You could almost call it divine pedophilia

 

Ordinarily you would want a saint who can intercede to get you out of an economic collapse, not get you into one lol

Actors are rarely known for their intelligence. And as we are all very painfully aware, Donald Trump is an actor, too.

 

The first miracle of Carlo Acutis, eucharistic enthusiast, is unconvincing: Brazil is overrun by faith healers and Catholics needed a win of their own

 

 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.

-- Catholic News Agency, October 12, 2021, here. 

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.

-- Catholic Stand, December 28, 2021, here. 

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.

-- Radiologia Brasileira 52 (4), Jul-Aug 2019, here. 

 

The subject underwent only ultrasound. The diagnosis of annular pancreas was never certain in the first place.

9news.com.au

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.

 

https://www.9news.com.au/world/john-of-god-inside-faith-healers-compound-psychic-surgery/e201d8c6-2090-46a7-aa2f-78b84c1e520c

It doesn't say what the first miracle of Carlo Acutis was, but the second was performed by . . . a surgeon

 Carlo Acutis to be first millennial saint: Pope Francis recognizes miracle for canonization

The recognition of the second miracle attributed to Acutis’ intercession makes it possible that Acutis could be canonized during the Catholic Church’s 2025 Jubilee Year.

 

Prattle on all you like, the "saints" can't hear you when you ask them to intercede

 

Behold therefore, I will gather thee unto thy fathers, and thou shalt be gathered into thy grave in peace; and thine eyes shall not see all the evil which I will bring upon this place. And they brought the king word again.

-- 2 Kings 22:20

Behold, I will gather thee to thy fathers, and thou shalt be gathered to thy grave in peace, neither shall thine eyes see all the evil that I will bring upon this place, and upon the inhabitants of the same. So they brought the king word again.  

-- 2 Chronicles 34:28

Adventures in Catholic cognitive dissonance: Sainted Pope J2P2 in 2001 gave the red hat to McCarrick, now charged with sex crimes from the '70s

Ex-Cardinal McCarrick charged with sexually assaulting teen

 

Two things are true here.

 

Pope John Paul II indeed made mistakes in these matters. He "covered up" predatory homosexuality in the Roman Catholic Church, and he elevated monsters like McCarrick.

 

Pope Francis, who defrocked McCarrick in 2019, is also out to sully the reputation of the traditionalism and conservatism J2P2 resurrected in the church in response to the liberalism of Vatican II, which Francis supports, most recently shown by his re-imposition of restrictions on the Latin Mass. 

 

The biggest problem for Catholics in our time has been the clash between the sexual revolution and the asceticism required of clergy, which, however, has been a problem since it became required over a thousand years ago.

 

Tradition which ignores the font of it is worthless, and ultimately destructive. The church needs priests who make love to women instead of who fake love with little boys.

 

Do we not have the right to the company of a believing wife, like the other apostles and the Lord's brothers and Cephas?

  

-- I Corinthians 9:5

The absence of "church", "saints" and "early catholicism"

You will search in vain for church and saints [ἐκκλησία and ἁγίων] in the gospels, save for Matthew 16:18, Matthew 18:17 and Matthew 27:52 (and what "saints" meant in the latter isn't exactly the same idea which we find after the gospels, but let's not open that can of worms right now).

The gospels dubiously tell us Jesus predicted his future death and resurrection on the third day, but the future church and its many members? not so much, which only underscores the dubiosity of the third-day rising predictions. (For fun, I resurrect the word "dubiosity", which had fallen into disuse already by the time of Samuel Johnson).

You would think that a guy who knew he was going to rise from the dead and found a church would have said much more about it. After all, predicting the future church is small potatoes compared with predicting your own crucifixion and resurrection on the third day. Jesus' imagination was clearly focused on something less pedestrian than the now interminable church age and the salvation of its billions of goyim.

And you would also think the church would have made him talk much more about it.

Talk of the "church" only in a little corner of Matthew is probably "early catholicism" at work, or at least something like it. It looks suspiciously similar to the insertion of the third-day-rising predictions themselves. It too is propaganda, but on a much smaller scale.

This tells us something very important.

The absence of "church" from the gospel tradition, even from John, testifies to, if not the sway of a smoldering conception of the eschatological future imagined by Jesus, at least to the enduring cognitive dissonance the memory of that still produced. The problem still being wrestled with in the gospels is the death of Jesus and the failure of the end of the world to materialize, not something else. This dissonance probably had everything to do with the production of the written gospels in the first place. The emphasis on, and the similarity of, the passion narratives in the gospels both make that plain.

The absence of "church" as a category, however, points to an earlier stage in this process of self-reflection than we find in the epistles. We are not yet at the later self-referential stage of the church found in Paul and elsewhere in the New Testament after the gospels where "church" and "saints" are most definitely used as routine categories. This means the material in the gospels, if not the gospels themselves, dates much earlier than is generally appreciated. The absence of "church" in the gospels is thus similar in significance for their dating to the gospels' failure to mention the destruction of the Jewish temple. Together they point to a date for the gospels before 70, perhaps well before.

It is difficult to believe that when the rest of the New Testament after the Fourth Gospel is loaded with uses of "church" and "saints" that the gospels could possibly come from that era.

The hypothesis of an intrusion of "early catholicism" has not been without its problems, however, for example for the composition of Luke-Acts. It is almost inconceivable that the repeated use of "church" in Acts, for example, comes from the very same hand as gave us the Gospel of Luke, or at least that Acts comes from the same time period of composition as the gospel, a point which perhaps speaks against the two-volume history hypothesis of Luke-Acts. But it is more inconceivable that on the original conception in New Testament scholarship of "early catholicism" at work all over the place in Luke's Gospel that it could be an exponent of that without once mentioning the church. To make matters worse for the theory as originally conceived, the third gospel's unique witness to some of Jesus' most pointed eschatological assertions hardly fits the relatively more mundane future ecclesiastical setting from which it is supposed to have sprung.

What this means is that as a phenomenon "early catholicism" remains a useful hypothetical category whose content has to be rethought and scaled back. The gospels' solution to the eschatological dilemma which occasioned their composition in the first place supplies that content. Early catholicism is thus at the same time a lot earlier than originally conceived and dedicated to a different object.

It seems best to view the gospels as earlier than 70, at least in spirit, and as attempts to rewrite the narrative of the failed eschatological message of Jesus.

How to seem a saint

Then thus I cloath my naked villany

With old odd ends, stol'n forth of holy writ,

And seem a saint when most I play the devil.

-- William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act 1, Scene 3

For all the saints who from their labors rest . . . all 100.8 billion of them, or so

The Scarlet Pimpernel

That's the total number of the dead.

Whether they be in heaven or in hell and in what proportion, sink me, I do not know.

And neither does Mona Chalabi. 

Roman Catholic sainthood process corrupted by cash

Reported here:

[T]he saint-making process has raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations per candidate with virtually no financial oversight.