"Our best window into the overall financial picture of American Catholicism comes from a 2012 investigation by the Economist, which offered a rough-and-ready estimate of $170 billion in annual spending"
That's a lot of "dung" Francis.
Posted on 02/28/2015 11:15:22 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
In his address to the Italian Confederation of Cooperatives Saturday, Pope Francis employed muscular language in speaking about money — while acknowledging its importance to business. “Money,” he said, “is the devil’s dung.”
“It is not easy to talk about money,” Francis said. Quoting Saint Basil the Great, the Pope said: “Money is the dung of the devil! When money becomes an idol, it rules over a person’s choices. And then it ruins a person and condemns him, turning him into a slave.”
The Pope called for “creative imagination” to find new methods, attitudes and tools to combat the “culture of waste,” in which the world is immersed, “fueled by the powers that govern the economic and financial policies of the globalized world, whose center is the god of money.”
This isn’t the first time that Francis has resorted to a scatological illusion to denounce the evils of mammon. In a homily given in September 2013, the Pope used the same expression to decry wealth....
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
“He’s from Argentina, home of Juan and Eva Peron.
And Che Guevara.”
Yeah, and my Grandmother came from Italy, home of Mussolini. The point?
References, please.
Amen. Our priorities are skewed.
References please? what’s that?
Then perhaps before they go home, the crowd should hear a better solution than they would hear from Francis. Got one?
I’ll take all the dung I can get and Francis can go piss up a rope!
Yeah, you go ahead and petition Francis to do that.
Link above to column by Cal Thomas....money quote:
Time magazine reports that, according to the best guess of bankers, Vatican wealth is between $10 and $15 billion. If Pope Francis is serious about redistribution, he should lead by example and sell all Vatican property, including its valuable artwork, empty its bank and give the money to the Italian government, or to the United Nations.
Where I think Pope Francis goes astray is in his apparent inability to see that absolute wealth is a very different thing than relative inequality. Indeed, given Pareto's Law, it's clear that relative inequality is the price of rapid and sustained economic growth and the increase of absolute wealth.
If we want to eradicate poverty from the world, then we have to have economic growth. In order to have economic growth, we have to recognize that relative inequality in economic results is inevitable, because Pareto's law is inevitable. Pareto's Law is inevitable because it proceeds from the laws of physics. Any attempt to lessen natural relative inequality will inexorably result in a diminution of economic growth, thus augmenting the problem of absolute poverty.
And that's my problem with liberals generally and Catholic liberals like Pope Francis in particular. You can't simultaneously decry the degrading poverty of the Third World while at the same time undertaking artificial state-imposed measures to "remedy" relative inequality, as such measures negatively impact economic growth.
If we want to end the sort of degrading poverty that Mother Teresa dealt with in Calcutta, then we need to achieve rapid and sustained global economic growth. We do that by instituting a culture that respects private property and celebrates individual achievement by allowing the creative and industrious among us to work and create new wealth and rewarding them by allowing them to keep most of what they make. We then tie all of those people together into a global system of free trade. We then step back, embrace relative inequality as the price of economic growth, and watch the world pull itself up by its boot straps.
This is exactly what the world saw the past 30-plus years after Reagan and Thatcher kicked Socialism in the teeth good and hard and began the process of tying the world together with trade. And hundreds of millions of people are no longer living lives of inhuman poverty.
There is so much to celebrate. So many enormous achievements to thank God for these past 35 years. What unbelievable progress the world has made. All we have to do is get over that people aren't equal and that's just the Way God made it, accept the inevitable Pareto distribution, and focus on producing so much wealth that even the very poorest in relative terms will have access to clean water and air, wholesome food, safe streets, decent housing, and access to basic medical care and education. It can be done, but only if we're willing to embrace inequality.
"the entire catholic church on it’s (sic) quest to send out messages not only to the US and other countries that the US is the LAND OF THE FREE & EASY"
Show facts, figures, articles from reputable sources to back up your view of the Catholic Church's "quest."
I could do this but you could do it better by doing it for yourself.
I’m not obligated to re-write the religious/socio-political/
cultural wheel for your convenience here on Free Republic.
You have the internet-go look things up for yourself
if you so desperately need “facts,figures, articles...”
My opinion is only a simple one so feel free to search
to your heart’s delight.
If the pope hates wealth, he could start selling off mountains of Vatican art treasures.
The pope might send a note to Hillary...
I’d like to know where Francis thinks the jobs come from. The government, the Church? It sounds like he wants everyone to have jobs created by some all powerful entity that decides how and where to spread the wealth.
Maybe he needs to read history some more. Capitalism is still the fairest system and the most creative, producing “wealth” in the form of goods and services for everyone. Sadly, we are becoming more socialist and more in line with what the pope wants.
I quit giving to the Catholic Church when I realize they were giving to Acorn and that was at least 25 years ago.
I still give to Covenant House, but I’m rethinking it. I don’t know why it’s not part of the larger Catholic Charities umbrella. As far as charitable causes, I’m going to give only to the local missions and the Salvation Army. I think my hard earned money may do more good in their hands than a Church bureaucrat who feels the need to give to Acorn or some global warming terrorists.
My charitable giving has gone way down. I feel that giving money directly to people running in elections who have the same beliefs as I do may be money better spent for the common good. I don’t need the tax deduction that much. I will not give to the RNC directly, but I’ll spend it on getting a real American elected as President. This is more important right now.
Statement of The Holy See, Beijing, 1995 ...On August 29 last, His Holiness Pope John Paul II committed all of the over 300,000 social, caring and educational institutions of the Catholic Church. to a concerted and priority strategy directed to girls and young women, and especially to the poorest, to ensure for them equality of status, welfare and opportunity, especially with regard to literacy and education, health and nutrition and to ensure that they can, in all circumstances, continue and complete their education. The Holy See has made a special appeal to the Church's educational institutions and religious congregations, on their own or as part of wider national strategies, to make this commitment in favour of the girl child a reality...
Will the church soon be giving away all its properties and priceless art? After all...money is “dung”.
"Our best window into the overall financial picture of American Catholicism comes from a 2012 investigation by the Economist, which offered a rough-and-ready estimate of $170 billion in annual spending"
That's a lot of "dung" Francis.
Does this mean the pope will be closing the Vatican bank?
Didn’t think so.
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