Two pieces of great fact-based satire yesterday from two sites I regularly check out...
13 March 2513
June 21, 2017
It is the 13 March 2513. 500 years ago, in the midst of a great crisis of faith, a heretical Pope was elected to the See of Peter.
No one remembers the event. No one – apart from people passionate of history, particularly of church history – remembers him. The second part of the XX and the first part of the XXI Century are recollected as times of great confusion, but the population at large does not care to remember those obscure times.
There is no need for it. A string of very strong Popes (Pius XIII to Pius XVII, who reigned between 2053 and 2144) fully restored Catholic orthodoxy in less than three generations, and the Church influence on Europe, America and Africa has been so strong since that the obscure times of heresy are barely remembered beside the moniker “one hundred years of heresy” or, more shortly, “the troubles”. Most Catholics don't know about Francis more than they do about the Synodus Horrenda.
There were some smaller challenges during this time. In the middle of the XXIII Century, a movement originating from Germany tried to make adultery and sodomy a venial sin and were therefore called the “Venialists” or, as they called themselves, the “Merciful”. But Pope Benedict XIX completely destroyed the heresy starting from 2352, and in twenty years the name was barely remembered.
Not that it was all so linear as it seems centuries later, mind. It never works that way. Pope Pius XIII was elected only in 2053, after his disgraceful predecessor Francis IV started to offer communion to Muslims and worked at an “interplanetary ceremony” able to unite Muslims, Jews, Hinduist, Sikh and Atheists in a “Common worship” meant to become the standard of a “unifying church of the persons of good will” (the project failed when the Pope died). What we barely notice today was a very bumpy road that went on for many decades then, for several decades from Francis I to Francis IV. But in the end, Truth triumphed. As always.
What did the Church do with Francis I to IV? What she always does with heretics: condemn, destroy, forget.
How many remember Huss or Wyclyffe? Ever wondered why? The Church destroys her heretics in a most definitive way: she obliterates them from the public consciousness.
No, you don't really need to know what Huss, or Wyclyffe or the Sillon movement preached. The Church has taken care that most people will never pose themselves the question. She destroys heretics even in their tombs. They deal with heretics so you don't have to.
And so we are here in 2513, in an age of unprecedented prosperity and religious revival. All is good in Vatican land.
You just have to be patient.
And from the Bear, the item he promised about equal time for Jesuit SG Sosa Abascal following the Bear's post on 1 John 2 and its 'anti-Christ challenge' (which I posted yesterday on the preceding page of this thread). The Bear plausibly imagines how the mustachioed paladin of Bergoglio would respond to that challenge - a response one imagines Bergoglio himself could well make...
Equal time for response
of top Jesuit Fr. Abascal
by Tim Capp
June 21, 2017
Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal begins, in the best Jesuit tradition, by smiling indulgently at the Bear's simple reading of the text of the First Epistle of John, Chapter 2, verses 18 - 26 in the previous article.
Ah, si, Oso, the Johannine Epistles. Of course the best scholarship recognizes they were written much later than claimed, by a school that associated itself with the apostle. Their author was not really the apostle, as you would know if you were a genuine scholar. Even the early Church did not know quite what to make of the epistles and Revelation attributed to him. It is doubtful that he was an historical person in the first place.
Even so, Oso, the words are relative and one must understand the audience and purpose of any passage left to us by ancient editors. Then, if you insist on applying it to real-world situations - which is a bad idea - it must be done with great discernment which the laity lack.
The truth is much less dramatic than you have imagined. The authors of this epistle were addressing local churches that had been divided by a different understanding of the new faith, most likely Gnostics of some sort.
In fact, this epistle is not even relevant to Catholics today. For example, we have a much broader understanding of who comprise the People of God on this great human pilgrimage.
Your simple-minded reading of the text out of context would eliminate our Muslim brothers and sisters in their own valid faith-experience of one of the three Great Abrahamic Religions. Such an exclusivist view of the Christian Faith was buried with Father Feeney. [Laughs.]
The requirement is not any sort of intellectual acceptance of some first-century Christ-figure, whose myths were collected around a possibly historical rabbi, or at any rate movement of universal love. Christianity is one of many simple expressions of mercy in today's world, a world that is much larger and more diverse than any imagined by the third-century editors of the Johannine school.
The Church is evolving into a reinterpretation of the Christ-figure that leads it to accompany everyone without exception, but especially those on the peripheries: the poor, the refugees and the migrants. Indeed, we must learn to do without the facile certainties of old labels like 'Catholic,' and even 'Christian.' Labels divide. We must never smugly formulate our brothers and sisters with a word. Only triumphalists do this.
"The existence of the crisis of Global Warming proves to us that we are all just humans being, facing the same threats, the same questions, and finding answers suited to our experience, heritage and language. The answers are unimportant. What is important is the image of each of us touching one another in mute loving ways and finding reciprocal acceptance beyond all ancient arguments, modern borders. or outdated arbitrary cultural constructs such as morality and gender.
Your implication that Pope Francis may be an antichrist, besides being shockingly non-Catholic and uncharitable, shows a naive, even childish proof-texting that is the result of wrenching the text from its context. Catholics can hardly insist on the biblical texts as some sort of 'divine oracle.' That is superstition, and one that the Catholic Church has always condemned. They did not have tape recorders in those days, you know. But I am sure you have not considered that essential fact in your petty bourgeoisie piety.
It is not only futile, then, but dangerous to rely on... [laughs again] your quaint reading of your Bible. Read it for inspiration, if you must, but leave the interpretation of it to scholars who have spent years in training. You are, after all, merely a Bear.
The Bear's counter-argument: 2 Kings 2:24
Although the above illustration is taken from the Bear's 'Bearmageddon' collection of bear-related humor,
the Bible quotation cited is authentic.
Elisha was a major Hebrew prophet and a wonder-worker whose story is recounted in the Old testament. A disciple and protege of the prophet Elijah, whom he succeeded as leader of the ‘sons of prophets’ after Elijah was taken up to heaven by a whirlwind. He held the office ‘prophet of Israel’ for six decades (892-932 BC). Shortly after Elijah’s ascension, Elisha went to Bethel where a group of young men [not literally children as the USCCB translation has it, but in the sense of ‘teenage ruffians’ connoted by the Hebrew term used] taunted him for his baldness. Elisha cursed them in the name of Yahweh and two female bears came out of the forest and killed forty-two of the boys.
It has been explained that 2 Kings 2:23-24 is not an account of God mauling children for making fun of a bald man. Rather, it is a record of an insulting demonstration against God’s prophet by a large group of young men. Because these young people of about 20 years of age or older (the same term is used of Solomon in 1 Kings 3:7) so despised the prophet of the Lord, Elisha called upon the Lord to deal with the rebels as He saw fit. The Lord’s punishment was the mauling of 42 of them by two female bears.
The penalty was clearly justified, for to ridicule Elisha was to ridicule the Lord Himself. The seriousness of the crime was indicated by the seriousness of the punishment. The appalling judgment was God’s warning to all who would scorn the prophets of the Lord.*
Several minutes later, after wiping his muzzle carefully with a napkin and brushing his fangs.) "Nothing tastes worse than antichrist," says the Bear with a toothpick in his jaws, "but what's a Bear supposed to do?"
*Additional commentary on the punishment by bear:
The prophet must be justified, for he did it by divine impulse. Had the curse come from any bad principle God would not have said Amen to it. We may think it would have been better to have called for two rods for the correction of these children than two bears for the destruction of them.
But Elisha knew, by the Spirit, the bad character of these children. He knew what a generation of vipers those were, and what mischievous enemies they would be to God’s prophets if they should live to be men, who began so early to be abusive to them. He intended hereby to punish the parents and to make them afraid of God’s judgments.
God must be glorified as a righteous God, that hates sin, and will reckon for it, even in little children. Let the wicked wretched brood make our flesh tremble for fear of God. Let little children be afraid of speaking wicked words, for God notices what they say. Let them not mock any for their defects in mind or body, but pity them rather; especially let them know that it is at their peril if they jeer God’s people or ministers, and scoff at any for well-doing.
Let parents, that would have comfort in their children, train them up well, and do their utmost betimes to drive out the foolishness that is bound up in their hearts; for, as bishop Hall says, "In vain do we look for good from those children whose education we have neglected; and in vain do we grieve for those miscarriages which our care might have prevented.’’
Elisha comes to Bethel and fears not the revenges of the bereaved parents; God, who bade him do what he did, he knew would bear him out.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/06/2017 18:52]