When the Catholics compare their OWN POPE to Stalin, you got problems.

[Ian David]

This sign has been in front of a local Catholic church now for a few weeks now, so if it wasn't sanctioned by the local parish priest, it would have been gone long ago:


"St. Peter Built- Pope and Stalin Closed Churches."

This sign is part of a larger display of white ribbons and crude wooden crosses.

Well, at least nobody in Brockton, Massachusetts voted for Pope Ratso, did they?

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. They have to close those churches to raise money to pay off the

child molestation suits.

[knitter4democracy]

2. Most of the Catholics I know don't like him much.

They're pretty darn mad at the Church in general right now, too.

I liked what one poster here called him when he was elevated: Pope Maledict. That's what I call him, since it seems to fit pretty well.

[Ian David]

3. I like Pope Ratso. n/t

[aquamarina]

5. My fav is "Joey the Rat"

eom.

[Ian David]

4. I think we should encourage them to keep fighting to keep their churches open.

It takes time and money away from their more troublesome meddling in the rest of our lives.

[knitter4democracy]

6. At some point, though, there just isn't enough money.

Not that people aren't mad about closing of the churches, but most Catholics I know are more upset about the priest scandals and aren't giving as much money anymore as a way to starve the beast, so to speak. Okay, that was a really bad metaphor, but it kind of fits if you think of how they let those priests hurt so many and kept moving them around.

[JerseygirlCT]

8. I also think the RCC in America will continuously run into a problem

because Americans generally don't care for dictators. They're used to having a say in things that affect them. The only vote they have is with their pocketbooks. And it's a downward spiral, of course. Less money, fewer churches, less attention, less connection to the parish (and let's face it, that IS the church for most), less money. And so on.

Ratzinger is just awful. And values his authority far more than what is good for the world or even the RCC, I think.

[knitter4democracy]

13. I agree.

I see it in our church, a Russian Orthodox parish. I'd put money on it that the parish councils in the Orthodox churches in the US have more power than they do in the mother countries.

[charlie]

7. I've said it before

I think this pope is trying to woo Mel Gibson back to the church. That's my screwy theory and I'm sticking with it.

[JerseygirlCT]

9. Not SO screwy.

There's a real push to roll back the advances of Vatican II. I think you're right that Ratzinger is probably a key person who was behind it during JPII's time, and eager to push it now as well.

And Vatican II is the big sticking point for the Mel Gibson's of the world.

[charlie]

11. No, not the Mel Gibsons

THE Mel Gibson. When Benedict bags Martin Riggs, his reformation will be done. Then he can go fishing.

Like I said, screwy :D

[JerseygirlCT]

14. LOL

Oh, man, he's welcome to him.

Gibson is NUTS.

[struggle4progress]

10. He's not my favorite Pope, but to keep things in perspective, the Vatican

hasn't invaded any countries lately and doesn't have a recent history of kidnapping thousands of people to torture in secret prisons. Nor does the Vatican spend much money on weaponry, like landmines, clusterbombs, nuclear warheads, and so on

[Ian David]

12. You don't always need weapons to take over a country. n/t

[struggle4progress]

15. Somehow, I've failed to notice any spooky Catholic takeover. I guess I must be

reading the wrong websites

[Feron]

17. Or looking at it the wrong way.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/magazine/09abortion.html?ex=1302235200&en=d855d80018cd6c56&ei=5088&partner=rssuserland

[struggle4progress]

19. That's a good discussion of the reality of clandestine abortion in El Salvador today but it does not

shed much light on the political history that led to the complete ban. Offered such a ban, of course, the Catholic Church supported it: that is completely consistent with their recent history and does not really suggest that the Church adopted Stalinist tactics to obtain the ban

El Salvador has been a vast killing field since the 1930s -- and the situation became quite grim during the Reagan and Bush I period, during which US-backed death squads and military groups murdered thousands of people. If you do not know this history, you should learn something about it. It suggests certain reasons for the prestige of the Catholic Church in El Salvador and may explain why El Salvador was especially likely to adopt a "pro-life" total abortion ban

The Truth of El Mozote
December 06, 1993
By Mark Danner
http://www.markdanner.com.nyud.net:8090/images/mozote1.jpg
In a remote corner of El Salvador, investigators uncovered the remains of a horrible crime — a crime that Washington had long denied. The villagers of El Mozote had the misfortune to find themselves in the path of the Salvadoran Army’s anti-Communist crusade. The story of the massacre at El Mozote — how it came about, and why it had to be denied — stands as a central parable of the Cold War
http://www.markdanner.com/articles/show/127

Whatever you may think of the Catholic Church as an institution, a number of Catholics died violently for peacefully opposing the slaughter:

Requiem for Romero
By Maurice Walsh
Presenter, BBC Radio 4
Last Updated: Wednesday, 23 March, 2005, 18:52 GMT

... In his sermon on Sunday, March 23rd, Romero spoke directly to Salvadoran soldiers saying they were killing their own people.

"No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God", Romero declared, before pleading for an end to repression. The next day he was killed.

During our visit to El Salvador we secured a rare interview with the judge who tried to investigate Romero's assassination before he was attacked by a death squad and had to go into exile.

A UN Truth Commission - established under the peace agreement which ended the civil war in El Salvador in 1992 - concluded that the death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson had ordered Archbishop Romero's killing ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/file_on_4/4376733.stm

Published on Friday, December 2, 2005
The Life and Example of Jean Donovan
by John Dear

Twenty five years ago today, December 2, 1980, four North American churchwomen were killed by U.S.-trained and funded death squads in El Salvador. I remember exactly where I was when I first heard the news. I was a senior at Duke University, with plans to enter the Jesuits the following year. I bent down to pick up the Durham Morning Herald, and was shocked by the headline: “Four Churchwomen Killed in El Salvador.” Their bodies had been found in a shallow, unmarked grave in a barren countryside not far from the San Salvador airport ...

The three nuns were extraordinary, heroic women, and so was Jean Donovan. She was born on April 10, 1953, and grew up in upper-middle-class Westport, Connecticut. She attended Mary Washington College in Virginia, and spent a life-changing year in Ireland, where a charismatic priest committed to the Latin American poor challenged her not to waste her life pursuing money but rather, to give her life pursuing God and serving God’s poor. In late 1977, Jean quit her executive position at the Cleveland, Ohio, branch of Arthur Andersen, a national accounting firm, turned her back on First World USA, gave away her Harley Davidson, said goodbye to friends, and joined the Cleveland Diocese and Maryknoll Lay Mission program to serve in El Salvador.

She was assigned to work in the village of La Libertad, near the Pacific ocean. For the next few years, she served a parish, managed its budget, played with the children, and helped other church workers. But the brutal government’s war against the poor intensified. The streets were filled with soldiers, and dead bodies were left along the roads. Jean and the sisters began to pick up the bodies and bury them. Then they turned their attentions to supporting the distraught relatives who searched for their “disappeared” loved ones ...

Jean stayed in touch with her Irish priest friend. “Things now are so much worse, it’s unbelievable,” she wrote him in May, 1980. “People are being killed daily. We just found out that three people from our area had been taken, tortured and hacked to death. Two were young men and one was an older man. The man had been in a government death squad, had a fight with them and quit. So that’s probably why they got him. We had done a mission out there recently and they were coming to the celebrations. Everything is really hitting so close now.” That summer, Jean’s two closest friends were assassinated after they took her to a movie and walked her home. Their violent deaths devastated her ...

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1202-30.htm

The 1989 University of Central America Massacre

"Sources at the <SOA> say that when…soldiers go through the urban-combat exercise with blanks in their weapons, half the time the village priest (played by a U.S. Army chaplain) is killed or roughed up."
–Newsweek Magazine, August 9, 1993

"Many of the critics <of the SOA> supported Marxism — Liberation Theology — which was defeated with the assistance of the U.S. Army."
– United States Army School of the Americas web page, June, 1999

On the night of November 16, 1989, a Salvadoran Army patrol entered the University of Central America in San Salvador and massacred six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter. Nineteen of the military officers cited for this atrocity have received training at the US Army School of the Americas ...

http://www.soaw.org/article.php?id=44

There was eventually an international Truth Commission:

From Madness to Hope: the 12-year war in El Salvador:
Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador ...
http://www.usip.org/library/tc/doc/reports/el_salvador/tc_es_03151993_toc.html

ILLUSTRATIVE CASE: ARCHBISHOP ROMERO ...

On 24 March 1980, the Archbishop of San Salvador, Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez, was assassinated while celebrating mass in the Chapel of the Hospital de la Divina Providencia.

The Commission finds .... Former Major Roberto D'Aubuisson gave the order to assassinate the Archbishop and gave precise instructions to members of his security service, acting as a "death squad", to organize and supervise the assassination ...

http://www.usip.org/library/tc/doc/reports/el_salvador/tc_es_03151993_casesD1_2.html#D1

The simple fact is that D'Aubuisson's rightwing ARENA party was responsible for widespread massacres, extrajudicial executions, and disappearances over an extended period -- and from the beginning, the Catholic Church opposed this oppression. ARENA has remained largely in control in El Salvador ever since.

So ... here is a potential take on the actual politics of the abortion ban. Salvadorans were sick of widespread slaughter, which had ended only a few years before, and a "respect life" message was likely to meet with wide approval. ARENA, the death squad party, needed to assert that it was "pro-life" and found an abortion ban a convenient vehicle for promoting this idea. And the anti-abortion Catholic Church was certainly not about to oppose an abortion ban.

[uberllama42]

16. Red Herring.

That doesn't excuse any of what he does.

[struggle4progress]

18. If you want to compare the Pope to Stalin, expect to be asked to point out the Pope's supposed

gulags. And expect to be asked how the Pope's supposed war-making and terror apparatus compare to that of various tyrants

[uberllama42]

20. I made no such comparison.

The comparisons of the Pope to Stalin are childishly simplistic, and quite frankly embarrassing to any thinking person. To say I made the comparison is a strawman.

But you attempted to excuse the man of his faults by stating that other men had worse. That's irrelevant. We don't excuse Bush because of Hitler.

[struggle4progress]

21. Nope. Not playin. Thanx anyway. n/t

[uberllama42]

22. Pfft. Fine by me.