divine mercy and forgiveness."
Just so.
Candida Moss stumbles over the Albert Schweitzer hard truth. The ameliorating of the hard sayings was the anomaly. The hard sayings did not arise from Lake Placid. Lectio difficilior potior, interpretatio item.
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
-- Matthew 7:14
For Moss the gospels are contradictory and run "hot and cold" on hell. The gospels give us only a "faint sense" of hell at best. After all there was a time when hell was not in the Bible, before the Greeks, and it shouldn't surprise us that the parables of Jesus really don't describe any "actual eternal punishment" dontcha know. It's a foreign idea, whose time came and went.
Oh dear.
And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter
into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire
that never shall be quenched:
Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.
And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter
halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire
that never shall be quenched:
Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.
And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to
enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be
cast into hell fire: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.
-- Mark 9:43ff.
Moss would like us to think, simply ignoring this passage, not only that there is no eternal fire according to Jesus, but that all such worm talk actually came from a later period, from the horrible fact of the parasites in human shit found everywhere and on everything in ancient prison cells, the literal analogues of an imaginary storied hell as in Dante, rather than from the actual message of Jesus about the eternal decay of death in the grave. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, they do a dance upon your snout. This is . . . completely unconvincing.
That last point needs to be emphasized. The eternal decay of death in the grave flies in the face of Jesus' supposed belief in and preaching of resurrection of the body. The eternal grave which confronts us here is an offense to that.
But there it is. Eternal fire. Eternal worm. Straight up.
Until the middle of the 20th century, it was assumed by most Catholics
that most (if not all) non-Catholics were destined for eternal hellfire. ... Catholics felt a duty to work for the conversion of non-Catholics ... Catholics were wary of becoming too culturally close to non-Catholics.
“Mixed marriages” were verboten, and Catholics tended to live together
in small neighborhoods (the Catholic “ghetto”) in order to protect the
faith of their impressionable children.
Yeah, just disconnect your brain and do what we tell ya.
37.5% of the world's Christians now beg to differ as Protestants because Luther and his heirs thought otherwise, but Rome's problem with schism long predates Luther.
Over the last 500 years, most American Christians — Protestant and Catholic — have operated as functional Lutherans. All I need is a Bible, a brain and the Holy Spirit to interpret Scripture. How has that worked out? Western missionaries, European and American, have exported a gospel around the world that has yielded more than 45,000 Christian denominations globally and more than 200 in the U.S., according to theCenter for the Study of Global Christianity.
If you think this is a problem (I do), remember that we can’t solve a problem using the same mind that created it. I suggest returning to the early centuries of the church, when a magisterium, an authority beyond individual interpretation, settled these sorts of disputes.
We know that people of many religious stripes, Catholics included,
are involved in various ways on every side of the current dispute. Maybe
that's where we should be, on every side, not to exacerbate or further
inflame but to do what we can to tamp down the ancient hatreds and the
inclinations to violence.
At the same time Catholic rescuers were helping Jews, some of those same people were also helping Nazis. The Catholic Church worked to win clemency for convicted Nazi war criminals after the war. “The justification given for aid to Nazi war criminals was Christian love and mercy,” says Brown-Fleming, whose research focuses on this effort.
But the challenge does run a little
deeper if the only parts of church that Dad believes in are the
secondary goods of religion (community and morality and solidarity and
choral music), while the primary good — communion with God and the
integration of human life with divine purposes — is assumed to probably
be so much wishful thinking even before the specific dogmatic questions
get involved.
Stunning because Douthat elsewhere recognized, in 2011, that the unique human characteristic of passing moral judgment is demonstrative of the way human beings strangely stand outside nature, just like God:
Second,
the idea that human beings are fashioned, in some way, in the image of
the universe’s creator explained why your own relationship to the world
was particularly strange. Your fourth- or 14th-century self was
obviously part of nature, an embodied creature with an animal form, and
yet your consciousness also seemed to stand outside it, with a peculiar
sense of immaterial objectivity, an almost God’s-eye view — constantly
analyzing, tinkering, appreciating, passing moral judgment.
God desires mercy, not sacrifice (Matthew 9:13; 12:7):
Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, O thou
wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?
And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him. So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your
hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.
-- Matthew 18:32ff.
Douthat, like much of Christianity and the West, suffers from too much vertically-oriented individualism, at least this year, for which we'll just have to forgive him.
“One of our eucharistic ministers was running out of hosts and
suddenly there were more hosts in the ciborium. God just duplicated
himself in the ciborium,” an emotional Crowley told the faithful. ...
“They were running out of hosts and all of a sudden more hosts were
there. So today not only did we have the miracle of the Eucharist, we
also had a bigger miracle. It’s pretty cool,” the priest said.
There's even a traveling Eucharistic Miracle Road Show which promotes the Eucharist, not unlike the traveling Protestant revivals and camp meetings common in America where powerful moves of God produce dramatic conversions at altar calls, miracles of speaking in tongues, divine healings, and the like.
A Vatican-endorsed exhibit “Eucharistic Miracles of the World,”
featuring documentary evidence of 152 such miracles, has visited over
3,000 churches on its international tour.
The universalist—in the sense of world-spanning—religion of this new
church was from the beginning suited to and even prefigured by the
political universalism of the Roman Empire. Roman-ness, this history teaches, is of the essence of Christianity. ... Roman reality structured the Christian mind and lent it the same universalist impulse. ...
Christian life in the centuries prior to the Constantinian
conversion was already developing authoritative structures, and at a
relentless pace. Such structures are always necessary for governance,
spiritual and temporal.
The general tendency of these structures was expansion, away from the margins and into the center of human affairs.
Certain partisans will object strenuously to the idea that pagan Rome lent the universalist impulse to Christianity, but they will be wrong.
They are already unwilling to accept that the aims of the historical Jesus were more modest, who insisted he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matthew 10), whose twelve disciples were to judge the twelve tribes of Israel in the imminently coming eschatological kingdom of God (Matthew 19) in Jerusalem. To it many in Israel were called, but only few were chosen.
The germ of the universal religion idea certainly came from elsewhere, from the likes of St. Paul the Roman citizen and his intellectual and spiritual kin who, inspired by Isaiah the prophet among others, thought God's aim was to have mercy on all the nations (Romans 11).
For his part, Paul combined in himself two streams with a single and much more ambitious agenda. The Hellenistic Jew of the proselytizing Pharisee variety not coincidentally was still the enthusiastic missionary despite a crisis of conversion, but with a now much wider field of opportunity. And the Roman citizen by birth who was at liberty to travel and study in Jerusalem became himself an itinerant teacher, exploiting his favored position both at the margins and finally at the center of the empire.
My ambition has always been to preach the Good News where the name of
Christ has never been heard, rather than where a church has already been
started by someone else. ... In fact, my visit to you has been delayed so long because I have been preaching in these places.
But now I have finished my work in these regions, and after all these long years of waiting, I am eager to visit you.
I am planning to go to Spain, and when I do, I will stop off in Rome.
And after I have enjoyed your fellowship for a little while, you can
provide for my journey.
But before I come, I must go to Jerusalem to take a gift to the believers there.
-- Romans 15:20ff.
Ahmari chalks it all up to the divine will. The evidence chalks it up to the civisromanus and Pharisee.
Rembert Weakland was a bad man, and not just because he spent $450,000 of the faithful's tithes
(which he paid back later) to pay off a male theology student with whom
he had had an affair. Weakland, a lion of liberal American Catholics,
came out as gay in 2009. ...
For those who engaged in these cover-ups, the most important thing of
all was the clergy, not the children who were molested, and their family
members. That is the real legacy of Rembert Weakland, a godfather of
the lavender mafia.
