Pastors will accompany the announcement with a warning: Only, say 10%, of what you give will will go to poor people.
Hey, they want to keep their jobs and who can blame them?
via Vatican Uses Donations for the Poor to Plug Its Budget Deficit – WSJ
Category: Blithe Spirit
The good and the bad, emphasis on Trib and Sun-Times
The pope of the poor shorts them for sake of running his organization
Unsuprisingly, we must fear. Has he been virtue signaling, or is he over his head as a CEO?
VATICAN CITY—Every year, Catholics around the world donate tens of millions of dollars to the pope. Bishops exhort the faithful to support the weak and suffering through the pope’s main charitable appeal, called Peter’s Pence.
What the church doesn’t advertise is that most of that collection, worth more than €50 million ($55 million) annually, goes toward plugging the hole in the Vatican’s own administrative budget, while as little as 10% is spent on charitable works, according to people familiar with the funds.
Woe.
via Vatican Uses Donations for the Poor to Plug Its Budget Deficit – WSJ
Hot title here from Fr. Rutler: Meditations from a man on whom his erudition hangs lightly . . .
Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground
Sample bon mot from chapter about what to do with your imagination.
Narcissus [a] moral idiot. He became enamored of his reflection in the water. He wanted to discover, in the jargon of our day, his “inner child.”
But anyone who wants to find his inner child without locating the source of life in God is condemned to a perpetual infancy, an arrested development of the soul. The autonomous self ignores the voice of the other, all others.
And so it was with Narcissus, for Echo called to him, bidding him to come and be her lover. Narcissus was so involved with himself that her voice fell, literally, on morally deaf ears. She dissolved into nothing but her voice, which is how we get the word “echo.” Narcissus ended up dissolving into a plant that is named for him.
Wit, gentle humor, pointed, memorable, from pages of this book:
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Francis makes his mark on the church with bad appointments
In a story about financial skulldudgery/ incompetence in Francis’ Vatican is this key comment:
It was also bewildering that Pope Francis kept promoting scandal-plagued prelates to offices for which they possess little or no qualifications.
Oh my, a key to the Francis effect. He consistently dumps on Holy Mother the Church these people who do not belong — Francis’ kind of people, apparently.
Pope at Angelus: May our whole life be a “yes” to God – Vatican News
Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground
“Openness to God is found in the openness to take on the needs of one’s neighbor”.
The wise Francis here. Now if he would veer away with his inveterate ambiguity in matters of doctrine. You don’t have to trash the brand to urge its application.
Memento Mori: Facing Death as a Fount of Life
Anne (of Green Gables) meditates on her friend’s facing death with fear at its being nothing she’s used to:
How often do we fail to long for Heaven and instead fear that it will be unfamiliar? Do we consider the beatific vision and worry that eternal worship may be boring rather than glorious? If we are living for this world, the next world cannot attract us. If we build our lives around the temporal, the eternal will not be, as poor Ruby explained, what we are used to.
She clings to the lesser thing.
Why did Evo Morales find such favour at the Vatican?
Evo Morales, who fled to Mexico after resigning as president, may not be missed in Bolivia but his absence will be felt at the Vatican.
One of the most curious aspects of the first Latin American pontificate is that Morales enjoyed the status he did. He was the Holy Father’s favourite leader in the Americas.
Which was passing strange, as he was a tyrant.
He did some good things. But typical of his type, and when the going got tough for his programs, he got tough.
Latin American populists of both right and left invoke the people but are less keen when the people take a different view.
Morales demonstrated ruthless tendencies early on, suppressing opponents, seizing control of the courts and using the electoral authorities for his own benefit.
He promulgated a new constitution that had presidential term limits, but after being re-elected twice thought he would like to run again.
These guys. When they don’t get what they want, what they have decided is best for the so-called citizens, they pull out the stops and make them do it.
Like Francis, throwing away the Gospel-and-doctrine rule book to make things happen — throughout the world. He will close you down if you buck him, and Commonweal Mag and other leftists applaud or ignore it.
Morales played hob with election rules and the constitution and refused to leave the country, and . . .
. . . people took to the streets in massive protests. Morales first dismissed them, then invited observers from the Organization of American States to investigate.
When they reported that there were too many irregularities to make the elections credible, the protests increased.
Only the military could quell the growing disorder and declined to shoot the citizenry to protect Morales. When the military leadership “suggested” that it was time for Morales to go, he resigned and fled to Mexico.
The pope objected, right? Wrong. The papal mouth remained closed when his friend did obviously bad things.
After all,
Morales [had] met Pope Francis six times in six years. At the final meeting he felt comfortable enough to greet Francis as “brother”.
In 2015, the papal visit to Bolivia was crowned by a fiery populist address by the Holy Father to the World Meeting of Popular Movements.
Morales was seated beside Francis as the Holy Father employed the high-octane rhetoric on economics favoured by Morales.
Brothers indeed. He’s my kinda pope, said the one, my kinda dictator, said the other.
Ladies and gentleman and fellow Catholics, we gotta left-wing pope — a dictator pope as one writer put it, a political pope as another put it.
During the crisis following October’s rigged election, Bolivia’s bishops took a strong line against Morales and his corruption of the election. The Holy See was more muted, following the pattern of the last several years in Venezuela.
Is it not hard to take such a pope seriously?
Oh, and there was the Marxist crucifix, . . .
. . . that remarkable moment in Bolivia, instantly symbolic, when Morales presented the Holy Father the blasphemous hammer-and-sickle crucifix, the meaning of which the Holy See’s communication apparatus has not adequately explained to this day.
And that pagan statue business during the recent Amazon synod:
Morales’s gifts keep on giving. He is a devotee of the Pachamama, attending ritual sacrifices in her honour and promoting her cult.
Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register tweeted that Morales was a “key figure” in the presence of the Pachamamas at the recent Amazon synod.
The new (acting) president in Bolivia, on the other hand, “took office holding an enormous Book of the Gospels, announcing that ‘the Bible was back’ in the presidential office.”
The hammer and sickle and Pachamama are no longer the accoutrements of the Bolivian president. How long before [she] is given a warm welcome at the Vatican?
A long time.
Cited article is by Fr Raymond J de Souza, priest of the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario, and editor-in-chief of convivium.ca, here via Catholic Herald
Hong Kong Protesters Sing American National Anthem to Thank Trump for Signing China Bills
On Thanksgiving Day (in the evening, actually) Hong Kong protesters decided to sing the American national anthem as a gesture of thanks for President Trump signing two bills into law Wednesday that condemned China.
When they were done with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the protesters chanted “USA, USA, USA.”
Via PJ Media
Notre Dame University Protest- Too Many White Male Authors in Curriculum
Sweet Jesus, do not let this happen. Dome alums, shower the school with objections.
via The Lid
Peggy Noonan, having for a long time held up skirts at Trump, whom she would never invite to a party, lies on her back and kicks her feet in the air as a clearly impeachable president
She loves the anti-Trump testifiers, except for the self-concentrated lieutenant colonel, whom she also would not invite, but detests Trump as mean and vulgar and hard to work with and declares him guilty beyond further consideration as having committed high crimes and misdemeanors.
Which have done or might have done what damage to the country? Weak on policy, strong on personal interaction, like a Henry James novel, she lays it all out, laying herself out for all to see.
