Perhaps not high on his faults, but the Pope is one of the dumbest men to ever be Pope. Making policy through interviews as he constantly does is an error that few first year priests would make. Heckuva job Conclave of 2013, heckuva job.
PopeWatch: White Flag
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Given that Francis has created a large chunk of the Cardinals who are going to choose his successor, I’m not holding out too much hope for the next Conclave.
Ofcourse everyone wants Peace, nobody wants war? The loss of innocent life, the destruction of cities, people’s homes…But what bargaining power does Ukraine have to negotiate? All nice words from PF. But they are only words.
Ukraine could never win alone.
Ukraine could never win alone.
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So what?
Dunno… maybe if he spends more time on secular politics he can show his general fallibility and educate the hyperpapalists.
Besides, there would be less time to write encyclicals 👍
Rewarding invaders would probably be ineffective at reducing invasions.
PF certainly proves himself a) to be an intellectual lightweight, b) a jesuit (but I repeat myself, c) someone with an aversion to reading St. Thomas Aquinas (again, I am being redundant). Part of understanding Just War theory is knowing there is such a thing as an Unjust Peace. He just advocated that.
It is worth noting that in January 2022, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was the most vociferously-pro-papal of the Eastern Catholic Churches.
That verb is very much past tense.
It is also worth noting that Putin has outlawed the UGCC in the parts of Ukraine that Russian forces control, and two Greek Catholic priests are missing and likely dead after being taken by the security forces.
That people insist on cringing, servile loyalty to this man is…truly something.
deco, it matters bc we are funding a war that could never be won in current form.
I’ll agree w the “so what” if we don’t fund anymore.
I don’t share the deep hatred some have for Russia it seems.
“I don’t share the deep hatred some have for Russia it seems.”
This is an uncharitable assumption to make, MrsOpey. Couldn’t it be the murdering and the invading (bombing, shooting, destroying) that folks hate, rather than Russia?
CAG, it’s a lot more complicated than that bc I’m old enough to remember our own Congress denouncing the current administration in Ukraine bc of being Nazis and ties!
And also an interest in what was being reported they were killing own citizens bc they were Russian/speaking!
eco, it matters bc we are funding a war that could never be won in current form.
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You haven’t defined your objects.
bc of being Nazis
Untrue other than the Azov Battalion. One of many ridiculous pretexts that Putin has used to justify his attempt to conquer Ukraine in his attempt to rebuild the old Soviet Union.
Greg,
I’m not optimistic about the next conclave, either. Humanly speaking, I think it would take another 50 or 60 years for the filth to be washed out of the Vatican. But then again, I remember Chesterton’s wonderful lines about the “funeral” held for the Church at the end of the 18th century: “And then the corpse did a very surprising thing: it came back to life.”
The problem with Russia is that it had no Nuremberg. The old Reds were out of power after 1991, but neither they nor their lieutenants (among which Putin) were held accountable for the crimes of the Soviet Union. Had there been trials (and hangings), all of us would have been better off, and the Idiot Left in this country might be less likely to praise a Communism whose corpses were spread out all to see.
RE Russia invading Ukraine, we notably still don’t know what Russia wants. If Putin merely wanted those areas most amenable to him, …he could have sued for peace by winter 2022. If we remember the Soviet Union, …so does he. Zelenskyy isn’t perfect; neither are our own political figures. We don’t need to like Zelenskyy to seek to keep Ukraine independent of Russia.
As for Francis suggesting Ukraine ought sue for peace, …I cannot think of any occasion when any modern pope encouraged war.
Regrettably, Francis seems to forget how negotiating with Hitler in Munich did not prevent Nazi Germany from invading Poland or annexing other neighboring nations.
“The problem with Russia is that it had no Nuremberg.”
Be careful what you seek. They had no Nuremberg after 1945 either. Then again, neither did we. Bombing or firebombing cities wasn’t very humane; we still did it for the purpose of breaking Germany’s wartime economy and spirit. Then again, …I have never understood how someone could condemn the Holocaust, yet insist on honoring “a woman’s right to choose”.
he problem with Russia is that it had no Nuremberg.
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Disagree. The constitutionalist element in the Russian political class was discredited by the catastrophic economic implosion after 1991. Some of it may have been baked in the cake given the disruption in the planning system from the break up of the Soviet Union. Other aspects were an ill-managed privatization program which was also shot through with corruption. The Central Asian states (bar Kyrgyzstan) remained boss-ruled, as did Azerbaijan. Russia and White Russia had a constitutional interlude followed by the re-imposition of boss rule. The others seemed to have maintained a competitive political order in spite of uneven economic performance.
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Putin and Lukashenko made satisfactory, if not optimal, calls in public policy for 20-odd years and both countries enjoyed an economic and social revival. That aside, neither are admirable as political actors and (we’ve discovered in the last two years) Putin is a lunkhead revanchist, and Russia does not need that. Hasn’t been working out for Russia; Putin’s admirers stateside haven’t figured that out yet.
I don’t share the deep hatred some have for Russia it seems.
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You’re not insightful.
@MrsOpey –> I agree that Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his government are corrupt, and that the Biden Crime Syndicate is up to its eyeballs in corrupt dealings with Ukrainian methane gas company Burisma. Further, Zelenskyy is pro-abortion, pro-sodomy. Nevertheless, Putin is still a murderous gangster ex-KGB agent strongman. Maybe that’s the only kind of person whom the Marxist Peronist Caudillo currently occupying the Seat of St. Peter can understand. Putin was the one who initiated force, not the Ukrainians. Further, the ones suffering the most are the innocent Ukrainian women and children in harm’s way, and the Russian soldier boys being sent as canon fodder to fight a stalemated contest that no one is currently winning. I don’t wish harm on either the Russians or the Ukrainians. I suspect no one here at TAC does either. I do wish that Putin and Zelenskyy were both deposed from power. But I also wish that same thing for both Pope Francis and President Biden. BTW, I think it’s wonderfully great that Russia is returning to her Christian Orthodox roots. But that’s not an entitlement to Patriarch Kirill’s ingratiation with the Putin government nor permission to condemn members and clergy of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church as Uniates. From an outsider’s perspective, I can’t tell the difference between Divine Liturgy at a UGCC and at a regular Ukrainian or Russian Orthodox Church. Summary: Pope Francis doesn’t understand any of these things, and doesn’t care to. He just wants to go down in history as the hero who made peace between Ukraine and Russia. Whether there really is peace or not is irrelevant.
It’s likely that the closest thing to an honest mediator for peace in this situation is Pope Francis. We should pray for him.
[…] Francis:PopeWatch: White Flag – Donald R. McClarey, Esq., at The American CatholicUkrainian Greek Catholics to Francis: […]
https://the-american-catholic.com/2024/03/11/popewatch-white-flag/#comment-405573
Yes.
But I don’t think it was unprovoked. Russia took advantage of weak world leaders. It seems Russia benefited greatly from Biden being in office 🤔
There were no white flags at Constantinople in 1453.