Pope Francis Descends on the U.S.:

We Don’t Need “Mercy” and Condemnation, We Need Liberation

October 5, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Editor’s note: For all his supposed speaking out on behalf of the poor, the environment, and the persecuted, the essential message of Pope Francis’ visit to the U.S. was to lull people into acceptance of the world as it is. On his last stop – in Philadelphia – the Pope let the “other shoe drop” with a series of ugly, overt assertions of traditional patriarchy. He held highly symbolic meetings with the Kentucky county clerk who refuses to marry same-sex couples, and with a Catholic order that  is fighting against allowing birth control insurance coverage for their employees. He insisted, in exchanges with reporters, that there is a so-called “right” for the government to persecute, discriminate, and oppress women and LGBT people as long as this is posed as a matter of individual Christians following their conscience. What emerged in sharper relief from the Pope’s stop in Philly was the degrading and vicious enslavement of women that is a core element of, and deeply woven into the Pope’s whole outlook and message. The following is from an article that appeared at revcom.us just before Pope Francis arrived in the U.S.

 

Pope Francis is being deployed to not just revitalize the Church, but to play a certain kind of role. First, to promote the traditional Catholic teaching that if people are obedient and humble, if they accept their place in the world and allow themselves to be demeaned as sinners responsible for their suffering, their lives will have meaning and they will live forever after they die. Second, to promote the idea that if people struggle for modest improvements in their lives, the Church will stand with them and speak out on their behalf. Third, that—in the case of those who the Church has almost literally demonized, including women who get abortions or use birth control, gay and lesbian people, and people who get divorced and remarry—there will be forgiveness and compassion... if they repent of their supposed sins.The pope is being hailed for supposedly enlightened and merciful changes in the Church’s position on women and LGBT people. Space does not permit us to get into all the hypocrisy and misrepresentation involved in this myth, and all the self-deception in which people who believe it are engaging. In all these cases of his so-called mercy, let it be noted, Francis is still insulting people as sinners needing to repent—the only difference being that if they are sincerely repentant they will be welcomed back into the Church.

But let’s take one example: abortion. Recently the pope announced a year of mercy and said that women who get an abortion but sincerely repent and confess to their priest may, after a year, be allowed to take communion.

Mercy? Repentance? Are you fucking kidding?

In fact, 47,000 women every year die from botched abortions, in large part due to the Church’s relentless efforts to keep or make abortion illegal. 47,000. What if the Church were to line 47,000 women against the wall? Picture them, like women you know, from all the different countries, people with lives and dreams and work and love. Then think of them murdered, one by one, nearly a thousand every week. And not just one year, not even just one decade—but for centuries. This “people’s pope” is soaked in the blood of women, from his shoes to his scarlet vestments. His profession of concern is oily insult on top of raw, unspeakable, repeated injury.Countless more millions of women are forced to bear children against their will, due to the Church’s opposition to birth control. Again—for centuries.

No woman, anywhere in the world, has anything to repent to the Catholic Church for. And no thinking person, anywhere, should fall for the sick hype about the “people’s pope.” Vindictiveness wrapped in professions of concern and mercy is still vindictiveness.

As for the Church itself? It can never atone for the suffering it has enforced and the ignorance it enshrines, every single day, vindictively and without apology. The day when all tradition’s chains on all humans—including the ideological hold and all-too-real chains of the Catholic Church—have been shattered and buried will be a truly joyous one.

People don’t need a makeover of the Church. We don’t need some guy in medieval pajamas alternately dispensing mercy and condemnation, telling us he is with us while he tries to smooth over and cover up the howling horrors of this system... giving consolation to the slave to make slavery tolerable, rather than leadership in a fight to do away with slavery... wagging his finger at the destroyers of the environment while legitimizing their right to power.

We need a revolution. And we need it as soon as possible.

Read the entire article “The ‘People's Pope’: This Is NOT a New Catholic Church.”

 

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