re: Catholics Only: What's Your Take on Pope Francis?

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Every prayer to a saint is a prayer request on our behalf; very much the same as when you ask your preacher to pray for yo

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But they are dead

Didn't he claim to be a Marxist a couple years ago??

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What are some of those things that you noticed and based you claim on? Just curious.

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I haven't noticed anything different, that's the point. Everything he has said (outside the homosexuality thing and abortion) is something the Catholic Church would stand for.

His stances on actual politics are no different than the church IMO.

Raised a Southern Baptist. Converted to Catholicism 22 years ago. Single best thing I ever did.

Francis is a shepherd. He is pastoral. He is very geared toward mercy and forgiveness. He is not a politician, and I do find him kind of awkward when he speaks on politics. But at the end of the day he is a good Pope. He was elected in part to bring down the uber-powerful Curia. He has made a good start, but is not there yet. I hope he lives long enough to finish the job.

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(1) Your assessment of some of his more politicized statements & views.

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I don't think he's a Christian. Point blank.

Of all the popes in 2,000 years of history, none have been so nakedly motivated by political ideology. There's never been anything like this before. Don't listen to people who are trying to tell you this is normal. This is anything but normal.

Earlier in his papacy I had a whole lot of restless nights thinking about what horrible things he was portending for the future of the Catholic Church (related to various personal revelations experienced by past saints--Fatima, Malachy, etc.)

Now I've found more peace about that stuff, and I don't worry about it so much anymore. There is a general consensus among many great saints (Thomas Aquinas & Fulton Sheen among them) that the Church will suffer through a Great Apostasy, and that this apostasy (A) will come through the clergy misleading the laity; (B) will parallel the suffering of Jesus on the Cross; and (C) will NOT represent the Second Coming, but rather a better (and last?) new age in human history.

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(2) How you would compare him to other Popes of the past 50-60 years.

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Related to some of the personal revelations I mentioned above, there are many other interpretations of the Church having sold itself to the Devil that have proliferated among "Traditionalist" Catholics over the past few decades. See, for example, the theories of the late Fr. Malachi Martin on the Satanic "black mass" rites that were performed in the Vatican to coincide with the beginning of Paul VI's papacy in 1963. (He also had a dramatic take on the cover-up of the Third Secret of Fatima.)

For the record, I am not a Traditionalist, and I do not believe these types of kook theories. However, the apocalyptic fears of some conservative Catholics reflected by such "fake news" beliefs does demonstrate a very real sense of worry about the Church's erosion since Vatican II.

I don't think Vatican II was all that bad, myself, but I do agree that the Church in general has gone through a pretty painful slide over the past 60 or 70 years. It's turned into a complete shite show lately, where literally nobody can tell you definitively what Catholics are actually supposed to believe anymore.

The story on Paul VI (1963-78) is that he was supposedly a nice guy who lost his faith before he became pope, and thus had a hard time keeping the rest of the Church in line. Remember that the 1970s is when all those crazy socialist/communist nuns and openly gay seminaries sprung up everywhere, and Paul VI adamantly refused to excommunicate ANYONE, no matter how outlandish the things they promoted. However, I do respect Paul VI for holding the line on Humanae vitae in 1968, which to me is a great piece of evidence (one out of many) in favor of the Catholic faith, showing that the Holy Spirit surely intervened at that point in time (perhaps the most recent time?) to keep the core teaching of the Church infallible.

I was not a big fan of John Paul II (1978-2005), who did a lot in terms of restoring the "faith and family" conservative values of the Church, but who was also a bit of a ham for the cameras, and went way overboard with the sacramentals and side show "extras" during that time, which really distracted from the core faith. This was the era of Medjugorje and Mother Teresa of Calcutta... that and tons and tons of cheesy ecumenical interfaith "dialogues."

I consider Benedict XVI (2005-13) to be the greatest pope of my lifetime, and indeed, I probably would not be a believing Catholic today if it weren't for Benedict bringing me back to the faith intellectually. He was a thoughtful, philosophical, and deeply caring man, who sought diligently to preserve the core dogma of the faith, and to present it to the world in such a way as to invite a secular world to take the faith seriously again from an intellectual standpoint. He is sorely missed.

However, there was something extremely disturbing about his renunciation of the papacy in 2013 (complete with that darkly ominous lightning strike). This hadn't occurred since Celestine V in 1294, and it was not looked upon well then either. Dante put Celestine V in the antechamber of Hell in his Divine Comedy for renouncing the papacy, leading the Church into the awful punishment that was the papacy of Boniface VIII (at least according to Dante, who wrote of Boniface's destiny as belonging to the simoniacs of Hell). It was Boniface VIII who issued the controversial bull Unam sanctam in 1302.

This is in contrast to the incredibly high standard the Church had for popes from 1846 to 1958, with Pius IX, Leo XIII (my personal favorite over the last 1000 years), Pius X, Benedict XV, Pius XI, & Pius XII. Popes were often terrible before then, so perhaps that century can be viewed as an aberration of normal history when the Church was blessed with unusually good leadership.

(No word yet on a Jude Law type of character from New York becoming Pope Pius XIII. Let it be known that Lenny Belardo cared deeply about formal papal dress; but also received absolutely horrible advice from other historical popes.)

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Peter is dead

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The communion of saints has been known to include laughter from time to time.

He is the Vicar of Christ and therefore must be listened to and obeyed on matters of faith and morals. If there is a doctrinal issue that needs addressing and he weighs in on it, I listen, obey, and carry on.

I respectfully listen to his opinions on matters outside the faith and will either agree or respectfully disagree with him. He may be liberal but his political views do not shape the Church. His theological views do. And on theology, he's about as conservative as his predecessors. This despite how the media portrays them.

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But they are dead

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But they are alive in Heaven. Revelation 8:4 talks about the "prayers of the saints" being lifted up to God from the hands of an angel.

Catholic here. He's a liberal idiot who should stay out of politics and do something about his pedophile priests.