Pope Bob From Chicago Says Death Penalty Bad, Immigrants Human, Climate Change Real. Wingnuts Outraged!
Also blessed a hunk of ice from a dying glacier, so he's a dirty pagan idolater now.
Pope Bob from Chicago upset a bunch of people who are always upset anyway this week. On Tuesday, Pope Bob said that being against abortion but in favor of the death penalty or abusing immigrants isn’t really very “pro life,” which really annoyed people who want to impose the death penalty for abortion and shoot people crossing the border without papers.
Then Wednesday the Woke Pope went and said that global warming is real and a danger to humanity, insisting that Christians need to care for the natural world because it’s part of God’s creation, and since when is how much gas Americans burn in their giant pickups any of the Pope’s business, how dare he?
So we’d say it was a pretty good week for the first US American pope.
Can’t We Be ‘Pro-Life’ And Still Kill People Who Need Killing?
Pope Leo XIV was asked by a reporter Tuesday about plans by a Chicago cardinal to give an award to Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) for his work to help immigrants. That’s supposedly a terrible thing because Durbin has consistently voted to support abortion rights, and how dare the cardinal even speak Durbin’s filthy name, let alone honor him. (Durbin ultimately declined to accept the award anyway.)
Leo said people on either side of that flap should try to be respectful, but then heretically suggested that there are other moral issues in the world besides abortion.
“Someone who says ‘I'm against abortion’ but says ‘I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life,” Leo told reporters. “Someone who says that ‘I'm against abortion, but I'm in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don't know if that's pro-life.”
That’s not really a new take; popes have for decades opposed abortion, capital punishment, and euthanasia, and have been supportive of refugees and human rights and other woke abominations, citing the woke ideas of that Jesus guy, an Agnus Dei hire if ever there was one.
The usual rightwing suspects griped that abortion is murder and murderers are supposed to get the death penalty, because God said so. And White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who is herself Catholic and prays with her staff before briefings, sidestepped Leo’s condemnation of the administration’s demonization of immigrants by blaming Joe Biden, what about him, huh?
“I would reject there is inhumane treatment of illegal immigrants in the United States under this administration,” Leavitt said with a straight face. “There was, however, significant, inhumane treatment of illegal immigrants in the previous administration as they were being trafficked and raped and beaten, in many cases killed over our United States southern border.”
And if you really wanna talk about inhumane treatment, Leavitt went on, without openly saying Pope Bob was a liar but implying he was the one with a moral blind spot, then what about all the “inhumane treatment at the hands of some of these illegal immigrants that took place under the previous administration.” As is mandatory to prove that immigrants are all monsters, Leavitt invoked the murder of Laken Riley, because there is no moral difference between what a depraved murderer does and official state actions. So shut up, stupid pope, if you call us inhumane again we’ll deport you to a torture prison without a hearing.
Leavitt went on to say we should go ahead and hate our neighbor and cheat a friend, as long as we do it in the name of heaven. Then one tin soldier rode away to teach those woke radical terrorists in Chicago and Portland some manners.
It’s Not My Damn Planet!
Wednesday, Pope Bob marked the tenth anniversary of Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical on climate change, which called for the world to take swift, unified action to cut greenhouse gases. Rightwingers at the time were outraged at Francis’s insistence that caring for the health of the environment is as much a Christian duty as caring for other humans, which rightwingers also consider an entirely private matter. Former presidential candidate and jarred-fetus enthusiast Rick Santorum, you’ll recall, said the Pope should pay attention to “more pressing problems confronting the earth than climate change,” although he didn’t specify. But you know, really important stuff like stopping gay marriage, making rape victims carry their rapists’ babies to term, and probably making porn go away, that kind of thing.
Speaking at the opening of a global church summit on climate — ahead of the annual UN climate summit set for November 10-21, where there will be no official US presence thanks to Donald Trump — Leo said that the vital question for climate action is “what must be done now to ensure that caring for our common home and listening to the cry of the earth and the poor do not appear as mere passing trends or, worse still, are seen and felt as divisive issues?” Here’s video of the speech.
Once more being terribly divisive and unfair to people who simply want to make money by despoiling the planet and leaving large parts of it too hot to sustain human populations, Leo said, “We cannot love God, whom we cannot see, while despising his creatures.” He also added, with that annoying emphasis on “the least of these” that American Christians can’t stand, “Nor can we call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ without participating in his outlook on creation and his care for all that is fragile and wounded.” Doesn’t the Pope understand that Jesus is manly and tough, not a wimp?
Leo even called for government regulation of greenhouse emissions, how dare he, saying, “Everyone in society, through non-governmental organizations and advocacy groups, must put pressure on governments to develop and implement more rigorous regulations, procedures and controls.”
Pope Bob’s remarks were a sharp contrast to the position taken by the world’s foremost authority on morality and science, Donald Trump, who last week at the UN declared climate change a hoax and a scam, and insisted that clean energy would bankrupt any nation that used it. We bet the pope even supports treasonous terrorist escalators, too.
Leo had some choice words for climate change deniers like the US president and everyone in his cabinet, too, noting that “Some have chosen to deride the increasingly evident signs of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming, and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them the most.”
In any case, while the usual oil-drenched suspects got mad at him for being a socialist hater of rich oiligarchs, other easily freaked out fundagelicals were upset that as part of the ceremony, Pope Bob did a PAGAN IDOLATRY. Or at least he performed the completely ordinary blessing that priests and even popes do to make holy water out of ordinary H2O. But instead of doing that ritual over some liquid water, he blessed a big, 20,000-year-old chunk of ice that was brought to Italy after it was collected from an iceberg that calved from a disappearing glacier in Greenland. (He also blessed water that was brought to the conference from around the world.) We’ve cued up the video below to that blessing.
I have to admit, even though I’m no longer a believer, I was deeply touched by the symbolism of blessing that very real, concrete relic of the damage we’re doing to the planet. Especially when you consider the key role glaciers play in the planet’s water system; their slow seasonal releases of meltwater keep fresh water in streams and rivers in some of the most populous parts of the world.
That’s what I thought about while video of the ceremony occasionally cut to the ice that shared the dais — showing water dripping inexorably from the ice into a receptacle below its plinth. I don’t actually believe that blessings make water into anything miraculous … but it’s not a stretch to think that water itself is holy, what with the whole sustaining life on Earth thing it does.
Oh, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? Suggesting that we have any obligation to think about other humans — especially the least among us, those losers — is socialism, and suggesting that we need to preserve the natural systems that keep us alive is actually PAGAN NATURE-WORSHIP that will send us all to HELL. This is a long-running theme in rightwing attacks on environmentalism, going way back to the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s. In this telling, Jesus wants us to use up the planet before He returns, so trying to keep it capable of sustaining life is actually an insult to the Almighty, who is the only one who can decide whether the world goes on.
Here’s the always-awful Matt Walsh, cramming all the invective he can into a single tweet. Why yes, Walsh is a Catholic, but not the kind who thinks popes can go around blessing water like common hippies.
You get the idea. Other really smart people on social media pointed out that Pope Bob doesn’t live in a cave and still travels by jet, and that the block of ice had to be brought to Italy by motor vehicles burning fossil fuels, so who’s he to talk about the planet?
But we’ll give the last word to Pope Bob, who pointed out a thing or two about water himself.
Also too, we’ll just add that Leo has pledged to support a project initiated by Francis, a large solar farm near Rome that, when it comes online, will make the Vatican City the first carbon-neutral “state” in the world. Shame on him.
[CBS News / NPR / CNN / National Catholic Reporter / BBC / Newsweek]
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Also too, the Twitter replies to Walsh are full of people saying that "Catholics aren't Christian," with occasional cognitive dissonance from people to whom it's pointed out that Walsh is Catholic.
Updated to actually start the second video at the blessing of water bit. I swore I had that right the first time, but I did not!