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In 2021, during a visit to the Greek island of Mytilene, Pope Francis delivered one of the finest speeches I've ever read:
> This great basin of water, the cradle of so many civilizations, now looks like a mirror of death. Let us not let our sea (mare nostrum) be transformed into a desolate sea of death (mare mortuum). Let us not allow this place of encounter to become a theatre of conflict. Let us not permit this “sea of memories” to be transformed into a “sea of forgetfulness”. Please brothers and sisters, let us stop this shipwreck of civilization!
> We are in the age of walls and barbed wire. To be sure, we can appreciate people’s fears and insecurities, the difficulties and dangers involved, and the general sense of fatigue and frustration, exacerbated by the economic and pandemic crises. Yet problems are not resolved and coexistence improved by building walls higher, but by joining forces to care for others according to the concrete possibilities of each and in respect for the law, always giving primacy to the inalienable value of the life of every human being
I had no idea anyone still used the term “mare nostrum”. I believe it began to be used during the Roman Empire when the Romans had conquered all lands surrounding the Mediterranean. Back then, the term meant the sea belonged to them and no one else. That meaning no longer applies in the modern day, so using it today would mean “we all share this” rather than the original meaning. His use of the term was a clever way to invoke shared history.
It's not that weird a term: I was taught this as the Roman name for the Mediterranean in middle school history class in Spain, without having to take Latin. There's a boardgame and a video game with Mare Nostrum as the title. I's expect relatively well educated people in countries bordering the Mediterranean to understand what he meant with little trouble, especially if they are also speak a latin-derived language. For instance in Spanish, mare is just mar, nostrum would be nuestro, and mortuum is muerto. It'd all be trivial first guesses.
You are correct that most people do not use the term any more. But the Pope isn't like most people. It's an informal requirement that the Pope be able to speak Latin and Italian is commonly used in the Vatican (being surrounded by Italy probably has something to do with that). Even though Francis was not as fluent as his predecessors in Latin and Italian, he certainly understood it better than most and his speechwriters probably were probably proficient in Latin.
As the child of Italian immigrants to Argentina, Francis was quite fluent in Italian. He’s old enough that his formation would have included significant Latin instruction as well. I would guess that Benedict’s Latin skills were superior, but Francis was reasonably conversant in the language from what I understand.
The thing that I found interesting was during trump’s visit to the Vatican, he asked trump’s Slovenian wife if she was feeding him potica which indicated a surprising level of knowledge of the cuisine of a country which is largely insignificant on the world stage (as someone who’s half Slovene and has a loaf of potica on his kitchen counter, I think I can safely make that declaration).
As an American, it’s always a bit startling to realize that “German,” “French,” “Italian,” etc. are in many ways hugely diverse language families with dialects that are often not intelligible by all speakers (as opposed to English where, with a few extreme exceptions, there’s not really a problem with mutual intelligibility and the written language elides most of those distinctions).
I don’t have enough broad knowledge of Spanish (Castellano) to comment on its intelligibility across dialects (although Argentine/Uruguayan Spanish is more of a challenge to my Mexican-Spanish trained brain than European Spanish).
I come from Croatia and have lived in Italy for a long time and it's very rare to find anybody who can barely place our countries on a map until fairly recently and let alone heard about foods or drinks. Not zero people of course, but very few
just to be clear, mine was not a jab against the georgaphy or culture knowledge of the average Italian. They are likely to know more details about German, French or Spanish geographical or culinary features than something from the balkans despite sharing a border.
Indeed. I grew up in a cultural milieu that was overwhelmingly Slavic (Chicago suburbs, mostly Czech and Polish but smaller numbers of Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats and Serbs) and even within that, the lack of understanding of distinctions was surprising (so many people thought Slovak and Slovene were the same thing, which isn’t helped by the fact that the countries have very similar flags since independence and near-identical demonyms in their own languages) although I would note that the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs were all highly aware of the distinctions between themselves and even as cultural self-identification as specific Slavs in Chicago has faded, there’s still a low-level hostility between Slovenes/Croats and Serbs.
I don't know how large the Lithuanian community in Chicago is, but when I lived on the South Side in the late 90s there was an amazing Lithuanian restaurant called just "Healthy Food", a weird amalgam of traditional Lithuanian cuisine and hippie wheat germ and molasses-based fare. They also sold amber jewelry, as well as their own swag like "I ♥ Kugelis" T-shirts. Anyone remember that place?
I’d never been there, but there seem to at least be multiple Lithuanian restaurants in the Chicago area. Sadly, while there were literally dozens of Czech restaurants when I was a kid, now there are three.
Chicago has been shrinking for decades and it's tragic. Even in the 90s there were whole blocks on the South Side (I lived in Back of the Yards) that were just abandoned.
Even so, Francis lived most of his life in Argentina and could be excused for not knowing about the cuisine of a neighboring country. Certainly most of the press was ignorant, with many reporters thinking Francis said “pizza” and not “potica.”
He certainly spoke Italian and Latin, but he did not prefer it. It was kind of a sticking point early on when he would slip into Spanish when talking. It irritated some of the old guard who thought that he should stop speaking Spanish because he became Pope.
It was also the name of a major Italian naval operation to rescue migrants crossing the Mediterranean in 2013–2014, launched after a particularly tragic shipwreck near Lampedusa. The operation was shut down after just one year due to high costs and limited support from the EU, which left Italy largely on its own.
Definitely not surprising hearing a pope using it in a speech.
Technically yes, but they're used interchangeably nowdays. Plus, the official transcript mentions "Mytilene" so I wanted to follow that. Although I use Lesvos myself.
I am really sorry for pope francis's death. I truly am.
But to me, this was the first time that I ever saw that vatican has its .va and vatican.va ....
With no opinion one way or another on the pope.. In the modern world this is a weird criteria to judge people on. I assume like every modern politician, he doesn't write his own speeches. A quite google search seems to confirm it
Who cares? He said it. The words are his responsibility. If his speech had advocated for grinding orphans into a nutritious paste, we wouldn’t be defending him on the basis that he didn’t write those words. He chose to read them and give them his official backing.
Because the book is plastered with the author's as well as the publisher's name. Their separation is easily comprehensible. Whereas when an orator delivers, the separation of the writer is not so apparent. It is automatically assumed the orator is the writer.
This is a perfect example of a motte and bailey. The "motte" is that people should be judged badly for parroting horrible ideas they heard (which makes sense) and the "bailey" is that people should be praised just for parroting nice things they heard (which doesn't make sense).
> My suspicion is that Pope Francis may have more to do with crafting his own speeches than did previous pontiffs, because Pope Francis’ talks strike me as more spontaneous, conversational, and unfiltered.
Anyway, a public figure is still giving the direction and “plot points” to their speech writer.
That pope was part of the Jesuits. If you don't know who the Jesuits are, let's just say they are amongst the most academically trained, most intellectual catholic religious orders there is.
Even if Pope Francis gave the charge of writing his speeches to someone else, that would be an heavy responsability for that person.
A friend of mine was one of his speech writers. JFK would change words and construction depending on how he liked it. The speech writers learned and he made less and less changes.
What you don't know is he would try things out on the golf course with his friend Buddy Hackett.
The Vatican published an interesting document on AI [1], which attributes a number of quotes to Pope Francis:
* As Pope Francis noted, the machine “makes a technical choice among several possibilities based either on well-defined criteria or on statistical inferences. Human beings, however, not only choose, but in their hearts are capable of deciding."
* In light of this, the use of AI, as Pope Francis said, must be “accompanied by an ethic inspired by a vision of the common good, an ethic of freedom, responsibility, and fraternity, capable of fostering the full development of people in relation to others and to the whole of creation.”
* As Pope Francis observes, “in this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity.”
* As Pope Francis observes, “the very use of the word ‘intelligence’” in connection with AI “can prove misleading”
I rarely feel this way about someone of Pope Francis' age and social position, but I've genuinely admired Francis as a thinker. He was a bona fide Jesuit, through and through. The next pope has big shoes to fill.
I have heard yesterday on some Catholic TV channel that Benedict had already done the theological clarification work during his mandate, and that Francis - who was already the runner-up to Benedict and knew he was likely to be next in line - knew his task would be more about preaching - thus his strong media game (and as he person it suited him well too, he seemed really approchable and outgoing).
Note that Antiqua et Nova was authored by the Church. With its profound philosophical tradition, the Church offers insights in this text that surpass anything ever written by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
I’ll also add that many of his admirers as well as his detractors exaggerated his virtues, his merits, and his flaws. He was both the victim of a media and film industry all too eager to spin him into the “progressive pope” — never shying away from quoting him out of context to push an agenda — and the issuer of problematic and ambiguous documents and off-the-cuff remarks that only served to generate confusion.
Intellectually, Benedict XVI and John Paul II were in a different league. As far as the Jesuits are concerned, I know that in the popular imagination, the Jesuits are imagined to be some kind of “progressive”, intellectually superior order, but historically, they were sort of the shock troops of the Church. They certainly have merits to their name. While they did become involved in education, they drew from the traditions of education in the Church. Education and scholarship, however, are not their charism. Compare that with the Dominicans, for example, who have teaching and education as their mission (Thomas Aquinas is probably their most famous member).
> But jesuits are historically linked to education and the sciences, this is a fact.
Isn't that what I said? I merely said it is not their charism, not their specialty. The point is that in the popular imagination, people elevate them above orders who not only have a better historical record, but whose mission is to educate, study, etc.
That isn't to downplay the good contributions of the Jesuits, but I can point you to Jesuits (who, as an order, are in poor shape these days, tbh) who would say the same thing. The popular imagination is simply ignorant or tendentious on this point in its exaggeration relative to the others.
Jesuit scholarship, especially in the last 100 years, is noteworthy for generating impressive literature while contributing close to nothing to the Church. See Rahner, Balthasar, de Lubac, Chardin... Garbage through and through
Knowledge is well described (not necessarily explained, but described) in information theory. Intelligence, sentience, consciousness, even whether something is alive, are fuzzy concepts.
Biology has a working definitions of "living organism" that includes a way to calculate likelihood that something is a living organism, but it still is probabilistic.
Understanding is another concept that depends on philosophy of the mind as opposed to concrete physical processes.
There's probably a couple PhD dissertations written around the origin of the color, it's hue and whatnot ... but also, most humans by the age of three can understand and identify the color blue.
At some point you will understand that you will never have absolute and complete axioms from which to build everything on [1], and you have to work with what you have.
If 99% of people in the street can agree on the meaning of a word without much ambiguity then that's a good starting point, and people eventually compiled all of this that's how dictionaries came to be ...
Man, I wish I was you at this moment, just to experience the absolute mind-blown of realizing the power of dictionaries and what they truly represent, I would compare it to learning to speak all over again!
(This may sound trivial, but at some point in time there were no dictionaries and most folks where living like my friend @diggan here. Then someone was like yo, let's agree on what these words mean and put together this impressive piece of technology. Very few things have had a larger impact on society, no exaggeration.)
tl;dr If you buy a soda and it's two dollars, you give the clerk two dollar bills. You don't give the clerk a lecture on "what exactly is a US dollar?" unless you want to go to jail.
1: not even math has been able to accomplish that, even through many things there start by definition which is kind of a cheat code, lol
> At some point you will understand that you will never have absolute and complete axioms from which to build everything on [1], and you have to work with what you have.
To have hardware that displays blue, and code that manipulates blue, you must have a very clear and unambiguous definition of what blue means. Notice I did not say correct, only clear and unambiguous. Your whole point seems to be that words mean what a native speaker of the language understands them to mean, which is useful in linguistics and in the editing or dictionaries, but the context of this discussion is the representation of some concept in symbols that a computer can process, which is a different thing. Indeed, it's possible that the difference between code and 'vibes' will have to be in some way addressed by those very definitions of knowledge and intelligence, so I think these are relevant questions that can't be hand-waved away.
The code will function, in the sense of executing, whether the underlying concepts are sufficiently well-understood or not. Considering the ramifications of that statement might lead you to seeing why people want to understand what they're building before they build it.
I gave you the benefit of the doubt that you were asking questions in good faith, but I'm not sure that's true anymore, so good luck.
Yes, but blue doesn't have a "Definitions of Blue" Wikipedia page.
There are nuances to definitions of common words "what is blue, what is a bicycle, what is a dollar, really?", but the magnitude of variance in definition is not shared with something like "knowledge" or "intelligence."
With these high-level concepts, most people are operating only on a "I know it when I see it" test (to reference the Supreme Court case on obscenity).
>Yes, but blue doesn't have a "Definitions of Blue" Wikipedia page.
Oh, I understand, so the criteria is to have a Wikipedia page like that?
You know what's interesting, I couldn't find neither of these:
* تعريفات المعرفة
* 知識嘅定義
* Définitions de la connaissance
* Definiciones de conocimiento
Should we add "and it has to be written in English" as a requirement?
I know this is arguing ad absurdum, but the point is, again, that if you choose to be that strict, you wouldn't even be able to communicate with other people, because your desired perfect 1:1 map of concepts among them doesn't even exist.
No, I mean to illustrate that "blue" and "knowledge" have a vastly different degree in variation in definition.
Like you say, all words of course have different definitions between individuals, but you and I are obviously able to communicate without specifying every definition. There exists a spectrum between well-agreed-upon definitions (like "and") and fuzzier ones. The definition of "knowledge" is divisive enough that many people disagree vehemently on definitions, which is illustrated by the fact that there is a whole Wikipedia article on it.
If there is a "midwit trap" related to this, there is certainly a Sorites paradox trap as well - that because all words have varying definitions, that it is no use to point out that some words' definitions are more variable than others.
I think they mean there many hues that some people will cal blue and other will disagree. And definitely if you try to buy paint and just say you want "blue" there's a huge spectrum of things you might get
It is probably exactly because he spent a career considering the cognition behind language that he is not as impressed by LLMs as many others are. I'll readily admit to being expert in neither language and linguistics nor AI, but I am skeptical that anything going on inside an LLM is properly described as "cognition."
does it really matter if it can be described as cognition or not? to me these models are useful for how effective they are, and that's literally it. the processes going on within them are extremely complex and at times very impressive, and whether some arbitrarily undefined word applies or not does not really matter. I think sometimes people forget that words are not maths or logic. when words come into language, no one sits down and makes sure that they're 100% logically and philosophically sound, they just start to be used, usually based on a feeling, and slowly gather and lose meaning over time. perhaps when dictionaries were first written there was some effort to do this, but for lots of words its probably impossible or incredibly difficult even now, never mind 200 years ago, if they could even be bothered in the first place.
to give an example, a quite boring "philosophy question" that's bandied around, usually by children, is "if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?". the answer is that "sound" is a word without a commonly-accepted, logically-derived meaning, for the reasons given above. so if to you the word sound is something human, then the answer is no, but if to you a sound is not something human, then the answer is yes. there's nothing particularly interesting or complex about the thought experiment, it's just a poorly defined word
does it really matter if it can be described as cognition or not?
Yes...it does. "AI" aka modern flavor LLMs as we understand them today are just doing certain things thats humans can do but orders of magnitude faster. What exactly is impressive about it being able to succinctly sum up any topic under the Sun aside from the speed? It will never create a new genre of music. It will never create a new style of art from the ground up. It lacks the human spark of ingenuity. To even suggest that what it does anything close to human cognition is egregiously insulting.
isn't it funny that half the time when you see criticism of LLMs it's almost like the words have been stolen from someone else?
the opinion you're parroting here completely misses the point of LLMs. their purpose is not to start artistic movements or liberally think for themselves and no one is claiming it is. their purpose is to accelerate information retrieval and translation and programming tasks, which they by and large are incredible at. even if they had the capacity to invent artistic movements, which in theory they most certainly do, starting an artistic movement is pretty much intrinsically a human thing, and it requires desire, inclination, trust and a grounding in the real world, such as it is. your "spark of ingenuity" is not lacking because of some issue or lack of creativity, it's lacking because it's not the point and no one wants it to be.
whether it is "cognition" or not is completely irrelevant to their purpose and use, and its a complete waste of time trying to litigate if it is or not because the word in itself is poorly defined. if you're trying to figure out if j=k but you can't define j or k, and you do know that k isn't a big factor in the usefulness of the system, then what is the point? is it jealousy? fear? I assure you, LLMs are not a threat to the special ingenuity of your mind
this opinion is the equivalent of watching the invention of the pocket calculator and complaining that it can't write calculus equations on a black board
their purpose is not to start artistic movements or liberally think for themselves and no one is claiming it is.
your "spark of ingenuity" is not lacking because of some issue or lack of creativity, it's lacking because it's not the point and no one wants it to be.
There are plenty of people/communities online that want it to be exactly that and want to remove the pesky human element from the equation. Dismissing them because it doesn't fit your argument doesn't mean they don't exist.
Re: "does it really matter if it can be described as cognition or not?"
To Chomsky? He'd have to speak for himself, but I suspect the answer is "yes, obviously, at least to be of interest to me."
Note that I'm not saying LLMs are useless or even that what they do is usefully described as "plagiarism."
But it seems entirely unsurprising to me that Chomsky would be unimpressed and uninterested -- even to the point of dismissiveness, he's pretty much like that -- precisely because they are unrelated to "cognition."
I suspect the disappointment wasn't about whenever LLMs exhibit cognitive-like properties or not, but rather about the negative connotations tied to the word "plagiarism". Yea, they replicate patterns from their training data. So do we (ok, to be fair I have no idea about others but I believe I know that I do), and that's normal.
I believe knowledge is what you know based on facts and experience; wind sensors could gather data and store it in a database without a human touching it beyond initial setup. With enough data, and basic information about where the sensors are located, the computer becomes very knowledgeable about wind in a region without human intervention.
I believe intelligence goes beyond that: knowing that such a system is a solution to an observed problem, architecting said system, using the output to solve a problem, analyzing the results, and deciding where to deploy additional systems.
I think both examples above can be done by AI (if not now, then soon)—but only after being prompted carefully by a human. However, a generalized AI that can do all of the above for any problem in the known universe is likely very far off.
if knowledge is a justified true belief, i’m down for saying LLMs have beliefs. to the extent that they are incorrigible, their faith may actually be superhuman.
This is what intentionality is about. No intentionality, no truth.
An LLM doesn't deal with propositions, and it is propositions that are the subjects of truth claims. LLMs produce strings of characters that, when interpreted by a human reader, can look like propositions and result in propositions in the human mind, and it is those propositions that have intentionality and truth value. But what the LLMs produce are not the direct expression of propositional content, only the recombination of a large number of expressions of propositional content authored by many human authors.
People are projecting subjective convention onto the objective. The objective truth about LLMs is far poorer in substance than the conventional readings we give to what LLMs generate. There is a good deal of superstition and magical thinking that surrounds LLMs.
I think this is wrong. For nearly a hundred years, popular media has been priming the public to understand that artificial intelligence is superficially intelligent but is very prone to malfunction in inhuman ways. All that media in which AIs go haywire used to make nerds roll their eyes, but resonated with the general public then and has proved prescient now.
Question, but perhaps, open your heart to recent research... There is neural tissue in and around the heart. There are studies showing personality changes and memory inculcation as a result of heart transplants. Recipients end up with memory and sometimes traits of the donor.
Are we sure? No. But neither should you be. Question but be open to answers you may not expect.
I'm not sure, but I'd bet £200 that within 10 years it'll still not be something that 99.9% of medical schools will teach. just because I'm not sure, it doesn't make both cases remotely equally likely.
He’s speaking to a popular audience in a poetic fashion. No one believes a pump in your chest is the seat of intellgence, even if it may be involved in some extended and removed manner with the expression of intelligence.
If Francis held Thomistic views on the subject, then even the brain, while needed for human intelligence, does not suffice for its operation, as functions like abstraction require the intellect, which cannot be entirely physical in operation since form cannot exist in matter without also instantiating the form, something by definition opposed to abstraction.
> He’s speaking to a popular audience in a poetic fashion. No one believes a pump in your chest is the seat of intellgence, even if it may be involved in some extended and removed manner with the expression of intelligence.
others on this very thread are proposing this exact extension.
You're misreading what I've written and being intentionally obtuse.
I didn't say the heart plays a role in intelligence. I simply allowed for the possibility for the sake of argument. The central claim is that no one (here, Francis and his writers) who uses the word "heart" colloquially is making the claim that the heart-as-organ is the seat of intelligence or what have you.
You're committing a vulgar equivocation fallacy that the average person with common sense would recognize. I have a difficult time believing you don't understand something so obvious.
People downvote this guy because obviously nobody actually thinks with their blood-pumping organ.
But as for the quote, it's incredibly clear how little empathy most people have towards others, to the point where AI will easily out-empathy them, both as a conversationalist and as a robotic assistant (such as a 24/7 robot nurse with no other patients).
> According to Archbishop Diego Ravelli, Master of Apostolic Ceremonies, the late Pope Francis had requested that the funeral rites be simplified and focused on expressing the faith of the Church in the Risen Body of Christ.
Always struck me as a simple man and that likely contributed to people liking him more when compared to his predecessors. RIP.
He was, but John Paul II was traditionally conservative. I think Francis resonated with more people–Christian or not–because he emphasized compassion, humility, and social justice.
He spoke more openly about issues like poverty, climate change, and inclusion–his encyclical LAUDATO SI’ is a great read–, and he often used language and gestures that the "common man" could relate to.
Perhaps the way he dressed so simply–with the plain white cassock–also emphasized his overall approach: less focus on grandeur, more on service.
There was an interview on NPR this morning with a high-level Jesuit in the Americas (former leader of the order in Canada and USA, IIRC).
He put it well... Pope Francis was always a pastor at heart. And he put the needs of the person in front of him ahead of strict doctrine. The interviewee likened it to triage in a field hospital - address the soul in front of you, worry about doctrine later (suture the wound, worry about cholesterol later).
Pope Francis was the only Pope that resonated with me. I was really shocked that at how human his words were. The moment he came on the scene he seemed genuine and honest. I hope they find more like him.
Comdemning evil is an act with many purposes. Making the evil-doer change his mind is just one of possible benefit. Even if that is unlikely the other ones remain.
* People naturally imitate what they see others do. A condemnation can prevent others from imitating the evil act.
* A condemnation calls on others to resist and not facilitate the evil act.
* Condemning someone makes you enemies, in a way that is plain for everyone to see. This positioning can open up for alliance offers from others with similar beliefs.
Making someone an enemy comes with risks and drawbacks of course. You become less able to influence someone if you cut ties, hence why people suggest to try influencing in private first.
John Paul II is widely credited with helping Poland overthrow communism. While he won't change the world overnight, there are millions of people even in Russia who respect the Roman Catholic pope, even if they aren't Roman Catholics themselves.
no, it doesnt. What my point is, is that it would have done NOTHING, whereas the message he did send probably had higher chances, and is atleast something someone might listen to, even if they dont follow the advice.
(well except ofcourse the corrupt dictator in ukraine, so it naturally falls on deaf ears)
> telling Ukraine to "have the courage of the white flag".
If an aggressor attacks your country, it takes courage to surrender. Churchill was a coward it seems. He could have surrendered to the Germans and saved so many lives on both sides.
I think it's interesting that PJII was very popular with Catholics and possibly less so with non-Christian. Despite or because being more conservative? He was also a very good man and humble.
JPII was a long running Pope. I would guess most people wouldn't know how conservative or not he was, or even what means in the context of the Catholic Church. He was the first Pope many of us knew, and the Pope who was with many of us the longest. He is probably most well known for the pope mobile.
He actively visited other countries and celebrated massive masses. I believe he was the first Pope to travel around the world bringing his faith. He also efficiently used the media.
JP was a great communicator. He understood what it meant for the church to talk to the people—first by traveling to many countries and in opposition to communist atheism, later with the organization of the Journee Mondiale de la Jeunesse. During the late 90s there was a pretty big Catholic spiritual movement towards boys and girls in their late teens or early 20s and it's crazy how big the JMJ was.
His trick was hiding the conservative positions behind the mask of the beloved communicator.
He also covered up sexual abuses, game power to the Opus Dei, and aggressively pushed the disgusting mandate against condoms in the middle of the AIDS pandemic. Yeah, not a fan.
Yes and no. He was at the same time very open to being "part of the world" beyond the church, but also very conservative in ethics. In the end the former prevailed also in terms of progressiveness, but it wasn't a given.
JPII was also elected in a very different world. And he played a big moral role in taking down iron curtain and getting Eastern Europe back Europe.
Meanwhile Francis was quite the opposite. Especially as seen in the light of Russian aggression against Ukraine. For much of Eastern Europe that was like 180 turn. At least here both church goers and not seem to despise Francis while JPII has a warm place in the hearts both factions. Maybe it was different far away where Russia ain’t a hot topic.
Which would be bad, had he done so, but he didn't actually say that; the white flag comment was specifically and explicitly about being willing to directly negotiate with Russia, not about surrender.
> There were multiple occurrences when he doubled-down on his words after backlash.
He certainly called on multiple occasions for all parties to negotiate, but he was also consistent, both before Russia invaded, after the invasion and before the "white flag" comment, immediately after the "white flag" comment, and since that the invasion by Russia is (or "would be" before it occurred) unjustifiable, immoral, an act of aggression, and that Russia has the primary obligation to stop it.
His global appeal was real, but his decision to give Opus Dei and similar conservative Catholic networks special status under the Vatican had serious consequences.
Elevating Escrivá to sainthood and creating a personal prelature for Opus Dei handed them unmatched moral authority—authority they used to push back on women’s autonomy, justify discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, and quietly influence politics from Spain to Latin America.
Popularity doesn’t erase the impact of empowering hard‑right movements that have harmed lives across the globe.
The church is never going to be pro feminism or pro LGBTQ. I don’t think many, many people find that to be a dealbreaker especially in many developing nations where the entirety of the medical and schooling framework is solely provided by the church and cultural mores already line up with those perspectives.
JP2 was liked by catholics (the reasons are interesting and complicated enough that would warrant a long discussion). But Francis was generally well-liked even by the irreligious.
Part of that though was that he was Polish, at a time when Poland and other Eastern European countries were Communist dictatorships. He represented in part a kind of "insurgency" against them.
The first non-Italian pope since the 1500s.
For comparison, note the 1968 movie The Shoes of the Fisherman, in which a priest from Russia unexpectedly becomes pope and provokes great political change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shoes_of_the_Fisherman_(fi...
Since I see a lot of people commenting on this topic, I would like to offer a different perspective.
Pope JPII was for my southern European social democratic Catholic family much more polarizing than Pope Francis. Pope Francis had politics that are mainstream and not at all controversial in my part of the world. Whereas JPII was perceived as the guy who was buddies with Reagan and Bush and a general supporter of American foreign policy. To what extent that was a fair assessment, I do not want to comment, since he did try to speak against the invasion of Iraq.
None the less, it is not true that Pope Francis is more popular with non-Catholics (Reagan, Bush and most of the US were not Catholic and big supporters of JPII). It was also JPII that started the interfaith dialogue. It is also not true that Pope Francis is unpopular with Catholics.
There are Catholics all across the globe with vastly different opinions on all kinds of issues.
Notably, while Francis is sometimes considered liberal, there weren't (m)any notable changes to Church doctrine during his papacy.
He did have a habit (a good one, IMO) of speaking more off-the-cuff in interviews. Whether that was contrived, or just a natural part of his personality, I do not know. But, it was those comments that usually led to the "he's a liberal!" comments. And both sides of the political spectrum said similar things... "He's a liberal (like us)!" or "He's a liberal (unlike us)!" - so he was probably doing something right.
>> According to Archbishop Diego Ravelli, Master of Apostolic Ceremonies, the late Pope Francis had requested that the funeral rites be simplified and focused on expressing the faith of the Church in the Risen Body of Christ.
As a kinda-sorta Christian (raised Catholic), I've long admired the Jewish approach to the Mourner's Kaddish prayer said when a loved one dies: It's not about the deceased, nor even about death — it's about G-d. It starts out (in English translation): "Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will."
It’s important to note that The Two Popes was a drama, and not a true factual story.
It fictionalizes and sensationalizes some details; and that’s ok because its purpose is to make you feel exactly the way you feel about it.
Pope Francis was a wonderful steward of Christianity and espoused the virtues that anyone would want to see in their religious leaders: humility, grace, an openness to listen and a strong voice against even prelates in his own church that are xenophobic or nationalistic. He wanted us to welcome all and to live as the bible said Jesus did.
The fear I have is that each swing of the pendulum goes in two directions. He was far more “liberal” than the conservative Catholic prelates of the USCCB, and I fear his actions — including rightfully limiting the Latin mass, will force the church to swing in the other direction and give in to the illiberal forces that divide us.
It's complicated. Few people in the church, including the priests themselves, are fluent in Latin (there's a story told, I think by Francis himself, about an diocese in England that required priests to pass an exam to give a Traditional Latin Mass, and almost none of the requesting priests could pass). The TLM obscures what the mass is about, which creates space for practitioners to substitute in their own things, which, as it happens, tends to be idiosyncratically ultra-conservative stuff. The church is a top-down institution, and the TLM gets in the way of that and divides it.
(I like Latin! Took it in high school, reading Lingua Latina for fun; I think the TLM is neat. But problematic.)
My experience, and that of many of my fellow TLM goers that I’ve heard or read, is that we treasure solemn reverent worship that helps us focus on the Eucharistic sacrifice. If we were being distracted from “what the mass is about”, we’d take ourselves and our children elsewhere.
Here’s a video of yesterday’s Easter Sunday Mass offered by priests of the same religious order that operates the oratory where I attend Mass:
If you get an opportunity, maybe attend Mass one Sunday at a location of the ICKSP or the FSSP. I believe you’ll experience a welcoming community of Catholics passionate about Jesus.
Well, SSPX is a thing. I’ve never been to one of their chapels myself, though there is one here in St. Louis and some folks who now attend the local oratory run by the ICKSP used to be regulars there. As a group, they seem to have a bit of a chip on their shoulder (irregular communion and all that), which has not been my experience with the ICKSP and FSSP, who are in full communion with the local bishops and Rome, even if the most recent pope was not exactly gracious toward “trads”.
Regarding obscurantism, I don't know how one gets around that observation. It's striking to me that even many TLM celebrants aren't fluent in the language. You know why you're going and you seem to have a good reason for it, and I respect that. I think the rap on the TLM is that, in addition to reasonable people like yourself, it also attracts a lot of whackjobs, some of whom have unfortunately included priests.
I'd actually love to attend a TLM! But I'm not setting foot into a chapel run by an order whose officiants accused the Jews of orchestrating 9/11. (That's SSPX, of course, not FSSP.)
I hope my "it's complicated" gives me some cover from the idea that I'm a folk-group C&E Catholic just looking to dunk on some tradcaths. I mean, I may be that too; it's complicated.
When I was in high school ('91-95), I had quite a few friends involved in band and other music programs at the public school we attended. One of those programs was "choir", though it wasn't affiliated with a church, of course, because it was a public school. I remember being amazed at their performances of polyphonic music from the 16th Century, Palestrina and the like – my parents never played recordings of music like that at home and I had not heard it elsewhere. As a kid I was curious about most everything, and I found it interesting but puzzling that some of those musical pieces were described as parts of a Mass – "what does that mean? can you explain the context, I don't get it?" My family was Catholic, but I grew up in a predominantly Protestant area of the country (eastern Tennessee); neither Catholic nor Protestant adults that I talked to could provide a clear explanation and I didn't know the the music teachers so didn't ask them. I looked up what I could in printed encyclopedias, but it was a jumble to me, and it wasn't until years later that I acquired a bigger picture.
All around the world, there exists (or survives, sometimes only in parts) beautiful art and architecture and music that, with a little examination, is directly connected to the Latin Rite as it was celebrated for centuries. You can't really get the full picture of why those things are the way they are without knowledge of the classical Latin Rite. Likewise, a study of the Latin Rite on paper would be impoverished without knowledge of the historical cultural developments and artistic treasures that enriched it over the centuries.
"Rite is the liturgical, theological, spiritual and disciplinary heritage, distinguished according to peoples' culture and historical circumstances, that finds expression in each autonomous church's way of living the faith." — according to the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches (28 §1)[1]
It is remarkable that in the Western Church we have passed through a period from the mid 20th Century during which so much of our Latin Rite heritage has been ignored, forgotten, even tossed aside or rent violently. The term wreckovation[2] is used, and it's pretty accurate though it causes some to bristle.
The TLM movement is, in many respects, about recovering our Western Catholic heritage. That's not accomplished in equal measure everywhere, but the most vibrant communities around it place an emphasis on sacred music, restoring art and architecture as circumstances allow, and educating — catechizing is probably the better term — ourselves and our children so those efforts aren't merely about appearances or performance art, but an integral part of loving and worshipping God as we look to rebuild local Catholic culture.
So "obscurantism"? No, rather traditional expressions of the Catholic Faith given new sails (sometimes the winds are a bit stormy, to be sure). Some of us are learning Latin as we go along — the ordinary parts of the Mass are easy to pick up, and if you're coming from the Novus Ordo you already know what they mean even if you don't fully understand the Latin grammar. Certainly the priests of the ICKSP and FSSP study Latin in their seminaries, and many homeschooling families I know have Latin in their kids' curriculums. It's pretty amazing how quickly little kids pick it up when they participate in choir or serve as altar boys.
I want to provide one more response re: the SSPX/Williamson and whackjobs stuff, but I've already blown my HN comments time-budget today, so it will have to wait.
> I hope my "it's complicated" gives me some cover from the idea that I'm a folk-group C&E Catholic just looking to dunk on some tradcaths. I mean, I may be that too; it's complicated.
I don't think TLM is intended to obscure anything; I claim instead that it is used as a tool of obscurantism for a fringe movement within the church. Everything you're saying that's good about TLM, I agree with. I'm the weirdo on the thread that actually took Latin, and, thanks to a work experience with a Latin scholar (hey Jon!) currently reads a little bit of Latin for fun.
I would claim as well that most people who attend TLM services do not in fact have any fluency in Latin, and would in support of that argument (but not that much support because I'm not going to take the time to dig up the source right now) point out the English bishop's observation that TLM-enthusiast priests in his diocese couldn't pass a simple Latin test.
Bishop Williamson, the source of that statement, was kicked from the SSPX partly due to raging and irrational antisemitism and misogyny. If that's enough for you to never set foot in a chapel, you shouldn't be Catholic at all, just take a look at what many popes and saints have said and done about jewish people, it's far worse
I don't think SSPX matters, really, but I'd encourage anyone curious about this particular controversy to simply Google [SSPX antisemitism]. There's a whole Wikipedia article about it (going back to the founder of the order), but lots more than that. Suffice it to say, we're just not going to agree about this.
TLM, don't TLM, but conservative Catholics had a beef with Francis about the Latin Mass, and this is important context to that beef.
> Few people in the church, including the priests themselves, are fluent in Latin (there's a story told, I think by Francis himself, about an diocese in England that required priests to pass an exam to give a Traditional Latin Mass, and almost none of the requesting priests could pass).
Strictly speaking, as well as the Tridentine Mass, one can also have the current Mass in Latin. From what I've heard (never been to one to experience it first hand), Opus Dei centres worldwide say it almost every day. Outside Opus Dei, I believe it is quite niche – but, strictly speaking, all Catholic priests (of the Latin Church, or Eastern rite with Latin faculties) are allowed to say the current Mass in Latin, and Traditionis custodes didn't do anything to change that. I think few are interested, and from what I've heard, to try to prevent people shifting from Tridentine-in-Latin to current Mass-in-Latin, bishops have been quietly instructed by Rome to disallow it in practice, even if it is still formally allowed on paper. However, if a priest wants to say the new Mass in Latin privately, or to a small group which isn't widely advertised and flies below the radar, I think that is both officially allowed and likely in practice too. But, the linguistic competence concerns you mention about Tridentine-in-Latin apply equally to current Mass-in-Latin.
Quite separately, there is a history of the Tridentine Mass being translated into other languages, both in some cases authorised by Rome, and also by external groups such as Anglo-Catholic Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox, Old Catholics, Polish National Catholic Church – I think all the cases of this in communion with Rome have all effectively lapsed through disuse. But still, it is another reason people ought to avoid equating Latin and Tridentine.
> The TLM obscures what the mass is about, which creates space for practitioners to substitute in their own things, which, as it happens, tends to be idiosyncratically ultra-conservative stuff. The church is a top-down institution, and the TLM gets in the way of that and divides it.
I think a big potential problem with what Pope Francis did – it made no difference to the quasi-schismatic SSPX, or the more explicitly schismatic groups to their right, who were very used to ignoring everything the Pope said (except maybe if they liked what he was saying on that occasion) – but it upset that minority of Catholics who were involved in the TLM within the Catholic Church proper, and potentially drove them into the arms of those more schismatic groups. Now, to what extent has that potential been fulfilled in practice, I don't have enough personal experience of this topic to say–but I'm sure it has happened in some cases, however many. And I know there are even quite a few conservative-leaning Catholics who weren't involved in TLM in practice, but found the decision upsetting, and it might increase the odds of them wandering off as well.
Of course, the people we are talking about are a small minority in comparison to over 1 billion Catholics worldwide. But most of that one billion are far from devout – people who rarely attend Mass. At the more devout end, at least in some geographies, those involved in TLM, or who aren't but were upset by this papal decision, are arguably much more significant. And much of the institutional strength of any religion comes from its devout minority, as opposed to millions of people who identify with it at some level but far more rarely actively engage with it.
So, I think even if one doesn't have any personal affinity for the Tridentine Mass, there are genuine reasons to question the prudence of this decision.
TLM participants are a tiny fraction of people who routinely attend mass. In fact, something you hear from TLM advocates is that TLM attendees tend to be younger.
You hear this a lot from TLM proponents. First, it's a category error to suggest that church doctrine has a goal of maximizing the number of people to that turn out to mass. But second, no, it really isn't. The idea that a great way to get lots of ordinary people to become practicing Catholics is to literally conduct services in a dead language nobody understands is an extraordinary claim.
>maximizing the number of people to that turn out to mass
Mark 16:15.
Hebrews 10:25.
The Church organisation is very distinct from the church. And anything that increases their participation is in line with scripture. Both growth and attendance are important.
There's already evidence it works. And it's something that sets the church apart.
Romans 12:2 indeed.
In Antioch [Acts 11:26] people were first called Christians. They weren't the regular people of that time. But people with something that made them visibly different from the Hoi Polloi.
What really is the point of a consecration that doesn't change you? What are you being set apart from?
I just find this sentiment really kind of funny, given how small the number of people who are passionately committed to it, vs. people who attend folk-group mass. But I'm not here to convert you!
For me it's not just about the in practice Latin suppression and the pretense it's not happening.
My reply is primarily about Church growth and the importance of fellowship.
Wherever you go, don't imagine this sentiment is American/Western only as many have claimed/alluded.
If Christ doesn't change you nothing really has changed.
Proselytizing by active action and being examples by our (different/changed post conversion) behaviour are duties of everyone in Christ. As is fellowship.
As exemplified by those who do it in countries and areas where it might mean death like where I live today.
The approach of some recently arrived evangelists has been slammed by some Aboriginal leaders, including Labor senator Pat Dodson.
"They are a type of virus that has really got no credibility," he said. "If they really understood the gospel then the gospel is about liberation.
"It's about an accommodation of the diversity and differences that we have in our belief systems."
He believes the destruction of traditional culture is "an act of bastardry".
"It's about the lowest act you could perform in trying to indicate to a fellow human being that you have total disdain for anything they represent."
compared to:
But the born-again Christian converts have defended their beliefs and practices, saying it is their decision to make, and finding God has brought them peace and happiness.
The Christian converts who are setting fire to sacred Aboriginal objects (2019)
The obvious objection would be that I linked to a story of poor behaviour from Tongan evangelicals rather than Catholics ... the counter being there's no shortage of truly appalling tales of Catholics destroying culture while expanding their flocks .. they are better known for other atrocities hereabouts though, eg:
> The idea that a great way to get lots of ordinary people to become practicing Catholics is to literally conduct services in a dead language nobody understands is an extraordinary claim.
Lots of religions have liturgical languages which are nobody's mother tongue any more. Orthodox Judaism has Hebrew (Reform/Conservative/etc too, albeit with variably greater use of vernacular): many diaspora Jews have limited Hebrew proficiency, and even for those who speak Modern Hebrew, the liturgy is in mediaeval Hebrew, which has significant differences. And some of the prayers (including quite important ones like the Kaddish and the Kol Nidre said on Yom Kippur) are in Aramaic. Most Muslims pray in Arabic despite the fact that less than 20% speak it natively, and even for those who do, modern vernacular Arabic has diverged a lot from the classical Arabic of the Quran and the prayers. The Russian Orthodox Church prays, not in Russian, but in Church Slavonic, which is a (somewhat Russified) descendant of mediaeval Bulgarian, which comes from a different branch of the Slavic language family. The Greek Orthodox liturgy is in mediaeval Greek, not modern Greek – many Middle Eastern Greek Orthodox have Arabic as their mother tongue, and many ethnic Greeks in Anglophone countries have quite limited Greek proficiency, yet still attend services in the language. The Coptic Church still uses Coptic, a descendant of ancient Egyptian, for its liturgy. The Ethiopian Church uses Ge'ez. The Syriac Churches use Syriac/Aramaic. (And what I just said of those Eastern churches is also true of many Eastern Catholics.) Many Theravada Buddhists pray in Pali. Many Mongolian Buddhists pray in Tibetan (there are many Anglophone Buddhists who pray in Tibetan too). Many Hindus pray in Sanskrit.
Having a special language set aside for prayer, a holy tongue (Lashon Hakodesh, as many Jews call Hebrew) is something a lot of people find spiritually beneficial, across numerous unrelated religious traditions. It can give people a sense of an encounter with the deep past of their own tradition. It can make a religious community feel more unified despite being divided between different mother tongues. And most Catholics, pre-1970, thought the same thing.
It wasn't like people couldn't understand it – they followed English-Latin parallel prayer books, just like people follow English-Hebrew parallel books in many synagogues today. Globally, very many Catholics have a Romance language as their mother tongue, which is historically descended from Latin, which helps with understanding some of the words. Even though English isn't, the heavy infusion of Latin (both directly and via French) into English helps achieve some of the same thing.
I think if I'd grown up Catholic with Latin instead of the vernacular, my understanding of Latin would be a lot better. I feel like I missed out on something there.
So one definitely doesn't have to be a regular Latin Mass goer – I've never been to one in my life, I've thought about doing it but its always just been too out of my way – to wonder if the Church has lost something by throwing away so much of its linguistic heritage. Personally, I'd be quite happy with a kind of compromise in which Latin was much more heavily used but the majority of Masses were still vernacular. Which I actually think is what Vatican II intended, I think the Council's original vision was closer to majority vernacular / minority Latin, than the almost-all-vernacular / almost-no-Latin which actually evolved afterwards.
And this is a separate issue from the Tridentine liturgy – you can say the Mass of Paul VI in Latin and you can say the Tridentine Mass in English (Roman Catholics never have, but some Anglican, Eastern Orthodox and schismatic Catholic churches do it)
You mistake me. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with saying the mass in Latin. I'd kind of like to go see one! Put my 4 years of Jesuit Latin to use! But no, I don't think that's going to be a big draw for ordinary people to join the church.
My Greek Orthodox friends growing up definitely spoke Greek!
It would definitely attract some people. An old friend of mine (from our Catholic high school), who almost never goes to Mass, told me he’d be willing to venture back if it were in Latin, just for the experience. We started looking into it, we were going to go together, but lost interest in the idea when we realised there weren’t any convenient to attend. I don’t know how common that attitude is, but I’m sure he’s not the only person like that.
And the fact is, if Latin doesn’t attract many ordinary people, will anything else? Catholicism (and Christianity more broadly) is full of grand evangelistic plans to “get people back to church”, the vast majority of which produce very little results. If anything, niche offerings such as Latin masses or Anglican Use or Eastern Catholicism at least have a bit of a ”it’s different” factor to draw people in with.
There are clearly people who are interested very specifically in the Latin mass. But even though the church is losing practicing members, it's still huge; normie Catholics dwarf tradcaths.
But again: drawing people isn't the point. Francis didn't crack down on TLM because he thought it was a bad way to get people to show up at mass! He did it because things in the church with TLM were getting weird. It's a doctrinal thing, not a marketing strategy.
> He did it because things in the church with TLM were getting weird.
What’s “weird” is in the eye of the beholder - a lot of stuff Francis saw as “weird”, JP2 and B16 may have seen as significantly less “weird”; conversely, JP2 and B16 may well have seen some of Francis’ own decisions as “weird”.
I know one of the big complaints against TLM communities is that many of them question the validity of Vatican II. But, given B16 as a young theologian authored his famous (in the rarified subfield of Catholic/Orthodox ecumenical theology) “Ratzinger proposal”, that reunion with the Orthodox should not require them to accept post-schism councils as binding - which implicitly downgrades the authority of all 13 post-schism councils from Lateran I to Vatican II inclusive, [0] maybe he’d view doubting Vatican II a bit more charitably than Francis ever could. And, among the more liberal/progressive-leaning Catholics (for whom Francis rather obviously had a significant degree of sympathy), there’s a long tradition of questioning the validity of Vatican I - and I suspect Francis was much more sympathetic to doubting the first than the second.
And then there’s also the Eastern Catholic followers of the late Lebanese Melkite archbishop Elias Zoghby, who rejected the ecumenicity of Vatican II (despite being one of its Fathers) on the grounds that a genuinely ecumenical council would require full Orthodox participation, hence denying that status to all post-schism councils - I suspect Francis would have seen that as much less “weird”, despite its superficial overlap with traditionalist views on Vatican II, since he’d be more sympathetic to the motivations behind it. Zoghby’s opposition to Vatican II’s validity wasn’t solely a matter of abstract theological principle, it was also about its substance - at it, he argued that Eastern Catholics should be allowed to observe the traditional Eastern leniency on divorce rather than being forced to conform to the Latin Church’s principled opposition to it, but he lost that argument-but yet again, likely something Francis had more sympathy for than the Latin traditionalist objections to the council’s substance
[0] there is also the problem of the 8th council, which is a pre-schism council; there are two competing claimants to the title of “Fourth Council of Constantinople”, the first in 869-870, the second in 879-880; Catholics accept the first as the 8th ecumenical council and reject the second as invalid; Orthodox reject the first as invalid and accept the second, but disagree among themselves as to whether to class it as the 8th ecumenical council or as sub-ecumenical; and then there’s also the Quinisext Council of 692 (aka Council in Trullo), which many Orthodox view as quasi-ecumenical, Catholics as local to the East; and then the fact that some Orthodox claim one of their own post-schism councils as ecumenical (the fifth council of Constantinople, 1341-1368) - Ratzinger’s proposal didn’t address these conciliar esoterica, but maybe they aren’t that important given so few get worked up about them
I'm just going to point out that it's not surprising that laypeople and clergy who reject Vatican II also have an unusual habit of faceplanting into antisemitism, given that Nostra Aetate was a product of Vatican II.
The Vatican first condemned antisemitism by name in 1928, so I don't think disagreeing even with Nostra aetate necessarily has antisemitism as a consequence. The perennial problem with antisemitism, however, is nobody (Jews included) can agree on how to define it, and how essential Nostra aetate is to ruling it out for Catholics may depend on how broad or narrow a definition of it you adopt.
Indeed; and when the Second Vatican Council decided Mass should be said in the vernacular, the obligation of the Church was to follow. Instead, the conservatives of the church ('conservative' here means those that emphasize adhering to tradition and are adverse to change) created a rift by eschewing this change and even heightening the importance of the Latin Mass, creating the impression that a mass spoken in the local language was somehow less of a mass.
If you’re Catholic, suggesting that a mass spoken in one language over another is somehow "less" takes away from the most important idea of the Mass: reenacting Christ’s Last supper commandment and the institution of the Holy Eucharist for what amounts to word games.
This divisive description of the mass increased over the decades, to the point that it threatened to cause a schism. As such it was the Holy Father’s duty to resolve the issue.
There are still groups(at least I'm aware of them in Poland, I've met people who are part of them) who believe exactly this, that the second Vatican Sobor was a mistake and the "real" mass is only the one conducted in Latin.
Also unlikely that Jesus intended for the ceremony to be conducted at times other than the evening of his death (replacing Passover). Up for interpretation, I suppose.
Once per year. He commanded his disciples to "do this in remembrance of me."
There is no mention of how often, but given Jesus allergy to ritual as opposed to genuine acts of worship, it seems reasonable that this would not be a commonplace thing.
We can get context for how the early Christians understood it by looking to additional sources from that period, e.g. the Didache and the early Church Fathers.
In the early centuries of Christianity, as it spread geographically, there developed distinct rites of worship that solidified and then were handed down to the present, retaining strong links to the spoken-written languages used to express them originally.
Oversimplifying greatly, but in and from Western Europe we have the Latin Rite, and in/from the East we have the Byzantine (Greek) Rite. There are others, not of less importance, see the link above.
There’s quite a lot of history involved in all this. But in Western Christianity it was Latin that became predominant for public worship and knowledge transmission.
But we do have record that the cross' title was written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.
God certainly had a special plan for these languages: the language of God's Law, the language of human power, and the language of human wisdom. The presence of His name in all three languages left the situation unambiguous to whoever might have been in the area to read it. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, hung on that cross. When pressed about it, Pilate would not amend those words.
In this way, though maybe unnecessary thanks to the Gift of Tongues the Holy Spirit later gave to His apostles, the sign stood as a kind of Rosetta Stone, which no one could misunderstand. It shows that history itself, along with all human matters, belong completely to Him, and at the same time it made those languages new by virtue of that single title, grounding them firmly in the Truth Himself.
Latin and Greek, themselves originally vernaculars, continue to hold a special place in their respective churches, both Catholic and Orthodox. Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, continues to be used in many Eastern churches as well, again Catholic and Orthodox both. All three constitute especially venerable traditions—and to this we may add Coptic, since Jesus spent his early years in Egypt; Slavonic, for its very writing system's role in the conversion of the Slavs; and a handful of others I am more or less ignorant of. With each one, by entering into the language, you enter the mind of those first converts, who themselves entered the Mind of Christ.
In the Latin Catholic Church (that is, the Latin Rite of the Roman Catholic Church, or however you want to name it) we call the Latin language a "sacramental"—the same sort of thing as holy water, something which conveys grace to those who use it with an openness to those graces.
Demons hate it because of its legal precision, by which, in the name of the same Christ named in Latin on the cross, they are driven out of people, things, and places, fulfilling Christ's own prediction that His followers would cast out demons.
By forming one's faith life around one of these languages, one can more clearly ask those basic human questions that Christ is the answer to, without having to deal with the centuries of semantic drift and overloading that are scattered about the minefields of our modern vernaculars. The vernacular, of course, is no impediment to personal prayer, but as more and more people are gathered in one place the confusion of Babel threatens to set in.
On the other hand, every little Latin grammatical lesson, every new piece of vocabulary learned, reveals new wonders and opens the door to the great body of literature that was composed in the single Mind of Christ.
But we had this, and in the 20th century we let it slip through our fingers, not knowing what we'd been given. The problem is not that we don't know Latin. The problem is that, in broad cultural strokes, even when we did, we didn't care.
> It was certainly not in Latin. It was either in Hebrew of in Greek.
I think it was very likely mostly Aramaic, possibly with some Hebrew mixed in (certain set prayers, with Torah readings in Hebrew followed by extemporaneous Aramaic translation). By the 1st century, Jews had abandoned Hebrew as an everyday tongue, a situation which didn't change until Zionists revived it in the late 19th century (which caused great controversy, since the traditional Jewish belief was that Hebrew is a holy language which should be reserved for religious purposes only, a position still maintained by most non-Israeli ultra-Orthodox to this day.)
Putting aside any claims of supernatural linguistic abilities, Jesus of Nazareth would likely have been fluent in Aramaic (his native tongue), competent in using Hebrew for certain religious purposes (but not as a language of everyday life), possibly some limited ability in Greek (but probably not fluent), maybe a few words of Latin (but very unlikely to be fluent).
> The focus on latin is a pure nitpicking and virtue signaling from the Conservatives (the irony!).
The majority of TLM (Traditional Latin Mass) adherents care more about keeping the traditional Tridentine (pre-Vatican II) liturgy than about Latin in itself – Catholic priests are allowed to say the contemporary Mass in Latin (subject to certain conditions), but there is rather little demand for it.
The issue ive heard with non-Latin mass is that it has lessened the feeling of global community among Catholics as they now do not all speak the same language (Latin).
Anecdatum, but I still feel like part of a community when I go to Mass in a language I'm not familiar with, because its rhythm and flow are the same more or less everywhere.
Disclaimer: I'm definitely not old enough to predate vatican 2, so I'm not from a time when Latin Mass was widespread.
Vatican II opened the way for use of vernacular in the Mass while also directing "use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites".
In practice, after the overhaul of the Latin rites was completed and promulgated (published) in 1969, four years after the council ended in '65, the Latin language itself was dropped almost everywhere all at once and only translations were used. Many people rejoiced at that, some did not, but the vast majority of bishops, priests and laity alike, conservatives and liberals across the full spectrum, probably 99.999%, went ahead full throttle with Mass and all the sacraments in the vernacular.
There were hold-out contingents like the SSPX, led by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who stuck with the all Latin rites per the last round of small reforms in 1962, the same as used for the celebration of Mass, etc. during the whole time of the council from 1962-65.
It was over the next 40 years that discontent with the reforms of 1969, and their fallout, began to grow. There was increasing awareness that it wasn't just a switch from Latin to vernacular — the '69 reforms were "cut from whole cloth", outright replacing the traditional rites with syntheses of a commission of scholars. Long story short, many Catholics, some born before '69 and many born after (myself included), desire a return, and have implemented a return, to the traditional form of the Latin rites. Pope Benedict XVI gave it his blessing. But then Pope Francis was not a fan, believing it to be a retrograde movement that causes more harm than good and a kind of "saying no" to the Holy Spirit. It's hard to find middle ground on this matter, to be quite honest.
No idea why you're being downvoted, you're correct. There was and still is pushback against the liturgical reform even from pro-Vatican II priests and bishops
Imagine going to church every Saturday or Sunday and sitting through a 1 hour service that you don't understand. The conservative side of the church has decided that it hates change, and since the Latin services were mostly cast aside, that's a bad thing to them.
The dozen or so TLMs I've ever been to have had their readings in the vernacular. All the other parts are either the same every time (or have only a few variations) or are propers (specific to each day).
I never studied Latin, but I don't find it difficult at all to keep up. A lot of churches that have TLM have the missal booklet with Latin on one page and vernacular on the facing page.
While I do appreciate the richness of the daily propers and miss understanding them, it doesn't bother me enough to avoid the TLM.
Modern catholics and protestants are the exception in regards to "understanding" their rites. For centuries religions have maintained "sacred languages" or at the very least sacred dialects, with the intention of emphasizing continuity between generations.
Also, you don't really seem to understand how the Latin Mass works. The Ordo is repeated the same way every mass, so anyone that remotely cares knows what it says. The proper, including the readings, changes most days, but many are repeated throughout the year, like the mass of the virgins, and also repeats every year in the exact same way, so there's no reason for a concerned faithful not to buy a book with them if they care so much. Readings are frequently read in vernacular before the sermon, if pertinent, but they are not core to the mass so there's not much reason to care
His persona as being simple focus is just PR, no different than puff pieces about bill gates driving a Prius, or Warren buffet living in the first house that be bought.
> It's quite a bit above our pay grade to proclaim categorically who supposedly cannot be redeemed; it verges on blasphemy.
And the idea that atheists can be saved isn't novel in Catholic teaching – it is implicit in the Holy Office's 1949 condemnation of Feeneyism, [0] in which it declared that a person who doesn't believe in Catholicism due to "invincible ignorance" can be saved by an "implicit desire" for God. Although it didn't include the case of atheists, it didn't exclude them either – suggesting that an atheist who doesn't believe in God in their head (due to some intellectual issue) but nonetheless believes in God in their heart can be saved.
In Catholic theology, God is believed to be Goodness itself – in a sense, identical to Plato's Form of the Good (but going far beyond Plato's idea at the same time).
Hence, anyone who loves Good loves God... so a person who truly loves Good, but who due to some intellectual obstacle, isn't able to call that Good "God" – from a Catholic viewpoint, it can be said that they love God without knowing that it is God whom they love – and by that love they can be saved
Pretty much, although it also depends on your mind's reasons.
If you start from the assumption that Christianity is true, and some people know this, and others don't – you have to ask why the people who don't know it, don't know it. And this is where Catholic theology distinguishes between "vincible" and "invincible" ignorance - "vincible" means the ignorance is your own fault, "invincible" means your ignorance is through no fault of your own.
How to distinguish the two? Ultimately, it is up to God to decide – nobody else knows for sure what's going on in your head. At best, theologians would give some examples of hypothetical situations which could be said to be one or the other – but the real world is often much messier than any such hypothetical can capture.
Which is part of why, the traditional Catholic teaching, is that (with rare exceptions) you can't actually know where people are going to end up. The idea is that if you make it to heaven, you might be surprised to find a lot of people there you weren't expecting, and also maybe some people you were sure would be there aren't.
As an agnostic who spends a lot of time reading scriptures of several religions, trying to grasp the themes and motivations of others I share a world with -- those passages are particularly inscrutable.
It's pretty easy to parse if you understand that God isn't actually asking anyone for the dimensions of the Earth. It's more about proffering humility to Job by comparing his understanding of things to God's.
> As an agnostic who spends a lot of time reading scriptures of several religions, trying to grasp the themes and motivations of others I share a world with -- those passages are particularly inscrutable.
I think the author's intent is to remind us that some things are simply beyond our ken (to which I'd add: For now).
Absolutely, but Pope Francis said a lot of things that were absolutely core, canon, Catholic beliefs but still made a bunch of Catholics unreasonably angry.
> He riled many of his flock and hierarchy when he said that "even atheists can be redeemed".
Which is "interesting", considering how much of the New Testament is about redemption and reaching out to outsiders. Aren’t we all supposed to be God’s creation, and wasn’t Jesus supposed to teach us about salvation, redemption and forgiveness?
(And by "interesting", I mean that it is yet another of example cognitive dissonance amongst fundamentalists. If anyone can be redeemed, it implies that atheists can, as well.)
> I will always applaud a person who retreats — even just a little — from dogma and fanaticism.
Indeed. He was not perfect but he was better than most. I hope the next one won’t be a catholic version of patriarch Kirill.
It's funny you mention Kiril. I keep thinking about Pope Francis's (apparently deep and genuine) friendship with Bartholomew, Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church.
It is traditional for the EP to visit Rome on the patronal Feast of Saints Peter and Paul and for the Pope to visit Istanbul on the Feast of Saint Andrew, which is apparently when the friendship first formed. My absolute favorite story about Francis is his deciding to send some of the most precious relics in the Vatican to Bartholomew as a gift: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2019-09/pope-francis... (That sent some people into a fury).
Actually, it's my second favorite story. My favorite story is his insistence that he live in the Vatican guesthouse (and not the Papal apartments). Or perhaps the fact that as archbishop of Buenos Ares he insisted on taking the subway.
The man declared Putin's war to be a literal crusade against the West:
> From a spiritual and moral point of view, the special military operation is a Holy War, in which Russia and its people, defending the single spiritual space of Holy Rus', fulfill the mission of the "Restrainer", protecting the world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West that has fallen into Satanism.
> After the end of the SVO, the entire territory of modern Ukraine must enter the zone of exclusive influence of Russia. The possibility of the existence on this territory of a Russophobic political regime hostile to Russia and its people, as well as a political regime controlled from an external center hostile to Russia, must be completely excluded.
He also said that russian men who die fighting in ukraine are guaranteed salvation. In orthodox theology this sort of thing has historically been recognized as a straightforward heresy. We do not claim to know in advance who will be saved, or by what specific acts. Not even bishops or metropolitans. So even from a strictly orthodox perspective he is dangerously divisive and has broken from one of our most important traditions.
(The recognition of saints is a little different, happening always after their death and depending on some degree of regional consensus. It's sloppy but whatever, it is actually not as similar as it might look.)
Read up on him more. He's essentially former KGB that was originally assigned to keep an eye on the token remnants of the church in Soviet Russia. He's now saying the war against Ukraine is "holy and justified", signing up to fight is "guaranteed to wipe away your sins", etc. He's designed to manipulate a segment of the population. He's Putin's method to "religiously justify" whatever Putin wants.
The Russian Orthodox Church has been a Chekist front since Stalin revived it for nationalistic reasons during WW2. Kirill is just continuing the tradition.
> Which is "interesting", considering how much of the New Testament is about redemption and reaching out to outsiders. Aren’t we all supposed to be God’s creation, and wasn’t Jesus supposed to teach us about salvation, redemption and forgiveness?
As religion has shrunk in participation in most of the west, it has become hugely susceptible to manipulation. My wife (now atheist, but grew up evangelical) often has to correct me when I make snide remarks about Christianity. Recently I made some comment about hypocrisy amongst Christians for supporting a multiply-divorced man who bragged about groping women for president (who has probably never read the bible), to say nothing of the people around him. She quickly snapped back at me that "they actually see themselves in him, have you not noticed all the sex scandals that happen in so many churches?" and then went on to list the "questionable" relationships in her own youth group. (I am NOT saying all Christians are like this, but religion is often used to cover up or excuse misdeeds).
It is not unique to Christianity or even Islam, though. You're seeing a lot of religion being used to justify many terrible things, including many smaller ones in Africa and Asia that have been used to justify atrocities and genocide.
> She quickly snapped back at me that "they actually see themselves in him, have you not noticed all the sex scandals that happen in so many churches?"
I think she is right for some of these people. It is a human reaction, but it is still a moral failing. The proper Christian (well, Catholic, anyway) thing to do would be what is expected in a confession: recognise one’s failings, express regret, and accept consequences, including punishment. Then comes redemption.
Something that irks me fundamentally with most Christian religions is how they believe that they are Good People because they accepted God and rejected Evil. It’s all good as long as you play the part. Once you start looking for excuses, you failed twice: first, because of your behaviour, and then for failing to repent. If you support someone because he made the same error you did, then you fail yet again. This behaviour is understandable, but trippy incorrect from a religious perspective and very hypocritical.
In the grand scheme of things, it is very easy to get forgiveness, you just have to be sincere in your regrets (again, for Catholics, which is what I know).
My (and my wife's) background is protestant. In this realm, there's no forgiveness unless you totally repent and accept the whole christian shebang. In extreme cases, it's not the the sin itself, but the rejection of god/jesus that's the worst you can do. Taken to the extreme, you see this manifested very strangely, like Chick tracts where the secular lifetime do-gooder burns in hell, but the terrible multiple murdering rapist gets into heaven because they repent "in time".
I know there are wonderful ministers, christians, and people of all religions. But I've come to the conclusion that if said minister/church/religion gets involved in politics, there's a greater chance than not that it's being run by manipulative power-hungry people. And those people want strict control, making mistakes (often the way people learn best) is not tolerated by them. It's in some ways gotten worse, because they're now treating other people's refusals to follow (gay marriage, no prayer in schools, etc) as direct attacks on them.
Sorry I misinterpreted. Protestant denominations are convenient for politics, because there are so many of them and hey have so different positions.
> In this realm, there's no forgiveness unless you totally repent and accept the whole christian shebang. In extreme cases, it's not the the sin itself, but the rejection of god/jesus that's the worst you can do.
That’s fertile ground for extremism and reinforces the group dynamics, for sure.
> Taken to the extreme, you see this manifested very strangely, like Chick tracts where the secular lifetime do-gooder burns in hell, but the terrible multiple murdering rapist gets into heaven because they repent "in time".
I think Pascal wrote something about this behaviour. I won’t chase the source but IIRC the conclusion was that these people were hypocrites using religion to be terrible people and I tend to agree. Personally I find also weird to believe that God is so easily fooled, but that’s just me.
> But I've come to the conclusion that if said minister/church/religion gets involved in politics, there's a greater chance than not that it's being run by manipulative power-hungry people.
Definitely. It is too effective as a tool for control and coercion. At least the Catholic Church mostly retreated from this. They do some lobbying but nobody is asking for a Catholic theocracy anywhere that I know of.
> It's in some ways gotten worse, because they're now treating other people's refusals to follow (gay marriage, no prayer in schools, etc) as direct attacks on them.
Yes. It is the end of enlightenment and the end of liberal democracies if enough people behave that way. These people are functionally similar to the imams who keep babbling about the shariah, it’s time we see them that way.
I guess it's good to correct an incorrect accusation of hypocrisy. But it's not great when doing so takes the form, "People aren't being hypocrites in not condemning someone in power for the bad things he does, because they do those bad things too".
> As religion has shrunk in participation in most of the west, it has become hugely susceptible to manipulation
That’s an interesting correlation. Do you have any ideas about the dynamics associated with it?
I do seem to remember experiencing my tradition as less manipulative when I was young, but have never been sure if that was me not seeing it. And if true, I’m not sure whether to attribute it to size, or the internet, or political influence, or something else.
Same here. Although I grew up a Catholic and am now an atheist, my father counselled me that there were few institutions in the world that look after the downtrodden. The Catholic church has often not done that, but under Francis moved more towards that goal than any other time in recent history.
this is terribly inaccurate. they teach gainst using birth control even in poor, AIDS ridden regions (see Mother Theresa in Africa), treat women as lesser beings (including not recognizing that marital rape is a thing), cause the mistreatment of queer and homosexual and trans people, etc etc
He felt like a throwback to me, in a good way. He reminded me of a time when Christians weren't so afraid of being subsumed by the secular progressive mainstream, when they could still see love and forgiveness as the core of their faith.
I'm not religious either, but was educated in a Jesuit school. He brought a well needed breath of fresh air to the church. He was a pope for our times. Let's see if the church will be able to make another strong selection to replace him.
Rerum Novarum was the basis of catholic social teaching since, so...
But yes, one thing is statements another is actions, regarding the latter the Latin Church's actions have often not been in keeping with their lofty writings.
On the other hand, lots of christians liked him because he was progressive (more than his predecessor, anyway). Catholics are not all fundamentalists and in general don’t have much in common with the catholics bishops in the US, who are for the most part downright medieval.
Plenty(well, some) Catholics in Poland had an issue with him for the exact same reason - just way too progressive for them. Although I do think that American Catholics are particularly.....fervent in their beliefs.
Look up some numbers, his approval ratings outside of America were rapidly declining (at least in Latin America). [1] Interestingly the US is the one place where his approval ratings didn't decline over time, probably owing to the perfectly divided nature of contemporary politics. As he lost support from one side he gained it in equal proportions from the other. But in places like Argentina, his birth place no less, his approval rating dropped 27 points as he got increasingly involved in Progressive stuff.
One data point, but I live in a progressive country in western Europe, and I have close family members who are in the "right wing / trumpist / christians" movement (which does exist in Europe too), and obviously they really disliked this pope.
Pope Francis caused quite a bit of controversy among Catholics. From his crackdown on the TLM (Traditional Latin Mass) to his often unscripted, pastoral tone on issues like sexuality, economics, and interfaith dialogue, he unsettled many and yet drew others closer to the Church. With his passing, we’re left to process a papacy that disrupted in the deepest sense of the word.
As a Catholic, I often found myself both inspired and unsettled by him. His theology wasn’t always systematic, but it was deeply Ignatian, rooted in discernment, encounter, and movement toward the margins. Francis often chose gestures over definitions, and presence over proclamations. That doesn't always scale well in a Church that spans continents, cultures, and centuries.
His legacy will be debated. But I think what made him so compelling, especially to someone who lives in the modern world but tries to be formed by ancient faith is that he forced us to confront the tension between tradition and aggiornamento not as an abstract debate, but as something lived.
He reminded me that the Church isn’t a museum, nor is it a startup. It’s something stranger.. the best I can described it is a body that somehow survives by dying daily.
- Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.
A teacher of mine often reminds me that in many cultures—like Japanese and Native American traditions—the role of having an enemy is viewed with a certain respect. Enemies help define us. They challenge us, sharpen us, and push us to grow. Western culture tends to abhor the idea of having enemies, but sometimes, having them simply means you’ve stood for something meaningful—something worth noticing.
It seems Pope Francis had his share of critics—those who opposed his beliefs or feared his vision. And yet, he stood firm and made people think. In that sense, perhaps even his enemies affirmed the impact he was making.
Not to sound like the oldest person in the room/thread, but the use of "opponent" as 'opps' has gained a lot of traction in the vernacular of Gen-z/alpha. Not so much as an outright enemy, and not so much as a 'hater'.
The word enemy, by definition and function, is spot on, because its presence triggers the primal instinct: Staying alive, no matter what.
Being in that mode opens a window to yourself no other state can open. You'll find what makes you tick, and what you are prepared to go through to make out alive in this situation.
You'll be tested in your might, intelligence and more importantly, ethical and moral limits.
The saying "You don't know how much violence it took for me to be this gentle." has roots in this perspective, so as my favorite quote from Murakami:
> And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
"Opponent" is the word that a lot of anime/manga uses (translates to) when someone is referring to someone. There is a lot respect, and sometimes gratitude, shown for someone that is a worthy opponent. The idea being, as is noted above, that the opponent is someone that helps one become better.
I think the problem with enemies is 1) vindictiveness and 2) ineffectiveness.
Everyone dislikes some actions and ideas, and thus dislikes people who express those actions and ideas. Every group has enemy groups, who they oppose and who oppose them, even if they're not explicitly named.
A problem is when people start opposing others who don't express the actions and ideas they oppose, because they resemble the people who do. Anger generalizes, sometimes to ethnic groups, sometimes to the entire world.
Another problem is when people attack others in ways that don't stop their actions or ideas. Violence doesn't seem to promote its ideas in the long term, and it can backfire. Jesus might be the greatest example of this.
The way to kill actions is through counter-actions, and the way to kill ideas is through counter-ideas. These counter-actions and counter-ideas can be ugly or violent, or they can be pretty or pacifist. But every action or idea opposes another action or idea, which could be considered an "enemy".
Western culture abhors the idea of enemies? What??? Western culture, more than any other embraces its enemies since the days of The Dying Gaul. Read a book.
Looking back on his papacy, I agree that we was very divisive in some aspects but also, being the pope has to be one of the hardest jobs on the planet, he's basically a world leader.
At the "world leader" level it's impossible to do a job in a way where everyone will think it's a good job, you're always going to piss off one group or another with practically any action in any direction.
IMO he took on one of the hardest tasks at the church which is "modernization". The way I look at it is the church is so old that it constantly needs modernization. But that comes at a steep cost as while you are attracting new parishioners, many of your older ones will scoff at the changes. And because of the church's age, this is something that must be done over and over and over again.
My favorite quote was when he talked about families in one of his many speeches.
"In families, there are difficulties. In families, we argue; in families, sometimes the plates fly...In families, there are difficulties, but these difficulties are overcome with love. Hate doesn’t overcome any difficulty."
People who aren't familiar with mainstream Catholicism might not understand that TLM is a pretty powerful cultural signifier; it's something close to a separatist movement within the church (in fact, it's the launch pad for an actual separatist movement, SSPX) and it's quite conservative. When you hear the pejorative "tradcath", these are the people they're talking about.
Naturally, the tiny but vocal minority of people who attended the TLM found Francis very activating. But it's important to know that those people are not broadly representative of the church as a whole. Most Catholics I know would barely offer a shrug if you told them (they certainly wouldn't already know) that Francis had restricted the TLM.
SSPX is in no way separatist, that is severely misinformed. If anything it is reformist, as they recognize the pope as their legitimate ruler and the local bishops as the legitimate local authorities. The claim is not that Rome has failed, it is that papal authority does not extend to the banishment of the Latin Mass, a position many regular clergy agree with.
Terry Pratchett's classic book "Small Gods" has a section that is perhaps inspired quite directly by the Church, comparing it to a type of shellfish: "Around the Godde there forms a Shelle of prayers and Ceremonies and Buildings and Priestes and Authority, until at Last the Godde Dies. Ande this maye notte be noticed."
I think Pope Francis was committed to trying to dig through some of the shell to get to the godly bits of the religion, and this is deeply laudable. It was frankly weird to see the opposition to some of his seemingly obviously Christian stances. He'd say something like "I guess I don't really approve of gay people marrying, but I think we should be focusing on all of these suffering and dying poor people?" and then a bunch of people would bitch about it.
Please stop talking in such general terms. No Catholics I know have been shaken by anything Pope Francis did. I have been educated in a Catholic school, which also served as a Catholic seminary, and I never heard Pope Francis say anything that was not in line with the catechism that we were taught back then.
Many Catholics I know were absolutely shaken by this Pope, and were absolutely not supporters of the man. They thought he was too liberal and too modern.
Christ welcomed the poor, prostitutes, lepers, and thieves into his fold. Many Catholics are like a lot of Evangelicals in that they're Christian in name only. Their political beliefs ARE their faith and their religious beliefs are just a convenient shield for their politics. They like to associate with the man, but have taken zero time to understand him. The only time Jesus was openly hostile in the entirety of the Bible was when there were people trying to make a profit in the Temple. Contrast that to people who will attend a megachurch but hate gay folks. Francis did not condone gay marriage. He simply said that if a gay couple comes to you for pastoral advice, that you love them and attempt to give them the help they need. But you'd think the dude was prancing around in rainbow underwear on camera with the way people reacted to his love and grace.
I think what many Catholics found frustrating about Pope Francis was his tendency to make apparently off-the-cuff remarks which, while never quite explicitly straying outside the bounds of faith and morals defined by the Magisterium, often seemed to strongly imply the opposite. This was especially true for audiences that did not already know the Catechism through and through, which even most Catholics do not. In that sense, Pope Francis's remarks sometimes seemed to possess a kind of not-committing-heresy-can't-get-mad character. This was exacerbated in turn by the media's selective quotation of statements that were, if quite reasonable in their entirety, not exactly robust to misinterpretation.
Although I personally wish Pope Francis had done certain things differently, God chose him for a reason. I will try reflect on that as I, along with the Church, pray for him.
> while never quite explicitly straying outside the bounds of faith and morals defined by the Magisterium, often seemed to strongly imply the opposite. This was especially true for audiences that did not already know the Catechism through and through, which even most Catholics do not. In that sense, Pope Francis's remarks sometimes seemed to possess a kind of not-committing-heresy-can't-get-mad character
He sounds like a good teacher, reminding people how much the faith encompasses outside of what they feel that it encompasses. People need prompting and guidance on the parts that feel uncomfortable, not the parts that dovetail neatly with their intuitions. If their reaction to his teaching is to trust their knee-jerk discomfort over the pope, despite not being able to formulate any concrete objections, just the feeling that it must be wrong in a sneaky way they can't put their finger on, then it seems like they have decided to let their own feelings be the highest authority.
> People need prompting and guidance on the parts that feel uncomfortable, not the parts that dovetail neatly with their intuitions.
I totally agree in general. But I wouldn't say that the issues with Francis's style amounted to knee-jerk discomfort without concrete objections. The concrete objection is that many of his comments had to be read in a kind of maximally un-Gricean way to be squared with Church teaching.
Francis's deployment of ambiguity in communication isn't something I'm making up-- it was a highly unusual and distinctive element of his papacy, most notably evidenced in his refusal to respond to (quite concrete) dubia over seemingly unorthodox comments for seven years.
But if there is a silver lining, I suppose there has been no other pope in recent years that has occasioned more clarification of the doctrine of papal infallibility, so there is that.
Pope St. Pius X put it in Pascendi: "It is one of the cleverest devices of the Modernists (as they are commonly and rightly called) to present their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement, in a scattered and disjointed manner, so as to make it appear as if their minds were in doubt or hesitation, whereas in reality they are quite fixed and steadfast."
Francis, like other Modernists, had the knack of saying heretical things in a way that the intended effect was obvious, but his defenders could say, "He never said that! And here's how you could interpret him in a completely consistent with Catholic teaching." Or they'd argue that he was speaking off-the-cuff and shouldn't be taken literally, or that he was misquoted by an atheist interviewer (to whom he kept giving interviews and never corrected the record). But everyone who wasn't in denial knew what he was doing.
I share some of your frustrations, and yet there is also a spiritual peril in failing to extend charity in the interpretation of these remarks, let alone in claiming to know that anyone who interpreted them differently is being willfully obtuse.
The greater the errors of the Franciscan papacy in your view, the more you owe the man your prayers.
Honestly, if you're going to be a member of a church and you fully believe that the dude is holding the seat of the founder of the faith, the least you could do is actually have enough of an attention span to fully hear him out. It isn't his fault that people decided to do what people do. He explained himself and people chose not to listen.
It is possible to be a Catholic and not support the direction that the Pope is taking the church; in the same way it is possible to disagree with the direction that the local priest is taking the parish. It is possible to look at someone as the leader of an organization you are part of, and treat them with respect, while not agreeing with every choice they make.
You're correct. For many modern Catholics, it's about inertia. They've always been Catholic, but they want to do it their way. That's the entire purpose of the Catholic Church - to tell you exactly how to do church.
Is also why there are so many converts from Catholicism to New age sorts of Christian churches.
Catholics are not obliged to follow the pope in matters not related to faith and morals, and even then not when he speaks as a private person instead of in the voice of the Church (the same sex marriage interview as a prime example where he directly states it is his own private opinion). Though every catholic IS obliged to pray for the pope and defend his legitimacy and claim to power, which I suppose could constitute a degree of obligatory support
I guess you can consider yourself lucky that the Catholics you know get the big picture. There's a whole world of Catholics out there, and unfortunately, not all do.
According to the rules in the first post, I cannot talk about politics in this thread, but the summary is, the political inclinations that he displayed were "uncomfortable".
Last year, an interviewer asked Francis how he envisages hell. His response stayed with me: “It’s difficult to imagine it. What I would say is not a dogma of faith, but my personal thought: I like to think hell is empty; I hope it is.”
“I like to think Hell is empty” might be a hopeful statement, as in he hopes nobody ever actually goes to Hell but that everyone, no matter how evil, repents in their dying moments and accepts the path of truth.
I like to think hell is empty because the people who would have been sent there for being foul and wicked are actually people with no souls: they are just p-zombies wandering the world inflicting harm. Thus, when they die, there is no actual soul being released, their matter just ceases to function.
This could also explain why some simple creatures, with no real conscious experience, don’t overpopulate heaven or Hell: they have no souls with which to populate it with. They are just matter, temporarily constructed into some form resembling a living thing.
So hell is empty, and evil is the result of soulless automatons created by accident in our world. So if you die and nothing else happens for you after, then you were a p-zombie, with no soul.
The bible only has sparse and often contradictory references to hell - so it's very difficult to state "what the Bible says about hell" as if there's a unified picture laid out.
I've heard descriptions of hell of everything from the classic "fire and torture" we all know, to it being a total and complete detachment from god (in a disappointed and kicked out of the house by your parents kind of way). It's similar to descriptions of Satin. Everything from the horns and pitchfork all the way down to a "beautiful fallen angel" that he technically was explained to be in the bible.
I've always just assumed the descriptions that work to keep people fearful of leaving the religion as whatever is used at the time (saying this as somebody who is agnostic).
That's not exactly true. The main thing that is popularized by Dante is "demons are performing the punishment" (rather than being punished as in scripture ... but the general idea goes back to Gnosticism) ... and I guess "hell has circles" if we count those as significant.
"Hell is a place of fire and torment" is explicitly Biblical (Luke 16), even if there are also mentions of Hell without that (and some mentions of fire and torment without calling it "Hell").
Annihilationism vs Eternal Conscious Torment is the main point that isn't given a perfectly clear answer in scripture; there are verses that hint toward each.
Limbo and Purgatory are not in the Bible, but predate Dante. "Deal with the Devil" predates Dante and is only weakly founded in scripture. "Devils" (plural, as opposed to "the Devil") being distinct from "Demons" is a translation artifact, popularized by Dungeons & Dragons. There being various types of demons long precedes Dante. Variants of Universalism (including "Nobody goes to Hell" and "it's possible to escape Hell") are explicitly rejected in scripture.
Those are all the aspects of "modern concept of hell" that I can think of (let me know if you can think of more), and the connection to Dante seems pretty weak.
The concept and nature of an afterlife, divine justice and punishment, and the existence of "Hell" (which is mostly a Christian invention) has evolved over the millennia of text which make up Biblical canon.
It's always a mistake to assume the Bible has a singular, coherent, intentional narrative. Parts of it were written before the Israelites were even monotheists. It has as many Gods as it has authors.
its not biblical but its very catholic, its optimistic. I've heard it from other catholics, its just a hope that at the end of everyones life they accepted jesus and made it into heaven.
Yes - I think it caught my attention because it was such a mystery. It was a welcome thing to hear from one of the most powerful people in the world, but it came like a bolt from the blue. As far as I know, he never revisited the topic.
Catholicism isn't Protestantism. The idea that the Bible is the only source of truth is a Protestant idea and thus is very visible in the US. Catholicism, however, teaches that tradition and church teachings are sources of truth on par with the Bible. As such, for many teachings, especially those like Hell where the Bible is unclear, what it says isn't very relevant to Catholic doctine.
It's not that simple, because there are multiple concepts and Hebrew and Greek words that were translated as "hell". And many of those passages don't mention hell at all, but are just interpreted as such by readers.
I would argue that reading random quotes without context can be misleading. Unless of course you believe in a univocal, consistent and divinely inspired bible - which is a fairly extreme position to take.
> I would argue that reading random quotes without context can be misleading. Unless of course you believe in a univocal, consistent and divinely inspired bible - which is a fairly extreme position to take.
Those two statements don't follow. You can believe in a univocal, consistent and divinely inspired Bible and still think taking random quotes out of context is bad exegesis.
I see what you mean but I wasn't making a formal logical argument. Rather I meant something like "These particular quotes are more likely to be regarded as inherently meaningful on their own by someone who believes in a univocal, consistent and divinely inspired Bible"
Not my best-crafted piece of self-expression I will admit.
Most of what we know as hell comes from depictions by Dante and Milton. Things like fallen angel Lucifer, battles between heaven and hell, the apocalypse and rapture, etc. are noncanonical.
Did you read these? I think they actually go against what you argue. One of the passages about "hell" is John 3:16, which could not be less about hell if it tried (IMO). Also the passages that actually mention hell/hades are extremely sparse on details: it's separate from god, there will be fire and it will be unpleasant. Considering the length of the bible, I think this list shows that the bible has "very little" to say about hell in general.
Yes, the Bible is long, but it talks about many topics. The only thing that is mentioned a lot is Yahweh and Jesus. Beyond that you're not really gonna get a lot of consistency on topics.
This is a random Bible search website to show some verses about hell. I was not implying that all of these verses are definitive treatments of hell or anything similar.
However you will notice that what is said in these verses is generally not "hell is just emptiness". So even if very little is said about hell, to me the appropriate response to that is not "it doesn't say much so I'm just gonna believe whatever I want" (if you also claim the Bible is divinely inspired and the underpinning of your entire religion).
I guess if you wanted to argue that the fact that it doesn't say much should not be mistaken for being able to pick and choose your understanding, you should have said that before. Instead you contradicted "The Bible has very little to say about hell in general." - and linked that list of passages. I would say that ~10 passages there clearly describe "hell" and that, because the bible is a long book, that absolutely qualifies as it having "little to say" about hell.
> Beyond that you're not really gonna get a lot of consistency on topics.
This just seems like moving the goalposts to me. There's not a lot of consistency in talking about the "kingdom of heaven / god" but there are a LOT of passages that describe it. Many more than describe hell in any form. That doesn't mean that hell couldn't be a real thing but it's not a thing that's very present in the canonical text. Christian thought goes far beyond the contents of the traditional bible, but if you want to argue for a "paradise lost" hell or somesuch, you need to cast your lot with thinkers beyond the old and new testament authors.
That said, I don't think any of my sibling comments have responded with sources that ignore the biblical text. I think Ehrman is a bit liberal to stand in for all of christendom, but he's a respected scholar and I think his analysis is not in the category of "ignoring the text and inserting his own beliefs."
It is impossible to reconcile the idea of an omnipotent god that is simultaneously good and permits people to be tortured for eternity.
Perhaps he chose the “god is good” over the “god, despite being able, will not prevent billions of reasonable and decent people from suffering eternally” fork in the road. You can’t logically choose both, and if you’re the pope, you probably had better have a belief in the goodness of god.
I've mentioned this before on HN but I find it interesting and valuable.
There is an older stream of christian thought on heaven and hell, still somewhat present in eastern christianity, that they are not separate places people are sent to.
In this view they are the same thing, simply the direct experience of the unattenuated light of god. A repentant person will experience this as mercy and all encompassing love, an unrepentant one will experience it as excruciating shame and terror. But they are both getting the same "treatment" so to speak.
I am not sure which label I should use for myself besides Christian as in 'follower of Christ', who tries to follow the Bible as accurately as possible, believing it to be the direct and absolute message from God.
Which indeed makes me incompatible with Catholicism.
Unless you live(d) in a time and place where Christian teachings were unavailable to you. Which accounts for a large majority of the humans who have ever lived.
Which is a problem for some Protestants who insist that only Christians can be saved... but not necessarily for Catholics. The belief that only Christians can be saved has actually been condemned by the Catholic Church as a heresy (Feeneyism, after the 20th century American priest, Leonard Feeney, who most famously espoused it)
According to Catholic teaching, non-Christians can be saved if (1) they are "invincibly ignorant" (i.e. their ignorance of the truth of Christianity is not their own fault), and (2) they have an "implicit desire" for the Christian God
I am a (non-catholic) Christian and I loved Pope Francis, for all the hate he won from traditionalists. He really seemed Christ-like, in his deep concern for the marginalized and poor. He never ceased to emphasize Jesus' saving power and good news. May he rest in peace and may he be with our Lord.
Also not a Roman Catholic, but there were some good things about Pope Francis that I could appreciate, particularly his very Augustinian take on reason and the restlessness of the heart found in his lecture from the launch of the Spanish edition of Msgr. Luigi Giussani's book "The Religious Sense."
A written version of Bergoglio's talk is published in chapter 7 of "Generative Thought: An Introduction to the Works of Luigi Giussani" by Elisa Buzzi, 2003
Yes, thank you for sharing a link to the PDF. I see you are familiar with the literature. Yesterday I posted a couple of screencaps pointing to this: https://x.com/wyclif/status/1914276336690139440
God bless him. Religion aside, his encyclicas covering more earthly subjects (Fratelli Tuti, Laudato Si) are really worth to be read. Download and read them as PDF in the language of your choice, no matter what your religious views are.
I wonder whether we will have another Jesuit Pope. Jesuits are supposed to be generally very education focused, more progressive (especially w.r.t science) and stand less on ceremony. I know nothing about how the College of Cardinals work, but if they're anything like other political voting bodies, one of two outcomes are possible: a swing to the Right (and toward tradition), recognizing the current balance of power in the world, or a swing even further Left of Francis, again recognizing the current trend but as a counterweight.
I would like to know more. My impression is that most Christian institutions have long ago disentangled from scientific debate - providing interpretative value rather than alternative science. This is part of a larger trend to focus their scope and mission in modern life. Have the last few popes made comments on scientific issues?
I was always taught that relativity, evolution, an old universe and even a not too literal interpretation of the bible (some caveats to that last one) are perfectly compatible with Catholicism. My dad was taught by Jesuits and I was taught at a former convent school. The Vatican has an observatory and the pontifical academy of sciences is far from an "answers in genesis" type organisation.
Catholics don’t generally adopt the anti-science stuff. Their dogma around life has some walls around some areas of medicine.
I know several priests who are scientists or teachers/professors.
Evangelicals have a simpler dogma where the individual minister or church has more sway (hence the joke about the man on a desert island with a hut, a church, and a church he doesn’t go to). It’s a more populist form of worship, which has ups and downs.
I went to a Jesuit university. The way it was explained to me could be simplified to: God wouldn't lie to us, God made nature, so then scientific discoveries therefore teach us more about nature and God. When a new discovery threatens old teachings, the Jesuits convene and figure out how to incorporate this new understanding into their beliefs, strengthening them rather than threatening.
I found it inspiring. I'm genuinely sad about the Pope's passing. He was a man who followed the teachings as he understood them.
Not sure if this is accurate. I was once a member of an astronomy club and its patron was a Catholic priest who was very much into the subject. And he wasn't even a Jesuit.
Indeed, that is exactly what it is. Mainstream catholics don’t really have a problem with science in general, but with moral consequences of some application of science. Broadly speaking, they are not saying that science is fake, more that there are some things we should not do.
A conversation with a Jesuit for example can be enlightening because they have intellectual and moral arguments, it’s not just castles built on the shifting foundations of a Bible verse.
This leads to different approaches compared to a lot of American Protestants. They don’t seek to undermine science.
Ironically, Catholicism as an institution has a better track record of supporting science than many Protestant sects. Much of the "alternative science" comes from the Baptists and Evangelicals.
It's ironic because no matter how much science they embrace, they never come around to realizing their God is just as much make believe as every other.
Science doesn’t say we are the only intelligent forms in the universe. Science doesn’t say intelligent max’s out with humans. Science doesn’t describe concepts outside of time and space.
oh. thanks for clarifying. I'd thought the irony lies in some image of being anti-scientific.
the fun thing, ironic itself, about dismissing religion in it's entirety is that most religions have long understood that G'd can't be proven, measured, captured with experiments. the irony in this is that while you can't prove G'd you can't disprove G'd either, so the lack of proof is no proof of a lack of "The Force". quantum physics did not not exist just because the was no proof for it.
one interesting train of thought in this regard was the conclusion of a book on the neurobiology of meditation, (the title escapes me right now): what if the only "instrument" to measure religious experience is the brain? we can measure effects of systematic religious practice on the brain, like meditation aka contemplative prayer. we can identify some aspects of states that humans describe as religious experience, in the brain, as they happen. why would we dismiss those as mere "brain formations"? while we accept equally measurable effects of sound or light on the brain as "real"?
The Jesuits do indeed have a long tradition of research on the basis of a belief that understanding how the universe works gives a greater understanding of God's creation.
As such, they've traditionally been more open, and a disproportionately high proportion of Jesuits have been scientists. At one point about 1/3 of all members of the Jesuit order were scientists.
"The pope's astronomer"[1] is a jesuit, and the Jesuits have a long tradition in astronomy, with the result of numerous lunar craters (e.g. McNally) and several asteroids named after Jesuits. More than once, Jesuits have also tangled with the question of extraterrestial life, e.g.[2a] - a question fraught by the question it would raise about what it would mean for belief [2b].
Wikipedia also has a long list of Catholic clergy scientists[3]. When reading it, it's worth considering that if anything they had more influence as teachers (e.g. Descartes, Mersenne were both educated at Jesuit colleges), and that the order ranged from low thousands to a few tens of thousands during the centuries the list covers.
With respect to the last few popes, the most notable recent intervention is Pope Francis making clear that he saw the theories of evolution and the Big Bang as real[4]. But already in 1950, even the deeply conservative Pope Pius XII, while expressing hope that evolution would prove to be a passing fad, made clear that catholic doctrine officially did not conflict with evolution. John Paul II formally acquitted Galileo, and stated that "truth cannot contradict truth", when talking about evolution vs. catholic doctrine. [5]
Francis spent the last couple of years creating new cardinals to stack the College in what - he hoped - was a more progressive direction.
But the College has a mind of its own, and there is going to be some furious horse trading happening behind the scenes to steer the result in one direction or the other.
> Francis spent the last couple of years creating new cardinals to stack the College in what - he hoped - was a more progressive direction.
I don't think that was necessarily what he was doing.
He tried to rebalance it to include a lot more cardinals from the developing world–who on average tend to be more conservative, at least on some issues. He arguably avoided the more outspoken conservatives, but he would have caught up a lot of quieter conservatives in the process.
Whereas, if he just wanted to stack it with progressives, he would have focused on adding cardinals from the developed world, where Catholic progressivism is arguably the strongest.
Fully agree. It's going to get interesting - by numbers, the Church is shrinking in its core lands of Europe, and it's growing in Africa, South America and Asia, but that isn't even closely reflected in political realities and the amount and importance of cardinals.
this italian (venetian) reggae band has been predicting it since 97, this song regains minor popularity in italy every time there is a new pope election
There is almost no hope of an African pope being chosen. They are all too conservative. You can read that conspiritorially or take it as the recognized imprudence of fomenting European schism.
Starting from his chosen name, since Franciscans and Jesuits have not been very close historically (although the founder of the latter was inspired by St. Francis).
From what I read, it's exactly as you say: people expect either a reaction swing to conservativism or a a big swing towards modernity. Pope Francis was old and could not do much, but he tried to set a path for the latter, afaiu.
i think that is intendeded; it's not a movie about catholicism but about politics and human nature. What I meant is that it shows the internal workings of the papal election and the conflicts within the catholic church that may be unknown to laypeople.
On second thought I think you’re right. The layperson can become more aware of religious politics, because there is so little exposure.
I hope the next step is for people to understand that religious problems are actually people problems. And similar themes and tendencies appear in modern secular contexts.
It always seems weird and ignorant for people to be labeling Catholic bishops as “left-wing” or “right-wing” or “liberal/progressive” or “conservative”.
Those are all political terms for politicians and their platforms or parties. They do not translate to Catholic doctrines or teachings. Y’all are simply parroting what the lamestream media wants to impose, a political veneer on non-politicians who are shepherds, pastors, teachers.
While "progressive", "conservative", etc. are commonly used as political labels, they are general terms that describe how a person wants to see the world work. All people, regardless of their job or function, can have these sorts of terms ascribed to them.
And the Catholic Church exists on the world stage, and is involved in politics. Its leadership can be and is political.
There very much is such a thing as a "progressive" and "conservative" wing in Catholicism, and the Vatican is well known to be very much a viper's nest. It's naive to imply that all those clergymen are simply "shepherds, pastors, teachers".
Catholic bishops and clergy like to meddle in politics.
In the US, reactionaries are dumping lots on money on the church, and many bishops have embraced right wing politics, stupidly aligning with evangelicals who deeply despise Catholicism in the process.
Some of the moves made are comically dumb. The archbishop of New York decided to make a big show about denying communion to the notoriously vindictive former governor of the state. That governor subsequently changed the look back period for civil sex abuse lawsuits, which has bankrupted or is in the process of bankrupting dioceses as they are forced to own up to their failures to protect children.
Thank you for sharing a text that I would not have seen/read otherwise.
The salient parts that support your view:
---
There can be no peace without freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of expression and respect for the views of others.
Nor is peace possible without true disarmament! The requirement that every people provide for its own defence must not turn into a race to rearmament. The light of Easter impels us to break down the barriers that create division and are fraught with grave political and economic consequences. It impels us to care for one another, to increase our mutual solidarity, and to work for the integral development of each human person.
I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear which only leads to isolation from others, but rather to use the resources available to help the needy, to fight hunger and to encourage initiatives that promote development. These are the “weapons” of peace: weapons that build the future, instead of sowing seeds of death!
May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions. In the face of the cruelty of conflicts that involve defenceless civilians and attack schools, hospitals and humanitarian workers, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that it is not targets that are struck, but persons, each possessed of a soul and human dignity.
> I express my closeness to the sufferings of Christians in Palestine and Israel, and to all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people. The growing climate of anti-Semitism throughout the world is worrisome. Yet at the same time, I think of the people of Gaza, and its Christian community in particular, where the terrible conflict continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation. I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace!
Tangentially related: why do so many people call for a ceasefire, when a ceasefire is generally temporary. It wouldn't resolve any of the underlying reasons for the war. He should be calling for surrender.
Who should surrender, though? At this point in time, if Hamas were to surrender, the Israeli occupation of Gaza would just get worse. That wouldn't be peace, or justice, for people of Gaza. I certainly don't support what Hamas has done, but Israeli rule will probably be pretty brutal for Palestinians.
Gaza (run by Hamas, supports Hamas, but not Hamas) should surrender.
Peace and justice for Gaza requires Gaza to surrender, just as peace and justice for Germany required Germany to surrender. When you start conflict you do not get any sympathy when it negatively affects you once you start losing.
I don't care how brutal it is for Gazans and nor should you. They are the aggressors. They are the brutal ones. They fire rockets. They have broken every ceasefire for decades.
> Nor is peace possible without true disarmament! The requirement that every people provide for its own defence must not turn into a race to rearmament.
The sentiment sounds great but I think we now see in the real world with Ukraine that if you rely [too much] on others (re: US), you have a real problem if they are no longer there for you. Peace through strength is real.
that fragment references Easter theology. at a fundamental level love is stronger than everything, including the unsurpassable frontier, death. nothing could kill Jesus, not slander, not hatred, not envy, not even the cross.
and btw, in that little collection of booklets we call the Bible, the story doesn't end all flowery and pink either. Jerusalem and the temple are destroyed, early disciples are martyred in troves and everybody is aware the story of that Jesus guy and Mary and Mary Magdalene and Junia and all the others just has begun.
and it's clear it has to be written by us...
so regarding the recent world events yes PP Francis was heavily displeased (he talks about several of them in the very text we respond to here) but the Jesus thing gives us confidence and hope and justification to actively do something about it and to nudge the world into being a better place, for all of us.
that's how I think PP Francis meant what he said. and it's definitively how I see it.
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
I don't know. Maybe I'm reading too much into it but it sounded like he was referring to something broader, especially given the explicit political references he made later.
... He's referring to "Christ is risen". That's way more broad (conceptually) and very in-character for the Pope, compared to some transient current events.
Francis stood for values over positions and ranks, which was a real revolution.
I sincerely hope the new pope will be as human, humble and pushing for renewal as Francis.
I think that after such a pope, people won't be satisfied with just another symbolic figure with empty gestures, hard conservative views and no real substance.
Are you pointing to another pope with "another symbolic figure with empty gestures"? Would be clearer to name him then! Having read a bit of the previous pope Benedict XVI I liked a lot what he did/wrote
If only one thing it's his series of books Jesus of Nazareth: the only theology book I've ever read, it clarified so much about the Scriptures, and was written from the point of view of a world-class scholar, much more scientific than I would have thought, taking into account the views of other scholars, Jew, Protestant or atheists alike, as long as they had interesting ideas.
That was a likable pope, non-christians and even non religious people tend to like the guy. I also enjoyed the memes about his lookalike in Game of Thrones. Rest in peace.
Though I’m neither Catholic nor especially religious, you don’t have to be devout to recognize that Pope Francis has been a powerful force for good. From his warm outreach to refugees and the homeless to his landmark environmental encyclical Laudato Si’, he has consistently championed the poor, fostered interfaith dialogue and empathy.
> Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, April 21, 2025, at the age of 88 at his residence in the Vatican's Casa Santa Marta.
> Pope Francis has died at the age of 88, the Vatican has announced. - Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected to lead the Catholic Church in March 2013 after Pope Benedict XVI stood down.
> May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions. In the face of the cruelty of conflicts that involve defenceless civilians and attack schools, hospitals and humanitarian workers, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that it is not targets that are struck, but persons, each possessed of a soul and human dignity.
"Think of those souls!" reads to me cynically close to "don't think of those who ordered and executed those strikes". Almost like a deliberate distraction. When you turn forgiveness into a carte blanche for serial sin, you're doing Christianity wrong.
I interpret it very differently from you. Modern warfare is directing drones at 'targets' based on 'intelligence' with little regard for the collateral damage. We see it daily in the news in various conflicts: children killed in strikes with the excuse being that bad guys were also in the vicinity - zero regard for the innocents. It' a reminder that just because you don't have to see the destruction you cause (thanks to modern technology) innocents are still being killed by your actions and you shouldn't forget that (and maybe should reconsider your actions).
I've always interpreted the line of message you refer to as an intent to reach the hearts of those responsible for commanding the violence, including those who assign responsibility to them. And if it did reach, and ellicited the intended emotion, then such violence would simply stop.
I do agree that narratives and morals matter. That said is hard for me to reconcile this statement with the late pope's stance on the Ukraine war. His narrative about this was that it is a regrettable conflict between brother nations and that the sides should somehow resolve their disagreement. He didn't once admit that Russia is the aggressor and is one sidedly pushing for war, not to speak about condemning the aggressor.
I understand that a leader of an organization that acts on historic time scale might be reluctant to take sides in contemporary conflicts. Nevertheless always washing your hands in every conflict is not morality, it is cowardice. It enables evil and is in direct conflict with "narratives and morals matter".
Pope Francis was truly inimitable. A Pope to remember, and one of a kind.
How to describe such a unique pontiff? Coming from "the end of the world," as he said, he truly represented a peculiar voice.
He stands alone as the greatest international symbol of our age, an embodiment of its most salient characteristics. A man whose presence will remain indelible in our minds, and who really made his presence known in the Church.
His fierce defense of his ideas, no matter what, marked the Church of our time forever. Catholics will never forget him. Traditional Catholics, in particular, will always vividly remember his legacy.
RIP. I think history will find Pope Francis to be a man who was a fairly average pope that constantly got taken out of context. Nothing he did was really far out of line with Catholic doctrine, but he was often portrayed as being more liberal than he really was.
That's really much more of a comment about who controls media narratives these days and how to get your message out undiluted directly to the intended audience, and not anything specific to Pope Francis.
Surprised noone here has mentioned yet that Pope Francis was only the second pope ever with a social-media strategy (Pope Benedict was the first, in 2012 [0][1], and didn't get as much traction as Pope Francis).
"The Most Followed World Leaders on Social Media 2022" [2] ranked Pope Francis 3rd in 2022 with 53m followers, which is/was still low compared to singers, sports stars, celebrities and tech figures. It would obviously be crass and reductive to try to estimate the Pope's impact this way (and not, say, country visits, appointments, encyclicals, other official statements, reaction/criticism by other religous/political figures, administrative and legal actions, measures of popularity by specific groups, by factions, by country, by politics or religion), but as traditional media channels become less relevant, the Vatican will presumably have to move with the times, as in many other ways.
Maybe the better question (as Dick Cheney would have put it) is which voices do/don't determine the media narrative on Pope Francis' papacy?
As to your take (that he was wasn't that far out of line with Catholic doctrine, but often portrayed as more liberal and
constantly taken out of context), that's the debate we're largely about to see happen.
Yeah, I can see that. Having a pope that's denounced by more conservative Catholics for truly believing in Catholic ethics shone a light on how far people were straying from the church. Really makes the pope look a bit like a Christ figure, when you think of it like that.
I was sad to hear about this this morning. Pope Francis has been a lot more about "love they neighbor" than many of his predecessors, and I think that's been beneficial to the Catholic Church and the world as a whole (insofar as the Catholic Church has a fairly wide influence). I've appreciated his (sometimes controversial) stance in a lot of cases that boils down to "you don't follow Catholic teachings, but we should still treat you with love".
Pope Francis has done much to transform the Catholic church into a more progressive and inclusive institution. If not for his papacy, it was somewhat likely that the church would drift too far from Millennial values to keep its former relevance.
Hopefully, the next pope will also champion unity, inclusivity, and peace, and oppose religious dogmatism. This will define the future of Christianity. Many challenges remain for the institution.
There's been much talk of the Church finally electing a black Pope from sub-Saharan Africa. The irony is that, if they are inclusive enough to do so, the selected Pope will almost certainly be more hard-line and doctrinaire than any of his recent predecessors on issues like homosexuality. Here's one of the contenders:
Of the current widely accepted papabili, Peter Turkson is from Sub-Saharan Africa. He is softly pro-LGBT, and he seeks to harmonize the progressive homosexuality views with traditional African culture[0]. I don't think Robert Sarah is considered papabile, possibly owing to his message of hate for homosexuality. Overall, it's inconsistent with the recent message of the church, and it is hard to imagine that progressive Catholics would accept it.
Interesting that they identify mostly progressives as papabile. If they're right, Francis did an excellent job behind the scenes to set up the Church to do in the future what he could not in the present.
People who want to join the church prefer Latin Mass which he's opposed to.
His proclamation on blessing LGBT people caused a rift with the Church in Africa (remember why we have Anglicans as part of the Catholic Church?) threatening an area that's seeing church growth.
He's also had his mouth closed about the killings of Catholics in Africa and Asia by extremists.
The Latin ship sailed 6 decades ago... There's no going back without pissing off everyone else, assuming it's indeed true new members would prefer Latin - if you have a source about that, I'd be really interested in reading it.
With most figureheads there will be words or actions with which you disagree. But his rejection of the 'riches' that came with the job, especially in the early days will hopefully outlast him.
He wasn’t an intellectual giant like his predecessor and I disagreed with some of his positions, but at the end of the day I do think that he was a good man. May he rest in peace.
Under his watch he did not move the church to fully acknowledge or deal with the historical and widespread abuses the organization he led was involved with. He had opportunity to be the leader to bring the organization around and he did not. Let's all hope his replacement will.
I don’t think anyone who would be ready to completely do a 180 with the Catholic Church will be the pope soon (or ever, given how the system works). He has, however, nudged that ship in the right direction and with what he has done and with his appointees. Let’s just hope it continues with whoever replaces him.
Not only that, but he actively made it worse by protecting abusers. McCarrick, Rupnik, Zanchetta, and many more. It really makes me sick to see so many people speaking well of Pope Francis. He is an enabler and a vindictive hypocrite.
He is restricted by the system around him, with the internal Vatican politics and overall views of members of the Catholic Church being very relevant here. His replacement may be more conservative as a reaction to the decline of Church membership, or may not be, but I don't think he can be faulted personally for not attempting to set the wrongs of the church right, he clearly wanted to do so.
In my early 20s I was part of secular and socialist Jewish research centre. Franciskus was just voted as the new pope, and my first assignment was to write an opinion paper about him, and forecast his future actions. I don't think anyone, including myself, expected that I'll end up with a positive report — religion was almost always a negative thing, and Catholic Christianity even more so. However, I concluded that his action seem to show that he cares more for people rather than for specific rules or biblical quotes. That he is flexible and open to changing things. In retrospect, I think the whole world benefited from his openness. I wish we could say that about other influential religious leaders.
I will never forget his sympathy for the motives of the terrorists who massacred staff at Charlie Hebdo:
“If my good friend Dr Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch,” Francis said while pretending to throw a punch in his direction.
He added: “It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”[0]
Why not? The concept of proportionality between an “offense” and a response that characterizes the liberal worldview was entirely missing here. If one chooses to take offense about some deeply held personal view, whatever it is, then fine; but let your response be proportional.
The music of Beethoven is sacred to me, let’s say, but I’m not prepared to murder you if you mock it, or miss a note in performance.
The pope’s threat of physical intervention himself seems at odds with the teachings of his own faith, too, as I understand them. Turn the other cheek, and all. But that would be for adherents to say for sure.
I think there's an implied "and not expect a response" there.
If you insult unhinged people (and people who kill over a mere 'offense' to their religion are unhinged), don't be surprised when you receive an unhinged response back.
So we should all be chilled and silent, because there are unhinged people who might retaliate far out of proportion to anything we might do or say? That's no way to live.
I didn’t hear from him any call-to-arms to defend Christianity from those who keep making fun of it left and right. Be it other religious faiths or quasi-religious political movements. His actions seemed the opposite tbh.
As Christians are being massacred in Africa at the hands of muslims, as Christianity is besieged, all he did was simp for one group in specific and scold everyone else.
Even scolded Greece for not wanting to share the same fate as some Western European countries.
> The pope’s threat of physical intervention himself seems at odds with the teachings of his own faith, too, as I understand them. Turn the other cheek, and all.
The quote in question talks about your cheek, not your mother's or anyone else's. In many circumstances, you're not as free to forego the defense of others as you are your own.
That being said, as an American, the culture of mocking and gracefully learning from being mocked runs deep in my blood. I don't know if others share that same worldview.
> That being said, as an American, the culture of mocking and gracefully learning from being mocked runs deep in my blood. I don't know if others share that same worldview.
> as an American [...] I don't know if others share that same worldview.
I'm far from American, but have the same "blood", but I think it has nothing to do with being American/Swedish/Spanish/whatever, some people have different personalities, upbringings and strengths/weaknesses simply.
Americans aren't "tougher-skinned" by default or anything, at least I didn't get that experience from interacting with Americans.
I'm not a Christian, but one of the main questions I have, reading this, is whether Francis would have had the same reaction if Catholics had been the ones doing the massacring after their faith was insulted. Something tells me that he wouldn't, and I think that's the most troubling part.
That’s reprehensible, but also refreshingly open-minded. It shows an awareness that other religions deserve an equal footing to his own. I prefer this over the nuts who decry Sharia law while wanting to implement a Christian equivalent.
Any Christian fundamentalist who advocates for its religion to become law is a bad Christian who never understood the lesson behind "Render unto Caesar...".
Now, contrast with Islamic teachings. Not every Muslim will advocate for Sharia, but there is a non-negligible part of them (leadership included) who think that not advocating for Sharia is a sin.
What’s the contrast? In both cases, there are good people who understand that their religion restricts them, not others, and there are bad people who think the government should enforce their religion.
What part of Christianity actively promotes it? There’s that one line, which meaning is debated, in a book full of stories about religious governments.
In any case, I only care about the practicalities. In terms of what they try to achieve, there’s no real difference between the Christian and Muslim dominionists.
The word "direct" is carrying an awful lot of weight in that sentence. The Catholic Church (as well as the Protestant and others) are very responsible for, or at least implicated in, many horrible things in the last few hundred years alone:
- signed off on the slave trade for hundreds of years (even gave excuses about how that was God's will)
- during World War II they promised to hide many Jewish children, only to subsequently steal them from their parents arguing that "they are now Christian, it would be a sin to give them to Jews"
- the inquisitions
- were the justification for so many wars (conversion by the sword)
- have long been a tool of repressive governments, arguing that it fell under "obey your father"
- in the U.S. many churches, including the Catholic Church have preached that voting for one party (Democrats) is a sin (often about abortion, but other topics have been raised)
In general, the Church's political power has waned over the last 500 years or so, but there are an awful lot of calls from Republicans saying that this is where we have gone wrong.
One only look to the political donations of Opes Dei (Catholic branch dedicated to getting Cristian influence over the "Lay" sphere) to see them as major power players today. The Heritage Foundation (main writers of Project 2025) are intimately bound with the organization. And Chief Justice Roberts is also associated.
So they may not be "direct" rulers, they are major power players.
> So they may not be "direct" rulers, they are major power players.
So are all the other countless media companies, tech corporations, Hollywood, labor unions, pharma companies, academia...
From this list, which one do you think is more intertwined with Government affairs? The Catholic Church or Amazon? The Mormons or Blueshield? Seventh Day Adventists or Disney? The Baptists or General Motors? The Anglicans or FOX News?
Even those "running the place" are doing it within the democratic system established and managed by the State. You can try to twist as hard you can, but to think that the US has become some form of Theocracy is absurd.
I am not going to argue that the democratic institutions are not under attack, but I am arguing that there is no key religious figure remotely close to take power and become the head of State, at any level whatsoever.
So, let's get back to question I posted before: which of the religious leaders have more control over the head of State than any of Big Tech CEOs? Which congregation in Florida has as much political pull (regardless of direction) as Disney?
Dude was leader of a massive organization that claims to be a divine instrument and the only path to salvation. Acknowledging another religion as anything other than heresy is a step up.
So if the terrorist of charlie hebdo would have just tortured the journalists there for a few hours and maybe cut of their fingers that would also be a "step up" or "refreshingly open-minded"?
Dude I can not believe how it can be anything but horrible to make acts of terrorism and killing of innocent anything but the worst humans can do.
No. Using soft language about someone else's words is not the same as using soft language about torture. It's not even remotely similar. There isn't some transitive property of outrage here. If you can't tell the difference between saying "these terrorists had reasonable motivations for murdering those innocent people" and "at least that guy's awful statement has one thing going for it" then I really can't help you.
If you can say that a statement that justifies killing innocent people because they draw a caricature had "one thing going for it" then I really can't help you.
> I prefer this over the nuts who decry Sharia law while wanting to implement a Christian equivalent.
The idea of a "Christian equivalent" to Sharia law is actually very fringe. The near unanimous teaching of Christianity, from the Church Fathers through to the mainstream Reformers, is that the criminal laws in the Jewish Torah were only ever intended for Jews, and Christians are not bound by the letter of them – they could be used as a source of moral principles which might influence secular legislation, but were not meant to be directly applied in Christian societies.
And Christianity always drew a distinction between ecclesiastical law, which governed the internal affairs of the Church (canon law), and temporal law (criminal and civil) which governed society at large. Temporal law was derived from secular, pre-Christian sources (especially the laws of the Roman Empire, but also the legal traditions of the Germanic tribes which invaded it); Christianity influenced aspects of it but the bulk of it was non-Christian in origin. Canon law did sometimes intrude into issues most nowadays would consider secular (such as marriage and inheritance), but the bulk of everyday legal matters were governed by the law of the State, not the law of the Church – the two were kept distinct (with separate court systems, legal professions and legal education), even if much more intertwined than most people nowadays would feel comfortable with.
It was only in the 20th century that a small group of American Protestants (R. J. Rushdoony, Greg Bahnsen and Gary North) began to spread the contrary idea, theonomy, that the criminal laws of the Torah are meant to be applied by Christians in the present day, as opposed to merely serving as a source of moral principle. But this is a very novel idea in Christian history, and it remains one which the vast majority of Protestants (even conservative Protestants) formally reject, to say nothing of the resolute Catholic and Orthodox opposition to it.
Islam is very different in that, unlike Christianity, it always proposed its religious laws (Sharia) as something to be adopted by the State. The whole Church-vs-State distinction which is fundamental to most Christians never existed to anywhere near the same degree in Islam, prior to the modern period. In mediaeval Muslim-ruled states, all judges were religious officials primarily implementing religious law – with decrees of the secular ruler at best serving as a supplement to it – quite unlike the situation which prevailed in Christian-ruled states, where Church and State had two parallel court systems applying two separate legal systems. The closest the Muslim world came to that, was granting religious minorities (primarily Jews and Christians) the right to legal autonomy, to impose their own laws and courts on their own communities (primarily in matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance) – but as the law of the state, Sharia applied to everybody.
And among Jews, the vast majority believe that the Torah laws (with a few exceptions) were only meant to apply to Jews; and shouldn't be the law of the State of Israel prior to the coming of the Messiah. There is a minority who disagree (Kahanists, Hardal, some hardline Religious Zionists), and believe the modern State of Israel should implement Torah law today, but >95% of Jews worldwide disagree with them. Even the vast majority of ultra-Orthodox Jews disagree with them.
So I really think drawing this kind of parallel between Islamic Sharia and Christianity or Judaism displays either a lack of understanding of all three religions, or else an excessive focus on very fringe minority positions. Although I also recognise that a lot of people drawing the parallel are actually complaining about attempts by conservative Christians (and to a lesser degree Jews) to legislate their own moral views on controversial social issues – but that isn't really akin to Islamic Sharia (except for the very fringe Christian reconstructionist/theonomist/Kahanist/etc minorities), since they are trying to amend secular law based on religion-influenced morality, quite unlike the Sharia approach of directly applying religious law to essentially secular issues such as murder cases or business contracts.
This distinction might sound very important for people within one of those religions, but it sounds pretty trivial from the outside. Changing secular law to reflect religious law versus directly applying religious law, who cares? The result is the same.
And for excessive focus, maybe you haven't noticed, but that fringe position is wielding a tremendous power in the country where I live at the moment.
> This distinction might sound very important for people within one of those religions, but it sounds pretty trivial from the outside. Changing secular law to reflect religious law versus directly applying religious law, who cares? The result is the same
The result is very different. If Sharia were fully implemented in your country, you’d go to the local courthouse and the judge would be a religious scholar applying the religious law of the Islamic state religion. Whereas, if conservative Christians vote for laws which encode their moral views (on abortion or whatever), those laws remain formally secular, and the judge enforcing them is not a religious official. Sharia expressly discriminates in favour of Muslims (e.g. it says the word of a Muslim witness is worth more than that of a non-Muslim witness in court); the laws you are complaining about don’t do anything remotely similar.
> And for excessive focus, maybe you haven't noticed, but that fringe position is wielding a tremendous power in the country where I live at the moment.
How? Trump is not a theonomist. Nor is Vance. Nor is Musk. I don’t believe any of the Cabinet secretaries are theonomists. Nor are any of the Supreme Court justices. The only way anyone can conclude that theonomy has any contemporary influence in the US government is by misrepresenting non-theonomist views as theonomy.
> The laws I’m complaining about don’t do anything remotely similar yet. They would if the fundamentalists had their way.
I don't know who you are calling "fundamentalists" – I personally think the term should be restricted to the historical fundamentalist movement in American Protestantism, and those Protestants who view themselves as heirs of that movement today – but I think the vast majority of people you are labelling that aren't theonomists, and have zero interest in emulating Islamic Sharia by replacing secular courts with tribunals of Christian clergy, or modifying evidence laws to make the word of a Christian worth more than that of a non-Christian. Nobody is asking for anything remotely resembling that, except for a very tiny movement on the fringes of Reformed Protestantism – which the vast majority of Reformed (even conservative Reformed) reject, and I've never heard of a Catholic or Anglican or Methodist or Lutheran or Eastern Orthodox or whatever supporting it.
From a Catholic perspective, replacing secular law with "Christian Sharia" is clearly a heresy – never officially condemned because no Catholic of significance has ever proposed it – but if it ever did become a serious issue I'm sure the Church would waste no time in doing so, since it is just so blatantly contrary to the Catholic tradition. And the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the vast majority of Protestant churches (even otherwise very conservative ones), would say more or less the same thing – the details of their reasons would likely differ, but the conclusion wouldn't.
Evangelicals are the main players here. Catholics are loosely aligned. Anglicans/Methodists/Lutherans are largely irrelevant.
Again, I don't see the practical difference between religious tribunals run by clergy, and nominally secular courts run by nominally secular judges who make religiously-guided decisions based on religiously-guided laws.
We already have such laws, ranging from blue laws to laws about medical research and procedures. And this is under a much more secular system than the dominionists would like.
Multiple states still prohibit atheists from holding office. Of course, the bans are unenforceable... for now. Such restrictions were enforced before and they could be again with the right people on the Supreme Court. From there, it's a short trip to deciding that only adherents to a proper form of Christianity count. The existing requirements already exclude non-monotheists.
I think that article lost a bit of nuance somewhere. The Pope was specifically defending the right of Muslims to protest peacefully against deliberate insults to their religion:
> Francis spoke about the Paris attacks while on his way to the Philippines, where around 1,500 Muslims protested yesterday against the depictions of the Prophet in the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo. [0]
He also explicitly condemned violence:
> Francis insisted that it was an “aberration” to kill in the name of God and said religion can never be used to justify violence. [0]
So, he wasn't justifying the attack on the Charlie Hebdo office.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest ... the Catholic Church!
Which _other_ churches besides the Catholic Church? Well, Catholicism is more encompassing than many people are aware of.
For instance, you might have heard of the "Roman Catholic Church." Besides the Roman Catholic Church, aka the Latin Church (which primarily uses the Roman Rite), there are 23 Eastern Catholic Churches, each with their own liturgical traditions, theological emphases, and cultural heritage. All of them are in full communion with the Pope.
Note: While many Catholic parishes do offer live-streamed services, for the benefit of the sick and homebound, they do not fulfill the Sunday obligation to attend Mass if you are able to do so in person.
There are many different orders of Catholic priests, but Pope Francis was a Jesuit and his teachings reflected that. Many of the Catholic universities (and even high schools) in the Americas were founded by Jesuits.
Popping into the church connected to your nearest Catholic university is a good bet, but you can probably find a Jesuit priest nearby even if you aren't in the Americas.
I'm curious how devout Catholics will perceive it when the leader of their Church dies on their holiest day, which commemorates the resurrection of Christ. Will they going to see it as a symbol, a sign, or perhaps some kind of deeper message?
The way I see it, expecting holy days to somehow be "safe" ignores the basis on which the Church was built.
Martyrs were mauled by lions regardless of their work in spreading the word of God. Jesus himself died just like the common thieves next to him. The Catholic Church is built by people, and people sometimes die.
I view it the same way I view three American founders dying on July 4th, two of them on the 50th anniversary of the signing. His force of will could take him a ways beyond when his body might reasonably have been expected to fail; having reached that point, he was not prepared to take the effort any further.
And for political side - in Poland, he was seen as way too leftist/liberal for the conservatives in Church, and too pro-Russian for the liberals in it - he had not condemned Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This was a very interesting thing to witness. It seemed to indicate that politics is more powerful than religion, even in a country as religious as Poland.
I found this surprising and genuinely thought-provoking.
I had been talking with my conservative colleagues - they were deeply unhappy with him on stance of migration, LGBT issues, or even very recent - his talk with Vance, whom they support (American politics are just so big that it has effect on us even across the ocean).
Then, from religious point of view - they didn't really like his ecumenism approach, to them it was borderline of heresy.
I was born in, and currently live in Poland. It truly blows my mind that any Polish person could side with a foreign political party that openly sides with moscow over Ukraine and even Poland. Political alignment is truly the strongest drug for many people.
Also, while I think that barring a fringe part of society, everyone would agree, the fun part is, how do you get to people to agree who's pro-Russian or not ;) Of course, this is for local parties, but go to /r/Poland and /r/Polska and ask them, what parties are pro-Russian. Then to Wykop, both Mikroblog and frontpage, and see the reactions.
Anecdotally, my uncle just dropped by to thank me for the Easter flowers I had left at their place. He is pretty conservative, had always railed against this pope, and just called him a really good man. So at least today, religion and forgiveness won his heart.
While I support Ukraine and would like to see a stronger, more unified front from the collective West, making this the only question that matters in Polish politics seems wrong. My 2c.
At one point Francis said "The Patriarch cannot become Putin’s altar boy", in reference to Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church [1]. Maybe Francis recognised that working to get Kirill to temper his support for Putin would be more effective than his own public condemnation, which might allow propagandists to whip up a Western vs. Orthodox religious frenzy to unify Russians behind Putin?
The concept of Liberal in the US is different from liberal in Europe. In Europe "liberal" means supporter of low taxes, small govertment. The concept in the US has to do with sexual liberation and sexual freedom more than economic marxism.
Francis was not sexually liberal. He was marxist. He believed in liberation theology.
As someone who knew personally the man from a spiritual exercises' house in Spain(obviously when he was not yet Pope), I never liked the guy.
He was the friend of dictators. Loved so much Raul Castro, and Maduro, never criticised them, but criticised the affluence of western democracies. His business was the poor and he loved poor makers.
His support for Putin and not denouncing the takeover of absolute power was jarring for someone in his position.
You can be a leftist religious leader, but you have to report abuses when you see them, specially if the abuses are made by your friends. Of course you will lose them if you do.
Francis was too weak in character to oppose them. But as a Pope, that is your job.
> The concept of Liberal in the US is different from liberal in Europe. In Europe "liberal" means supporter of low taxes, small govertment. The concept in the US has to do with sexual liberation and sexual freedom more than economic marxism.
It isn't a purely US vs Europe thing though – you will find some Americans who call themselves "classical liberals", by which they mean "liberal" in largely the same sense as many Europeans do. It is just that "classical liberal" is somewhat of an obscure term in the US–you are only likely to know it if you are interested in or have studied economics, politics, etc–but among those Americans who know it there are definitely some who identify with it.
"Progressive" avoids this to some extent, in being a term which is closer to meaning the same thing in the US and Europe – although in a US context, "progressive" often means something in the same direction as "liberal" but going further.
Some people like to talk about two dimensions, social vs economic – so a person can be socially conservative but economically progressive (not an uncommon position among some conservative Catholics, for example) – although that still has the limitation that "socially progressive/conservative" is a selection of issues with an assumption that people's positions across them are correlated, but there are people who break the assumption, e.g. self-described "consistent pro-lifers" who oppose both legal abortion and the death penalty (unlike many "pro-lifers" in the US who oppose legal abortion yet are pro-death penalty), or certain radical feminists who support LGB rights but oppose transgender rights ("gender critical" as they prefer to call themselves, with "TERF" being the pejorative label applied to them by their opponents)
Some of these linkages are country specific – e.g. in the US, most social conservatives support the death penalty and oppose gun control, in some other Western countries you may find most social conservatives opposing the death penalty and supporting gun control, even while they agree with US social conservatives on other issues.
I wonder if a Pope's funeral can serve as an occasion for backdoor diplomacy - the world needs a lot of that.
If the next Pope is young and energetic, he may want to use his first few days making a mark in history by putting people from different side of different conflicts.
Paraxodically, he may have more chance putting the Israelis and Palestinian around a table (or at least provide the optics for a deal that would be discussed in the usual boring transactional way.)
On the other hand, one has to wonder what a populist pope would do (interfere in elections ? Make a u turn on climate, migrants, etc... ? Go back to hardcore conservatism ? Or fall into irrelevance ?)
RIP, I have given Francis my prayers for his soul and his close ones and everyone who saw him as a leader and a holy figure. God can use anything for the good <3
Does anyone have any theories why his predecessor, Benedict, so shockingly resigned? (And then, according to this article, continued to live there, which was news to me).
The conventional wisdom is that Benedict was a hardline, conservative nut who had to resign for unknown reasons and was replaced by this well-loved, progressive guy. As seen in this thread, lots of people liked him and his philosophy, and his progressive take on things which always made the news, as he focused on the poor and traveled the world.
However, I've heard the conspiracy that Benedict was forced out, possibly related to his investigations into the child sex abuse scandal, maybe because he was finding important people involved. He was always very focused on the Church itself. And Francis was chosen, almost as a patsy, to end those investigations and instead be the friendly Pope out away from the Vatican.
I just always thought Benedict's resignation was surprising and there was something more to the story.
Conventional wisdom is he attempted to resign 3 times, had a stroke, and had a pacemaker all before he spent a further 8 years of his career elected as pope and then actually resigned. This all extends decades prior to his final resignation, giving the same health and desire for retirement reasons as prior attempts.
As for whether there was something more than the conventional wisdom to the story... I'm not really sure the news of his successors death is the correct thread to spawn that conversation in as it's getting to have little to do with Francis.
I think it's relevant. We're discussing the life and impact of Pope Francis. I'm speculating that he was chosen specifically for his outward focus.
I'm a practicing but not terribly devout Catholic, and my impression of Benedict was that he was very formal and focused Pope on the Church itself (eg how we had to relearn all the prayers and responses in the Mass). Francis was much more about helping the poor of the world, and to my limited experience didn't affect Catholicism, with a Capital C, very much. His politics aligned with mine, so I didn't mind that so much, but I can't help thinking that all was very intentional, and that there be dragons lurking within the Vatican institution that are being ignored.
I can't remember the provenance, but there is a compelling argument that Benedict only expected to live a few months beyond his stepping down. He probably despaired of not being able to show the stoicism of his predecessor at the end.
So Pope Francis departs for a meeting with his boss perhaps?
Jokes aside, he seemed like a genuinely decent human being and enough of a humanist to cast aside some of the drier absurdities surrounding the bureaucracy of Catholic Church administration, and ideology.
Even as someone who's deep in the skeptically agnostic camp on any questions about supreme creators (after all even a firm atheist can't be absolutely sure there is no genuine God) I had more respect for the apparent practical concern for humanity of this pope, particularly compared to the more typical nature of historical pontiffs.
Because it can't be proven either way. An atheist who claims to know for certainty that there is no god is expressing a religious, faith-based viewpoint. I guess that isn't necessarily at odds with being an atheist, but part of why I'm an atheist is that I try to avoid believing in things that aren't provable and don't fit existing evidence.
> If we go for that, sure, we cannot be sure of anything.
We can be sure of things that have been proven using the scientific method. Certainly we can't be 100% sure, because that method is applied by fallible humans. But it's silly to suggest that levels of sureness don't matter; I can be more sure about the idea that we don't live in a giant ice cream than of other things, and that's fine.
But I think it's true that we can't really be sure of anything... and that's also fine.
>There is no reason for one to exist so not having one is the obvious case.
It's a usable supposition, sure, and I agree that being asked to prove a negative is silly, but you can't actually be sure that one doesn't exist. It's not the obvious case at all, it's not even all that obvious as a supposition.
What's more, superficially at least, it makes more sense to believe in a supreme, essentially divine creator than it does to believe visibly enormous complexity deriving from a mostly unknown nothing.
I'd say that this more than anything has been responsible for virtually all cultures in history believing in supreme, divine creators of one kind or another vs no historical cultures that I know of believing in the universe springing from random chance and hand-wavey nothingness behind it.
We could also of course be living in a large ice cream, you can't be absolutely sure that's not the case either.
Though, the idea of being the creations of a tremendously powerful and conscious being that created a universe hospitable to our use and for our potential given by all our evident cognitive and material tools seems to me a lot more plausible than being subject to an accidental existence in a gargantuan ice cream environment.
> What's more, superficially at least, it makes more sense to believe in a supreme, essentially divine creator than it does to believe visibly enormous complexity deriving from a mostly unknown nothing.
We would come from nothing in the same way God came from nothing. There's little reason to conclude the universe was ever non-existent.
> Though, the idea of being the creations of a tremendously powerful and conscious being that created a universe hospitable to our use and for our potential given by all our evident cognitive and material tools seems to me a lot more plausible than being subject to an accidental existence in a gargantuan ice cream environment.
I actually thought you were going to say the first clause is less probable than whatever the second upcoming clause would be, because it sounds so improbably specific and human-crafted.
I think the belief that we were gifted our cognitive superiority (if that even is something unique to us in the history of the universe) by a divine entity is not meant to be an explanation of where our cognition comes from, but a method of assuaging our guilt. Because if God gave us the tools to debase, kill, maim, and roast ourselves on this rock, then surely it is meant to be, and will add up to something meaningful.
In fact, it's much more likely giving monkeys the ability to talk was an act of The Devil, not God.
> We would come from nothing in the same way God came from nothing.
That would only be true, if your God is part of the same universe, which by (christian) definition wouldn't be truly God. When you talk about God as the creator of the universe he has also created time and thus causality and other properties of the universe, like that things come from other things.
> What's more, superficially at least, it makes more sense to believe in a supreme, essentially divine creator than it does to believe visibly enormous complexity deriving from a mostly unknown nothing.
It can't make more sense to believe in one entirely made up thing vs another since they're both made up.
> I'd say that this more than anything has been responsible for virtually all cultures in history believing in supreme, divine creators of one kind or another vs no historical cultures that I know of believing in the universe springing from random chance and hand-wavey nothingness behind it.
Ascribing rationality to faith is an interesting supposition. It's all based on emotions, such as fear of death, on the side of the believers and greed on the side of belief-providers.
> Though, the idea of being the creations of a tremendously powerful and conscious being that created a universe hospitable to our use and for our potential given by all our evident cognitive and material tools seems to me a lot more plausible than being subject to an accidental existence in a gargantuan ice cream environment.
No, it just seems more comforting to you. That doesn't make it any more plausible.
>It can't make more sense to believe in one entirely made up thing vs another since they're both made up.
It makes sense to believe in Newton's laws, which he made up, even though we know the study of kinematics flowing from them is wrong. We have observed them being wrong. Someone else made up a complicated explanation of why and when Newton's laws are wrong. That guy's theories formed the basis for some incredible stuff that works really well, and he's probably wrong too... but I'll believe them both.
For anyone curious, this is an example of the Continuum Fallacy [1]. Interestingly, that wiki page happens to use Newton's laws as an example:
"For example, Newton's gravitational theories are "wrong" (they're a rough approximation) and Einstein's gravitation is almost certainly "wrong" too (it doesn't easily blend with quantum mechanics), but it would be a spectacular fallacy to suggest that they are equally wrong because there is such a continuous shading between "makes rough predictions" and "makes more accurate predictions" when it comes to scientific theories. Saying that the Earth is flat is wrong, and saying that it's spherical is also wrong — it's an oblate spheroid, roughly — but both statements do not have the same degree of "wrongness" on a continuum."
This is not an example of the 'Continuum fallacy', but you believe it so because you are thoroughly convinced that religious thinking is vacuous.
Unless you are denying Newton's agency or participation, he made those laws up. That's how articulation of reality works.
When you make a strong binary conjecture, you invite counterproof. You object to the wording because you find it beneath the dignity of those laws to label it so; on that point, we agree.
> Though, the idea of being the creations of a tremendously powerful and conscious being that created a universe hospitable to our use and for our potential given by all our evident cognitive and material tools seems to me a lot more plausible than being subject to an accidental existence in a gargantuan ice cream environment.
Why, they are the same to me. None is more probable because none needs to be.
We can explain some things (until we cannot, and then we look for another model). Some we cannot explain because we do not yet have the appropriate knowledge. Someday we will, or we won't.
The difference between me and someone who believes in one or more deities I that I can say "we don't know because we are not good enough yet". They need to say "this is driven by god" (for reasons I cannot explain)
Most cultures have believed in a multiplicity of gods rather than just a single creator god. This new-fangled monotheism is a relatively modern invention.
When I think about it being the Pope is quite a position, probably the most unique in our world?
You have to be:
- A head of state, meaning taking positions though UN votes, etc.
- A "CEO", there is a lot of "business" decision to be taken to run the Vatican and the Church. I mean the Vatican can be seen as a giant museum (no offense) with a lot of people flowing in everyday so that need to be managed.
- But first he is a religious, spiritual leader and has to steer its evolution.
- Many also still see him steering an entire civilisation. Whether you are a Catholic or not, he is at the center of something.
I think he will be mostly remembered as a terrible politician, first alienating conservatives with progressive policy and then alienating liberals with very questionable opinions on war in Ukraine.
In the end, nobody was really happy with him. On the other hand, he definitely had a will and a spine to stick to his own opinions - I guess that counts for something.
A comment I'd heard some time back concerned a politician. The speaker (not a politician themselves, but recalling an interaction with one) had said to the politician something like "I suppose you want to win with the biggest majority possible". The politician responded along the lines of, "No, that would mean I wasn't doing my job; if I'm really pushing the limits of the possible I'll have just the barest majority."
People pleasing in politics means never pushing out of the public's comfort zone.
(And no, this isn't an endorsement of any current orange head of state, far from it.)
This is true if you live in a bubble. Most Catholics don't hold strong opinions on the Pope. The people who do are, as usual, the extremes on either side - not the majority.
I do, according to christian doctrine Jesus sacrificed himself for humanity’s sins. That sacrifice wouldn’t be particularly meaningful if it came with expectation for everybody to follow through. As much as I am not a fan of this (or any other) religion, I’m pretty sure it’s not a suicide pact.
I think getting killed for your belief is exactly what Jesus was arguing for. It was also what all apostles did and the only cause for the next 300 years to be declared a saint.
Jesus' death was special, because he was without sins, he was the son of God (YMMV) and, because was walking around afterwards physically (i.e. capable of touching and eating, etc.) on earth. I am not sure, why you name it suicide, because he didn't killed himself, he got himself killed.
I do not think, that Jesus would defend "the agressor". But fighting in return is also not good, which is where "turning the other cheek" comes into play.
Suicide is a mortal sin, so I'm not sure, if we argue past each other.
> reframe Christianity
How is it reframing, when it is what it is all about? Can you elaborate about the counter arguments?
Of course dying is not the only method of worshiping God and promote the faith, but it is quite effective. And giving the other option is killing people it is definitely the preferred way.
Yep, as a sacrifice. Using this as a justification for aggressive war against a christian nation is not only extremely intellectually dishonest, but against the doctrine as well.
As with everything, it's open to interpretation, but you don't turn your other cheek expecting to be hit again; it's meant to signal defiance not resignation.
I guess, but "defiance" can mean anything, and the passage is telling you not to resist. It's about not participating in a violent conflict to begin with. It's definitely not "I f'ing dare you to try that again".
Why is this posted on HN, even twice? It’s not like other news sources won’t announce this. The pope had its good and bad sides, but in the end we should remind ourselves he’s just a human being. It’s OK for HN to inform about people here, but shouldn’t they be somehow related to any topics HN touches? The popes was just a guy who somehow got popular because of some quite successful religion - but I’d personally prefer keep religion out of HN.
It's conventional for there to be a thread on HN when a major pubic figure dies. If you look at the list of obituary posts on HN [1], several of the biggest were for politicians, royals, and others unrelated to computer science and technology.
It's in keeping with the convention that stories that have "significant new information" are on topic for HN, and that includes major mainstream news stories when they first break.
- The pope was not only a very important religious and political leader but also wrote and spoke about the relationship between humans and technology [1, 2]
- I joined Hacker News due to its links but stayed for the community of smart and thoughtful people (and the great moderation). Oftentimes, a HN submission acts as a seed crystal for "off-topic" discussions that people want to talk about. As the people that make up this community get older, and as the times change, the topics we discuss change, too. At some level, technology always has political, moral, ideological implications. For me, HN is one of the best places to discuss these.
This isn't a headline service or newswire. It's a place for discussion too. He was the head of a large institution that has a lot of influence. And the views of the institution on emergent technologies is very much relevant. Those views are greatly shaped by the one at the top for their stint. This post isn't about religion.
I concur. I believe that political and religious discussions are better suited for other platforms rather than HN. I am not particularly interested in the Pope, if I were, I could find coverage of the topic on mainstream news sources. There’s nothing interesting here from a technical or startup perspective.
I understand the intention behind keeping the thread respectful, especially in the context of someone’s death. That said, I find it difficult to fully separate reflections on Pope Francis from reflections on the institution he led. The papacy is not just a personal role—it is deeply representative of the Catholic Church as an institution, with all the historical and present-day weight that carries.
It also stands out to me that similar moderation reminders don't usually appear in threads about other public figures. That gives the impression that this topic is being treated as more sensitive or "untouchable" than others, and I think it's fair to question why that is.
I'm all for thoughtful conversation, but part of that includes being able to engage critically with the institutions and roles that public figures embody—even in moments like this.
It may be unusual for this kind of reminder to be posted on an obituary thread, but it's not so unusual for it to be posted on a thread about a religious topic. There's nothing to read into this other than we all know that religion is a topic that elicits strong reactions in people and is one of the most frequent topics of bitter argument, and that's just the thing we're trying to avoid on HN.
It's fine to talk about the larger institution he led; please just keep to the HN guidelines, which apply equally to all threads on HN, and which, in particular, ask us to be thoughtful and substantive, and to avoid generic tangents.
(I've edited my top comment, to clarify what I think should be deemed on/off topic.)
> similar moderation reminders don't usually appear in threads about other public figures.
Friend, this is not true. "dang" himself has often exhorted posters in this same manner and language when a notable death may attract inconsiderate commentary.
See the search link provided by tomhow in this branch of the same discussion:
> The line between good and evil is very clear in this case.
> Edit: I mean Ukraine war.
Yes but it's not clear yet who will win, and the church cannot afford siding with the losing side, especially that now it's weakest it's been since medieval times.
It would be different materially. The rallying cry would be different for one.
No matter who did it, it would still be 'evil'. There would be 'good guys' and 'bad guys'. Specially when the labels would be applied to dead children and innocents under rubble. Everyone keeps forgetting them.
Just because you think they would do the same to you, does not justify your actions.
>That is a great and underused method of evaluating moral judgments and I believe that it’s very suitable in this particular case.
It also dilutes the current and very real responsibilities of the 'effectors'. In saying 'they would have done the same' it becomes very easy to justify the unjustifiable.
> [basically] What if in a different world Hamas had all the weapons plus the backing of the US while Israel only had shoddy weapons?
In a hypothetical world where Usain Bolt was raised on Greenland and became interested in competitive gaming: would he have become the fastest human? Probably not. Different timelines.
This Sam Harris exercise is meaningless. The goal is not to measure the level of evil in the hearts of <hamas> or <isreali government>. That’s impossible. Hypotheticals that have nothing to do with reality are also fruitless. The goal is to figure out what evil actions are being committed and stop them.
But the abuser only did those things because he was abused as a child for eight yea— What’s that got to do with the problem at hand?
> The goal is not to measure the level of evil in the hearts of <hamas> or <isreali government>. That’s impossible.
The goal of thought experiment wasn't to measure evil or good. It's to determine if the lines between good and evil are that far apart.
If Ukraine was way stronger than Russia, would it try to annex Kursk and other non-Ukraine regions? Would it commit as many atrocities? No. It would be constrained by its desire to join EU. Could it do it if it had 30 more people, more nationalistic populace, and near infinite ammo supply? Probably.
But a litmus test, just tells you rough acidity, not exact pH either.
If Israel wasn’t an ethnostate that treated Palestinians as second-class citizens (especially in the West Bank, especially in Gaza) would violent Palestinian factions have a political basis? No.
All: The topic of this thread is the passing of a significant public figure. Discussion should be primarily focused on thoughtful reflections on the life of that person, and his influence on the institution he represented and the broader world. Generic commentary about the institution, religion in general, or other public figures or issues, is likely off topic.*
Before commenting, please take a moment to consider whether your comment is within the HN guidelines [1], particularly the first two:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
(*Edited in response to community feedback.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://archive.is/uo8bN
In 2021, during a visit to the Greek island of Mytilene, Pope Francis delivered one of the finest speeches I've ever read:
> This great basin of water, the cradle of so many civilizations, now looks like a mirror of death. Let us not let our sea (mare nostrum) be transformed into a desolate sea of death (mare mortuum). Let us not allow this place of encounter to become a theatre of conflict. Let us not permit this “sea of memories” to be transformed into a “sea of forgetfulness”. Please brothers and sisters, let us stop this shipwreck of civilization!
> We are in the age of walls and barbed wire. To be sure, we can appreciate people’s fears and insecurities, the difficulties and dangers involved, and the general sense of fatigue and frustration, exacerbated by the economic and pandemic crises. Yet problems are not resolved and coexistence improved by building walls higher, but by joining forces to care for others according to the concrete possibilities of each and in respect for the law, always giving primacy to the inalienable value of the life of every human being
Worth reading in full https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2021/de...
I had no idea anyone still used the term “mare nostrum”. I believe it began to be used during the Roman Empire when the Romans had conquered all lands surrounding the Mediterranean. Back then, the term meant the sea belonged to them and no one else. That meaning no longer applies in the modern day, so using it today would mean “we all share this” rather than the original meaning. His use of the term was a clever way to invoke shared history.
It's not that weird a term: I was taught this as the Roman name for the Mediterranean in middle school history class in Spain, without having to take Latin. There's a boardgame and a video game with Mare Nostrum as the title. I's expect relatively well educated people in countries bordering the Mediterranean to understand what he meant with little trouble, especially if they are also speak a latin-derived language. For instance in Spanish, mare is just mar, nostrum would be nuestro, and mortuum is muerto. It'd all be trivial first guesses.
Don’t forget supercomputers! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MareNostrum
You are correct that most people do not use the term any more. But the Pope isn't like most people. It's an informal requirement that the Pope be able to speak Latin and Italian is commonly used in the Vatican (being surrounded by Italy probably has something to do with that). Even though Francis was not as fluent as his predecessors in Latin and Italian, he certainly understood it better than most and his speechwriters probably were probably proficient in Latin.
As the child of Italian immigrants to Argentina, Francis was quite fluent in Italian. He’s old enough that his formation would have included significant Latin instruction as well. I would guess that Benedict’s Latin skills were superior, but Francis was reasonably conversant in the language from what I understand.
The thing that I found interesting was during trump’s visit to the Vatican, he asked trump’s Slovenian wife if she was feeding him potica which indicated a surprising level of knowledge of the cuisine of a country which is largely insignificant on the world stage (as someone who’s half Slovene and has a loaf of potica on his kitchen counter, I think I can safely make that declaration).
> As the child of Italian immigrants to Argentina, Francis was quite fluent in Italian.
Actually he was more fluent in the Piedmontese dialect. His Italian was somewhat wobbly at the time of his election.
As an American, it’s always a bit startling to realize that “German,” “French,” “Italian,” etc. are in many ways hugely diverse language families with dialects that are often not intelligible by all speakers (as opposed to English where, with a few extreme exceptions, there’s not really a problem with mutual intelligibility and the written language elides most of those distinctions).
I don’t have enough broad knowledge of Spanish (Castellano) to comment on its intelligibility across dialects (although Argentine/Uruguayan Spanish is more of a challenge to my Mexican-Spanish trained brain than European Spanish).
Well of course Slovenia is Italy's neighbor, but I guess that's more surprising from a non-Italian.
I come from Croatia and have lived in Italy for a long time and it's very rare to find anybody who can barely place our countries on a map until fairly recently and let alone heard about foods or drinks. Not zero people of course, but very few
I doubt many Americans can name a single Canadian province or Mexican state.
just to be clear, mine was not a jab against the georgaphy or culture knowledge of the average Italian. They are likely to know more details about German, French or Spanish geographical or culinary features than something from the balkans despite sharing a border.
Indeed. I grew up in a cultural milieu that was overwhelmingly Slavic (Chicago suburbs, mostly Czech and Polish but smaller numbers of Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats and Serbs) and even within that, the lack of understanding of distinctions was surprising (so many people thought Slovak and Slovene were the same thing, which isn’t helped by the fact that the countries have very similar flags since independence and near-identical demonyms in their own languages) although I would note that the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs were all highly aware of the distinctions between themselves and even as cultural self-identification as specific Slavs in Chicago has faded, there’s still a low-level hostility between Slovenes/Croats and Serbs.
I don't know how large the Lithuanian community in Chicago is, but when I lived on the South Side in the late 90s there was an amazing Lithuanian restaurant called just "Healthy Food", a weird amalgam of traditional Lithuanian cuisine and hippie wheat germ and molasses-based fare. They also sold amber jewelry, as well as their own swag like "I ♥ Kugelis" T-shirts. Anyone remember that place?
It's the largest population of Lithuanians outside of Lithuania, for what it's worth.
I’d never been there, but there seem to at least be multiple Lithuanian restaurants in the Chicago area. Sadly, while there were literally dozens of Czech restaurants when I was a kid, now there are three.
Chicago has been shrinking for decades and it's tragic. Even in the 90s there were whole blocks on the South Side (I lived in Back of the Yards) that were just abandoned.
I suspect many Americans would have trouble identifying all the American states. I wouldn’t use Americans as a model of geographic awareness.
Even so, Francis lived most of his life in Argentina and could be excused for not knowing about the cuisine of a neighboring country. Certainly most of the press was ignorant, with many reporters thinking Francis said “pizza” and not “potica.”
He certainly spoke Italian and Latin, but he did not prefer it. It was kind of a sticking point early on when he would slip into Spanish when talking. It irritated some of the old guard who thought that he should stop speaking Spanish because he became Pope.
It was also the name of a major Italian naval operation to rescue migrants crossing the Mediterranean in 2013–2014, launched after a particularly tragic shipwreck near Lampedusa. The operation was shut down after just one year due to high costs and limited support from the EU, which left Italy largely on its own.
Definitely not surprising hearing a pope using it in a speech.
For "older generations" in Italy it is absolutely fine as a reference.
Not sure about Gen Z and younger people though.
Isn't Mytilene a city while the island itself is called Lesvos?
Technically yes, but they're used interchangeably nowdays. Plus, the official transcript mentions "Mytilene" so I wanted to follow that. Although I use Lesvos myself.
Can confirm, I never realized until now that Mytilene is just the city, I've always wondered why we have two names for the island.
I am really sorry for pope francis's death. I truly am. But to me, this was the first time that I ever saw that vatican has its .va and vatican.va ....
Out of curiosity, Who hosts the holy servers?
Again I don't want to demean anyone's death.
> Out of curiosity, Who hosts the holy servers?
The Dicastery for Communcation [0]. They're ASN 8978, and geolocation for all their IP addresses says that they're actually in the Vatican city state.
[0] https://www.comunicazione.va/en.html
Small correction; the name of the island is Lesbos
Ironically, the Vatican has very high border walls of them all. Maybe the highest in the world even. https://www.sheridan.com/wp-content/uploads/NL_vatican-city-...
With no opinion one way or another on the pope.. In the modern world this is a weird criteria to judge people on. I assume like every modern politician, he doesn't write his own speeches. A quite google search seems to confirm it
https://cruxnow.com/church/2015/02/does-the-pope-write-his-o...
Who cares? He said it. The words are his responsibility. If his speech had advocated for grinding orphans into a nutritious paste, we wouldn’t be defending him on the basis that he didn’t write those words. He chose to read them and give them his official backing.
That's because we mean "credit for how well-written the thing is", whereas you mean "credit for agreeing with the meaning".
He still is responsible for the team that wrote it.
a publisher is responsible for a book, but the credit of the thing is poured onto the author.
why?
Because the book is plastered with the author's as well as the publisher's name. Their separation is easily comprehensible. Whereas when an orator delivers, the separation of the writer is not so apparent. It is automatically assumed the orator is the writer.
This is a perfect example of a motte and bailey. The "motte" is that people should be judged badly for parroting horrible ideas they heard (which makes sense) and the "bailey" is that people should be praised just for parroting nice things they heard (which doesn't make sense).
Upvote for practical and informative description of a logical fallacy, with extra love for motte and bailey.
Doesn't "motte and bailey" involve the same person taking the more extreme position followed by the more defensible position?
The link says:
> My suspicion is that Pope Francis may have more to do with crafting his own speeches than did previous pontiffs, because Pope Francis’ talks strike me as more spontaneous, conversational, and unfiltered.
Anyway, a public figure is still giving the direction and “plot points” to their speech writer.
That pope was part of the Jesuits. If you don't know who the Jesuits are, let's just say they are amongst the most academically trained, most intellectual catholic religious orders there is.
Even if Pope Francis gave the charge of writing his speeches to someone else, that would be an heavy responsability for that person.
JFK didn't write his own speeches either for the most part, he was still a heck of an orator.
A friend of mine was one of his speech writers. JFK would change words and construction depending on how he liked it. The speech writers learned and he made less and less changes.
What you don't know is he would try things out on the golf course with his friend Buddy Hackett.
The Vatican published an interesting document on AI [1], which attributes a number of quotes to Pope Francis:
* As Pope Francis noted, the machine “makes a technical choice among several possibilities based either on well-defined criteria or on statistical inferences. Human beings, however, not only choose, but in their hearts are capable of deciding."
* In light of this, the use of AI, as Pope Francis said, must be “accompanied by an ethic inspired by a vision of the common good, an ethic of freedom, responsibility, and fraternity, capable of fostering the full development of people in relation to others and to the whole of creation.”
* As Pope Francis observes, “in this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity.”
* As Pope Francis observes, “the very use of the word ‘intelligence’” in connection with AI “can prove misleading”
[1] https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
I rarely feel this way about someone of Pope Francis' age and social position, but I've genuinely admired Francis as a thinker. He was a bona fide Jesuit, through and through. The next pope has big shoes to fill.
Benedict seemed more academic, but Francis seemed more humane.
I have heard yesterday on some Catholic TV channel that Benedict had already done the theological clarification work during his mandate, and that Francis - who was already the runner-up to Benedict and knew he was likely to be next in line - knew his task would be more about preaching - thus his strong media game (and as he person it suited him well too, he seemed really approchable and outgoing).
Academic thought != clear, deep thought. Working out all the details is good, but getting to the crux of the matter is also needed.
Note that Antiqua et Nova was authored by the Church. With its profound philosophical tradition, the Church offers insights in this text that surpass anything ever written by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
Indeed.
I’ll also add that many of his admirers as well as his detractors exaggerated his virtues, his merits, and his flaws. He was both the victim of a media and film industry all too eager to spin him into the “progressive pope” — never shying away from quoting him out of context to push an agenda — and the issuer of problematic and ambiguous documents and off-the-cuff remarks that only served to generate confusion.
Intellectually, Benedict XVI and John Paul II were in a different league. As far as the Jesuits are concerned, I know that in the popular imagination, the Jesuits are imagined to be some kind of “progressive”, intellectually superior order, but historically, they were sort of the shock troops of the Church. They certainly have merits to their name. While they did become involved in education, they drew from the traditions of education in the Church. Education and scholarship, however, are not their charism. Compare that with the Dominicans, for example, who have teaching and education as their mission (Thomas Aquinas is probably their most famous member).
But jesuits are historically linked to education and the sciences, this is a fact.
I agree with the "ambiguous statements" though.
> But jesuits are historically linked to education and the sciences, this is a fact.
Isn't that what I said? I merely said it is not their charism, not their specialty. The point is that in the popular imagination, people elevate them above orders who not only have a better historical record, but whose mission is to educate, study, etc.
That isn't to downplay the good contributions of the Jesuits, but I can point you to Jesuits (who, as an order, are in poor shape these days, tbh) who would say the same thing. The popular imagination is simply ignorant or tendentious on this point in its exaggeration relative to the others.
Jesuit scholarship, especially in the last 100 years, is noteworthy for generating impressive literature while contributing close to nothing to the Church. See Rahner, Balthasar, de Lubac, Chardin... Garbage through and through
> offers insights in this text that surpass anything ever written by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs
There's a low bar if there ever was one
> * As Pope Francis observes, “the very use of the word ‘intelligence’” in connection with AI “can prove misleading”
Yes, LLMs are more about knowledge than intelligence. AK rather than AI.
Illustrating perfectly how wide this conversation really is, as we don't even have consensus about what "knowledge" means :)
Knowledge is well described (not necessarily explained, but described) in information theory. Intelligence, sentience, consciousness, even whether something is alive, are fuzzy concepts.
Biology has a working definitions of "living organism" that includes a way to calculate likelihood that something is a living organism, but it still is probabilistic.
Understanding is another concept that depends on philosophy of the mind as opposed to concrete physical processes.
Knowledge, data, information, it’s all just awareness.
We do!
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/knowledg...
The Cambridge Dictionary has its own internal consensus, true, but there are so many more ways people understand that specific word :)
Wikipedia even has it's own page with some of the various definitions people use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_knowledge
Then we have implicit/explicit knowledge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_and_explicit_knowledg...) where some people assume one of them when they say "knowledge", others refer to the other.
In fact, there is an entire scientific field to understanding what "knowledge" actually is/means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
So yeah, it isn't as simple as looking it up in a dictionary, unfortunately.
You fell for the midwit trap.
You can pick any word you choose and do that exact same thing.
Let's try "blue": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue
There's probably a couple PhD dissertations written around the origin of the color, it's hue and whatnot ... but also, most humans by the age of three can understand and identify the color blue.
At some point you will understand that you will never have absolute and complete axioms from which to build everything on [1], and you have to work with what you have.
If 99% of people in the street can agree on the meaning of a word without much ambiguity then that's a good starting point, and people eventually compiled all of this that's how dictionaries came to be ...
Man, I wish I was you at this moment, just to experience the absolute mind-blown of realizing the power of dictionaries and what they truly represent, I would compare it to learning to speak all over again!
(This may sound trivial, but at some point in time there were no dictionaries and most folks where living like my friend @diggan here. Then someone was like yo, let's agree on what these words mean and put together this impressive piece of technology. Very few things have had a larger impact on society, no exaggeration.)
tl;dr If you buy a soda and it's two dollars, you give the clerk two dollar bills. You don't give the clerk a lecture on "what exactly is a US dollar?" unless you want to go to jail.
1: not even math has been able to accomplish that, even through many things there start by definition which is kind of a cheat code, lol
> At some point you will understand that you will never have absolute and complete axioms from which to build everything on [1], and you have to work with what you have.
To have hardware that displays blue, and code that manipulates blue, you must have a very clear and unambiguous definition of what blue means. Notice I did not say correct, only clear and unambiguous. Your whole point seems to be that words mean what a native speaker of the language understands them to mean, which is useful in linguistics and in the editing or dictionaries, but the context of this discussion is the representation of some concept in symbols that a computer can process, which is a different thing. Indeed, it's possible that the difference between code and 'vibes' will have to be in some way addressed by those very definitions of knowledge and intelligence, so I think these are relevant questions that can't be hand-waved away.
I feel a little blue. Does your code understand that? Can the code function properly in civilization without that understanding?
Da ba di da ba dah, my friend.
The code will function, in the sense of executing, whether the underlying concepts are sufficiently well-understood or not. Considering the ramifications of that statement might lead you to seeing why people want to understand what they're building before they build it.
I gave you the benefit of the doubt that you were asking questions in good faith, but I'm not sure that's true anymore, so good luck.
Yes, but blue doesn't have a "Definitions of Blue" Wikipedia page.
There are nuances to definitions of common words "what is blue, what is a bicycle, what is a dollar, really?", but the magnitude of variance in definition is not shared with something like "knowledge" or "intelligence."
With these high-level concepts, most people are operating only on a "I know it when I see it" test (to reference the Supreme Court case on obscenity).
>Yes, but blue doesn't have a "Definitions of Blue" Wikipedia page.
Oh, I understand, so the criteria is to have a Wikipedia page like that?
You know what's interesting, I couldn't find neither of these:
* تعريفات المعرفة
* 知識嘅定義
* Définitions de la connaissance
* Definiciones de conocimiento
Should we add "and it has to be written in English" as a requirement?
I know this is arguing ad absurdum, but the point is, again, that if you choose to be that strict, you wouldn't even be able to communicate with other people, because your desired perfect 1:1 map of concepts among them doesn't even exist.
No, I mean to illustrate that "blue" and "knowledge" have a vastly different degree in variation in definition.
Like you say, all words of course have different definitions between individuals, but you and I are obviously able to communicate without specifying every definition. There exists a spectrum between well-agreed-upon definitions (like "and") and fuzzier ones. The definition of "knowledge" is divisive enough that many people disagree vehemently on definitions, which is illustrated by the fact that there is a whole Wikipedia article on it.
If there is a "midwit trap" related to this, there is certainly a Sorites paradox trap as well - that because all words have varying definitions, that it is no use to point out that some words' definitions are more variable than others.
> If 99% of people in the street can agree on the meaning of a word without much ambiguity then that's a good starting point
This turns out to never be true once you get into actual details. Try to buy blue house paint for a basic example.
I do not understand your comment as buying blue paint is an extremely trivial thing to do unless you're in the middle of the Sahara desert.
I think they mean there many hues that some people will cal blue and other will disagree. And definitely if you try to buy paint and just say you want "blue" there's a huge spectrum of things you might get
This website was doing the rounds not long ago: https://ismy.blue/
Which blue paint? If you are buying by yourself, it might be simple, if you are a decisive sort, but there's more blues than I at least expected.
Because everyone knows that millennia of epistemology can be summarized in a single incomplete sentence.
I was always taught that knowledge was "justified true belief."
Now you get into the tricky waters of defining "justified" and "true". It's a circular definition that does not settle anything.
Einstien said it was what was left over when you forgot everything you leaned in school.
The Gettier examples disagree!
Noam Chomsky just called it "plagiarism software."
Pretty disappointing from someone who spent his career modelling language and the cognition behind it.
It is probably exactly because he spent a career considering the cognition behind language that he is not as impressed by LLMs as many others are. I'll readily admit to being expert in neither language and linguistics nor AI, but I am skeptical that anything going on inside an LLM is properly described as "cognition."
does it really matter if it can be described as cognition or not? to me these models are useful for how effective they are, and that's literally it. the processes going on within them are extremely complex and at times very impressive, and whether some arbitrarily undefined word applies or not does not really matter. I think sometimes people forget that words are not maths or logic. when words come into language, no one sits down and makes sure that they're 100% logically and philosophically sound, they just start to be used, usually based on a feeling, and slowly gather and lose meaning over time. perhaps when dictionaries were first written there was some effort to do this, but for lots of words its probably impossible or incredibly difficult even now, never mind 200 years ago, if they could even be bothered in the first place.
to give an example, a quite boring "philosophy question" that's bandied around, usually by children, is "if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?". the answer is that "sound" is a word without a commonly-accepted, logically-derived meaning, for the reasons given above. so if to you the word sound is something human, then the answer is no, but if to you a sound is not something human, then the answer is yes. there's nothing particularly interesting or complex about the thought experiment, it's just a poorly defined word
does it really matter if it can be described as cognition or not?
Yes...it does. "AI" aka modern flavor LLMs as we understand them today are just doing certain things thats humans can do but orders of magnitude faster. What exactly is impressive about it being able to succinctly sum up any topic under the Sun aside from the speed? It will never create a new genre of music. It will never create a new style of art from the ground up. It lacks the human spark of ingenuity. To even suggest that what it does anything close to human cognition is egregiously insulting.
isn't it funny that half the time when you see criticism of LLMs it's almost like the words have been stolen from someone else?
the opinion you're parroting here completely misses the point of LLMs. their purpose is not to start artistic movements or liberally think for themselves and no one is claiming it is. their purpose is to accelerate information retrieval and translation and programming tasks, which they by and large are incredible at. even if they had the capacity to invent artistic movements, which in theory they most certainly do, starting an artistic movement is pretty much intrinsically a human thing, and it requires desire, inclination, trust and a grounding in the real world, such as it is. your "spark of ingenuity" is not lacking because of some issue or lack of creativity, it's lacking because it's not the point and no one wants it to be.
whether it is "cognition" or not is completely irrelevant to their purpose and use, and its a complete waste of time trying to litigate if it is or not because the word in itself is poorly defined. if you're trying to figure out if j=k but you can't define j or k, and you do know that k isn't a big factor in the usefulness of the system, then what is the point? is it jealousy? fear? I assure you, LLMs are not a threat to the special ingenuity of your mind
this opinion is the equivalent of watching the invention of the pocket calculator and complaining that it can't write calculus equations on a black board
their purpose is not to start artistic movements or liberally think for themselves and no one is claiming it is.
your "spark of ingenuity" is not lacking because of some issue or lack of creativity, it's lacking because it's not the point and no one wants it to be.
There are plenty of people/communities online that want it to be exactly that and want to remove the pesky human element from the equation. Dismissing them because it doesn't fit your argument doesn't mean they don't exist.
point to them
I see you are unable to point to them
got 'em
amusing
Re: "does it really matter if it can be described as cognition or not?"
To Chomsky? He'd have to speak for himself, but I suspect the answer is "yes, obviously, at least to be of interest to me."
Note that I'm not saying LLMs are useless or even that what they do is usefully described as "plagiarism."
But it seems entirely unsurprising to me that Chomsky would be unimpressed and uninterested -- even to the point of dismissiveness, he's pretty much like that -- precisely because they are unrelated to "cognition."
If can answer questions about a subject because you want to university and studied it, does that make you a plagiarist?
To me this is the usual "it doesn't _really_ understand" claim which people say because they feel like their human exceptionality is threatened.
I suspect the disappointment wasn't about whenever LLMs exhibit cognitive-like properties or not, but rather about the negative connotations tied to the word "plagiarism". Yea, they replicate patterns from their training data. So do we (ok, to be fair I have no idea about others but I believe I know that I do), and that's normal.
Interesting, I would consider knowledge to be something innately human in a way that solving problems isn't.
Though intelligence is possibly even less well defined than knowledge, so it's hard to tell.
I believe knowledge is what you know based on facts and experience; wind sensors could gather data and store it in a database without a human touching it beyond initial setup. With enough data, and basic information about where the sensors are located, the computer becomes very knowledgeable about wind in a region without human intervention.
I believe intelligence goes beyond that: knowing that such a system is a solution to an observed problem, architecting said system, using the output to solve a problem, analyzing the results, and deciding where to deploy additional systems.
I think both examples above can be done by AI (if not now, then soon)—but only after being prompted carefully by a human. However, a generalized AI that can do all of the above for any problem in the known universe is likely very far off.
if knowledge is a justified true belief, i’m down for saying LLMs have beliefs. to the extent that they are incorrigible, their faith may actually be superhuman.
Not even knowledge. Knowledge requires intentionality and belief as well as justification. LLMs don’t have any of these.
We ought to avoid anthropomorphizing LLMs. It is muddle headed.
I'd add that knowledge usually implies a claim to truth, while llms can only offer information with varying likelihood of being true.
This is what intentionality is about. No intentionality, no truth.
An LLM doesn't deal with propositions, and it is propositions that are the subjects of truth claims. LLMs produce strings of characters that, when interpreted by a human reader, can look like propositions and result in propositions in the human mind, and it is those propositions that have intentionality and truth value. But what the LLMs produce are not the direct expression of propositional content, only the recombination of a large number of expressions of propositional content authored by many human authors.
People are projecting subjective convention onto the objective. The objective truth about LLMs is far poorer in substance than the conventional readings we give to what LLMs generate. There is a good deal of superstition and magical thinking that surrounds LLMs.
I think this is wrong. For nearly a hundred years, popular media has been priming the public to understand that artificial intelligence is superficially intelligent but is very prone to malfunction in inhuman ways. All that media in which AIs go haywire used to make nerds roll their eyes, but resonated with the general public then and has proved prescient now.
* As Pope Francis observes, the wave function collapses.
Related: Vatican hosts quantum science workshop to spread benefits of technology
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2023-12/vati...
> but in their hearts are capable of deciding
I question both the organ and the action.
Question, but perhaps, open your heart to recent research... There is neural tissue in and around the heart. There are studies showing personality changes and memory inculcation as a result of heart transplants. Recipients end up with memory and sometimes traits of the donor.
Are we sure? No. But neither should you be. Question but be open to answers you may not expect.
I'm not sure, but I'd bet £200 that within 10 years it'll still not be something that 99.9% of medical schools will teach. just because I'm not sure, it doesn't make both cases remotely equally likely.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/
He’s speaking to a popular audience in a poetic fashion. No one believes a pump in your chest is the seat of intellgence, even if it may be involved in some extended and removed manner with the expression of intelligence.
If Francis held Thomistic views on the subject, then even the brain, while needed for human intelligence, does not suffice for its operation, as functions like abstraction require the intellect, which cannot be entirely physical in operation since form cannot exist in matter without also instantiating the form, something by definition opposed to abstraction.
> He’s speaking to a popular audience in a poetic fashion. No one believes a pump in your chest is the seat of intellgence, even if it may be involved in some extended and removed manner with the expression of intelligence.
others on this very thread are proposing this exact extension.
I'll ignore the supernatural suggestion.
You're misreading what I've written and being intentionally obtuse.
I didn't say the heart plays a role in intelligence. I simply allowed for the possibility for the sake of argument. The central claim is that no one (here, Francis and his writers) who uses the word "heart" colloquially is making the claim that the heart-as-organ is the seat of intelligence or what have you.
You're committing a vulgar equivocation fallacy that the average person with common sense would recognize. I have a difficult time believing you don't understand something so obvious.
People downvote this guy because obviously nobody actually thinks with their blood-pumping organ.
But as for the quote, it's incredibly clear how little empathy most people have towards others, to the point where AI will easily out-empathy them, both as a conversationalist and as a robotic assistant (such as a 24/7 robot nurse with no other patients).
> it's incredibly clear how little empathy most people have towards others
Sorry but not everyone is an American.
And as Conway's law applies, of course AI done by American or Chinese companies will be oppressive - with only superficial politeness à la GladOS.
Which side was your country on in WW2? And what does your country contribute to AI safety?
Which side is your country today?
Must have been pretty bad if you can't even say, but feel free to keep blaming your problems on the USA, you'll do that anyway.
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-04/pope-francis...
> According to Archbishop Diego Ravelli, Master of Apostolic Ceremonies, the late Pope Francis had requested that the funeral rites be simplified and focused on expressing the faith of the Church in the Risen Body of Christ.
Always struck me as a simple man and that likely contributed to people liking him more when compared to his predecessors. RIP.
Pope John Paul II was also extremely popular across the world.
He was, but John Paul II was traditionally conservative. I think Francis resonated with more people–Christian or not–because he emphasized compassion, humility, and social justice.
He spoke more openly about issues like poverty, climate change, and inclusion–his encyclical LAUDATO SI’ is a great read–, and he often used language and gestures that the "common man" could relate to.
Perhaps the way he dressed so simply–with the plain white cassock–also emphasized his overall approach: less focus on grandeur, more on service.
There was an interview on NPR this morning with a high-level Jesuit in the Americas (former leader of the order in Canada and USA, IIRC).
He put it well... Pope Francis was always a pastor at heart. And he put the needs of the person in front of him ahead of strict doctrine. The interviewee likened it to triage in a field hospital - address the soul in front of you, worry about doctrine later (suture the wound, worry about cholesterol later).
Pope Francis was the only Pope that resonated with me. I was really shocked that at how human his words were. The moment he came on the scene he seemed genuine and honest. I hope they find more like him.
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"telling Ukraine to "have the courage of the white flag"."
Perhaps he should have told Russia to have the "courage" to stop murdering people.
>Pope begs Putin to end 'spiral of violence and death'
https://web.archive.org/web/20230326034459/https://www.reute...
He did. Several times.
do you think that would have even the slightest chance of changing anything?
So never speak against brutal aggressors who commit war crimes? That seems to be antithetical to Christian values.
where did I say that? I am merely saying, that what WAS said might have higher chance of helping
Comdemning evil is an act with many purposes. Making the evil-doer change his mind is just one of possible benefit. Even if that is unlikely the other ones remain.
* People naturally imitate what they see others do. A condemnation can prevent others from imitating the evil act.
* A condemnation calls on others to resist and not facilitate the evil act.
* Condemning someone makes you enemies, in a way that is plain for everyone to see. This positioning can open up for alliance offers from others with similar beliefs.
Making someone an enemy comes with risks and drawbacks of course. You become less able to influence someone if you cut ties, hence why people suggest to try influencing in private first.
John Paul II is widely credited with helping Poland overthrow communism. While he won't change the world overnight, there are millions of people even in Russia who respect the Roman Catholic pope, even if they aren't Roman Catholics themselves.
No but it puts the ball on their court
The ball was never in the Catholic Church's court in the first place, so no it does not.
Neither is the Israel/Gaza conflict ball, doesn't preclude them from voicing their opinion on it
no, it doesnt. What my point is, is that it would have done NOTHING, whereas the message he did send probably had higher chances, and is atleast something someone might listen to, even if they dont follow the advice.
(well except ofcourse the corrupt dictator in ukraine, so it naturally falls on deaf ears)
> telling Ukraine to "have the courage of the white flag".
If an aggressor attacks your country, it takes courage to surrender. Churchill was a coward it seems. He could have surrendered to the Germans and saved so many lives on both sides.
/s
I think it's interesting that PJII was very popular with Catholics and possibly less so with non-Christian. Despite or because being more conservative? He was also a very good man and humble.
JPII was a long running Pope. I would guess most people wouldn't know how conservative or not he was, or even what means in the context of the Catholic Church. He was the first Pope many of us knew, and the Pope who was with many of us the longest. He is probably most well known for the pope mobile.
He actively visited other countries and celebrated massive masses. I believe he was the first Pope to travel around the world bringing his faith. He also efficiently used the media.
Don't know about that. I'm not a catholic and still view him in a much more favorable light than Francis.
I think maybe it's just some progressives (and related groups) who liked Francis a lot for many of his positions.
JP was a great communicator. He understood what it meant for the church to talk to the people—first by traveling to many countries and in opposition to communist atheism, later with the organization of the Journee Mondiale de la Jeunesse. During the late 90s there was a pretty big Catholic spiritual movement towards boys and girls in their late teens or early 20s and it's crazy how big the JMJ was.
His trick was hiding the conservative positions behind the mask of the beloved communicator.
He also covered up sexual abuses, game power to the Opus Dei, and aggressively pushed the disgusting mandate against condoms in the middle of the AIDS pandemic. Yeah, not a fan.
Didn’t JPII rebuild the curia so that progressive popes like Francis could get closer to the keys of power?
Yes and no. He was at the same time very open to being "part of the world" beyond the church, but also very conservative in ethics. In the end the former prevailed also in terms of progressiveness, but it wasn't a given.
He also spoke incredibly directly about abortion - "hiring a hitman" cuts right to the heart of the issue.
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JPII was also elected in a very different world. And he played a big moral role in taking down iron curtain and getting Eastern Europe back Europe.
Meanwhile Francis was quite the opposite. Especially as seen in the light of Russian aggression against Ukraine. For much of Eastern Europe that was like 180 turn. At least here both church goers and not seem to despise Francis while JPII has a warm place in the hearts both factions. Maybe it was different far away where Russia ain’t a hot topic.
Can you elaborate on what you mean here? You seem to be alluding to a stance that Francis had towards Russia that I am not familiar with.
He said Ukraine should surrender. To Russia which wants to exterminate Ukraine as a nation, culture and language.
Feel free to google for more details. There were multiple occurrences when he doubled-down on his words after backlash.
> He said Ukraine should surrender.
Which would be bad, had he done so, but he didn't actually say that; the white flag comment was specifically and explicitly about being willing to directly negotiate with Russia, not about surrender.
> There were multiple occurrences when he doubled-down on his words after backlash.
He certainly called on multiple occasions for all parties to negotiate, but he was also consistent, both before Russia invaded, after the invasion and before the "white flag" comment, immediately after the "white flag" comment, and since that the invasion by Russia is (or "would be" before it occurred) unjustifiable, immoral, an act of aggression, and that Russia has the primary obligation to stop it.
What negotiations when Russians were asking for surrender and no other options were on the table?
Went to Jesus in a keffiyeh, that in itself is atrocious!!! Then simped for jihadis. Plenty of similar stuff.
It's hard to blame all the catholics that are sighing in relief hoping for a better successor.
Seems to line up well with self-hate tendencies in many parts of West.
And if he rallied for war he'd be criticized just the same: "leader of the Christians is such a hypocrite advocating for killing .."
Just war theory was first written on in the West by Saint Augustine.
His global appeal was real, but his decision to give Opus Dei and similar conservative Catholic networks special status under the Vatican had serious consequences.
Elevating Escrivá to sainthood and creating a personal prelature for Opus Dei handed them unmatched moral authority—authority they used to push back on women’s autonomy, justify discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, and quietly influence politics from Spain to Latin America.
Popularity doesn’t erase the impact of empowering hard‑right movements that have harmed lives across the globe.
The church is never going to be pro feminism or pro LGBTQ. I don’t think many, many people find that to be a dealbreaker especially in many developing nations where the entirety of the medical and schooling framework is solely provided by the church and cultural mores already line up with those perspectives.
Even in Europe Opus Dei has immense influence in certain circles. I've seen first-hand the nefarious effects of that.
can you elaborate?
In what way are women in the church less autonomous today than they were.
Also the + stuff.
The church has always influenced politics. See the fall of Communism as an example.
In Poland, he was a figure bigger than life.
JP2 was liked by catholics (the reasons are interesting and complicated enough that would warrant a long discussion). But Francis was generally well-liked even by the irreligious.
I know a few muslims that liked him. I believe he just seemed like a "good guy" who wanted to unify the world
Yeah, Hamas gave a note on Francis for his support.
Part of that though was that he was Polish, at a time when Poland and other Eastern European countries were Communist dictatorships. He represented in part a kind of "insurgency" against them.
The first non-Italian pope since the 1500s. For comparison, note the 1968 movie The Shoes of the Fisherman, in which a priest from Russia unexpectedly becomes pope and provokes great political change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shoes_of_the_Fisherman_(fi...
Exactly, and as a pope far more respectable.
Even non-catholics like me could sympathize with the dismay of so many catholics at many of the positions/blunders of Francis.
Since I see a lot of people commenting on this topic, I would like to offer a different perspective.
Pope JPII was for my southern European social democratic Catholic family much more polarizing than Pope Francis. Pope Francis had politics that are mainstream and not at all controversial in my part of the world. Whereas JPII was perceived as the guy who was buddies with Reagan and Bush and a general supporter of American foreign policy. To what extent that was a fair assessment, I do not want to comment, since he did try to speak against the invasion of Iraq.
None the less, it is not true that Pope Francis is more popular with non-Catholics (Reagan, Bush and most of the US were not Catholic and big supporters of JPII). It was also JPII that started the interfaith dialogue. It is also not true that Pope Francis is unpopular with Catholics.
There are Catholics all across the globe with vastly different opinions on all kinds of issues.
As an outsider it sounds like both were in the current overton window of the power systems at the time.
That's a fair assessment.
Notably, while Francis is sometimes considered liberal, there weren't (m)any notable changes to Church doctrine during his papacy.
He did have a habit (a good one, IMO) of speaking more off-the-cuff in interviews. Whether that was contrived, or just a natural part of his personality, I do not know. But, it was those comments that usually led to the "he's a liberal!" comments. And both sides of the political spectrum said similar things... "He's a liberal (like us)!" or "He's a liberal (unlike us)!" - so he was probably doing something right.
>> According to Archbishop Diego Ravelli, Master of Apostolic Ceremonies, the late Pope Francis had requested that the funeral rites be simplified and focused on expressing the faith of the Church in the Risen Body of Christ.
As a kinda-sorta Christian (raised Catholic), I've long admired the Jewish approach to the Mourner's Kaddish prayer said when a loved one dies: It's not about the deceased, nor even about death — it's about G-d. It starts out (in English translation): "Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will."
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/text-of-the-mourner...
I thought the film the Two Popes gave a good overview of his life and perspective.
It’s important to note that The Two Popes was a drama, and not a true factual story.
It fictionalizes and sensationalizes some details; and that’s ok because its purpose is to make you feel exactly the way you feel about it.
Pope Francis was a wonderful steward of Christianity and espoused the virtues that anyone would want to see in their religious leaders: humility, grace, an openness to listen and a strong voice against even prelates in his own church that are xenophobic or nationalistic. He wanted us to welcome all and to live as the bible said Jesus did.
The fear I have is that each swing of the pendulum goes in two directions. He was far more “liberal” than the conservative Catholic prelates of the USCCB, and I fear his actions — including rightfully limiting the Latin mass, will force the church to swing in the other direction and give in to the illiberal forces that divide us.
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.
- John 14:27
> including rightfully limiting the Latin mass
Why is that a political thing though? The mass of the roman church was for centuries (almost all it’s history?) in latin.
It's complicated. Few people in the church, including the priests themselves, are fluent in Latin (there's a story told, I think by Francis himself, about an diocese in England that required priests to pass an exam to give a Traditional Latin Mass, and almost none of the requesting priests could pass). The TLM obscures what the mass is about, which creates space for practitioners to substitute in their own things, which, as it happens, tends to be idiosyncratically ultra-conservative stuff. The church is a top-down institution, and the TLM gets in the way of that and divides it.
(I like Latin! Took it in high school, reading Lingua Latina for fun; I think the TLM is neat. But problematic.)
> The TLM obscures what the mass is about…
Well, opinions and all that…
My experience, and that of many of my fellow TLM goers that I’ve heard or read, is that we treasure solemn reverent worship that helps us focus on the Eucharistic sacrifice. If we were being distracted from “what the mass is about”, we’d take ourselves and our children elsewhere.
Here’s a video of yesterday’s Easter Sunday Mass offered by priests of the same religious order that operates the oratory where I attend Mass:
https://www.youtube.com/live/XshPZzdI0zk
If you get an opportunity, maybe attend Mass one Sunday at a location of the ICKSP or the FSSP. I believe you’ll experience a welcoming community of Catholics passionate about Jesus.
I'd rather not get snark for putting my Christmas tree up the first week of December. My nearest TLM is at an SSPX chapel.
Well, SSPX is a thing. I’ve never been to one of their chapels myself, though there is one here in St. Louis and some folks who now attend the local oratory run by the ICKSP used to be regulars there. As a group, they seem to have a bit of a chip on their shoulder (irregular communion and all that), which has not been my experience with the ICKSP and FSSP, who are in full communion with the local bishops and Rome, even if the most recent pope was not exactly gracious toward “trads”.
Regarding obscurantism, I don't know how one gets around that observation. It's striking to me that even many TLM celebrants aren't fluent in the language. You know why you're going and you seem to have a good reason for it, and I respect that. I think the rap on the TLM is that, in addition to reasonable people like yourself, it also attracts a lot of whackjobs, some of whom have unfortunately included priests.
I'd actually love to attend a TLM! But I'm not setting foot into a chapel run by an order whose officiants accused the Jews of orchestrating 9/11. (That's SSPX, of course, not FSSP.)
I hope my "it's complicated" gives me some cover from the idea that I'm a folk-group C&E Catholic just looking to dunk on some tradcaths. I mean, I may be that too; it's complicated.
When I was in high school ('91-95), I had quite a few friends involved in band and other music programs at the public school we attended. One of those programs was "choir", though it wasn't affiliated with a church, of course, because it was a public school. I remember being amazed at their performances of polyphonic music from the 16th Century, Palestrina and the like – my parents never played recordings of music like that at home and I had not heard it elsewhere. As a kid I was curious about most everything, and I found it interesting but puzzling that some of those musical pieces were described as parts of a Mass – "what does that mean? can you explain the context, I don't get it?" My family was Catholic, but I grew up in a predominantly Protestant area of the country (eastern Tennessee); neither Catholic nor Protestant adults that I talked to could provide a clear explanation and I didn't know the the music teachers so didn't ask them. I looked up what I could in printed encyclopedias, but it was a jumble to me, and it wasn't until years later that I acquired a bigger picture.
All around the world, there exists (or survives, sometimes only in parts) beautiful art and architecture and music that, with a little examination, is directly connected to the Latin Rite as it was celebrated for centuries. You can't really get the full picture of why those things are the way they are without knowledge of the classical Latin Rite. Likewise, a study of the Latin Rite on paper would be impoverished without knowledge of the historical cultural developments and artistic treasures that enriched it over the centuries.
"Rite is the liturgical, theological, spiritual and disciplinary heritage, distinguished according to peoples' culture and historical circumstances, that finds expression in each autonomous church's way of living the faith." — according to the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches (28 §1)[1]
It is remarkable that in the Western Church we have passed through a period from the mid 20th Century during which so much of our Latin Rite heritage has been ignored, forgotten, even tossed aside or rent violently. The term wreckovation[2] is used, and it's pretty accurate though it causes some to bristle.
The TLM movement is, in many respects, about recovering our Western Catholic heritage. That's not accomplished in equal measure everywhere, but the most vibrant communities around it place an emphasis on sacred music, restoring art and architecture as circumstances allow, and educating — catechizing is probably the better term — ourselves and our children so those efforts aren't merely about appearances or performance art, but an integral part of loving and worshipping God as we look to rebuild local Catholic culture.
So "obscurantism"? No, rather traditional expressions of the Catholic Faith given new sails (sometimes the winds are a bit stormy, to be sure). Some of us are learning Latin as we go along — the ordinary parts of the Mass are easy to pick up, and if you're coming from the Novus Ordo you already know what they mean even if you don't fully understand the Latin grammar. Certainly the priests of the ICKSP and FSSP study Latin in their seminaries, and many homeschooling families I know have Latin in their kids' curriculums. It's pretty amazing how quickly little kids pick it up when they participate in choir or serve as altar boys.
I want to provide one more response re: the SSPX/Williamson and whackjobs stuff, but I've already blown my HN comments time-budget today, so it will have to wait.
[1] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/la/apost_constit...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wreckovation
> I hope my "it's complicated" gives me some cover from the idea that I'm a folk-group C&E Catholic just looking to dunk on some tradcaths. I mean, I may be that too; it's complicated.
I don't take offense, Dominus vobiscum.
I don't think TLM is intended to obscure anything; I claim instead that it is used as a tool of obscurantism for a fringe movement within the church. Everything you're saying that's good about TLM, I agree with. I'm the weirdo on the thread that actually took Latin, and, thanks to a work experience with a Latin scholar (hey Jon!) currently reads a little bit of Latin for fun.
I would claim as well that most people who attend TLM services do not in fact have any fluency in Latin, and would in support of that argument (but not that much support because I'm not going to take the time to dig up the source right now) point out the English bishop's observation that TLM-enthusiast priests in his diocese couldn't pass a simple Latin test.
Bishop Williamson, the source of that statement, was kicked from the SSPX partly due to raging and irrational antisemitism and misogyny. If that's enough for you to never set foot in a chapel, you shouldn't be Catholic at all, just take a look at what many popes and saints have said and done about jewish people, it's far worse
I don't think SSPX matters, really, but I'd encourage anyone curious about this particular controversy to simply Google [SSPX antisemitism]. There's a whole Wikipedia article about it (going back to the founder of the order), but lots more than that. Suffice it to say, we're just not going to agree about this.
TLM, don't TLM, but conservative Catholics had a beef with Francis about the Latin Mass, and this is important context to that beef.
For fun, try searching YouTube for "speaking latin at the vatican". It's hard to find people who can speak it even there!
sed invenire potes ibi scorpiōnem martianum
> Few people in the church, including the priests themselves, are fluent in Latin (there's a story told, I think by Francis himself, about an diocese in England that required priests to pass an exam to give a Traditional Latin Mass, and almost none of the requesting priests could pass).
Strictly speaking, as well as the Tridentine Mass, one can also have the current Mass in Latin. From what I've heard (never been to one to experience it first hand), Opus Dei centres worldwide say it almost every day. Outside Opus Dei, I believe it is quite niche – but, strictly speaking, all Catholic priests (of the Latin Church, or Eastern rite with Latin faculties) are allowed to say the current Mass in Latin, and Traditionis custodes didn't do anything to change that. I think few are interested, and from what I've heard, to try to prevent people shifting from Tridentine-in-Latin to current Mass-in-Latin, bishops have been quietly instructed by Rome to disallow it in practice, even if it is still formally allowed on paper. However, if a priest wants to say the new Mass in Latin privately, or to a small group which isn't widely advertised and flies below the radar, I think that is both officially allowed and likely in practice too. But, the linguistic competence concerns you mention about Tridentine-in-Latin apply equally to current Mass-in-Latin.
Quite separately, there is a history of the Tridentine Mass being translated into other languages, both in some cases authorised by Rome, and also by external groups such as Anglo-Catholic Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox, Old Catholics, Polish National Catholic Church – I think all the cases of this in communion with Rome have all effectively lapsed through disuse. But still, it is another reason people ought to avoid equating Latin and Tridentine.
> The TLM obscures what the mass is about, which creates space for practitioners to substitute in their own things, which, as it happens, tends to be idiosyncratically ultra-conservative stuff. The church is a top-down institution, and the TLM gets in the way of that and divides it.
I think a big potential problem with what Pope Francis did – it made no difference to the quasi-schismatic SSPX, or the more explicitly schismatic groups to their right, who were very used to ignoring everything the Pope said (except maybe if they liked what he was saying on that occasion) – but it upset that minority of Catholics who were involved in the TLM within the Catholic Church proper, and potentially drove them into the arms of those more schismatic groups. Now, to what extent has that potential been fulfilled in practice, I don't have enough personal experience of this topic to say–but I'm sure it has happened in some cases, however many. And I know there are even quite a few conservative-leaning Catholics who weren't involved in TLM in practice, but found the decision upsetting, and it might increase the odds of them wandering off as well.
Of course, the people we are talking about are a small minority in comparison to over 1 billion Catholics worldwide. But most of that one billion are far from devout – people who rarely attend Mass. At the more devout end, at least in some geographies, those involved in TLM, or who aren't but were upset by this papal decision, are arguably much more significant. And much of the institutional strength of any religion comes from its devout minority, as opposed to millions of people who identify with it at some level but far more rarely actively engage with it.
So, I think even if one doesn't have any personal affinity for the Tridentine Mass, there are genuine reasons to question the prudence of this decision.
TLM participants are a tiny fraction of people who routinely attend mass. In fact, something you hear from TLM advocates is that TLM attendees tend to be younger.
A clear direction for church growth.
You hear this a lot from TLM proponents. First, it's a category error to suggest that church doctrine has a goal of maximizing the number of people to that turn out to mass. But second, no, it really isn't. The idea that a great way to get lots of ordinary people to become practicing Catholics is to literally conduct services in a dead language nobody understands is an extraordinary claim.
>maximizing the number of people to that turn out to mass
Mark 16:15.
Hebrews 10:25.
The Church organisation is very distinct from the church. And anything that increases their participation is in line with scripture. Both growth and attendance are important.
There's already evidence it works. And it's something that sets the church apart.
Romans 12:2 indeed.
In Antioch [Acts 11:26] people were first called Christians. They weren't the regular people of that time. But people with something that made them visibly different from the Hoi Polloi.
What really is the point of a consecration that doesn't change you? What are you being set apart from?
I just find this sentiment really kind of funny, given how small the number of people who are passionately committed to it, vs. people who attend folk-group mass. But I'm not here to convert you!
For me it's not just about the in practice Latin suppression and the pretense it's not happening.
My reply is primarily about Church growth and the importance of fellowship.
Wherever you go, don't imagine this sentiment is American/Western only as many have claimed/alluded.
If Christ doesn't change you nothing really has changed.
Proselytizing by active action and being examples by our (different/changed post conversion) behaviour are duties of everyone in Christ. As is fellowship.
As exemplified by those who do it in countries and areas where it might mean death like where I live today.
"Take up your cross and follow me" indeed.
There are many opinions about proselytism, eg:
compared to: The Christian converts who are setting fire to sacred Aboriginal objects (2019)https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/the-christian-convert...
This isn't relevant here.
I don't know if I should bother pointing out why.
The obvious objection would be that I linked to a story of poor behaviour from Tongan evangelicals rather than Catholics ... the counter being there's no shortage of truly appalling tales of Catholics destroying culture while expanding their flocks .. they are better known for other atrocities hereabouts though, eg:
* https://kelsolawyers.com/au/paedophile_offenders/brother-kea...
* https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-29/child-sex-abuse-royal...
* https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/final-report
> The idea that a great way to get lots of ordinary people to become practicing Catholics is to literally conduct services in a dead language nobody understands is an extraordinary claim.
Lots of religions have liturgical languages which are nobody's mother tongue any more. Orthodox Judaism has Hebrew (Reform/Conservative/etc too, albeit with variably greater use of vernacular): many diaspora Jews have limited Hebrew proficiency, and even for those who speak Modern Hebrew, the liturgy is in mediaeval Hebrew, which has significant differences. And some of the prayers (including quite important ones like the Kaddish and the Kol Nidre said on Yom Kippur) are in Aramaic. Most Muslims pray in Arabic despite the fact that less than 20% speak it natively, and even for those who do, modern vernacular Arabic has diverged a lot from the classical Arabic of the Quran and the prayers. The Russian Orthodox Church prays, not in Russian, but in Church Slavonic, which is a (somewhat Russified) descendant of mediaeval Bulgarian, which comes from a different branch of the Slavic language family. The Greek Orthodox liturgy is in mediaeval Greek, not modern Greek – many Middle Eastern Greek Orthodox have Arabic as their mother tongue, and many ethnic Greeks in Anglophone countries have quite limited Greek proficiency, yet still attend services in the language. The Coptic Church still uses Coptic, a descendant of ancient Egyptian, for its liturgy. The Ethiopian Church uses Ge'ez. The Syriac Churches use Syriac/Aramaic. (And what I just said of those Eastern churches is also true of many Eastern Catholics.) Many Theravada Buddhists pray in Pali. Many Mongolian Buddhists pray in Tibetan (there are many Anglophone Buddhists who pray in Tibetan too). Many Hindus pray in Sanskrit.
Having a special language set aside for prayer, a holy tongue (Lashon Hakodesh, as many Jews call Hebrew) is something a lot of people find spiritually beneficial, across numerous unrelated religious traditions. It can give people a sense of an encounter with the deep past of their own tradition. It can make a religious community feel more unified despite being divided between different mother tongues. And most Catholics, pre-1970, thought the same thing.
It wasn't like people couldn't understand it – they followed English-Latin parallel prayer books, just like people follow English-Hebrew parallel books in many synagogues today. Globally, very many Catholics have a Romance language as their mother tongue, which is historically descended from Latin, which helps with understanding some of the words. Even though English isn't, the heavy infusion of Latin (both directly and via French) into English helps achieve some of the same thing.
I think if I'd grown up Catholic with Latin instead of the vernacular, my understanding of Latin would be a lot better. I feel like I missed out on something there.
So one definitely doesn't have to be a regular Latin Mass goer – I've never been to one in my life, I've thought about doing it but its always just been too out of my way – to wonder if the Church has lost something by throwing away so much of its linguistic heritage. Personally, I'd be quite happy with a kind of compromise in which Latin was much more heavily used but the majority of Masses were still vernacular. Which I actually think is what Vatican II intended, I think the Council's original vision was closer to majority vernacular / minority Latin, than the almost-all-vernacular / almost-no-Latin which actually evolved afterwards.
And this is a separate issue from the Tridentine liturgy – you can say the Mass of Paul VI in Latin and you can say the Tridentine Mass in English (Roman Catholics never have, but some Anglican, Eastern Orthodox and schismatic Catholic churches do it)
You mistake me. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with saying the mass in Latin. I'd kind of like to go see one! Put my 4 years of Jesuit Latin to use! But no, I don't think that's going to be a big draw for ordinary people to join the church.
My Greek Orthodox friends growing up definitely spoke Greek!
It would definitely attract some people. An old friend of mine (from our Catholic high school), who almost never goes to Mass, told me he’d be willing to venture back if it were in Latin, just for the experience. We started looking into it, we were going to go together, but lost interest in the idea when we realised there weren’t any convenient to attend. I don’t know how common that attitude is, but I’m sure he’s not the only person like that.
And the fact is, if Latin doesn’t attract many ordinary people, will anything else? Catholicism (and Christianity more broadly) is full of grand evangelistic plans to “get people back to church”, the vast majority of which produce very little results. If anything, niche offerings such as Latin masses or Anglican Use or Eastern Catholicism at least have a bit of a ”it’s different” factor to draw people in with.
There are clearly people who are interested very specifically in the Latin mass. But even though the church is losing practicing members, it's still huge; normie Catholics dwarf tradcaths.
But again: drawing people isn't the point. Francis didn't crack down on TLM because he thought it was a bad way to get people to show up at mass! He did it because things in the church with TLM were getting weird. It's a doctrinal thing, not a marketing strategy.
> He did it because things in the church with TLM were getting weird.
What’s “weird” is in the eye of the beholder - a lot of stuff Francis saw as “weird”, JP2 and B16 may have seen as significantly less “weird”; conversely, JP2 and B16 may well have seen some of Francis’ own decisions as “weird”.
I know one of the big complaints against TLM communities is that many of them question the validity of Vatican II. But, given B16 as a young theologian authored his famous (in the rarified subfield of Catholic/Orthodox ecumenical theology) “Ratzinger proposal”, that reunion with the Orthodox should not require them to accept post-schism councils as binding - which implicitly downgrades the authority of all 13 post-schism councils from Lateran I to Vatican II inclusive, [0] maybe he’d view doubting Vatican II a bit more charitably than Francis ever could. And, among the more liberal/progressive-leaning Catholics (for whom Francis rather obviously had a significant degree of sympathy), there’s a long tradition of questioning the validity of Vatican I - and I suspect Francis was much more sympathetic to doubting the first than the second.
And then there’s also the Eastern Catholic followers of the late Lebanese Melkite archbishop Elias Zoghby, who rejected the ecumenicity of Vatican II (despite being one of its Fathers) on the grounds that a genuinely ecumenical council would require full Orthodox participation, hence denying that status to all post-schism councils - I suspect Francis would have seen that as much less “weird”, despite its superficial overlap with traditionalist views on Vatican II, since he’d be more sympathetic to the motivations behind it. Zoghby’s opposition to Vatican II’s validity wasn’t solely a matter of abstract theological principle, it was also about its substance - at it, he argued that Eastern Catholics should be allowed to observe the traditional Eastern leniency on divorce rather than being forced to conform to the Latin Church’s principled opposition to it, but he lost that argument-but yet again, likely something Francis had more sympathy for than the Latin traditionalist objections to the council’s substance
[0] there is also the problem of the 8th council, which is a pre-schism council; there are two competing claimants to the title of “Fourth Council of Constantinople”, the first in 869-870, the second in 879-880; Catholics accept the first as the 8th ecumenical council and reject the second as invalid; Orthodox reject the first as invalid and accept the second, but disagree among themselves as to whether to class it as the 8th ecumenical council or as sub-ecumenical; and then there’s also the Quinisext Council of 692 (aka Council in Trullo), which many Orthodox view as quasi-ecumenical, Catholics as local to the East; and then the fact that some Orthodox claim one of their own post-schism councils as ecumenical (the fifth council of Constantinople, 1341-1368) - Ratzinger’s proposal didn’t address these conciliar esoterica, but maybe they aren’t that important given so few get worked up about them
I'm just going to point out that it's not surprising that laypeople and clergy who reject Vatican II also have an unusual habit of faceplanting into antisemitism, given that Nostra Aetate was a product of Vatican II.
The Vatican first condemned antisemitism by name in 1928, so I don't think disagreeing even with Nostra aetate necessarily has antisemitism as a consequence. The perennial problem with antisemitism, however, is nobody (Jews included) can agree on how to define it, and how essential Nostra aetate is to ruling it out for Catholics may depend on how broad or narrow a definition of it you adopt.
Indeed; and when the Second Vatican Council decided Mass should be said in the vernacular, the obligation of the Church was to follow. Instead, the conservatives of the church ('conservative' here means those that emphasize adhering to tradition and are adverse to change) created a rift by eschewing this change and even heightening the importance of the Latin Mass, creating the impression that a mass spoken in the local language was somehow less of a mass.
If you’re Catholic, suggesting that a mass spoken in one language over another is somehow "less" takes away from the most important idea of the Mass: reenacting Christ’s Last supper commandment and the institution of the Holy Eucharist for what amounts to word games.
This divisive description of the mass increased over the decades, to the point that it threatened to cause a schism. As such it was the Holy Father’s duty to resolve the issue.
There are still groups(at least I'm aware of them in Poland, I've met people who are part of them) who believe exactly this, that the second Vatican Sobor was a mistake and the "real" mass is only the one conducted in Latin.
It seems unlikely that Jesus spoke Latin at the last supper.
Also unlikely that Jesus intended for the ceremony to be conducted at times other than the evening of his death (replacing Passover). Up for interpretation, I suppose.
As in just the one time? Or as a once per year replacement?
Once per year. He commanded his disciples to "do this in remembrance of me."
There is no mention of how often, but given Jesus allergy to ritual as opposed to genuine acts of worship, it seems reasonable that this would not be a commonplace thing.
Again... interpretation.
We can get context for how the early Christians understood it by looking to additional sources from that period, e.g. the Didache and the early Church Fathers.
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/holy-eucharist-in-t...
You’re under the impression that’s relevant? How so? Asking out of genuine curiosity.
My understanding is that the mass is intended to be a recreation or commemoration of that event. So why is speaking it in Latin important?
In the early centuries of Christianity, as it spread geographically, there developed distinct rites of worship that solidified and then were handed down to the present, retaining strong links to the spoken-written languages used to express them originally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_particular_churches_a...
Oversimplifying greatly, but in and from Western Europe we have the Latin Rite, and in/from the East we have the Byzantine (Greek) Rite. There are others, not of less importance, see the link above.
There’s quite a lot of history involved in all this. But in Western Christianity it was Latin that became predominant for public worship and knowledge transmission.
But we do have record that the cross' title was written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.
God certainly had a special plan for these languages: the language of God's Law, the language of human power, and the language of human wisdom. The presence of His name in all three languages left the situation unambiguous to whoever might have been in the area to read it. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, hung on that cross. When pressed about it, Pilate would not amend those words.
In this way, though maybe unnecessary thanks to the Gift of Tongues the Holy Spirit later gave to His apostles, the sign stood as a kind of Rosetta Stone, which no one could misunderstand. It shows that history itself, along with all human matters, belong completely to Him, and at the same time it made those languages new by virtue of that single title, grounding them firmly in the Truth Himself.
Latin and Greek, themselves originally vernaculars, continue to hold a special place in their respective churches, both Catholic and Orthodox. Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, continues to be used in many Eastern churches as well, again Catholic and Orthodox both. All three constitute especially venerable traditions—and to this we may add Coptic, since Jesus spent his early years in Egypt; Slavonic, for its very writing system's role in the conversion of the Slavs; and a handful of others I am more or less ignorant of. With each one, by entering into the language, you enter the mind of those first converts, who themselves entered the Mind of Christ.
In the Latin Catholic Church (that is, the Latin Rite of the Roman Catholic Church, or however you want to name it) we call the Latin language a "sacramental"—the same sort of thing as holy water, something which conveys grace to those who use it with an openness to those graces.
Demons hate it because of its legal precision, by which, in the name of the same Christ named in Latin on the cross, they are driven out of people, things, and places, fulfilling Christ's own prediction that His followers would cast out demons.
By forming one's faith life around one of these languages, one can more clearly ask those basic human questions that Christ is the answer to, without having to deal with the centuries of semantic drift and overloading that are scattered about the minefields of our modern vernaculars. The vernacular, of course, is no impediment to personal prayer, but as more and more people are gathered in one place the confusion of Babel threatens to set in.
On the other hand, every little Latin grammatical lesson, every new piece of vocabulary learned, reveals new wonders and opens the door to the great body of literature that was composed in the single Mind of Christ.
But we had this, and in the 20th century we let it slip through our fingers, not knowing what we'd been given. The problem is not that we don't know Latin. The problem is that, in broad cultural strokes, even when we did, we didn't care.
It was certainly not in Latin. It was either in Hebrew of in Greek.
The focus on latin is a pure nitpicking and virtue signaling from the Conservatives (the irony!).
> It was certainly not in Latin. It was either in Hebrew of in Greek.
I think it was very likely mostly Aramaic, possibly with some Hebrew mixed in (certain set prayers, with Torah readings in Hebrew followed by extemporaneous Aramaic translation). By the 1st century, Jews had abandoned Hebrew as an everyday tongue, a situation which didn't change until Zionists revived it in the late 19th century (which caused great controversy, since the traditional Jewish belief was that Hebrew is a holy language which should be reserved for religious purposes only, a position still maintained by most non-Israeli ultra-Orthodox to this day.)
Putting aside any claims of supernatural linguistic abilities, Jesus of Nazareth would likely have been fluent in Aramaic (his native tongue), competent in using Hebrew for certain religious purposes (but not as a language of everyday life), possibly some limited ability in Greek (but probably not fluent), maybe a few words of Latin (but very unlikely to be fluent).
> The focus on latin is a pure nitpicking and virtue signaling from the Conservatives (the irony!).
The majority of TLM (Traditional Latin Mass) adherents care more about keeping the traditional Tridentine (pre-Vatican II) liturgy than about Latin in itself – Catholic priests are allowed to say the contemporary Mass in Latin (subject to certain conditions), but there is rather little demand for it.
The issue ive heard with non-Latin mass is that it has lessened the feeling of global community among Catholics as they now do not all speak the same language (Latin).
Anecdatum, but I still feel like part of a community when I go to Mass in a language I'm not familiar with, because its rhythm and flow are the same more or less everywhere.
Disclaimer: I'm definitely not old enough to predate vatican 2, so I'm not from a time when Latin Mass was widespread.
> the Second Vatican Council decided Mass should be said in the vernacular
It didn't actually.
See Sacrosanctum Concilium: https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_coun...
Vatican II opened the way for use of vernacular in the Mass while also directing "use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites".
In practice, after the overhaul of the Latin rites was completed and promulgated (published) in 1969, four years after the council ended in '65, the Latin language itself was dropped almost everywhere all at once and only translations were used. Many people rejoiced at that, some did not, but the vast majority of bishops, priests and laity alike, conservatives and liberals across the full spectrum, probably 99.999%, went ahead full throttle with Mass and all the sacraments in the vernacular.
There were hold-out contingents like the SSPX, led by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who stuck with the all Latin rites per the last round of small reforms in 1962, the same as used for the celebration of Mass, etc. during the whole time of the council from 1962-65.
It was over the next 40 years that discontent with the reforms of 1969, and their fallout, began to grow. There was increasing awareness that it wasn't just a switch from Latin to vernacular — the '69 reforms were "cut from whole cloth", outright replacing the traditional rites with syntheses of a commission of scholars. Long story short, many Catholics, some born before '69 and many born after (myself included), desire a return, and have implemented a return, to the traditional form of the Latin rites. Pope Benedict XVI gave it his blessing. But then Pope Francis was not a fan, believing it to be a retrograde movement that causes more harm than good and a kind of "saying no" to the Holy Spirit. It's hard to find middle ground on this matter, to be quite honest.
Illa fuit captatio nerdorum maxime satisfaciens.
No idea why you're being downvoted, you're correct. There was and still is pushback against the liturgical reform even from pro-Vatican II priests and bishops
Imagine going to church every Saturday or Sunday and sitting through a 1 hour service that you don't understand. The conservative side of the church has decided that it hates change, and since the Latin services were mostly cast aside, that's a bad thing to them.
The dozen or so TLMs I've ever been to have had their readings in the vernacular. All the other parts are either the same every time (or have only a few variations) or are propers (specific to each day).
I never studied Latin, but I don't find it difficult at all to keep up. A lot of churches that have TLM have the missal booklet with Latin on one page and vernacular on the facing page.
While I do appreciate the richness of the daily propers and miss understanding them, it doesn't bother me enough to avoid the TLM.
Modern catholics and protestants are the exception in regards to "understanding" their rites. For centuries religions have maintained "sacred languages" or at the very least sacred dialects, with the intention of emphasizing continuity between generations. Also, you don't really seem to understand how the Latin Mass works. The Ordo is repeated the same way every mass, so anyone that remotely cares knows what it says. The proper, including the readings, changes most days, but many are repeated throughout the year, like the mass of the virgins, and also repeats every year in the exact same way, so there's no reason for a concerned faithful not to buy a book with them if they care so much. Readings are frequently read in vernacular before the sermon, if pertinent, but they are not core to the mass so there's not much reason to care
Understanding the Mass and uniting in prayer with the Eucharistic sacrifice are one thing, being fluent in Latin is another thing.
One does not necessarily imply or require or constrain the other.
Interesting, I always considered him possibly the most unpopular pope of recent times and understandably so.
If I were to say one pope that many have been fond of, it's probably John Paul II.
More than concrete actions, his posture and presentation as a simple man is probably his most recognisable legacy for believers and nonbelievers.
My first impression when he arrived was of the Bishop of Digne. May the world be that lucky again.
His persona as being simple focus is just PR, no different than puff pieces about bill gates driving a Prius, or Warren buffet living in the first house that be bought.
This is really not true for those who knew him throughout his life.
I genuinely liked him, even as an atheist. He seemed to be trying his best to make the world a better place and I can't fault him for that.
He riled many of his flock and hierarchy when he said that "even atheists can be redeemed". [0]
I will always applaud a person who retreats — even just a little — from dogma and fanaticism.
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2013/05/29/187009384/...
> He riled many of his flock and hierarchy when he said that "even atheists can be redeemed".
It's quite a bit above our pay grade to proclaim categorically who supposedly cannot be redeemed; it verges on blasphemy.
Cf. Job. 38:
1. Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said:
2 “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge?
3 "Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.
5 "Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 "On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone—
7 "while the morning stars sang together and all the angels[a] shouted for joy?"
(etc.)
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%2038&versio...
> It's quite a bit above our pay grade to proclaim categorically who supposedly cannot be redeemed; it verges on blasphemy.
And the idea that atheists can be saved isn't novel in Catholic teaching – it is implicit in the Holy Office's 1949 condemnation of Feeneyism, [0] in which it declared that a person who doesn't believe in Catholicism due to "invincible ignorance" can be saved by an "implicit desire" for God. Although it didn't include the case of atheists, it didn't exclude them either – suggesting that an atheist who doesn't believe in God in their head (due to some intellectual issue) but nonetheless believes in God in their heart can be saved.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeneyism
> ... who doesn't believe in God in their head [..] but nonetheless believes in God in their heart ...
I'm racking my brain right now dissecting what that even means. Believing there is no one but wishing it wasn't so?
In Catholic theology, God is believed to be Goodness itself – in a sense, identical to Plato's Form of the Good (but going far beyond Plato's idea at the same time).
Hence, anyone who loves Good loves God... so a person who truly loves Good, but who due to some intellectual obstacle, isn't able to call that Good "God" – from a Catholic viewpoint, it can be said that they love God without knowing that it is God whom they love – and by that love they can be saved
if you're good but in your mind reject God, I guess they're saying that it's good enough
Pretty much, although it also depends on your mind's reasons.
If you start from the assumption that Christianity is true, and some people know this, and others don't – you have to ask why the people who don't know it, don't know it. And this is where Catholic theology distinguishes between "vincible" and "invincible" ignorance - "vincible" means the ignorance is your own fault, "invincible" means your ignorance is through no fault of your own.
How to distinguish the two? Ultimately, it is up to God to decide – nobody else knows for sure what's going on in your head. At best, theologians would give some examples of hypothetical situations which could be said to be one or the other – but the real world is often much messier than any such hypothetical can capture.
Which is part of why, the traditional Catholic teaching, is that (with rare exceptions) you can't actually know where people are going to end up. The idea is that if you make it to heaven, you might be surprised to find a lot of people there you weren't expecting, and also maybe some people you were sure would be there aren't.
As an agnostic who spends a lot of time reading scriptures of several religions, trying to grasp the themes and motivations of others I share a world with -- those passages are particularly inscrutable.
It's pretty easy to parse if you understand that God isn't actually asking anyone for the dimensions of the Earth. It's more about proffering humility to Job by comparing his understanding of things to God's.
It's repeating, over and over, the extreme ignorance, and thus presumption, of Job in running from what God told him to do.
Edited to add: this is a single passage with verse markings.
You might enjoy unsongbook.com, a main theme of which is contemplating the meaning of that passage (and, related to that, making whale puns).
> As an agnostic who spends a lot of time reading scriptures of several religions, trying to grasp the themes and motivations of others I share a world with -- those passages are particularly inscrutable.
I think the author's intent is to remind us that some things are simply beyond our ken (to which I'd add: For now).
> It's quite a bit above our pay grade [...] it verges on blasphemy.
Cheers! As I understand the term blasphemy, our presumptuous species has a great deal to assert about the unknowable. ^_^
Absolutely, but Pope Francis said a lot of things that were absolutely core, canon, Catholic beliefs but still made a bunch of Catholics unreasonably angry.
> He riled many of his flock and hierarchy when he said that "even atheists can be redeemed".
Which is "interesting", considering how much of the New Testament is about redemption and reaching out to outsiders. Aren’t we all supposed to be God’s creation, and wasn’t Jesus supposed to teach us about salvation, redemption and forgiveness?
(And by "interesting", I mean that it is yet another of example cognitive dissonance amongst fundamentalists. If anyone can be redeemed, it implies that atheists can, as well.)
> I will always applaud a person who retreats — even just a little — from dogma and fanaticism.
Indeed. He was not perfect but he was better than most. I hope the next one won’t be a catholic version of patriarch Kirill.
It's funny you mention Kiril. I keep thinking about Pope Francis's (apparently deep and genuine) friendship with Bartholomew, Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church.
It is traditional for the EP to visit Rome on the patronal Feast of Saints Peter and Paul and for the Pope to visit Istanbul on the Feast of Saint Andrew, which is apparently when the friendship first formed. My absolute favorite story about Francis is his deciding to send some of the most precious relics in the Vatican to Bartholomew as a gift: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2019-09/pope-francis... (That sent some people into a fury).
Actually, it's my second favorite story. My favorite story is his insistence that he live in the Vatican guesthouse (and not the Papal apartments). Or perhaps the fact that as archbishop of Buenos Ares he insisted on taking the subway.
"Actually, it's my second favorite story. My favorite story is his insistence that he live in the Vatican guesthouse"
I believe that had mainly power reasons, because pope Paul II was pretty out of the loop, what the cardinals were doing.
And Francis likely expected to face opposition in what he was doing, so being closer to the "people" was likely helpful on having an eye on them.
Mind explaining your issues with Kirill?
Haven't really been paying attention. Wasn't he the one who got Russia into defending persecuted Christians wherever (Syria etc)?
The man declared Putin's war to be a literal crusade against the West:
> From a spiritual and moral point of view, the special military operation is a Holy War, in which Russia and its people, defending the single spiritual space of Holy Rus', fulfill the mission of the "Restrainer", protecting the world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West that has fallen into Satanism.
> After the end of the SVO, the entire territory of modern Ukraine must enter the zone of exclusive influence of Russia. The possibility of the existence on this territory of a Russophobic political regime hostile to Russia and its people, as well as a political regime controlled from an external center hostile to Russia, must be completely excluded.
https://www-patriarchia-ru.translate.goog/db/text/6116189.ht...
He also said that russian men who die fighting in ukraine are guaranteed salvation. In orthodox theology this sort of thing has historically been recognized as a straightforward heresy. We do not claim to know in advance who will be saved, or by what specific acts. Not even bishops or metropolitans. So even from a strictly orthodox perspective he is dangerously divisive and has broken from one of our most important traditions.
(The recognition of saints is a little different, happening always after their death and depending on some degree of regional consensus. It's sloppy but whatever, it is actually not as similar as it might look.)
Read up on him more. He's essentially former KGB that was originally assigned to keep an eye on the token remnants of the church in Soviet Russia. He's now saying the war against Ukraine is "holy and justified", signing up to fight is "guaranteed to wipe away your sins", etc. He's designed to manipulate a segment of the population. He's Putin's method to "religiously justify" whatever Putin wants.
("He" here is Kirill not the Pope)
The Russian Orthodox Church has been a Chekist front since Stalin revived it for nationalistic reasons during WW2. Kirill is just continuing the tradition.
> Which is "interesting", considering how much of the New Testament is about redemption and reaching out to outsiders. Aren’t we all supposed to be God’s creation, and wasn’t Jesus supposed to teach us about salvation, redemption and forgiveness?
As religion has shrunk in participation in most of the west, it has become hugely susceptible to manipulation. My wife (now atheist, but grew up evangelical) often has to correct me when I make snide remarks about Christianity. Recently I made some comment about hypocrisy amongst Christians for supporting a multiply-divorced man who bragged about groping women for president (who has probably never read the bible), to say nothing of the people around him. She quickly snapped back at me that "they actually see themselves in him, have you not noticed all the sex scandals that happen in so many churches?" and then went on to list the "questionable" relationships in her own youth group. (I am NOT saying all Christians are like this, but religion is often used to cover up or excuse misdeeds).
It is not unique to Christianity or even Islam, though. You're seeing a lot of religion being used to justify many terrible things, including many smaller ones in Africa and Asia that have been used to justify atrocities and genocide.
> She quickly snapped back at me that "they actually see themselves in him, have you not noticed all the sex scandals that happen in so many churches?"
I think she is right for some of these people. It is a human reaction, but it is still a moral failing. The proper Christian (well, Catholic, anyway) thing to do would be what is expected in a confession: recognise one’s failings, express regret, and accept consequences, including punishment. Then comes redemption.
Something that irks me fundamentally with most Christian religions is how they believe that they are Good People because they accepted God and rejected Evil. It’s all good as long as you play the part. Once you start looking for excuses, you failed twice: first, because of your behaviour, and then for failing to repent. If you support someone because he made the same error you did, then you fail yet again. This behaviour is understandable, but trippy incorrect from a religious perspective and very hypocritical.
In the grand scheme of things, it is very easy to get forgiveness, you just have to be sincere in your regrets (again, for Catholics, which is what I know).
My (and my wife's) background is protestant. In this realm, there's no forgiveness unless you totally repent and accept the whole christian shebang. In extreme cases, it's not the the sin itself, but the rejection of god/jesus that's the worst you can do. Taken to the extreme, you see this manifested very strangely, like Chick tracts where the secular lifetime do-gooder burns in hell, but the terrible multiple murdering rapist gets into heaven because they repent "in time".
I know there are wonderful ministers, christians, and people of all religions. But I've come to the conclusion that if said minister/church/religion gets involved in politics, there's a greater chance than not that it's being run by manipulative power-hungry people. And those people want strict control, making mistakes (often the way people learn best) is not tolerated by them. It's in some ways gotten worse, because they're now treating other people's refusals to follow (gay marriage, no prayer in schools, etc) as direct attacks on them.
> My (and my wife's) background is protestant.
Sorry I misinterpreted. Protestant denominations are convenient for politics, because there are so many of them and hey have so different positions.
> In this realm, there's no forgiveness unless you totally repent and accept the whole christian shebang. In extreme cases, it's not the the sin itself, but the rejection of god/jesus that's the worst you can do.
That’s fertile ground for extremism and reinforces the group dynamics, for sure.
> Taken to the extreme, you see this manifested very strangely, like Chick tracts where the secular lifetime do-gooder burns in hell, but the terrible multiple murdering rapist gets into heaven because they repent "in time".
I think Pascal wrote something about this behaviour. I won’t chase the source but IIRC the conclusion was that these people were hypocrites using religion to be terrible people and I tend to agree. Personally I find also weird to believe that God is so easily fooled, but that’s just me.
> But I've come to the conclusion that if said minister/church/religion gets involved in politics, there's a greater chance than not that it's being run by manipulative power-hungry people.
Definitely. It is too effective as a tool for control and coercion. At least the Catholic Church mostly retreated from this. They do some lobbying but nobody is asking for a Catholic theocracy anywhere that I know of.
> It's in some ways gotten worse, because they're now treating other people's refusals to follow (gay marriage, no prayer in schools, etc) as direct attacks on them.
Yes. It is the end of enlightenment and the end of liberal democracies if enough people behave that way. These people are functionally similar to the imams who keep babbling about the shariah, it’s time we see them that way.
I guess it's good to correct an incorrect accusation of hypocrisy. But it's not great when doing so takes the form, "People aren't being hypocrites in not condemning someone in power for the bad things he does, because they do those bad things too".
> As religion has shrunk in participation in most of the west, it has become hugely susceptible to manipulation
That’s an interesting correlation. Do you have any ideas about the dynamics associated with it?
I do seem to remember experiencing my tradition as less manipulative when I was young, but have never been sure if that was me not seeing it. And if true, I’m not sure whether to attribute it to size, or the internet, or political influence, or something else.
Same here. Although I grew up a Catholic and am now an atheist, my father counselled me that there were few institutions in the world that look after the downtrodden. The Catholic church has often not done that, but under Francis moved more towards that goal than any other time in recent history.
> look after the downtrodden. The Catholic church
gifted all women indissoluble marriage, which was practiced by the Roman aristocracy as "confarreatio".
This was trashed as soon as possible, and the trashing was billed as great progress.
this is terribly inaccurate. they teach gainst using birth control even in poor, AIDS ridden regions (see Mother Theresa in Africa), treat women as lesser beings (including not recognizing that marital rape is a thing), cause the mistreatment of queer and homosexual and trans people, etc etc
Any Abrahamic religion that teaches otherwise isn't compatible with tradition or scripture period.
Also the condom thing is false. Keep up to date.
He felt like a throwback to me, in a good way. He reminded me of a time when Christians weren't so afraid of being subsumed by the secular progressive mainstream, when they could still see love and forgiveness as the core of their faith.
I'm not religious either, but was educated in a Jesuit school. He brought a well needed breath of fresh air to the church. He was a pope for our times. Let's see if the church will be able to make another strong selection to replace him.
A prevalent sentiment.
I'd researched popes' policies and statements toward the poor some years back, and he really had no peer going back centuries.
Partial exception in the late 1900s, under Leo XIII (1878--1903), in the encyclical Rerum novarum.
Rerum Novarum was the basis of catholic social teaching since, so...
But yes, one thing is statements another is actions, regarding the latter the Latin Church's actions have often not been in keeping with their lofty writings.
> .. even as an atheist
lots of christians didn't like him, considering he was too progressive
On the other hand, lots of christians liked him because he was progressive (more than his predecessor, anyway). Catholics are not all fundamentalists and in general don’t have much in common with the catholics bishops in the US, who are for the most part downright medieval.
Only American Protesting Catholics had issues with him. The same ones that post Deus Vult memes on Facebook.
Plenty(well, some) Catholics in Poland had an issue with him for the exact same reason - just way too progressive for them. Although I do think that American Catholics are particularly.....fervent in their beliefs.
Look up some numbers, his approval ratings outside of America were rapidly declining (at least in Latin America). [1] Interestingly the US is the one place where his approval ratings didn't decline over time, probably owing to the perfectly divided nature of contemporary politics. As he lost support from one side he gained it in equal proportions from the other. But in places like Argentina, his birth place no less, his approval rating dropped 27 points as he got increasingly involved in Progressive stuff.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/26/how-peopl...
I saw a map of countries he visited as the Pope and Argentina wasn't even there. Feels really strange.
One data point, but I live in a progressive country in western Europe, and I have close family members who are in the "right wing / trumpist / christians" movement (which does exist in Europe too), and obviously they really disliked this pope.
I think these are two sides of the same coin
i saw this only on the internet tho, and mainly the english speaking internet, never in real life.
This just isn't true. Anyone who hangs around people who follow the church happenings would know even if they were in support of his actions.
He is one of the few religious leaders who actually gave me a positive view of religion. He seemed like a really great human.
"An athiest doesn't believe in 2,000 gods, a Christian doesn't believe in 1,999 gods." -- Ricky Gervais
Ricky is smart, but not smart enough.
Maybe not, but dismissing this quote outright is to dismiss something fundamental to our psychology, and our history.
Pope Francis caused quite a bit of controversy among Catholics. From his crackdown on the TLM (Traditional Latin Mass) to his often unscripted, pastoral tone on issues like sexuality, economics, and interfaith dialogue, he unsettled many and yet drew others closer to the Church. With his passing, we’re left to process a papacy that disrupted in the deepest sense of the word.
As a Catholic, I often found myself both inspired and unsettled by him. His theology wasn’t always systematic, but it was deeply Ignatian, rooted in discernment, encounter, and movement toward the margins. Francis often chose gestures over definitions, and presence over proclamations. That doesn't always scale well in a Church that spans continents, cultures, and centuries.
His legacy will be debated. But I think what made him so compelling, especially to someone who lives in the modern world but tries to be formed by ancient faith is that he forced us to confront the tension between tradition and aggiornamento not as an abstract debate, but as something lived.
He reminded me that the Church isn’t a museum, nor is it a startup. It’s something stranger.. the best I can described it is a body that somehow survives by dying daily.
- Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.
A teacher of mine often reminds me that in many cultures—like Japanese and Native American traditions—the role of having an enemy is viewed with a certain respect. Enemies help define us. They challenge us, sharpen us, and push us to grow. Western culture tends to abhor the idea of having enemies, but sometimes, having them simply means you’ve stood for something meaningful—something worth noticing.
It seems Pope Francis had his share of critics—those who opposed his beliefs or feared his vision. And yet, he stood firm and made people think. In that sense, perhaps even his enemies affirmed the impact he was making.
"Enemy" may be the wrong word for this. To me, that implies wishing sth bad on the other party and aiming to hurt/damage/destroy it.
"Opponent"? "Antagonist"?
Not to sound like the oldest person in the room/thread, but the use of "opponent" as 'opps' has gained a lot of traction in the vernacular of Gen-z/alpha. Not so much as an outright enemy, and not so much as a 'hater'.
The word enemy, by definition and function, is spot on, because its presence triggers the primal instinct: Staying alive, no matter what.
Being in that mode opens a window to yourself no other state can open. You'll find what makes you tick, and what you are prepared to go through to make out alive in this situation.
You'll be tested in your might, intelligence and more importantly, ethical and moral limits.
The saying "You don't know how much violence it took for me to be this gentle." has roots in this perspective, so as my favorite quote from Murakami:
> And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
"Opponent" is the word that a lot of anime/manga uses (translates to) when someone is referring to someone. There is a lot respect, and sometimes gratitude, shown for someone that is a worthy opponent. The idea being, as is noted above, that the opponent is someone that helps one become better.
Rival.
Source: Anime and Pokemon games :)
Does the enemy have to be a person?
I think the problem with enemies is 1) vindictiveness and 2) ineffectiveness.
Everyone dislikes some actions and ideas, and thus dislikes people who express those actions and ideas. Every group has enemy groups, who they oppose and who oppose them, even if they're not explicitly named.
A problem is when people start opposing others who don't express the actions and ideas they oppose, because they resemble the people who do. Anger generalizes, sometimes to ethnic groups, sometimes to the entire world.
Another problem is when people attack others in ways that don't stop their actions or ideas. Violence doesn't seem to promote its ideas in the long term, and it can backfire. Jesus might be the greatest example of this.
The way to kill actions is through counter-actions, and the way to kill ideas is through counter-ideas. These counter-actions and counter-ideas can be ugly or violent, or they can be pretty or pacifist. But every action or idea opposes another action or idea, which could be considered an "enemy".
I agree that a foil can help foster introspection versus living in a bubble.
Interesting, it depends on your temper and philosophy. A respected enemy is worth having, but when it devolves into primitive antagonism, less so.
Western culture abhors the idea of enemies? What??? Western culture, more than any other embraces its enemies since the days of The Dying Gaul. Read a book.
Looking back on his papacy, I agree that we was very divisive in some aspects but also, being the pope has to be one of the hardest jobs on the planet, he's basically a world leader.
At the "world leader" level it's impossible to do a job in a way where everyone will think it's a good job, you're always going to piss off one group or another with practically any action in any direction.
IMO he took on one of the hardest tasks at the church which is "modernization". The way I look at it is the church is so old that it constantly needs modernization. But that comes at a steep cost as while you are attracting new parishioners, many of your older ones will scoff at the changes. And because of the church's age, this is something that must be done over and over and over again.
Younger Catholics apparently prefer the Latin Mass but no..
My favorite quote was when he talked about families in one of his many speeches.
"In families, there are difficulties. In families, we argue; in families, sometimes the plates fly...In families, there are difficulties, but these difficulties are overcome with love. Hate doesn’t overcome any difficulty."
People who aren't familiar with mainstream Catholicism might not understand that TLM is a pretty powerful cultural signifier; it's something close to a separatist movement within the church (in fact, it's the launch pad for an actual separatist movement, SSPX) and it's quite conservative. When you hear the pejorative "tradcath", these are the people they're talking about.
Naturally, the tiny but vocal minority of people who attended the TLM found Francis very activating. But it's important to know that those people are not broadly representative of the church as a whole. Most Catholics I know would barely offer a shrug if you told them (they certainly wouldn't already know) that Francis had restricted the TLM.
SSPX is in no way separatist, that is severely misinformed. If anything it is reformist, as they recognize the pope as their legitimate ruler and the local bishops as the legitimate local authorities. The claim is not that Rome has failed, it is that papal authority does not extend to the banishment of the Latin Mass, a position many regular clergy agree with.
Being both inspiring and unsettling to me says he did the job well. I will remember him as the smiling Pope.
Terry Pratchett's classic book "Small Gods" has a section that is perhaps inspired quite directly by the Church, comparing it to a type of shellfish: "Around the Godde there forms a Shelle of prayers and Ceremonies and Buildings and Priestes and Authority, until at Last the Godde Dies. Ande this maye notte be noticed."
I think Pope Francis was committed to trying to dig through some of the shell to get to the godly bits of the religion, and this is deeply laudable. It was frankly weird to see the opposition to some of his seemingly obviously Christian stances. He'd say something like "I guess I don't really approve of gay people marrying, but I think we should be focusing on all of these suffering and dying poor people?" and then a bunch of people would bitch about it.
Feel like I just read a eulogy.
Please stop talking in such general terms. No Catholics I know have been shaken by anything Pope Francis did. I have been educated in a Catholic school, which also served as a Catholic seminary, and I never heard Pope Francis say anything that was not in line with the catechism that we were taught back then.
Many Catholics I know were absolutely shaken by this Pope, and were absolutely not supporters of the man. They thought he was too liberal and too modern.
Christ welcomed the poor, prostitutes, lepers, and thieves into his fold. Many Catholics are like a lot of Evangelicals in that they're Christian in name only. Their political beliefs ARE their faith and their religious beliefs are just a convenient shield for their politics. They like to associate with the man, but have taken zero time to understand him. The only time Jesus was openly hostile in the entirety of the Bible was when there were people trying to make a profit in the Temple. Contrast that to people who will attend a megachurch but hate gay folks. Francis did not condone gay marriage. He simply said that if a gay couple comes to you for pastoral advice, that you love them and attempt to give them the help they need. But you'd think the dude was prancing around in rainbow underwear on camera with the way people reacted to his love and grace.
I think what many Catholics found frustrating about Pope Francis was his tendency to make apparently off-the-cuff remarks which, while never quite explicitly straying outside the bounds of faith and morals defined by the Magisterium, often seemed to strongly imply the opposite. This was especially true for audiences that did not already know the Catechism through and through, which even most Catholics do not. In that sense, Pope Francis's remarks sometimes seemed to possess a kind of not-committing-heresy-can't-get-mad character. This was exacerbated in turn by the media's selective quotation of statements that were, if quite reasonable in their entirety, not exactly robust to misinterpretation.
Although I personally wish Pope Francis had done certain things differently, God chose him for a reason. I will try reflect on that as I, along with the Church, pray for him.
> while never quite explicitly straying outside the bounds of faith and morals defined by the Magisterium, often seemed to strongly imply the opposite. This was especially true for audiences that did not already know the Catechism through and through, which even most Catholics do not. In that sense, Pope Francis's remarks sometimes seemed to possess a kind of not-committing-heresy-can't-get-mad character
He sounds like a good teacher, reminding people how much the faith encompasses outside of what they feel that it encompasses. People need prompting and guidance on the parts that feel uncomfortable, not the parts that dovetail neatly with their intuitions. If their reaction to his teaching is to trust their knee-jerk discomfort over the pope, despite not being able to formulate any concrete objections, just the feeling that it must be wrong in a sneaky way they can't put their finger on, then it seems like they have decided to let their own feelings be the highest authority.
> People need prompting and guidance on the parts that feel uncomfortable, not the parts that dovetail neatly with their intuitions.
I totally agree in general. But I wouldn't say that the issues with Francis's style amounted to knee-jerk discomfort without concrete objections. The concrete objection is that many of his comments had to be read in a kind of maximally un-Gricean way to be squared with Church teaching.
Francis's deployment of ambiguity in communication isn't something I'm making up-- it was a highly unusual and distinctive element of his papacy, most notably evidenced in his refusal to respond to (quite concrete) dubia over seemingly unorthodox comments for seven years.
But if there is a silver lining, I suppose there has been no other pope in recent years that has occasioned more clarification of the doctrine of papal infallibility, so there is that.
Pope St. Pius X put it in Pascendi: "It is one of the cleverest devices of the Modernists (as they are commonly and rightly called) to present their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement, in a scattered and disjointed manner, so as to make it appear as if their minds were in doubt or hesitation, whereas in reality they are quite fixed and steadfast."
Francis, like other Modernists, had the knack of saying heretical things in a way that the intended effect was obvious, but his defenders could say, "He never said that! And here's how you could interpret him in a completely consistent with Catholic teaching." Or they'd argue that he was speaking off-the-cuff and shouldn't be taken literally, or that he was misquoted by an atheist interviewer (to whom he kept giving interviews and never corrected the record). But everyone who wasn't in denial knew what he was doing.
I share some of your frustrations, and yet there is also a spiritual peril in failing to extend charity in the interpretation of these remarks, let alone in claiming to know that anyone who interpreted them differently is being willfully obtuse.
The greater the errors of the Franciscan papacy in your view, the more you owe the man your prayers.
Not to turn this political, but what are your views on trump?
That question very much does turn this political, and is not in the spirit of the thread. What is it that you'd really like to know?
Honestly, if you're going to be a member of a church and you fully believe that the dude is holding the seat of the founder of the faith, the least you could do is actually have enough of an attention span to fully hear him out. It isn't his fault that people decided to do what people do. He explained himself and people chose not to listen.
That's the problem with calling yourself X, without a clear non-subjective definition of X.
That sucks, because if you’re catholic and you _dont_ support the pope…you’re not really a catholic
It is possible to be a Catholic and not support the direction that the Pope is taking the church; in the same way it is possible to disagree with the direction that the local priest is taking the parish. It is possible to look at someone as the leader of an organization you are part of, and treat them with respect, while not agreeing with every choice they make.
You're correct. For many modern Catholics, it's about inertia. They've always been Catholic, but they want to do it their way. That's the entire purpose of the Catholic Church - to tell you exactly how to do church.
Is also why there are so many converts from Catholicism to New age sorts of Christian churches.
Catholics are not obliged to follow the pope in matters not related to faith and morals, and even then not when he speaks as a private person instead of in the voice of the Church (the same sex marriage interview as a prime example where he directly states it is his own private opinion). Though every catholic IS obliged to pray for the pope and defend his legitimacy and claim to power, which I suppose could constitute a degree of obligatory support
> No Catholics I know have been shaken by anything Pope Francis did.
I'm not convinced that every Catholic you know constitutes a representative sample of Catholics worldwide.
If you look at my other posts, I acknowledge this and I am only replying to posts who pretend to speak for the whole worldwide Church.
I guess you can consider yourself lucky that the Catholics you know get the big picture. There's a whole world of Catholics out there, and unfortunately, not all do.
It does make the news. This is something we should be aware of. Here's just one such story: https://apnews.com/article/vatican-pope-francis-samesex-bles..., not to mention the recent spats from VPOTUS.
According to the rules in the first post, I cannot talk about politics in this thread, but the summary is, the political inclinations that he displayed were "uncomfortable".
Said political inclinations were written in the Catechism before any of us knew who Pope Francis was.
You can, but is only encouraged if it helps make the topic more deep and interesting.
Last year, an interviewer asked Francis how he envisages hell. His response stayed with me: “It’s difficult to imagine it. What I would say is not a dogma of faith, but my personal thought: I like to think hell is empty; I hope it is.”
“I like to think Hell is empty” might be a hopeful statement, as in he hopes nobody ever actually goes to Hell but that everyone, no matter how evil, repents in their dying moments and accepts the path of truth.
I like to think hell is empty because the people who would have been sent there for being foul and wicked are actually people with no souls: they are just p-zombies wandering the world inflicting harm. Thus, when they die, there is no actual soul being released, their matter just ceases to function.
This could also explain why some simple creatures, with no real conscious experience, don’t overpopulate heaven or Hell: they have no souls with which to populate it with. They are just matter, temporarily constructed into some form resembling a living thing.
So hell is empty, and evil is the result of soulless automatons created by accident in our world. So if you die and nothing else happens for you after, then you were a p-zombie, with no soul.
Or that it is empty for eternity for each and all who are there. Endless solitude would be a hellish punishment.
That’s how I’ve read it firstly. Hard to imagine worse hell than this to me.
And then I realized the real meaning of the quote. Made me cry a little.
Same here, probably says a lot about us. Made me happy to finally understand what he actually mean.
It also made me realize what I truly value (community and people around) and made me a bit more hopeful about the future.
Nothing from the Bible indicates that hell is empty, so that is indeed an interesting response from the Pope.
The bible only has sparse and often contradictory references to hell - so it's very difficult to state "what the Bible says about hell" as if there's a unified picture laid out.
I've heard descriptions of hell of everything from the classic "fire and torture" we all know, to it being a total and complete detachment from god (in a disappointed and kicked out of the house by your parents kind of way). It's similar to descriptions of Satin. Everything from the horns and pitchfork all the way down to a "beautiful fallen angel" that he technically was explained to be in the bible.
I've always just assumed the descriptions that work to keep people fearful of leaving the religion as whatever is used at the time (saying this as somebody who is agnostic).
The modern concept of hell came from Dante's The Devine Comedy which was, ironically, a criticism of the contemporary church.
That's not exactly true. The main thing that is popularized by Dante is "demons are performing the punishment" (rather than being punished as in scripture ... but the general idea goes back to Gnosticism) ... and I guess "hell has circles" if we count those as significant.
"Hell is a place of fire and torment" is explicitly Biblical (Luke 16), even if there are also mentions of Hell without that (and some mentions of fire and torment without calling it "Hell").
Annihilationism vs Eternal Conscious Torment is the main point that isn't given a perfectly clear answer in scripture; there are verses that hint toward each.
Limbo and Purgatory are not in the Bible, but predate Dante. "Deal with the Devil" predates Dante and is only weakly founded in scripture. "Devils" (plural, as opposed to "the Devil") being distinct from "Demons" is a translation artifact, popularized by Dungeons & Dragons. There being various types of demons long precedes Dante. Variants of Universalism (including "Nobody goes to Hell" and "it's possible to escape Hell") are explicitly rejected in scripture.
Those are all the aspects of "modern concept of hell" that I can think of (let me know if you can think of more), and the connection to Dante seems pretty weak.
I highly recommend the youtube channel hochelaga. He's the one behind "biblically accurate" stuff
The concept and nature of an afterlife, divine justice and punishment, and the existence of "Hell" (which is mostly a Christian invention) has evolved over the millennia of text which make up Biblical canon.
It's always a mistake to assume the Bible has a singular, coherent, intentional narrative. Parts of it were written before the Israelites were even monotheists. It has as many Gods as it has authors.
Why would that be? There is a rich tradition of theology outside the Bible. Most popes are able to have a thought on a subject without quoting it.
its not biblical but its very catholic, its optimistic. I've heard it from other catholics, its just a hope that at the end of everyones life they accepted jesus and made it into heaven.
Yes - I think it caught my attention because it was such a mystery. It was a welcome thing to hear from one of the most powerful people in the world, but it came like a bolt from the blue. As far as I know, he never revisited the topic.
The Bible has very little to say about hell in general.
Catholicism isn't Protestantism. The idea that the Bible is the only source of truth is a Protestant idea and thus is very visible in the US. Catholicism, however, teaches that tradition and church teachings are sources of truth on par with the Bible. As such, for many teachings, especially those like Hell where the Bible is unclear, what it says isn't very relevant to Catholic doctine.
Gonna disagree with you there.
https://www.openbible.info/topics/hell
It's not that simple, because there are multiple concepts and Hebrew and Greek words that were translated as "hell". And many of those passages don't mention hell at all, but are just interpreted as such by readers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_in_Christianity
Modern academic scholarship paints a very complex picture: https://www.bartehrman.com/hell-in-the-bible/
I would argue that reading random quotes without context can be misleading. Unless of course you believe in a univocal, consistent and divinely inspired bible - which is a fairly extreme position to take.
> I would argue that reading random quotes without context can be misleading. Unless of course you believe in a univocal, consistent and divinely inspired bible - which is a fairly extreme position to take.
Those two statements don't follow. You can believe in a univocal, consistent and divinely inspired Bible and still think taking random quotes out of context is bad exegesis.
I see what you mean but I wasn't making a formal logical argument. Rather I meant something like "These particular quotes are more likely to be regarded as inherently meaningful on their own by someone who believes in a univocal, consistent and divinely inspired Bible"
Not my best-crafted piece of self-expression I will admit.
Most of what we know as hell comes from depictions by Dante and Milton. Things like fallen angel Lucifer, battles between heaven and hell, the apocalypse and rapture, etc. are noncanonical.
Did you read these? I think they actually go against what you argue. One of the passages about "hell" is John 3:16, which could not be less about hell if it tried (IMO). Also the passages that actually mention hell/hades are extremely sparse on details: it's separate from god, there will be fire and it will be unpleasant. Considering the length of the bible, I think this list shows that the bible has "very little" to say about hell in general.
Yes, the Bible is long, but it talks about many topics. The only thing that is mentioned a lot is Yahweh and Jesus. Beyond that you're not really gonna get a lot of consistency on topics.
This is a random Bible search website to show some verses about hell. I was not implying that all of these verses are definitive treatments of hell or anything similar.
However you will notice that what is said in these verses is generally not "hell is just emptiness". So even if very little is said about hell, to me the appropriate response to that is not "it doesn't say much so I'm just gonna believe whatever I want" (if you also claim the Bible is divinely inspired and the underpinning of your entire religion).
I guess if you wanted to argue that the fact that it doesn't say much should not be mistaken for being able to pick and choose your understanding, you should have said that before. Instead you contradicted "The Bible has very little to say about hell in general." - and linked that list of passages. I would say that ~10 passages there clearly describe "hell" and that, because the bible is a long book, that absolutely qualifies as it having "little to say" about hell.
> Beyond that you're not really gonna get a lot of consistency on topics.
This just seems like moving the goalposts to me. There's not a lot of consistency in talking about the "kingdom of heaven / god" but there are a LOT of passages that describe it. Many more than describe hell in any form. That doesn't mean that hell couldn't be a real thing but it's not a thing that's very present in the canonical text. Christian thought goes far beyond the contents of the traditional bible, but if you want to argue for a "paradise lost" hell or somesuch, you need to cast your lot with thinkers beyond the old and new testament authors.
That said, I don't think any of my sibling comments have responded with sources that ignore the biblical text. I think Ehrman is a bit liberal to stand in for all of christendom, but he's a respected scholar and I think his analysis is not in the category of "ignoring the text and inserting his own beliefs."
Nothing from the Bible indicates that hell exists in the way that Westerners perceive it.
It is impossible to reconcile the idea of an omnipotent god that is simultaneously good and permits people to be tortured for eternity.
Perhaps he chose the “god is good” over the “god, despite being able, will not prevent billions of reasonable and decent people from suffering eternally” fork in the road. You can’t logically choose both, and if you’re the pope, you probably had better have a belief in the goodness of god.
I've mentioned this before on HN but I find it interesting and valuable.
There is an older stream of christian thought on heaven and hell, still somewhat present in eastern christianity, that they are not separate places people are sent to.
In this view they are the same thing, simply the direct experience of the unattenuated light of god. A repentant person will experience this as mercy and all encompassing love, an unrepentant one will experience it as excruciating shame and terror. But they are both getting the same "treatment" so to speak.
People often think of hell as an active punishment form God, but for us humans it's not.
Hell, whatever it is, is where people end up when they'd rather be there than be with Christ.
God will never force you to love Him and accept Him. He gives you the choice, the rest is up to you.
This claim directly contradicts the teachings of the catholic faith.
Whatever your beliefs are, they aren’t catholicism.
I am not a Catholic.
I am not sure which label I should use for myself besides Christian as in 'follower of Christ', who tries to follow the Bible as accurately as possible, believing it to be the direct and absolute message from God.
Which indeed makes me incompatible with Catholicism.
Unless you live(d) in a time and place where Christian teachings were unavailable to you. Which accounts for a large majority of the humans who have ever lived.
Which is a problem for some Protestants who insist that only Christians can be saved... but not necessarily for Catholics. The belief that only Christians can be saved has actually been condemned by the Catholic Church as a heresy (Feeneyism, after the 20th century American priest, Leonard Feeney, who most famously espoused it)
According to Catholic teaching, non-Christians can be saved if (1) they are "invincibly ignorant" (i.e. their ignorance of the truth of Christianity is not their own fault), and (2) they have an "implicit desire" for the Christian God
Ah yes, "He/Him" - the original neo-pronoun if you will
A much more hopeful version than “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here”!
LOL Ill say! Far more positive
Interesting.
Is this a way of saying I don’t believe there is a place like hell?
The "threat" is there, but the hope is that everybody finds the "right" path at the very end.
I am a (non-catholic) Christian and I loved Pope Francis, for all the hate he won from traditionalists. He really seemed Christ-like, in his deep concern for the marginalized and poor. He never ceased to emphasize Jesus' saving power and good news. May he rest in peace and may he be with our Lord.
Also not a Roman Catholic, but there were some good things about Pope Francis that I could appreciate, particularly his very Augustinian take on reason and the restlessness of the heart found in his lecture from the launch of the Spanish edition of Msgr. Luigi Giussani's book "The Religious Sense."
A written version of Bergoglio's talk is published in chapter 7 of "Generative Thought: An Introduction to the Works of Luigi Giussani" by Elisa Buzzi, 2003
https://isidore.co/misc/Res%20pro%20Deo/Giussani's%20errors/...
Yes, thank you for sharing a link to the PDF. I see you are familiar with the literature. Yesterday I posted a couple of screencaps pointing to this: https://x.com/wyclif/status/1914276336690139440
God bless him. Religion aside, his encyclicas covering more earthly subjects (Fratelli Tuti, Laudato Si) are really worth to be read. Download and read them as PDF in the language of your choice, no matter what your religious views are.
Fratelli tutti : https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/docu...
Laudato si : https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/docu...
I wonder whether we will have another Jesuit Pope. Jesuits are supposed to be generally very education focused, more progressive (especially w.r.t science) and stand less on ceremony. I know nothing about how the College of Cardinals work, but if they're anything like other political voting bodies, one of two outcomes are possible: a swing to the Right (and toward tradition), recognizing the current balance of power in the world, or a swing even further Left of Francis, again recognizing the current trend but as a counterweight.
> especially w.r.t science
I would like to know more. My impression is that most Christian institutions have long ago disentangled from scientific debate - providing interpretative value rather than alternative science. This is part of a larger trend to focus their scope and mission in modern life. Have the last few popes made comments on scientific issues?
(The exception is evangelical Americans.)
I was always taught that relativity, evolution, an old universe and even a not too literal interpretation of the bible (some caveats to that last one) are perfectly compatible with Catholicism. My dad was taught by Jesuits and I was taught at a former convent school. The Vatican has an observatory and the pontifical academy of sciences is far from an "answers in genesis" type organisation.
Catholics don’t generally adopt the anti-science stuff. Their dogma around life has some walls around some areas of medicine.
I know several priests who are scientists or teachers/professors.
Evangelicals have a simpler dogma where the individual minister or church has more sway (hence the joke about the man on a desert island with a hut, a church, and a church he doesn’t go to). It’s a more populist form of worship, which has ups and downs.
I went to a Jesuit university. The way it was explained to me could be simplified to: God wouldn't lie to us, God made nature, so then scientific discoveries therefore teach us more about nature and God. When a new discovery threatens old teachings, the Jesuits convene and figure out how to incorporate this new understanding into their beliefs, strengthening them rather than threatening.
I found it inspiring. I'm genuinely sad about the Pope's passing. He was a man who followed the teachings as he understood them.
Not sure if this is accurate. I was once a member of an astronomy club and its patron was a Catholic priest who was very much into the subject. And he wasn't even a Jesuit.
the pontifical academy of science has.
https://www.pas.va/en.html
Thanks. That looks like a way for Catholics to support and endorse scientific research rather than a develop alternative science.
Indeed, that is exactly what it is. Mainstream catholics don’t really have a problem with science in general, but with moral consequences of some application of science. Broadly speaking, they are not saying that science is fake, more that there are some things we should not do.
A conversation with a Jesuit for example can be enlightening because they have intellectual and moral arguments, it’s not just castles built on the shifting foundations of a Bible verse.
This leads to different approaches compared to a lot of American Protestants. They don’t seek to undermine science.
Ironically, Catholicism as an institution has a better track record of supporting science than many Protestant sects. Much of the "alternative science" comes from the Baptists and Evangelicals.
Why is this ironic?
It's ironic because no matter how much science they embrace, they never come around to realizing their God is just as much make believe as every other.
This position has nothing to do with science.
Science doesn’t say we are the only intelligent forms in the universe. Science doesn’t say intelligent max’s out with humans. Science doesn’t describe concepts outside of time and space.
oh. thanks for clarifying. I'd thought the irony lies in some image of being anti-scientific.
the fun thing, ironic itself, about dismissing religion in it's entirety is that most religions have long understood that G'd can't be proven, measured, captured with experiments. the irony in this is that while you can't prove G'd you can't disprove G'd either, so the lack of proof is no proof of a lack of "The Force". quantum physics did not not exist just because the was no proof for it.
one interesting train of thought in this regard was the conclusion of a book on the neurobiology of meditation, (the title escapes me right now): what if the only "instrument" to measure religious experience is the brain? we can measure effects of systematic religious practice on the brain, like meditation aka contemplative prayer. we can identify some aspects of states that humans describe as religious experience, in the brain, as they happen. why would we dismiss those as mere "brain formations"? while we accept equally measurable effects of sound or light on the brain as "real"?
it's non-trivial...
The Jesuits do indeed have a long tradition of research on the basis of a belief that understanding how the universe works gives a greater understanding of God's creation.
As such, they've traditionally been more open, and a disproportionately high proportion of Jesuits have been scientists. At one point about 1/3 of all members of the Jesuit order were scientists.
"The pope's astronomer"[1] is a jesuit, and the Jesuits have a long tradition in astronomy, with the result of numerous lunar craters (e.g. McNally) and several asteroids named after Jesuits. More than once, Jesuits have also tangled with the question of extraterrestial life, e.g.[2a] - a question fraught by the question it would raise about what it would mean for belief [2b].
Wikipedia also has a long list of Catholic clergy scientists[3]. When reading it, it's worth considering that if anything they had more influence as teachers (e.g. Descartes, Mersenne were both educated at Jesuit colleges), and that the order ranged from low thousands to a few tens of thousands during the centuries the list covers.
With respect to the last few popes, the most notable recent intervention is Pope Francis making clear that he saw the theories of evolution and the Big Bang as real[4]. But already in 1950, even the deeply conservative Pope Pius XII, while expressing hope that evolution would prove to be a passing fad, made clear that catholic doctrine officially did not conflict with evolution. John Paul II formally acquitted Galileo, and stated that "truth cannot contradict truth", when talking about evolution vs. catholic doctrine. [5]
[1] https://www.deseret.com/faith/2024/07/27/vatican-observatory...
[2a] https://aleteia.org/2020/08/28/jesuit-astronomer-calls-extra...
[2b] https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/men-black-belief-aliens-no...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scient...
[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pope-francis...
[5] http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/vatican...
Francis spent the last couple of years creating new cardinals to stack the College in what - he hoped - was a more progressive direction.
But the College has a mind of its own, and there is going to be some furious horse trading happening behind the scenes to steer the result in one direction or the other.
Newton never realized exactly how insightful his 3rd law of motion truly was.
> Francis spent the last couple of years creating new cardinals to stack the College in what - he hoped - was a more progressive direction.
I don't think that was necessarily what he was doing.
He tried to rebalance it to include a lot more cardinals from the developing world–who on average tend to be more conservative, at least on some issues. He arguably avoided the more outspoken conservatives, but he would have caught up a lot of quieter conservatives in the process.
Whereas, if he just wanted to stack it with progressives, he would have focused on adding cardinals from the developed world, where Catholic progressivism is arguably the strongest.
Fully agree. It's going to get interesting - by numbers, the Church is shrinking in its core lands of Europe, and it's growing in Africa, South America and Asia, but that isn't even closely reflected in political realities and the amount and importance of cardinals.
I'll admit that I am curious about if we'll ever see a conservative African pope.
this italian (venetian) reggae band has been predicting it since 97, this song regains minor popularity in italy every time there is a new pope election
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh0O2Ah-qO4
I see a lot of people in my news circle hoping for Robert Sarah, who seems to be exactly that.
There is almost no hope of an African pope being chosen. They are all too conservative. You can read that conspiritorially or take it as the recognized imprudence of fomenting European schism.
But he was also an odd Jesuit wasn't he?
Starting from his chosen name, since Franciscans and Jesuits have not been very close historically (although the founder of the latter was inspired by St. Francis).
From what I read, it's exactly as you say: people expect either a reaction swing to conservativism or a a big swing towards modernity. Pope Francis was old and could not do much, but he tried to set a path for the latter, afaiu.
Given how changes of power tend to swing nowadays, I am afraid I guessed it right (pun not intentional)
the film Conclave did a very good job at showing the politics and conflicts within the catholic church
I think that is merely skin deep - Catholicism provided an interesting setting or scenery for a story, rather than being the subject.
i think that is intendeded; it's not a movie about catholicism but about politics and human nature. What I meant is that it shows the internal workings of the papal election and the conflicts within the catholic church that may be unknown to laypeople.
On second thought I think you’re right. The layperson can become more aware of religious politics, because there is so little exposure.
I hope the next step is for people to understand that religious problems are actually people problems. And similar themes and tendencies appear in modern secular contexts.
It always seems weird and ignorant for people to be labeling Catholic bishops as “left-wing” or “right-wing” or “liberal/progressive” or “conservative”.
Those are all political terms for politicians and their platforms or parties. They do not translate to Catholic doctrines or teachings. Y’all are simply parroting what the lamestream media wants to impose, a political veneer on non-politicians who are shepherds, pastors, teachers.
While "progressive", "conservative", etc. are commonly used as political labels, they are general terms that describe how a person wants to see the world work. All people, regardless of their job or function, can have these sorts of terms ascribed to them.
And the Catholic Church exists on the world stage, and is involved in politics. Its leadership can be and is political.
There very much is such a thing as a "progressive" and "conservative" wing in Catholicism, and the Vatican is well known to be very much a viper's nest. It's naive to imply that all those clergymen are simply "shepherds, pastors, teachers".
"Our left-right political paradigm does not map neatly onto ancient institutions." -- Michael Knowles
https://youtu.be/y0v0xQdiY7U
> Y’all are simply parroting what the lamestream media wants to impose, a political veneer on non-politicians who are shepherds, pastors, teachers.
Bishops and Cardinals are very much political animals.
https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/study-liberal-us-priests-fa...
This is a Catholic media group. It uses the words as above. Think Karl Rahner or Yves Congar.
Catholic bishops and clergy like to meddle in politics.
In the US, reactionaries are dumping lots on money on the church, and many bishops have embraced right wing politics, stupidly aligning with evangelicals who deeply despise Catholicism in the process.
Some of the moves made are comically dumb. The archbishop of New York decided to make a big show about denying communion to the notoriously vindictive former governor of the state. That governor subsequently changed the look back period for civil sex abuse lawsuits, which has bankrupted or is in the process of bankrupting dioceses as they are forced to own up to their failures to protect children.
RIP.
His speech yesterday (he dictated it I guess) was very very political, not on the usual level, felt like a finally "all out" for me.
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/urbi/do...
Thank you for sharing a text that I would not have seen/read otherwise.
The salient parts that support your view:
---
---> I express my closeness to the sufferings of Christians in Palestine and Israel, and to all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people. The growing climate of anti-Semitism throughout the world is worrisome. Yet at the same time, I think of the people of Gaza, and its Christian community in particular, where the terrible conflict continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation. I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace!
Tangentially related: why do so many people call for a ceasefire, when a ceasefire is generally temporary. It wouldn't resolve any of the underlying reasons for the war. He should be calling for surrender.
Who should surrender, though? At this point in time, if Hamas were to surrender, the Israeli occupation of Gaza would just get worse. That wouldn't be peace, or justice, for people of Gaza. I certainly don't support what Hamas has done, but Israeli rule will probably be pretty brutal for Palestinians.
Israel hasn't occupied Gaza for 20 years.
Well yes, but that's because once Israel occupies it, it isn't Gaza anymore. Now it's a "Security Zone." Something like half of Gaza is "Security Zone" now: https://www.npr.org/2025/04/14/g-s1-59633/gaza-buffer-zone-i...
Gaza (run by Hamas, supports Hamas, but not Hamas) should surrender.
Peace and justice for Gaza requires Gaza to surrender, just as peace and justice for Germany required Germany to surrender. When you start conflict you do not get any sympathy when it negatively affects you once you start losing.
I don't care how brutal it is for Gazans and nor should you. They are the aggressors. They are the brutal ones. They fire rockets. They have broken every ceasefire for decades.
For which side?
> Nor is peace possible without true disarmament! The requirement that every people provide for its own defence must not turn into a race to rearmament.
The sentiment sounds great but I think we now see in the real world with Ukraine that if you rely [too much] on others (re: US), you have a real problem if they are no longer there for you. Peace through strength is real.
Yes because some even went against was he previously said.
But Love him or Hate him. Rest in peace.
Thanks for posting this.
>> Love has triumphed over hatred, light over darkness and truth over falsehood.
This is interesting since I thought he was displeased about recent world events (e.g. Trump's election, shift towards deglobalization, ...).
that fragment references Easter theology. at a fundamental level love is stronger than everything, including the unsurpassable frontier, death. nothing could kill Jesus, not slander, not hatred, not envy, not even the cross.
and btw, in that little collection of booklets we call the Bible, the story doesn't end all flowery and pink either. Jerusalem and the temple are destroyed, early disciples are martyred in troves and everybody is aware the story of that Jesus guy and Mary and Mary Magdalene and Junia and all the others just has begun.
and it's clear it has to be written by us...
so regarding the recent world events yes PP Francis was heavily displeased (he talks about several of them in the very text we respond to here) but the Jesus thing gives us confidence and hope and justification to actively do something about it and to nudge the world into being a better place, for all of us.
that's how I think PP Francis meant what he said. and it's definitively how I see it.
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
— Gandalf
It's Easter :)
I don't know. Maybe I'm reading too much into it but it sounded like he was referring to something broader, especially given the explicit political references he made later.
... He's referring to "Christ is risen". That's way more broad (conceptually) and very in-character for the Pope, compared to some transient current events.
Francis stood for values over positions and ranks, which was a real revolution.
I sincerely hope the new pope will be as human, humble and pushing for renewal as Francis.
I think that after such a pope, people won't be satisfied with just another symbolic figure with empty gestures, hard conservative views and no real substance.
Are you pointing to another pope with "another symbolic figure with empty gestures"? Would be clearer to name him then! Having read a bit of the previous pope Benedict XVI I liked a lot what he did/wrote
what about Benedict did you like?
If only one thing it's his series of books Jesus of Nazareth: the only theology book I've ever read, it clarified so much about the Scriptures, and was written from the point of view of a world-class scholar, much more scientific than I would have thought, taking into account the views of other scholars, Jew, Protestant or atheists alike, as long as they had interesting ideas.
That was a likable pope, non-christians and even non religious people tend to like the guy. I also enjoyed the memes about his lookalike in Game of Thrones. Rest in peace.
RIP. He was a likable guy with the heart in the right place, always struck me as deeply humble.
The world would be better off if many a leader these days, religious or otherwise, would be a bit more like him.
Though I’m neither Catholic nor especially religious, you don’t have to be devout to recognize that Pope Francis has been a powerful force for good. From his warm outreach to refugees and the homeless to his landmark environmental encyclical Laudato Si’, he has consistently championed the poor, fostered interfaith dialogue and empathy.
> Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, April 21, 2025, at the age of 88 at his residence in the Vatican's Casa Santa Marta.
> Pope Francis has died at the age of 88, the Vatican has announced. - Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected to lead the Catholic Church in March 2013 after Pope Benedict XVI stood down.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/crknlnzlrzdt
We live in cynical times, i hope his passing reminds people that narratives and morals matter
From his statement yesterday:
> May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions. In the face of the cruelty of conflicts that involve defenceless civilians and attack schools, hospitals and humanitarian workers, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that it is not targets that are struck, but persons, each possessed of a soul and human dignity.
Yes. I agree with you and hope so too.
"Think of those souls!" reads to me cynically close to "don't think of those who ordered and executed those strikes". Almost like a deliberate distraction. When you turn forgiveness into a carte blanche for serial sin, you're doing Christianity wrong.
I interpret it very differently from you. Modern warfare is directing drones at 'targets' based on 'intelligence' with little regard for the collateral damage. We see it daily in the news in various conflicts: children killed in strikes with the excuse being that bad guys were also in the vicinity - zero regard for the innocents. It' a reminder that just because you don't have to see the destruction you cause (thanks to modern technology) innocents are still being killed by your actions and you shouldn't forget that (and maybe should reconsider your actions).
I've always interpreted the line of message you refer to as an intent to reach the hearts of those responsible for commanding the violence, including those who assign responsibility to them. And if it did reach, and ellicited the intended emotion, then such violence would simply stop.
(FWIW I'm atheist, always been.)
I think it’s more, he’s speaking to those who order and execute such strikes.
I do agree that narratives and morals matter. That said is hard for me to reconcile this statement with the late pope's stance on the Ukraine war. His narrative about this was that it is a regrettable conflict between brother nations and that the sides should somehow resolve their disagreement. He didn't once admit that Russia is the aggressor and is one sidedly pushing for war, not to speak about condemning the aggressor.
I understand that a leader of an organization that acts on historic time scale might be reluctant to take sides in contemporary conflicts. Nevertheless always washing your hands in every conflict is not morality, it is cowardice. It enables evil and is in direct conflict with "narratives and morals matter".
Pope Francis was truly inimitable. A Pope to remember, and one of a kind.
How to describe such a unique pontiff? Coming from "the end of the world," as he said, he truly represented a peculiar voice.
He stands alone as the greatest international symbol of our age, an embodiment of its most salient characteristics. A man whose presence will remain indelible in our minds, and who really made his presence known in the Church.
His fierce defense of his ideas, no matter what, marked the Church of our time forever. Catholics will never forget him. Traditional Catholics, in particular, will always vividly remember his legacy.
May he rest in peace.
source: https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2025/04/francis-pope-who-w...
RIP. I think history will find Pope Francis to be a man who was a fairly average pope that constantly got taken out of context. Nothing he did was really far out of line with Catholic doctrine, but he was often portrayed as being more liberal than he really was.
That's really much more of a comment about who controls media narratives these days and how to get your message out undiluted directly to the intended audience, and not anything specific to Pope Francis.
Surprised noone here has mentioned yet that Pope Francis was only the second pope ever with a social-media strategy (Pope Benedict was the first, in 2012 [0][1], and didn't get as much traction as Pope Francis).
"The Most Followed World Leaders on Social Media 2022" [2] ranked Pope Francis 3rd in 2022 with 53m followers, which is/was still low compared to singers, sports stars, celebrities and tech figures. It would obviously be crass and reductive to try to estimate the Pope's impact this way (and not, say, country visits, appointments, encyclicals, other official statements, reaction/criticism by other religous/political figures, administrative and legal actions, measures of popularity by specific groups, by factions, by country, by politics or religion), but as traditional media channels become less relevant, the Vatican will presumably have to move with the times, as in many other ways.
Maybe the better question (as Dick Cheney would have put it) is which voices do/don't determine the media narrative on Pope Francis' papacy?
As to your take (that he was wasn't that far out of line with Catholic doctrine, but often portrayed as more liberal and constantly taken out of context), that's the debate we're largely about to see happen.
[0]: "Pope Joins Twitter: Benedict XVI's Screenname Will Be @Pontifex" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4897631
[1]: https://x.com/Pontifex
[2]: https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/the-most-followed-world...
> Nothing he did was really far out of line with Catholic doctrine
Maybe he was merely good at pointing out the obvious, maybe it's what the church needed/needs?
Yeah, I can see that. Having a pope that's denounced by more conservative Catholics for truly believing in Catholic ethics shone a light on how far people were straying from the church. Really makes the pope look a bit like a Christ figure, when you think of it like that.
I was sad to hear about this this morning. Pope Francis has been a lot more about "love they neighbor" than many of his predecessors, and I think that's been beneficial to the Catholic Church and the world as a whole (insofar as the Catholic Church has a fairly wide influence). I've appreciated his (sometimes controversial) stance in a lot of cases that boils down to "you don't follow Catholic teachings, but we should still treat you with love".
Pope Francis has done much to transform the Catholic church into a more progressive and inclusive institution. If not for his papacy, it was somewhat likely that the church would drift too far from Millennial values to keep its former relevance.
Hopefully, the next pope will also champion unity, inclusivity, and peace, and oppose religious dogmatism. This will define the future of Christianity. Many challenges remain for the institution.
There's been much talk of the Church finally electing a black Pope from sub-Saharan Africa. The irony is that, if they are inclusive enough to do so, the selected Pope will almost certainly be more hard-line and doctrinaire than any of his recent predecessors on issues like homosexuality. Here's one of the contenders:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sarah
Of the current widely accepted papabili, Peter Turkson is from Sub-Saharan Africa. He is softly pro-LGBT, and he seeks to harmonize the progressive homosexuality views with traditional African culture[0]. I don't think Robert Sarah is considered papabile, possibly owing to his message of hate for homosexuality. Overall, it's inconsistent with the recent message of the church, and it is hard to imagine that progressive Catholics would accept it.
Here's a Reuters list for possible Francis successors: https://www.reuters.com/world/who-might-succeed-pope-francis.... Usually, Reuters does thorough due diligence before releasing something. So I'd expect their predictions are accurate.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turkson
Interesting that they identify mostly progressives as papabile. If they're right, Francis did an excellent job behind the scenes to set up the Church to do in the future what he could not in the present.
He's negatively affected church growth and that's stark.
How so?
People who want to join the church prefer Latin Mass which he's opposed to.
His proclamation on blessing LGBT people caused a rift with the Church in Africa (remember why we have Anglicans as part of the Catholic Church?) threatening an area that's seeing church growth.
He's also had his mouth closed about the killings of Catholics in Africa and Asia by extremists.
The Latin ship sailed 6 decades ago... There's no going back without pissing off everyone else, assuming it's indeed true new members would prefer Latin - if you have a source about that, I'd be really interested in reading it.
There's no reconciliation between living in sin and in Christ, period.
Anything outside that, regardless of how progressive it seems, is inconsistent with church teachings.
RIP to the coolest pope.
May we live his consistent reminder of refraining from hurting and hating each other regardless of country, race, religion, politics, etc.
With most figureheads there will be words or actions with which you disagree. But his rejection of the 'riches' that came with the job, especially in the early days will hopefully outlast him.
He wasn’t an intellectual giant like his predecessor and I disagreed with some of his positions, but at the end of the day I do think that he was a good man. May he rest in peace.
A man has died, that is sad.
Under his watch he did not move the church to fully acknowledge or deal with the historical and widespread abuses the organization he led was involved with. He had opportunity to be the leader to bring the organization around and he did not. Let's all hope his replacement will.
I don’t think anyone who would be ready to completely do a 180 with the Catholic Church will be the pope soon (or ever, given how the system works). He has, however, nudged that ship in the right direction and with what he has done and with his appointees. Let’s just hope it continues with whoever replaces him.
Not only that, but he actively made it worse by protecting abusers. McCarrick, Rupnik, Zanchetta, and many more. It really makes me sick to see so many people speaking well of Pope Francis. He is an enabler and a vindictive hypocrite.
He is restricted by the system around him, with the internal Vatican politics and overall views of members of the Catholic Church being very relevant here. His replacement may be more conservative as a reaction to the decline of Church membership, or may not be, but I don't think he can be faulted personally for not attempting to set the wrongs of the church right, he clearly wanted to do so.
No he isn't. The pope is the absolute king of any matter Vatican related and can charge his priests however he wants
He didn’t make things worse and he, in his heart and in his words, kept the spirit of Jesus’ teachings and not the dogma of power and patriarchy.
May the next pope feel emboldened to further this as the church itself becomes less of a lumbering monster.
I can imagine that for people of faith there is a lot to be read into the time of death.
For the superstitious perhaps, but not for those that have the virtue of religion!
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14339a.htm
The last three popes have all died during the Octave of Easter or Christmas.
One of the last three popes is not yet dead ;-)
Several ways.
He was undoubtedly one of the most catholic [1] of the Catholic popes. RIP.
1. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/catholic (definition 1)
In my early 20s I was part of secular and socialist Jewish research centre. Franciskus was just voted as the new pope, and my first assignment was to write an opinion paper about him, and forecast his future actions. I don't think anyone, including myself, expected that I'll end up with a positive report — religion was almost always a negative thing, and Catholic Christianity even more so. However, I concluded that his action seem to show that he cares more for people rather than for specific rules or biblical quotes. That he is flexible and open to changing things. In retrospect, I think the whole world benefited from his openness. I wish we could say that about other influential religious leaders.
RIP, i hope it was peaceful. he was such a good leader and force within the church.
I guess we're just waiting for Peter the Roman now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophecy_of_the_Popes
I will never forget his sympathy for the motives of the terrorists who massacred staff at Charlie Hebdo:
“If my good friend Dr Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch,” Francis said while pretending to throw a punch in his direction.
He added: “It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”[0]
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/charlie-hebd...
> You cannot insult the faith of others
Why not? The concept of proportionality between an “offense” and a response that characterizes the liberal worldview was entirely missing here. If one chooses to take offense about some deeply held personal view, whatever it is, then fine; but let your response be proportional.
The music of Beethoven is sacred to me, let’s say, but I’m not prepared to murder you if you mock it, or miss a note in performance.
The pope’s threat of physical intervention himself seems at odds with the teachings of his own faith, too, as I understand them. Turn the other cheek, and all. But that would be for adherents to say for sure.
I think there's an implied "and not expect a response" there.
If you insult unhinged people (and people who kill over a mere 'offense' to their religion are unhinged), don't be surprised when you receive an unhinged response back.
So we should all be chilled and silent, because there are unhinged people who might retaliate far out of proportion to anything we might do or say? That's no way to live.
I didn’t hear from him any call-to-arms to defend Christianity from those who keep making fun of it left and right. Be it other religious faiths or quasi-religious political movements. His actions seemed the opposite tbh.
Literally.
As Christians are being massacred in Africa at the hands of muslims, as Christianity is besieged, all he did was simp for one group in specific and scold everyone else.
Even scolded Greece for not wanting to share the same fate as some Western European countries.
> The pope’s threat of physical intervention himself seems at odds with the teachings of his own faith, too, as I understand them. Turn the other cheek, and all.
The quote in question talks about your cheek, not your mother's or anyone else's. In many circumstances, you're not as free to forego the defense of others as you are your own.
Punching someone who insulted your mother is escalation. Not defense.
Edit, see https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/buzz-aldrin-punched-conspi...
That being said, as an American, the culture of mocking and gracefully learning from being mocked runs deep in my blood. I don't know if others share that same worldview.
> Remember, a judge let Neil Armstrong off for punching a moon landing denier in the face due to persistent taunting.
That didn’t happen. The person you mean was Buzz Aldrin and it looks like there weren’t even charges filed, and there was no judge involved.
> That being said, as an American, the culture of mocking and gracefully learning from being mocked runs deep in my blood. I don't know if others share that same worldview.
This is quickly getting forgotten.
> as an American [...] I don't know if others share that same worldview.
I'm far from American, but have the same "blood", but I think it has nothing to do with being American/Swedish/Spanish/whatever, some people have different personalities, upbringings and strengths/weaknesses simply.
Americans aren't "tougher-skinned" by default or anything, at least I didn't get that experience from interacting with Americans.
That was Buzz Aldrin
I believe that in the incident you referring to, it was Buzz Aldrin who did the punching. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/buzz-aldrin-punched-conspi...
I'm not a Christian, but one of the main questions I have, reading this, is whether Francis would have had the same reaction if Catholics had been the ones doing the massacring after their faith was insulted. Something tells me that he wouldn't, and I think that's the most troubling part.
Hit the nail on the head.
This checks out - he worked as a bouncer at a nightclub to put himself through seminary.
That’s reprehensible, but also refreshingly open-minded. It shows an awareness that other religions deserve an equal footing to his own. I prefer this over the nuts who decry Sharia law while wanting to implement a Christian equivalent.
Any Christian fundamentalist who advocates for its religion to become law is a bad Christian who never understood the lesson behind "Render unto Caesar...".
Now, contrast with Islamic teachings. Not every Muslim will advocate for Sharia, but there is a non-negligible part of them (leadership included) who think that not advocating for Sharia is a sin.
What’s the contrast? In both cases, there are good people who understand that their religion restricts them, not others, and there are bad people who think the government should enforce their religion.
What part of Islam actively promotes separation of church and state?
What country with a majority Islamic population is currently going through a secularization process?
What part of Christianity actively promotes it? There’s that one line, which meaning is debated, in a book full of stories about religious governments.
In any case, I only care about the practicalities. In terms of what they try to achieve, there’s no real difference between the Christian and Muslim dominionists.
> There’s that one line.
And centuries of liberal democracies where the church was just one institution that had no direct rule over its subjects?
The word "direct" is carrying an awful lot of weight in that sentence. The Catholic Church (as well as the Protestant and others) are very responsible for, or at least implicated in, many horrible things in the last few hundred years alone: - signed off on the slave trade for hundreds of years (even gave excuses about how that was God's will) - during World War II they promised to hide many Jewish children, only to subsequently steal them from their parents arguing that "they are now Christian, it would be a sin to give them to Jews" - the inquisitions - were the justification for so many wars (conversion by the sword) - have long been a tool of repressive governments, arguing that it fell under "obey your father" - in the U.S. many churches, including the Catholic Church have preached that voting for one party (Democrats) is a sin (often about abortion, but other topics have been raised)
In general, the Church's political power has waned over the last 500 years or so, but there are an awful lot of calls from Republicans saying that this is where we have gone wrong.
One only look to the political donations of Opes Dei (Catholic branch dedicated to getting Cristian influence over the "Lay" sphere) to see them as major power players today. The Heritage Foundation (main writers of Project 2025) are intimately bound with the organization. And Chief Justice Roberts is also associated.
So they may not be "direct" rulers, they are major power players.
As opposed to Islamic slave trade still existing in 2025? And I'm not talking about modern day slavery.
> So they may not be "direct" rulers, they are major power players.
So are all the other countless media companies, tech corporations, Hollywood, labor unions, pharma companies, academia...
From this list, which one do you think is more intertwined with Government affairs? The Catholic Church or Amazon? The Mormons or Blueshield? Seventh Day Adventists or Disney? The Baptists or General Motors? The Anglicans or FOX News?
Catholics and SDAs don't have a whole lot of political influence here, but evangelicals are basically running the place now.
Even those "running the place" are doing it within the democratic system established and managed by the State. You can try to twist as hard you can, but to think that the US has become some form of Theocracy is absurd.
I am not going to argue that the democratic institutions are not under attack, but I am arguing that there is no key religious figure remotely close to take power and become the head of State, at any level whatsoever.
if you are the one controlling the head of State you don’t have to actually be the head of State
So, let's get back to question I posted before: which of the religious leaders have more control over the head of State than any of Big Tech CEOs? Which congregation in Florida has as much political pull (regardless of direction) as Disney?
Actually fairly simple.
Killing someone for insulting Christianity => goes against Christian theology.
Killing someone for insulting islam/moe => completely in line with Islam.
Did not expect to read on HN that thinking it is good to kill people for a caricature is "refreshingly open-minded"
Do I need to put “that’s reprehensible” in bigger letters or something?
No you just need to stop there (or better find more drastic tone, but ok) and not make it sound ok, heck be a good thing afterwards.
Dude was leader of a massive organization that claims to be a divine instrument and the only path to salvation. Acknowledging another religion as anything other than heresy is a step up.
So if the terrorist of charlie hebdo would have just tortured the journalists there for a few hours and maybe cut of their fingers that would also be a "step up" or "refreshingly open-minded"?
Dude I can not believe how it can be anything but horrible to make acts of terrorism and killing of innocent anything but the worst humans can do.
No. Using soft language about someone else's words is not the same as using soft language about torture. It's not even remotely similar. There isn't some transitive property of outrage here. If you can't tell the difference between saying "these terrorists had reasonable motivations for murdering those innocent people" and "at least that guy's awful statement has one thing going for it" then I really can't help you.
If you can say that a statement that justifies killing innocent people because they draw a caricature had "one thing going for it" then I really can't help you.
I'm similarly in complete shock, but then again I see jihadi simps every once in a while on HN.
> I prefer this over the nuts who decry Sharia law while wanting to implement a Christian equivalent.
The idea of a "Christian equivalent" to Sharia law is actually very fringe. The near unanimous teaching of Christianity, from the Church Fathers through to the mainstream Reformers, is that the criminal laws in the Jewish Torah were only ever intended for Jews, and Christians are not bound by the letter of them – they could be used as a source of moral principles which might influence secular legislation, but were not meant to be directly applied in Christian societies.
And Christianity always drew a distinction between ecclesiastical law, which governed the internal affairs of the Church (canon law), and temporal law (criminal and civil) which governed society at large. Temporal law was derived from secular, pre-Christian sources (especially the laws of the Roman Empire, but also the legal traditions of the Germanic tribes which invaded it); Christianity influenced aspects of it but the bulk of it was non-Christian in origin. Canon law did sometimes intrude into issues most nowadays would consider secular (such as marriage and inheritance), but the bulk of everyday legal matters were governed by the law of the State, not the law of the Church – the two were kept distinct (with separate court systems, legal professions and legal education), even if much more intertwined than most people nowadays would feel comfortable with.
It was only in the 20th century that a small group of American Protestants (R. J. Rushdoony, Greg Bahnsen and Gary North) began to spread the contrary idea, theonomy, that the criminal laws of the Torah are meant to be applied by Christians in the present day, as opposed to merely serving as a source of moral principle. But this is a very novel idea in Christian history, and it remains one which the vast majority of Protestants (even conservative Protestants) formally reject, to say nothing of the resolute Catholic and Orthodox opposition to it.
Islam is very different in that, unlike Christianity, it always proposed its religious laws (Sharia) as something to be adopted by the State. The whole Church-vs-State distinction which is fundamental to most Christians never existed to anywhere near the same degree in Islam, prior to the modern period. In mediaeval Muslim-ruled states, all judges were religious officials primarily implementing religious law – with decrees of the secular ruler at best serving as a supplement to it – quite unlike the situation which prevailed in Christian-ruled states, where Church and State had two parallel court systems applying two separate legal systems. The closest the Muslim world came to that, was granting religious minorities (primarily Jews and Christians) the right to legal autonomy, to impose their own laws and courts on their own communities (primarily in matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance) – but as the law of the state, Sharia applied to everybody.
And among Jews, the vast majority believe that the Torah laws (with a few exceptions) were only meant to apply to Jews; and shouldn't be the law of the State of Israel prior to the coming of the Messiah. There is a minority who disagree (Kahanists, Hardal, some hardline Religious Zionists), and believe the modern State of Israel should implement Torah law today, but >95% of Jews worldwide disagree with them. Even the vast majority of ultra-Orthodox Jews disagree with them.
So I really think drawing this kind of parallel between Islamic Sharia and Christianity or Judaism displays either a lack of understanding of all three religions, or else an excessive focus on very fringe minority positions. Although I also recognise that a lot of people drawing the parallel are actually complaining about attempts by conservative Christians (and to a lesser degree Jews) to legislate their own moral views on controversial social issues – but that isn't really akin to Islamic Sharia (except for the very fringe Christian reconstructionist/theonomist/Kahanist/etc minorities), since they are trying to amend secular law based on religion-influenced morality, quite unlike the Sharia approach of directly applying religious law to essentially secular issues such as murder cases or business contracts.
This distinction might sound very important for people within one of those religions, but it sounds pretty trivial from the outside. Changing secular law to reflect religious law versus directly applying religious law, who cares? The result is the same.
And for excessive focus, maybe you haven't noticed, but that fringe position is wielding a tremendous power in the country where I live at the moment.
> This distinction might sound very important for people within one of those religions, but it sounds pretty trivial from the outside. Changing secular law to reflect religious law versus directly applying religious law, who cares? The result is the same
The result is very different. If Sharia were fully implemented in your country, you’d go to the local courthouse and the judge would be a religious scholar applying the religious law of the Islamic state religion. Whereas, if conservative Christians vote for laws which encode their moral views (on abortion or whatever), those laws remain formally secular, and the judge enforcing them is not a religious official. Sharia expressly discriminates in favour of Muslims (e.g. it says the word of a Muslim witness is worth more than that of a non-Muslim witness in court); the laws you are complaining about don’t do anything remotely similar.
> And for excessive focus, maybe you haven't noticed, but that fringe position is wielding a tremendous power in the country where I live at the moment.
How? Trump is not a theonomist. Nor is Vance. Nor is Musk. I don’t believe any of the Cabinet secretaries are theonomists. Nor are any of the Supreme Court justices. The only way anyone can conclude that theonomy has any contemporary influence in the US government is by misrepresenting non-theonomist views as theonomy.
The laws I’m complaining about don’t do anything remotely similar yet. They would if the fundamentalists had their way.
Trump obviously doesn’t give a damn about religion, but who do you think put him in office? Who does he pander to?
> The laws I’m complaining about don’t do anything remotely similar yet. They would if the fundamentalists had their way.
I don't know who you are calling "fundamentalists" – I personally think the term should be restricted to the historical fundamentalist movement in American Protestantism, and those Protestants who view themselves as heirs of that movement today – but I think the vast majority of people you are labelling that aren't theonomists, and have zero interest in emulating Islamic Sharia by replacing secular courts with tribunals of Christian clergy, or modifying evidence laws to make the word of a Christian worth more than that of a non-Christian. Nobody is asking for anything remotely resembling that, except for a very tiny movement on the fringes of Reformed Protestantism – which the vast majority of Reformed (even conservative Reformed) reject, and I've never heard of a Catholic or Anglican or Methodist or Lutheran or Eastern Orthodox or whatever supporting it.
From a Catholic perspective, replacing secular law with "Christian Sharia" is clearly a heresy – never officially condemned because no Catholic of significance has ever proposed it – but if it ever did become a serious issue I'm sure the Church would waste no time in doing so, since it is just so blatantly contrary to the Catholic tradition. And the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the vast majority of Protestant churches (even otherwise very conservative ones), would say more or less the same thing – the details of their reasons would likely differ, but the conclusion wouldn't.
Evangelicals are the main players here. Catholics are loosely aligned. Anglicans/Methodists/Lutherans are largely irrelevant.
Again, I don't see the practical difference between religious tribunals run by clergy, and nominally secular courts run by nominally secular judges who make religiously-guided decisions based on religiously-guided laws.
We already have such laws, ranging from blue laws to laws about medical research and procedures. And this is under a much more secular system than the dominionists would like.
Multiple states still prohibit atheists from holding office. Of course, the bans are unenforceable... for now. Such restrictions were enforced before and they could be again with the right people on the Supreme Court. From there, it's a short trip to deciding that only adherents to a proper form of Christianity count. The existing requirements already exclude non-monotheists.
It's not trivial for someone like me literarily living under Shari'a today.
Jihadi-sympathizing.... I have no words.
No wonder he never cared when muslims murdered Christians in Nigeria this year. Just 50 in Easter.
Our leaders should not be normalizing or condoning responding to words with violence.
Such an attitude is abhorrent and shameful.
I think that article lost a bit of nuance somewhere. The Pope was specifically defending the right of Muslims to protest peacefully against deliberate insults to their religion:
> Francis spoke about the Paris attacks while on his way to the Philippines, where around 1,500 Muslims protested yesterday against the depictions of the Prophet in the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo. [0]
He also explicitly condemned violence:
> Francis insisted that it was an “aberration” to kill in the name of God and said religion can never be used to justify violence. [0]
So, he wasn't justifying the attack on the Charlie Hebdo office.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/charlie-hebd...
Which churches come closest to Pope Francis's teachings and worldview? Ones that have both in-person and online services.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest ... the Catholic Church!
Which _other_ churches besides the Catholic Church? Well, Catholicism is more encompassing than many people are aware of.
For instance, you might have heard of the "Roman Catholic Church." Besides the Roman Catholic Church, aka the Latin Church (which primarily uses the Roman Rite), there are 23 Eastern Catholic Churches, each with their own liturgical traditions, theological emphases, and cultural heritage. All of them are in full communion with the Pope.
Note: While many Catholic parishes do offer live-streamed services, for the benefit of the sick and homebound, they do not fulfill the Sunday obligation to attend Mass if you are able to do so in person.
There are many different orders of Catholic priests, but Pope Francis was a Jesuit and his teachings reflected that. Many of the Catholic universities (and even high schools) in the Americas were founded by Jesuits.
Popping into the church connected to your nearest Catholic university is a good bet, but you can probably find a Jesuit priest nearby even if you aren't in the Americas.
What I don't know is how & what his approach does when it encounters gang stuff, how well it works there.
He was a Liberation Theologist. People who follow the actual life example of Jesus of Nazareth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_theology
I'm curious how devout Catholics will perceive it when the leader of their Church dies on their holiest day, which commemorates the resurrection of Christ. Will they going to see it as a symbol, a sign, or perhaps some kind of deeper message?
The way I see it, expecting holy days to somehow be "safe" ignores the basis on which the Church was built.
Martyrs were mauled by lions regardless of their work in spreading the word of God. Jesus himself died just like the common thieves next to him. The Catholic Church is built by people, and people sometimes die.
It wasn't regardless, it was because. They're not saints despite being martyrs, but because they are.
I view it the same way I view three American founders dying on July 4th, two of them on the 50th anniversary of the signing. His force of will could take him a ways beyond when his body might reasonably have been expected to fail; having reached that point, he was not prepared to take the effort any further.
That's the nicest day to die. One can simply move from one celebration to the next.
https://newsthump.com/2025/04/21/pope-loses-will-to-live-aft...
:(
And for political side - in Poland, he was seen as way too leftist/liberal for the conservatives in Church, and too pro-Russian for the liberals in it - he had not condemned Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This was a very interesting thing to witness. It seemed to indicate that politics is more powerful than religion, even in a country as religious as Poland.
I found this surprising and genuinely thought-provoking.
I had been talking with my conservative colleagues - they were deeply unhappy with him on stance of migration, LGBT issues, or even very recent - his talk with Vance, whom they support (American politics are just so big that it has effect on us even across the ocean).
Then, from religious point of view - they didn't really like his ecumenism approach, to them it was borderline of heresy.
I was born in, and currently live in Poland. It truly blows my mind that any Polish person could side with a foreign political party that openly sides with moscow over Ukraine and even Poland. Political alignment is truly the strongest drug for many people.
Also, while I think that barring a fringe part of society, everyone would agree, the fun part is, how do you get to people to agree who's pro-Russian or not ;) Of course, this is for local parties, but go to /r/Poland and /r/Polska and ask them, what parties are pro-Russian. Then to Wykop, both Mikroblog and frontpage, and see the reactions.
Same thing will apply here.
Anecdotally, my uncle just dropped by to thank me for the Easter flowers I had left at their place. He is pretty conservative, had always railed against this pope, and just called him a really good man. So at least today, religion and forgiveness won his heart.
While I support Ukraine and would like to see a stronger, more unified front from the collective West, making this the only question that matters in Polish politics seems wrong. My 2c.
At one point Francis said "The Patriarch cannot become Putin’s altar boy", in reference to Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church [1]. Maybe Francis recognised that working to get Kirill to temper his support for Putin would be more effective than his own public condemnation, which might allow propagandists to whip up a Western vs. Orthodox religious frenzy to unify Russians behind Putin?
[1] https://www.wn.catholic.org.nz/adw_welcom/pope-says-kirill-m...
The concept of Liberal in the US is different from liberal in Europe. In Europe "liberal" means supporter of low taxes, small govertment. The concept in the US has to do with sexual liberation and sexual freedom more than economic marxism.
Francis was not sexually liberal. He was marxist. He believed in liberation theology.
As someone who knew personally the man from a spiritual exercises' house in Spain(obviously when he was not yet Pope), I never liked the guy.
He was the friend of dictators. Loved so much Raul Castro, and Maduro, never criticised them, but criticised the affluence of western democracies. His business was the poor and he loved poor makers.
His support for Putin and not denouncing the takeover of absolute power was jarring for someone in his position.
You can be a leftist religious leader, but you have to report abuses when you see them, specially if the abuses are made by your friends. Of course you will lose them if you do.
Francis was too weak in character to oppose them. But as a Pope, that is your job.
> The concept of Liberal in the US is different from liberal in Europe. In Europe "liberal" means supporter of low taxes, small govertment. The concept in the US has to do with sexual liberation and sexual freedom more than economic marxism.
It isn't a purely US vs Europe thing though – you will find some Americans who call themselves "classical liberals", by which they mean "liberal" in largely the same sense as many Europeans do. It is just that "classical liberal" is somewhat of an obscure term in the US–you are only likely to know it if you are interested in or have studied economics, politics, etc–but among those Americans who know it there are definitely some who identify with it.
"Progressive" avoids this to some extent, in being a term which is closer to meaning the same thing in the US and Europe – although in a US context, "progressive" often means something in the same direction as "liberal" but going further.
Some people like to talk about two dimensions, social vs economic – so a person can be socially conservative but economically progressive (not an uncommon position among some conservative Catholics, for example) – although that still has the limitation that "socially progressive/conservative" is a selection of issues with an assumption that people's positions across them are correlated, but there are people who break the assumption, e.g. self-described "consistent pro-lifers" who oppose both legal abortion and the death penalty (unlike many "pro-lifers" in the US who oppose legal abortion yet are pro-death penalty), or certain radical feminists who support LGB rights but oppose transgender rights ("gender critical" as they prefer to call themselves, with "TERF" being the pejorative label applied to them by their opponents)
Some of these linkages are country specific – e.g. in the US, most social conservatives support the death penalty and oppose gun control, in some other Western countries you may find most social conservatives opposing the death penalty and supporting gun control, even while they agree with US social conservatives on other issues.
He was a man of hypocrisy:
Immigrants must be welcome as a moral imperative, but not in the Vatican!
Bigotry is wrong, except for the modern Marxist form!
Embrace the Progressive world view, but don’t talk about how we forcibly sterilized people!
Etc.
Very interesting to see he has died after the tons of press the church was putting out about his health and he was "recovering" and "fine".
When you're at that age it's not uncommon to be on the mend from illness as then deteriorate rapidly again.
Held out all through out Easter. Lot of strength of character.
Strength and power of will does not affect one’s lifespan or ability to resist disease. This is a myth.
Disease is not a fistfight.
Condoléances.
I wonder if a Pope's funeral can serve as an occasion for backdoor diplomacy - the world needs a lot of that.
If the next Pope is young and energetic, he may want to use his first few days making a mark in history by putting people from different side of different conflicts.
Paraxodically, he may have more chance putting the Israelis and Palestinian around a table (or at least provide the optics for a deal that would be discussed in the usual boring transactional way.)
On the other hand, one has to wonder what a populist pope would do (interfere in elections ? Make a u turn on climate, migrants, etc... ? Go back to hardcore conservatism ? Or fall into irrelevance ?)
RIP, I have given Francis my prayers for his soul and his close ones and everyone who saw him as a leader and a holy figure. God can use anything for the good <3
Rest in Peace to a dude who actually lived his beliefs
I recommend one of his books, The Name of God is Mercy
May he rest in peace.
I think he did well. Seemed thoughtful, can't expect him to totally buck the system. But he got it moving along again.
May he rest in peace
This atheist admired him and read his Encylicals.
It feels kinda wrong to like this post
Some of the highest voted stories on HN are related to someone's passing. Think of the upvotes less as a 'like' and more as 'paying respects'.
It's called "upvote", not "like".
Okey
Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.
To deeply reflect:
Francis was the favorite pope of the Poor and of the Atheists.
Does anyone have any theories why his predecessor, Benedict, so shockingly resigned? (And then, according to this article, continued to live there, which was news to me).
The conventional wisdom is that Benedict was a hardline, conservative nut who had to resign for unknown reasons and was replaced by this well-loved, progressive guy. As seen in this thread, lots of people liked him and his philosophy, and his progressive take on things which always made the news, as he focused on the poor and traveled the world.
However, I've heard the conspiracy that Benedict was forced out, possibly related to his investigations into the child sex abuse scandal, maybe because he was finding important people involved. He was always very focused on the Church itself. And Francis was chosen, almost as a patsy, to end those investigations and instead be the friendly Pope out away from the Vatican.
I just always thought Benedict's resignation was surprising and there was something more to the story.
Conventional wisdom is he attempted to resign 3 times, had a stroke, and had a pacemaker all before he spent a further 8 years of his career elected as pope and then actually resigned. This all extends decades prior to his final resignation, giving the same health and desire for retirement reasons as prior attempts.
As for whether there was something more than the conventional wisdom to the story... I'm not really sure the news of his successors death is the correct thread to spawn that conversation in as it's getting to have little to do with Francis.
I think it's relevant. We're discussing the life and impact of Pope Francis. I'm speculating that he was chosen specifically for his outward focus.
I'm a practicing but not terribly devout Catholic, and my impression of Benedict was that he was very formal and focused Pope on the Church itself (eg how we had to relearn all the prayers and responses in the Mass). Francis was much more about helping the poor of the world, and to my limited experience didn't affect Catholicism, with a Capital C, very much. His politics aligned with mine, so I didn't mind that so much, but I can't help thinking that all was very intentional, and that there be dragons lurking within the Vatican institution that are being ignored.
I can't remember the provenance, but there is a compelling argument that Benedict only expected to live a few months beyond his stepping down. He probably despaired of not being able to show the stoicism of his predecessor at the end.
So Pope Francis departs for a meeting with his boss perhaps?
Jokes aside, he seemed like a genuinely decent human being and enough of a humanist to cast aside some of the drier absurdities surrounding the bureaucracy of Catholic Church administration, and ideology.
Even as someone who's deep in the skeptically agnostic camp on any questions about supreme creators (after all even a firm atheist can't be absolutely sure there is no genuine God) I had more respect for the apparent practical concern for humanity of this pope, particularly compared to the more typical nature of historical pontiffs.
> after all even a firm atheist can't be absolutely sure there is no genuine God
Why so? There is no reason for one to exist so not having one is the obvious case.
We could of course assume anything, that we are av stylization, that the world is a large ice cream, that what we see is not the reality, whatever
If we go for that, sure, we cannot be sure of anything. But we then must also believe that we may live in a large ice cream.
> Why so?
Because it can't be proven either way. An atheist who claims to know for certainty that there is no god is expressing a religious, faith-based viewpoint. I guess that isn't necessarily at odds with being an atheist, but part of why I'm an atheist is that I try to avoid believing in things that aren't provable and don't fit existing evidence.
> If we go for that, sure, we cannot be sure of anything.
We can be sure of things that have been proven using the scientific method. Certainly we can't be 100% sure, because that method is applied by fallible humans. But it's silly to suggest that levels of sureness don't matter; I can be more sure about the idea that we don't live in a giant ice cream than of other things, and that's fine.
But I think it's true that we can't really be sure of anything... and that's also fine.
>There is no reason for one to exist so not having one is the obvious case.
It's a usable supposition, sure, and I agree that being asked to prove a negative is silly, but you can't actually be sure that one doesn't exist. It's not the obvious case at all, it's not even all that obvious as a supposition.
What's more, superficially at least, it makes more sense to believe in a supreme, essentially divine creator than it does to believe visibly enormous complexity deriving from a mostly unknown nothing.
I'd say that this more than anything has been responsible for virtually all cultures in history believing in supreme, divine creators of one kind or another vs no historical cultures that I know of believing in the universe springing from random chance and hand-wavey nothingness behind it.
We could also of course be living in a large ice cream, you can't be absolutely sure that's not the case either.
Though, the idea of being the creations of a tremendously powerful and conscious being that created a universe hospitable to our use and for our potential given by all our evident cognitive and material tools seems to me a lot more plausible than being subject to an accidental existence in a gargantuan ice cream environment.
> What's more, superficially at least, it makes more sense to believe in a supreme, essentially divine creator than it does to believe visibly enormous complexity deriving from a mostly unknown nothing.
We would come from nothing in the same way God came from nothing. There's little reason to conclude the universe was ever non-existent.
> Though, the idea of being the creations of a tremendously powerful and conscious being that created a universe hospitable to our use and for our potential given by all our evident cognitive and material tools seems to me a lot more plausible than being subject to an accidental existence in a gargantuan ice cream environment.
I actually thought you were going to say the first clause is less probable than whatever the second upcoming clause would be, because it sounds so improbably specific and human-crafted.
I think the belief that we were gifted our cognitive superiority (if that even is something unique to us in the history of the universe) by a divine entity is not meant to be an explanation of where our cognition comes from, but a method of assuaging our guilt. Because if God gave us the tools to debase, kill, maim, and roast ourselves on this rock, then surely it is meant to be, and will add up to something meaningful.
In fact, it's much more likely giving monkeys the ability to talk was an act of The Devil, not God.
> We would come from nothing in the same way God came from nothing.
That would only be true, if your God is part of the same universe, which by (christian) definition wouldn't be truly God. When you talk about God as the creator of the universe he has also created time and thus causality and other properties of the universe, like that things come from other things.
> What's more, superficially at least, it makes more sense to believe in a supreme, essentially divine creator than it does to believe visibly enormous complexity deriving from a mostly unknown nothing.
It can't make more sense to believe in one entirely made up thing vs another since they're both made up.
> I'd say that this more than anything has been responsible for virtually all cultures in history believing in supreme, divine creators of one kind or another vs no historical cultures that I know of believing in the universe springing from random chance and hand-wavey nothingness behind it.
Ascribing rationality to faith is an interesting supposition. It's all based on emotions, such as fear of death, on the side of the believers and greed on the side of belief-providers.
> Though, the idea of being the creations of a tremendously powerful and conscious being that created a universe hospitable to our use and for our potential given by all our evident cognitive and material tools seems to me a lot more plausible than being subject to an accidental existence in a gargantuan ice cream environment.
No, it just seems more comforting to you. That doesn't make it any more plausible.
>It can't make more sense to believe in one entirely made up thing vs another since they're both made up.
It makes sense to believe in Newton's laws, which he made up, even though we know the study of kinematics flowing from them is wrong. We have observed them being wrong. Someone else made up a complicated explanation of why and when Newton's laws are wrong. That guy's theories formed the basis for some incredible stuff that works really well, and he's probably wrong too... but I'll believe them both.
Yeah, sure, Newton "made up" the laws. Good one.
For anyone curious, this is an example of the Continuum Fallacy [1]. Interestingly, that wiki page happens to use Newton's laws as an example:
"For example, Newton's gravitational theories are "wrong" (they're a rough approximation) and Einstein's gravitation is almost certainly "wrong" too (it doesn't easily blend with quantum mechanics), but it would be a spectacular fallacy to suggest that they are equally wrong because there is such a continuous shading between "makes rough predictions" and "makes more accurate predictions" when it comes to scientific theories. Saying that the Earth is flat is wrong, and saying that it's spherical is also wrong — it's an oblate spheroid, roughly — but both statements do not have the same degree of "wrongness" on a continuum."
[1]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy
This is not an example of the 'Continuum fallacy', but you believe it so because you are thoroughly convinced that religious thinking is vacuous.
Unless you are denying Newton's agency or participation, he made those laws up. That's how articulation of reality works.
When you make a strong binary conjecture, you invite counterproof. You object to the wording because you find it beneath the dignity of those laws to label it so; on that point, we agree.
> Though, the idea of being the creations of a tremendously powerful and conscious being that created a universe hospitable to our use and for our potential given by all our evident cognitive and material tools seems to me a lot more plausible than being subject to an accidental existence in a gargantuan ice cream environment.
Why, they are the same to me. None is more probable because none needs to be.
We can explain some things (until we cannot, and then we look for another model). Some we cannot explain because we do not yet have the appropriate knowledge. Someday we will, or we won't.
The difference between me and someone who believes in one or more deities I that I can say "we don't know because we are not good enough yet". They need to say "this is driven by god" (for reasons I cannot explain)
Most cultures have believed in a multiplicity of gods rather than just a single creator god. This new-fangled monotheism is a relatively modern invention.
Condolences
Rest in peace.
When I think about it being the Pope is quite a position, probably the most unique in our world?
You have to be:
- A head of state, meaning taking positions though UN votes, etc.
- A "CEO", there is a lot of "business" decision to be taken to run the Vatican and the Church. I mean the Vatican can be seen as a giant museum (no offense) with a lot of people flowing in everyday so that need to be managed.
- But first he is a religious, spiritual leader and has to steer its evolution.
- Many also still see him steering an entire civilisation. Whether you are a Catholic or not, he is at the center of something.
Tough job...
Minor correction: the Vatican is a UN observer member, meaning it does not have voting rights.
I think he will be mostly remembered as a terrible politician, first alienating conservatives with progressive policy and then alienating liberals with very questionable opinions on war in Ukraine.
In the end, nobody was really happy with him. On the other hand, he definitely had a will and a spine to stick to his own opinions - I guess that counts for something.
A good politician is a people pleaser?
A comment I'd heard some time back concerned a politician. The speaker (not a politician themselves, but recalling an interaction with one) had said to the politician something like "I suppose you want to win with the biggest majority possible". The politician responded along the lines of, "No, that would mean I wasn't doing my job; if I'm really pushing the limits of the possible I'll have just the barest majority."
People pleasing in politics means never pushing out of the public's comfort zone.
(And no, this isn't an endorsement of any current orange head of state, far from it.)
A good politician is able to garner support to enact change.
>> In the end, nobody was really happy with him.
This is true if you live in a bubble. Most Catholics don't hold strong opinions on the Pope. The people who do are, as usual, the extremes on either side - not the majority.
Not holding a strong opinion counts as not being happy with him, otherwise you would have a strong positive opinion of him.
How very Christ-like
Yeah, nothing says Jesus like siding with the aggressor due to your own prejudices.
Jesus famously said turn the other cheek
You can’t turn your other cheek when you’re dead, so I am pretty sure he didn’t mean it as allow yourself to get killed.
Besides, Ukraine did turn other cheek after 2014 war, they just run out of cheeks to turn.
Back to main subject, I believe nothing weakened Pope Francis’s policies as much as his widely misunderstood position on this subject.
> he didn’t mean it as allow yourself to get killed.
You know, what happened on Easter right?
I do, according to christian doctrine Jesus sacrificed himself for humanity’s sins. That sacrifice wouldn’t be particularly meaningful if it came with expectation for everybody to follow through. As much as I am not a fan of this (or any other) religion, I’m pretty sure it’s not a suicide pact.
I think getting killed for your belief is exactly what Jesus was arguing for. It was also what all apostles did and the only cause for the next 300 years to be declared a saint.
Jesus' death was special, because he was without sins, he was the son of God (YMMV) and, because was walking around afterwards physically (i.e. capable of touching and eating, etc.) on earth. I am not sure, why you name it suicide, because he didn't killed himself, he got himself killed.
I do not think, that Jesus would defend "the agressor". But fighting in return is also not good, which is where "turning the other cheek" comes into play.
There's almost two millennia of counter arguments to the usual attempts to reframe Christianity as strictly "just suicide and turn the other cheek".
Suicide is a mortal sin, so I'm not sure, if we argue past each other.
> reframe Christianity
How is it reframing, when it is what it is all about? Can you elaborate about the counter arguments?
Of course dying is not the only method of worshiping God and promote the faith, but it is quite effective. And giving the other option is killing people it is definitely the preferred way.
Jesus pretty famously did allow himself to be killed
Yep, as a sacrifice. Using this as a justification for aggressive war against a christian nation is not only extremely intellectually dishonest, but against the doctrine as well.
[flagged]
You could educate the audience, rather than commenting like this. People are here to have curious conversations.
Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Hmm, I meant that in an "it's off-topic" way but you're right, the wording comes across quite harsh.
Thanks for that comment, as it encouraged me to read a wikipedia article on the subject, which was very interesting.
Link for others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turning_the_other_cheek
It mostly does. There's a deeper meaning to it, but it's still also about nonviolence.
As with everything, it's open to interpretation, but you don't turn your other cheek expecting to be hit again; it's meant to signal defiance not resignation.
I guess, but "defiance" can mean anything, and the passage is telling you not to resist. It's about not participating in a violent conflict to begin with. It's definitely not "I f'ing dare you to try that again".
I don't think that US conservatives and liberals are were the center of gravity of papal policy is.
US doesn’t have a monopoly on those words and I am not even American.
In Portugal, the local Catholic University is one of the foremost strongholds of Economic Neoliberalism.
There were vicious attacks to Pope Francis on the newspapers by the most orthodox professors there.
Why is this posted on HN, even twice? It’s not like other news sources won’t announce this. The pope had its good and bad sides, but in the end we should remind ourselves he’s just a human being. It’s OK for HN to inform about people here, but shouldn’t they be somehow related to any topics HN touches? The popes was just a guy who somehow got popular because of some quite successful religion - but I’d personally prefer keep religion out of HN.
It's conventional for there to be a thread on HN when a major pubic figure dies. If you look at the list of obituary posts on HN [1], several of the biggest were for politicians, royals, and others unrelated to computer science and technology.
It's in keeping with the convention that stories that have "significant new information" are on topic for HN, and that includes major mainstream news stories when they first break.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22has+died%22
Cheers! Good idea to provide the search example with Algolia!
Two thoughts:
- The pope was not only a very important religious and political leader but also wrote and spoke about the relationship between humans and technology [1, 2]
- I joined Hacker News due to its links but stayed for the community of smart and thoughtful people (and the great moderation). Oftentimes, a HN submission acts as a seed crystal for "off-topic" discussions that people want to talk about. As the people that make up this community get older, and as the times change, the topics we discuss change, too. At some level, technology always has political, moral, ideological implications. For me, HN is one of the best places to discuss these.
[1] https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino/pu...
[2] Tim Cook on how Pope Francis influenced his thinking: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1541230109287507
> Why is this posted on HN
This isn't a headline service or newswire. It's a place for discussion too. He was the head of a large institution that has a lot of influence. And the views of the institution on emergent technologies is very much relevant. Those views are greatly shaped by the one at the top for their stint. This post isn't about religion.
Meanwhile, anything about Trump is insta-flagged. Look at your criteria.
He was the head of one of the largest and oldest institutions that was working to handle its successes and failures as it worked to modernize.
I concur. I believe that political and religious discussions are better suited for other platforms rather than HN. I am not particularly interested in the Pope, if I were, I could find coverage of the topic on mainstream news sources. There’s nothing interesting here from a technical or startup perspective.
Someone's running bot farm to manipulate this website. There's been tons of dupes and suspicious flagging lately.
Why have you posted the same general comment twice after the first was flagged? As the rules suggest, if you disagree with the post - flag it.
@tomhow
I understand the intention behind keeping the thread respectful, especially in the context of someone’s death. That said, I find it difficult to fully separate reflections on Pope Francis from reflections on the institution he led. The papacy is not just a personal role—it is deeply representative of the Catholic Church as an institution, with all the historical and present-day weight that carries.
It also stands out to me that similar moderation reminders don't usually appear in threads about other public figures. That gives the impression that this topic is being treated as more sensitive or "untouchable" than others, and I think it's fair to question why that is.
I'm all for thoughtful conversation, but part of that includes being able to engage critically with the institutions and roles that public figures embody—even in moments like this.
It may be unusual for this kind of reminder to be posted on an obituary thread, but it's not so unusual for it to be posted on a thread about a religious topic. There's nothing to read into this other than we all know that religion is a topic that elicits strong reactions in people and is one of the most frequent topics of bitter argument, and that's just the thing we're trying to avoid on HN.
It's fine to talk about the larger institution he led; please just keep to the HN guidelines, which apply equally to all threads on HN, and which, in particular, ask us to be thoughtful and substantive, and to avoid generic tangents.
(I've edited my top comment, to clarify what I think should be deemed on/off topic.)
> similar moderation reminders don't usually appear in threads about other public figures.
Friend, this is not true. "dang" himself has often exhorted posters in this same manner and language when a notable death may attract inconsiderate commentary.
See the search link provided by tomhow in this branch of the same discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43749405#43750046
Interestingly, [X has died] seems to be among some of the topmost upvoted posts of HN. (Based on https://hn.algolia.com/)
[X has been born] posts would be a lot more difficult. Hard to know if the babies are going to do anything noteworthy ahead of time.
I’m pretty sure that comments count as upvotes; if that’s the case, I find it a lot less surprising.
May he rest in peace
[flagged]
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43749471 and marked it offtopic. Please adhere to the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> The line between good and evil is very clear in this case.
> Edit: I mean Ukraine war.
Yes but it's not clear yet who will win, and the church cannot afford siding with the losing side, especially that now it's weakest it's been since medieval times.
> The line between good and evil is very clear in this case.
Edit parent meant Ukraine war, not the Israel conflict quote Pope had.
It would be different materially. The rallying cry would be different for one.
No matter who did it, it would still be 'evil'. There would be 'good guys' and 'bad guys'. Specially when the labels would be applied to dead children and innocents under rubble. Everyone keeps forgetting them.
Just because you think they would do the same to you, does not justify your actions.
Apologies, I meant Ukraine war, should have been more clear, it is that simple there.
your username is peak irony, considering your statement
That is a great and underused method of evaluating moral judgments and I believe that it’s very suitable in this particular case.
I do not have much hope that Palestinians would behave “better” according to any sensible measure of the word.
I would conjecture that many governments would position themselves differently and that criticism would face less obstacles.
In the end it would be as much of a catastrophe.
>That is a great and underused method of evaluating moral judgments and I believe that it’s very suitable in this particular case.
It also dilutes the current and very real responsibilities of the 'effectors'. In saying 'they would have done the same' it becomes very easy to justify the unjustifiable.
To your pre-edit:
> [basically] What if in a different world Hamas had all the weapons plus the backing of the US while Israel only had shoddy weapons?
In a hypothetical world where Usain Bolt was raised on Greenland and became interested in competitive gaming: would he have become the fastest human? Probably not. Different timelines.
This Sam Harris exercise is meaningless. The goal is not to measure the level of evil in the hearts of <hamas> or <isreali government>. That’s impossible. Hypotheticals that have nothing to do with reality are also fruitless. The goal is to figure out what evil actions are being committed and stop them.
But the abuser only did those things because he was abused as a child for eight yea— What’s that got to do with the problem at hand?
> The goal is not to measure the level of evil in the hearts of <hamas> or <isreali government>. That’s impossible.
The goal of thought experiment wasn't to measure evil or good. It's to determine if the lines between good and evil are that far apart.
If Ukraine was way stronger than Russia, would it try to annex Kursk and other non-Ukraine regions? Would it commit as many atrocities? No. It would be constrained by its desire to join EU. Could it do it if it had 30 more people, more nationalistic populace, and near infinite ammo supply? Probably.
But a litmus test, just tells you rough acidity, not exact pH either.
Small edit. 30 million not 30.
If Israel wasn’t an ethnostate that treated Palestinians as second-class citizens (especially in the West Bank, especially in Gaza) would violent Palestinian factions have a political basis? No.