https://ecclesandbosco.blogspot.com/2024/03/serialization-of-pope-franciss.html?m=1 Serialization of Pope Francis's autobiography 1 We are deeply privileged to be able to print excerpts from the autobiography of Pope Francis, Life: My Story Through History, subtitled Why I was right and all other popes were wrong, which is to be published on St Joseph's Day, the 75th birthday of the great Cardinal Cupich. All the stories that Austen Ivereigh never knew about! My early career. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, I worked for a time as a bouncer, throwing people out of clubs; I came away from this job with a black belt in the ancient martial art of Papa-Slappa, which I use whenever people annoy me. I then trained as a chemist, but this was an unhappy time, as I rejected all traditional teaching (e.g. "do not put arsenic in people's sandwiches" and "acid baths can harm people") in favour of my own magisterium. I make coffee for my friend "Tucho" Fernández. I train as a priest. After my unhappy experiences as a chemist, I was looking for another career, and my mentor, Fr Juan Perón SJ, suggested that I was best suited to be either a priest or a confidence trickster. In the end we compromised, and I became a Jesuit. A few pages omitted here, Let's get on to more recent history. Eccles. I become pope! In 2005 I had already been a candidate for the papacy, but inexplicably the Holy Spirit, who has the final say in these decisions, burst out laughing and gave the job to Cardinal Ratzinger instead. What was I to do? Little did I know, apart from the fact that they telephoned me about it every day, that the Holy Spirit had appointed an organization called the St Gallen Mafia, whose job it was to make sure that Ratzinger did not stay around too long, and that I should take his place. Apart from the Godfather, Ivo Fürer, there were other notorious people. I remember Martini, who put a horse's head into Benedict's bed; Danneels, who once nailed a seminarian's head to the pew; and Kasper, who made Benedict an offer he couldn't refuse. Carlo Maria Martini and his Uncle Baal.Eventually, the Holy Spirit caused Benedict to resign suddenly, and persuaded the conclave to elect me as Pope! As someone once said "Thus proves that God has a sense of humour!" To follow: * How I corrected the errors of 2000 years of Catholicism! * Amoris Laetitia! How adultery became cool! * Pachamama! How I came to love idols! * Traditionis Custodes! How I applied Fr Juan Perón's methods! No backwardism in MY Church! * Austen Ivereigh! How a garden-gnome became a theological expert! * Synods! How to waste the time of your most irritating friends! On to Part 2!
https://ecclesandbosco.blogspot.com/2024/03/pope-franciss-autobiography-2-our-hero.html?m=1 Pope Francis's autobiography 2 - our hero starts work Our serialization of the book continues from Part 1. Me with my troublesome predecessor!The Year of Mercy Quite early in my reign I decided to institute a Jubilee Year of Mercy. As well as being very humble, I am also a particularly merciful man - except to people I don't like - so I initially proposed a slogan "Be merciful like the Holy Father!" However, owing to a clerical error (the cleric in question has now been mercifully laicised), it came out as "Merciful like the Father", which isn't at all the same thing! My great friend Marko Rupnik was in Rome, and so I asked him whether he could provide one of his artistic masterpieces as a logo. "The most appropriate thing would be a two-headed skiing instructor with three eyes," he said, "just as soon as I finish some work I have to do with my 'Nuns in Bondage'." The NIB wasn't an order I had ever come across, but I was pleased to know that Marko was reaching out to these ladies. An artistic masterpiece! Amoris Laetitia. One of my early triumphs was the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia, which followed two Synods on the Family. In those days I hadn't yet got hold of the best way to run a synod, namely, to invite trouble-makers to chatter to each other, flatter them by calling them experts, and then ignore everything they say! A few weeks before the report was due, I received a letter from Adolfo Nicolás, who was then head of the Jesuits, saying "Holy Father, your recent documents have been too easy for people to understand. Please insert some ambiguity, heresy and confusion into the next one, or we may have to review your membership of the Jesuits." I think I did rather well. The result was that four turbulent cardinals sent me five Dubia. These were questions such as "Are you off your head?" and "What do you think you are playing at?" and they were very difficult to answer! So I ignored them completely, but made a note that a bit of Merciful Persecution would be needed. Luckily, two of the cardinals died quite quickly, and one was very old. This just left my ARCH-ENEMY, Raymond Burke! I gradually took my revenge, so that now, at the time of writing, he is penniless, homeless, and under order to walk around ringing a bell and shouting "UNSAVED! UNSAVED!" Here I have him in a painful grip known as the "Chinese Burn". PachamamaOne of my great triumphs as pope has been to welcome other religions into the "big tent". Muslims, Hindus, Aztecs, Fire-worshippers, Pagans - even Anglicans - they're all just following slight variations on Catholicism. So when the time came to welcome the Amazonian indigenous groups, we bought a job lot of Pachamama idols and showed reverence to them. My dear friend Austen Ivereigh, who has already written six seven books about me, including "The Pope Francis keep-fit book" and "Pope Francis's insect-based recipes", told me that Pachamama was actually just a name used by the Blessed Virgin Mary: this sounded a bit TOO Catholic for me, but I let it pass. Then what happened? Newspaper headlines worldwide! POPE'S IDOLS NOW IN SANTA MARIA CHURCH. FRANCIS IDOLS THROWN IN TIBER POPE APOLOGISES TO PACHAMAMA FOR EARLY BATH What nonsense! As if I would ever apologise to anyone, even an Amazonian fertility goddess! Just a perfectly ordinary day in the Vatican. You may be wondering where the sex idols are now. Well, I passed them onto my great friends Marko and Tucho. They were delighted! Part 3 is the last part. Honest.
https://ecclesandbosco.blogspot.com/2024/03/pope-franciss-autobiography-3rd-and.html?m=1 Pope Francis's autobiography - the 3rd and last phase In this final instalment of Pope Francis's autobiography Life: My Story Through History, subtitled Why I was right and all other popes were wrong, which is published today, the Holy Father explain his most brilliant decisions of the last few years. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.Traditionis Custodes. My evil predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, died in December 2022. I was very pleased to comfort him in his last few months by phoning him up three times a day to tell him that I was repealing his own Summorum Pontificum and banning the traditional Latin Mass. My main ally, with one of his great interests, cakes. It was not going to be easy. At the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments there was one of my arch-enemies, Cardinal Sarah. A man who not only read books without pictures in them, but even wrote them. Yes, an intellectual, and a backwardist who kept quoting the Bible! Luckily his deputy was quite the opposite, and had never been accused of being an intellectual. An overweight power-mad bully, he reminded me of someone: who could it have been? Well, never mind. So out went Sarah and in came the Yorkshireman Arthur Roche. Uncle Arthur was delighted to have this opportunity to serve me. Provided that he was made a cardinal, he would do anything I wished: "Make the TLM compulsory? Hold all masses in the Yorkshire dialect? (I must admit that the idea of the Italians and Polish reciting 'Ee ba goom, tha Lord be with thee, luv!' was rather appealing.) Just tell me what you want and I'll do it!" So we agreed to ban the TLM, and to lean on bishops to make sure it happened. It would take a while to remove these masses entirely, so we made it hard to find them. Advertising them in the parish newsletter was OUT. Even mentioning them was now a SIN. The bishops knew that promotion was now conditional on persecuting traditionalists. AND WE ARE WINNING!Austen Ivereigh. I first encountered Austen in the Vatican gardens. Dr Austen Ivereigh has been one of most loyal allies. Because he keeps dogs, he is entitled to call himself an expert on Canine Canon Law, and as is well known, he has written many biographies of me. In the first he portrayed me as a wise and holy man, in the second he upgraded me to saint, and in the third he saw me as the fourth person of the Trinity. Recently we have been holding a synod on synodality, and Austen has been a lively and vocal participant. I gave him a little badge marked EXPERT, and he is very proud of it. Of course I haven't broken it to him that whatever the synod decides is irrelevant since I will make the final decisions. Did I ever mention that I am infallible? Sometimes it embarrasses me, being so infallible! The synod logo. Silly, but not by Rupnik. Sorry, Marko! Fiducia Supplicans. You will remember that the main message of Amoris Laetitia was "Hey, adultery's cool!" Now, more recently, I thought I would try out "Hey, same-sex marriage is cool!" To do this I needed the cooperation of someone at the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. Ladaria was no good, he might actually have had some moral scruples, but I knew just the chap to replace him. Yes, we had come full circle. I chose my old mate Víctor Manuel Fernández, known as Tucho. Since the days of our friendship in Argentina, he had made a career out of working as a male kissogram and also by writing dirty books. Just what we needed. So - and here my Jesuit training came in handy - we decided to make it permissible to bless same-sex couples, provided that we didn't call them that. They could be described as an alliance, brace, coalition, confederation, deuce, doublet, duo, dyad, item, pair, partnership, twain, twosome or union, but NEVER a couple. Unfortunately, Fr James Martin LGBTSJ gave the game away! If you want any more, you'll have to buy the book. It should soon be available from second-hand bookshops for about 50p. Eccles.
Every time I hear someone is an "expert" from now on I will think of this and laugh out loud! Way better than being angry or disgusted
To my mind the whole thing is funny, it points out many truths! Thanks for Posting Brian. However it hits home in a literal sense. So I can not give likes. If Eccles was speaking about a nincompoop at the head of some sort of leisure activity (such as an incompetent rafting leader in charge of your boat, while rafting down unsustainable rapids) we could all relate to this impossible situation and find solace in others reactions. But in our Catholic case we know, we are not dealing with a nincompoop, because if that were the case, there would be an inkling of hope for the church to turn about from the rocks. However we have seen a plethora of continuous, ad nauseum, heretical statements endorsed by the Vatican which are insidious, jeopardising many souls (who should be headed for heaven) but instead are lead to eternal damnation I agree with Tibbi Your post should be posted under, " Time for a cry" otherwise known as a "Time for a laugh"
From the Catechism of the Catholic Church: The Church's ultimate trial 675 Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers.573 The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth574 will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.575 676 The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgement. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism,576 especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.577 677 The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection.578 The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven.579 God's triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgement after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.580 573 Cf. Lk 18:8; Mt 24:12. 574 Cf. Lk 21:12; Jn 15:19-20. 575 Cf. 2 Th 2:4-12; I Th 5:2-3; 2 Jn 7; I Jn 2:1 8, 22. 576 Cf. DS 3839. 577 Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, condemning the "false mysticism" of this "counterfeit of the redemption of the lowly"; cf. GS 20-21. 578 Cf. Rev 19:1-9. 579 Cf Rev 13:8; 20:7-10; 21:2-4. 580 Cf. Rev 20:12 2 Pt 3:12-13.
Thank you, Josephite! Apart from my Mom, Christine, you're the only other person I know to have used the word, nincompoop. It brings back a deluge of memories. My holy Mom died 49 years ago, today. May she be praising the Lord before the throne as I write!
My family uses the word nimrod much more than nincompoop. Now that I know so much more about the actual Nimrod, I don't think it is the greatest word for referring to some one as an idiot. Then again, maybe it is!
I know many express disdain for the messages of Ned Dougherty, but I just happened to be reading the last 4 messages before this thread appeared, bu the certainly ring true for the Church today. As these messages say, only God's intervention [The Warning] can rescue us from the nightmare that is the world [and Church] today! Who would have believed, even ten years go, it would be so?
