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The TV channels are still at it, concentrating on multitudinous details surrounding the recent election of a 76 year old Pope. Some have created even more hype from the incident where a seagull landed and loitered long upon the perch created by the installation of a chimney on the roof of the Sistine Chapel. It has become, according to the ladies of CBS News, a dove like symbol of God's blessing on the new Pope.
Glory Be!
Catholicism, in my skeptic's mind, is nothing more than a mixture of naive dependency on childlike superstition and the sheer stupidity of the human race.
Also:
If I understand it correctly, women's groups are calling for more inclusion in Church policy.
Evidently the feminists want to change, for one thing, what Church Doctrine decrees about women being excluded from the priesthood. In other words, modern women know better than does the old outmoded male hierarchy and their sexist God, and only women know what the real role of a woman should be in this enlightened twenty-first century.
When I was quite young, back in the mid to late 1940s, there were several protestant churches in my small Indiana hometown and one Catholic Church with its own Catholic Grammar School. Sometimes, while walking home in the afternoon when school let out, we encountered homeward bound students from the Catholic school. When this happened, it invariably led to the two groups picking up rocks and throwing them at each other accompanied by shouted epithets we'd learned from the older kids in the neighborhood. Stuff like: "Dirty Cat-lickers!" (Catholic-ers)" answered by "Shitty pup-lickers" (Public-ers).
My grandfather told me some eye-popping horror stories about Catholics, such as how the priests sometimes kidnapped women and protestant kids and tied them down on altars and sacrificed them by stabbing them with daggers and drank their blood from jeweled golden cups in midnight rituals called Masses.
And how horribly wrong adults often were (and still are) about things.
Most things.
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HISTORICAL CLIP
On this day in history, March 15, 44 B.C., Julius Caesar, the "dictator for life" of the Roman Empire, was murdered by his own senators at a meeting in a hall next to Pompey's Theatre.
Details at The Ides Of March
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WORD FOR TODAY
Pope
noun
The bishop of Rome as head of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Pope (Latin: papa; Greek: pappas; a child's word for father) is the Bishop of Rome and the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church. In the Catholic Church, the Pope is regarded as the successor of Saint Peter, the Apostle.
Many Protestants claim that when Catholics address priests as "father," they are engaging in an unbiblical practice that Jesus forbade: "Call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven" (Matt. 23:9). In his tract 10 Reasons Why I Am Not a Roman Catholic, Fundamentalist anti-Catholic writer Donald Maconaghie quotes this passage as support for his charge that "the papacy is a hoax."
Bill Jackson, another Fundamentalist who runs a full-time anti-Catholic organization, says in his book Christian’s Guide To Roman Catholicism that a "study of Matthew 23:9 reveals that Jesus was talking about being called father as a title of religious superiority . . . [which is] the basis for the [Catholic] hierarchy."
How do Catholics respond to such objections?
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BORN ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Born Mar 15, 1935
Age: 77 years old
Age: 77 years old
Judd Hirsch is an American actor most known for playing Alex Rieger on the television comedy series Taxi, John Lacey on the NBC series Dear John, and Alan Eppes on the CBS series Numb3rs. He is also well known for his roles in films such as Independence Day (1996), A Beautiful Mind (2001), and Ordinary People (1980), for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Born Mar 15, 1932
Age: 80 years old
Age: 80 years old
Alan LaVern Bean is a former NASA astronaut and currently a painter. Bean was selected to become an astronaut by NASA in 1963 as part of Astronaut Group 3. He made his first flight into space aboard Apollo 12, the second manned mission to land on the Moon, at the age of thirty-seven years in November 1969. During this mission, Bean became the fourth person to walk on the Moon. He made his second and final flight into space on the Skylab 3 mission in 1973, the second manned mission to the Skylab space station.
Born: Mar 15, 1914
Died: Aug 13, 1982
Died: Aug 13, 1982
Joe E. Ross (born Joseph Roszawikz) was an American actor known for his trademark "Ooh! Ooh!" exclamation, which he used in many of his roles. He starred in such TV sitcoms as The Phil Silvers Show and as Patrolman Gunther Toody of New York's 53rd Precinct in Car 54, Where Are You?.
Born Mar 15, 1935
Age: 77 years old
Age: 77 years old
Jimmy Lee Swaggart is an American Pentecostal pastor, teacher, musician, author, television host, and televangelist. He has preached to crowds around the world through his weekly telecast. According to the official website for Jimmy Swaggart Ministries, his 1980s telecast was transmitted to over 3,000 stations and cable systems each week.
Sexual scandals in the late 1980s and early 1990s led the Assemblies of God to defrock him, and to his temporarily stepping down as the head of Jimmy Swaggart Ministries. He is a cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis.
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Show business offers more solid promises than Catholicism.
--John Guare
