But be true shepherds, with your crooks always in your hands. Do not go to sleep, but guard on all sides the flock committed to you. For if through your carelessness or negligence a wolf carries away one of your sheep, you will surely lose the reward laid up for you with God. And after you have been bitterly scourged with remorse for your faults, you will be fiercely overwhelmed in hell, the abode of death.
Pope Urban II, Speech at Council of Clermont, 1095
The latest atrocity by ISIS brought a predictable response from the Pope:
Go here to read the rest. Let us recall the oft repeated claim by the Pope that wars are caused by arms merchants. I can understand why the Pope believes this fable. It is easier to condemn wars if one does not have to recognize that wars are almost always the product of basic conflicts between two or more groups over land, ideology, religion, etc. Wars would be easy to stop if they were simply caused by the machinations of a handful of greedy men. Such is not the case, and as a result wars are hard to avoid and harder to stop. The Pope’s condemning the attacks as “blind violence”, couldn’t be farther from the truth. ISIS seeks to set up a caliphate in the Middle East that will ultimately encompass the globe. These type of dramatic attacks enhance their status among radical Muslims, and produces more fear of ISIS around the world. From the point of view of ISIS these attacks are certainly not blind violence, but rather an essential part of their struggle to power.
Pope Francis of course has no clue how to deal with ISIS. He has fully embraced the anti-war ethos of the contemporary West. He has faith in dialogue and a strong instinct that if the West only ramps up economic assistance to the Middle East and takes in an unlimited amount of Middle Eastern “refugees”, all will be well. The Pope truly does believe this fatuous nonsense and therefore when an event like the attacks in Belgium occur, they have to be “blind”, “irrational”, etc. Accepting that we are dealing with a cruel enemy with a carefully thought out goal that they are seeking to implement atrocity by carefully executed atrocity, would cause the Pope to be calling for the use of military force, and lots of it, to ensure that not only the victims of ISIS need to fear sudden death, and to stop ISIS in its course. Alas, the Pope would sooner eat ground glass than accept an obvious truth: Si vis pacem, para bellum.
“… wars are almost always the product of basic conflicts between two or more
groups over land, ideology, religion, etc.”
.
The only peaceful resolution to Europe’s increasing violence surrounding its
recently imported islamist underclass is for most of those immigrants to become
Christians and assimilate. Unfortunately, Europe’s elites, our current Pope
included, take a dim view of proselytizing, and instead make an idol of
“diversity”. I get the sneaking feeling that the elites of the EU fear a population
of newly converted, committed Christians more than they fear the increasingly
violent islamist underclass.
Pope Francis …EYES WIDE SHUT…that’s about the description of this Papacy
Note that “blind violence” reduces Mahommedans to the status of unreasoning beasts: like a rabid dog, they simply attack without knowing why.
It’s often the little things with this pope. Could anyone possessing the Catholic faith really speak of “blind violence”, as if they’d never heard of sin? This is the way liberals speak. Lacking a theology of sin and rejecting the concepts of human nature and objective truth, they are intellectually disarmed before the brute fact of iniquity.
Evangelii Gaudium, paragraph 253.
Murray-
It just as easily is a continuation of the long-standing Church condemnation of indiscriminate violence, going all the way back to the attempt to ban crossbowmen and archers, supposedly because they were used in a rather scatter-shot way rather than the way it’s hard to accidentally hit a random person with a sword.
Blind violence, as opposed to specific and targeted violence; ‘spray and pray’ vs a sniper.
****
Part of why bombs are especially horrific is because they are so random, as opposed to someone with a handgun shooting specific people. The people setting these don’t care who dies, so long as death comes.
Link for Dale’s…quote thing.
http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html#Interreligious_dialogue
He threatened the mafia with hell and excommunicated them in June of 2014 during a speech. Ecumenism placed at the level of the ten commandments apparently prevented him and his predecessors from using the world media to threaten jihadists with hell. Popes may think they are local…but as vicar of Christ, they really can warn any non Catholic religionist about hell….not as to skipping Mass….but as to especially crimes against humanity….the obvious natural law things.
The full quote for the image at top:
Fourth question, by an Egyptian boy. “Dear Pope, we are from countries that are poor and at war. The school cares for us. Why don’t powerful people help the school?”
Why don’t powerful people help the school? We can also broaden the question a bit: why is it that so many powerful people don’t want peace? Because they live on war! The arms industry: this is grave! The powerful, some of the powerful, profit from the production of arms and they sell arms to this country which is against that one, and then they sell them to the one that goes against this one. It is the industry of death! And they profit. You know, greed does us so much harm: the desire to have more, more and more money. When we see that everything revolves around money — the economic system revolves around money and not around the person, around man, around woman, but around money — so much is sacrificed and war is made to protect the money. And because of this, many people don’t want peace. There is more profit with war! Money is earned, but lives are lost, culture is lost, education is lost, so many things are lost. This is why they don’t want it. An elderly priest that I met years ago used to say this: the devil enters through the pocketbook, through greed. This is why they don’t want peace!
http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/may/documents/papa-francesco_20150511_bambini-la-fabbrica-della-pace.html
Except that this is specific and targeted violence; that is, targeted specifically at ordinary Europeans innocently going about their business, in order to convey the message that no public area is safe. They are specific and targeted in exactly the same way as the 9/11 attacks were, albeit of two lower orders of magnitude. So far.
.
Following your logic, we should apparently regard terrorist attacks carried out with handguns (or scimitars, etc.) as being of a lower order of evil. Take the Bataclan, for instance, where the Mahommedan savages got to execute their victims up close and personal, man to man. We might even say, paraphrasing Pope Benedict XVI, that those terrorists who use hand weapons may be taking the first step in respecting the life of another even if the evil of [terrorism] remains in all its gravity.
..and I really don’t see how the full quote mitigates things; if anything, it’s even more obtuse and ignorant than the excerpt.
.
Keep in mind that the pope neglects to answer the child’s question, preferring instead to launch into a completely unrelated (and entirely loopy) disquisition on arms merchants. After all, we all know how the Australian Aborigines, lacking arms merchants, lived in an almost Edenic paradise of peace and harmony with each other.
Murray –
before you try to follow someone’s logic, you should check that you actually understand it.
The equivocation with the word “specific and targeted” would be a clever segue to a point of your own; unfortunately you treated it as a point in itself and neglected to make any sort of argument against what I said.
****
..and I really don’t see how the full quote mitigates things; if anything, it’s even more obtuse and ignorant than the excerpt.
Then perhaps you should go find out something about the situation in Egypt, specifically how their military works. I’d suggest Bryan Suits of KFI, if you have decent tolerance for an Army guy’s radio-edited phrasing.
America isn’t the whole world, and the whole world isn’t Christian. The Middle East and China especially do not share most of our assumptions, yet people insist on reading everything the Pope says as if he’s talking about American conservatives, the USA and Europe. *sigh*
By the by, the full quote was provided because I like facts, not to “mitigate” something.
Gasp, someone on line is giving links to sources– start making assumptions about their motivation! Rather than, y’know, considering that it may be a long-standing habit because I don’t like unsourced graphics.
Foxfier,
.
To the contrary, I understood you and answered you. You imposed your own preferred Catholic meaning onto the pope’s words, choosing to believe that by “blind violence” he really meant to invoke a specific point of Church teaching against indiscriminate violence as opposed to specific and targeted violence. The only trouble with your interpretation is that it makes no logical sense, it is invoked in the wrong context, and it has monstrous implications. Look again at what he is reported to have said:
.
[Pope Francis] again condemns the blind violence which has caused so much suffering, and he implores God for the gift of peace, invoking upon the grieving families and on all Belgians the benefit of divine blessings.
.
According to your interpretation, the Holy Father is merely condemning the indiscriminacy of the murders; to follow your logic to its conclusion, he is deploring the fact that the barbarians did not individually walk up to their victims and shoot them. This is actually a far less charitable reading of his remarks than mine. I believe he was merely mouthing the required liberal pieties about evil being mystifying, or “hard to understand“. Do you think he would have preferred them to use “specific and targeted” violence instead?
.
Furthermore, we know that the pope condemned terrorism in similarly befuddled terms after the Paris attacks, which did involve specific and targeted violence; that is, individual attackers selecting specific individuals and shooting them. How likely is it that he is merely condemning the indiscriminate nature of the means in this case, rather than the violence itself?
.
Finally, on this point, the teaching you cite applies primarily to lawful combatants operating in a theater of war; combatants, moreover, whom it assumes are susceptible to moral suasion on the moral means that may be used in warfare. And it worked, to a large extent: most nations formally agree to abide by certain laws of warfare in order to place limits on the suffering of non-combatants. But it simply does not apply to unlawful combatants whose entire aim is to maximize the suffering of innocents by any and all means available.
Murray –
To the contrary, I understood you and answered you.
You’re welcome to your own views, but not your own facts. Other than noting that your next sentence is some weapons grade projection, I can see no reason to spend any more time trying to communicate with you.
I’m going to take that as an implicit concession, Foxfier. Otherwise,
.
Then perhaps you should go find out something about the situation in Egypt, specifically how their military works. I’d suggest Bryan Suits of KFI, if you have decent tolerance for an Army guy’s radio-edited phrasing.
America isn’t the whole world, and the whole world isn’t Christian. The Middle East and China especially do not share most of our assumptions, yet people insist on reading everything the Pope says as if he’s talking about American conservatives, the USA and Europe. *sigh*
I’m actually not a conservative, and really couldn’t care less about the pope attacking conservatives, as he is wont to do. But who here claimed he was talking about conservatives? I expect a great many arms manufacturers are good liberals, operating as they do in the highest reaches of the liberal state.
.
Otherwise, I honestly have no idea what you’re trying to say. The pope made a broad factual claim about the causes of war. The question therefore is, Is this claim true? Its truth value is entirely independent of the situation in Egypt, America, China, or the Middle East, whether anyone is Christian, or what assumptions you start from.
.
I contend that not only is his claim not true, but that it betrays a mindset that is dangerously ignorant of human nature and our propensity to sin. For instance, World War I started when Germany backed Austria-Hungary’s rejection of the Serbian response to the Franz Ferdinand assassination, Russia backed Serbia, France backed Russia, Germany invaded Belgium to defeat the French before the Russians could mobilize, Britain intervened on behalf of Belgium and France, and the rest is history. Where were the arms manufacturers? Did greedy capitalists persuade Genghis Khan to attempt to conquer Europe and the Middle East? Did Saul wipe out the Amalekites because of the enticements of avaricious spear manufacturers? Was there an arms dealer whispering in Cain’s ear?
.
We could certainly inquire into the role of weapons manufacturers and bankers in prolonging or intensifying wars, and I’m certain we’d find tons of fascinating material, but the pope made a far more sweeping claim than that. And once again, the only important question is, Is it true? No.
May the souls of the murdered victims rest in peace, may the injured and the loved ones of those murdered be consoled and healed, may the terrorists who did this be brought to eternal justice, may Islam be cast into hell to burn forever, and may the Pope repent of his ludicrous idiocy or failing that, be deposed and anathematized.
“He has faith in dialogue and a strong instinct that if the West only ramps up economic assistance to the Middle East and takes in an unlimited amount of Middle Eastern “refugees”, all will be well. ”
.
I’m not so sure I totally believe he believes that. It isn’t as if the Vatican or diocesan offices and the like are taking in a multitude of these “refugees,” nor offering massive amounts of their “own” monies from the Church coffers.
I’d like to know the size of the homemade bomb industry and its market capitalization. And who are these arms merchants supplying rice cooker bombs?
Bishops should stick to speaking about matters of which they have a charism and proven expertise. Otherwise they cast doubt on their authority to speak competently about anything.
Perhaps you fail to realize that when Vatican City State with its population of less than 1,000 citizens takes in one refugee family that is proportional to the USA with its population of 300 million citizens taking in 300,000 refugee families. There’s your multitude.
Interesting that pope Francis offers specific recommendations to fight climate change along with a list of condemned culprits while, in the case of Islamic terror, talks in meaningless generalities.
Here’s Ann Barnhardt’s recommendation:
http://www.barnhardt.biz/2016/03/22/furthermore-i-consider-that-islam-must-be-destroyed/
If only the spirit of Pope Pius V would inhabit our dear pontiff.
“Bishops should stick to speaking about matters of which they have a charism and proven expertise.”
That would exclude some of them speaking about Christ.
The spiritually blind pope condemning blind violence is a perfect irony. For those of us who have family members in the line of advance of the coming Caliphate, history will be severe in judging his, and our episcopal leaders’, smiling accomodationist approval of the mass invasion..
…
To wit, my daughter who lives with her husband and my granddaughter about 40 miles s. of Brussels, fortunately in the countryside which is still Catholic, fairly traditional, and opposed to the dimwits running the country, checked in with this report by e-mail:
…
” It’s been a rough day today. There’s this sort of surreal atmosphere. I guess people really thought it would never happen here (despite the Paris attacks). They’re not sure if its in retaliation for capturing Abdesalam, or if they were afraid Abdesalam would talk and expose their plans so they bumped them up to today, but intel has recently released that their investigation suggests he was supposed to take part in today’s attacks.
The media here isn’t censored, and I watched it since very soon after the first bombings in Zaventem, around 9am, and caught it in time to see Maalbeek happen.. In all, I’d say Belgian authorities were (suspiciously?) well prepared for the attack. and that idiot Jambon [Jan Jambon, deputy minister for “security”) (pm. French word for “Ham”, which is what he is…) said, “What we had feared has happened.” Sigh.
Makes me wonder if intel knew something was up but wanted to try to catch the perps before the attacks. Who knows. The hall where we last saw each other is gutted. People died in front of the check-in counter where we’ve stood many, many times.. The ceiling panels fell and injured many. Almost all the front windows have been blown out, from the nail bombs and force of the blast. The authorities had said from the beginning the bombs were different from regular explosives because of the blast damage.. We always thought it dangerous that one could just walk up into the airport hall from the street. If you know your way around, it’s easy to get in without much fuss, as you probably remember. And now London is on high alert, as they expect a similar multi-phased attack imminently. Needless to say, we’ll have to change our Brussels/Heathrow/LA flight plans ha.
So that’s the quick recap of today.. It’s been a long, sad day here…”
…
I also saw the photos of the check-in counter on Drudgereport, and what she is referring to is that we have stood at the counter very near by where British Airways is located, many, many times. People had their legs blown off (at least 5) and bled to death instantly. Witnesses said the floors ran with blood.
….
Thank you, P Francis, Card Kasper, and many others, for your perfectly useless leadership.
Oh the pity! God bless your daughter Steve and all who are caught in this maelstrom.
The human suffering while ideologues blinded by ideology do what blind guides do. May God send us help from heaven.
Dale Price- your quote Evangelii Gaudium, paragraph 253 is a bullseye, –
what mularkey, and from a supreme pontiff no less
Micha- It is also no doubt easier to carefully vet one refugee family than 300,000.
” I believe he was merely mouthing the required liberal pieties about evil being mystifying, or “hard to understand“. Do you think he would have preferred them to use “specific and targeted” violence instead?
.
Furthermore, we know that the pope condemned terrorism in similarly befuddled terms after the Paris attacks, which did involve specific and targeted violence; that is, individual attackers selecting specific individuals and shooting them. How likely is it that he is merely condemning the indiscriminate nature of the means in this case, rather than the violence itself?”
It has been my experience that since Leftists don’t believe in absolutes that they are generally unable to define evil, accept that people as individuals are evil and/or individually accountable for it. One cannot take effective action against something one cannot accurately define or even correctly name.
If there is a definition of evil to the Leftist, it seems to be the free expression and/or action taken upon ideas with which the Leftists does not agree, politically.