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UPSG -> RE: Condoms in Africa, best you can do ? (3/26/2009 12:16:28 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: LaTigresse
I've known several intelligent people that spoke multiple languages. It didn't make them admirable or worthy of leading people.
As for what the pope said in that snippit, it reminds me of far too many political speeches I've heard. A lot of blah blah blah blah, to cover up that they will simply continue on with their own agenda while using the smoke screen of doing something wonderful for the poor lost souls in the world.
When the catholic church sells off its huge fortune, in art, real estate, etc.......and gives it all towards actually DOING something seriously productive in this world, instead of hiding behind it and preaching a bunch of outdated nonsense, I might give them some small amount of consideration as a worth while organization.
I don't think Catholics really care what you think, be they Mexican or Angolan.
The Catholic Church is one of not the largest material charity organization in the world. The churches or "cathedrals" belong to the heritage of the Church from one generation to the next. The basilica in Milwaukee was built by poor Polish Catholic immigrants. Many Catholic churches were. Many of the huge cathedrals in Europe were built over generations and often times financed by various guilds.
In comparative terms to modern industrial based and serviced based economies the Vatican is no where comparative to cities like Milwaukee or Chicago in wealth. That's basic economics. And certainly in hell can't be compared to the wealth of nation-states like the United States.
But again, these things belong to Catholics, like the White House belongs to the heritage and people of the United States. Catholics have every right - over the course of 2,000 years I might add - to acquire material properties.
I received Catholicism from my mother (not my father - he's not even Catholic) and not from any Pope or Priest or whatever spooky image Hollywood likes to produce. Like many other Catholics it was my mother that was trying to steer me as a child in the direction of the Priesthood. And my mother like many Catholics in the U.S. has been (and she as always remained) a voting Democrat. My mother also marched in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and was incarcerated for it.
This bigoted idea that all Catholics are this one narrow way inflicting suffering on all men comes from ingrained prejudice. Catholic Priests and Popes almost always come from Catholic families just as Jewish Rabbi's come from Jewish families or Buddhist monks and nuns come from Buddhist families. The Mexicans receive their Catholic religion from their families like Thai Buddhists receive their Buddhist religion from their Buddhist families. President Lula in Brazil is Catholic - I know he was very much so in his young adult years from a biography I have on him. The cat is missing one finger he lost working in a factory, he grew up in literal abject poverty (not what economist would term "relative poverty"), dropped out of grade school as a child, became a union leader, was incarcerated opposing the U.S. backed military regime of Brazil, eventually became President (both him and Chavez have Lincoln like rises to the Presidency never to be heard of again in the U.S. - where Harvard and a handful of universities, not UW-Milwaukee, are King Makers), and has passed one of the most praised "cash-transfer" programs in the world: The Bolsa Familia Program (even New York City is consider modeling it).
President Lula remarked before Obama was elected, projecting his win, that his (Lula) rise and that of Chavez, Evo Morales, and a former Catholic Bishop in another Latin American country, and now that of Obama in the United States, marks the great changes taking place throughout the Americas. I understand his comment about the former Catholic Bishop (The Vatican does not want Priests running for public offices and wants that left to the secular world - it only wants to remain in the sphere of teaching and or lobbying and influencing it's flock, so, the Bishop requested to the Vatican to be allowed to step down from his Priestly position so he could fight and serve the poor and his people in the secular sphere of civil service) because I've read a couple of books from the renowned Liberation Theologians in Latin America and I know Catholic clergy very close association with the poor in many of those nations. It's claimed a number of the U.S. sponsored Evangelical Protestant groups, operating in Latin America, are linked with the CIA. I don't know how true that is but I know some of them push not just a "prosperity gospel" but advocate right-wing politics and neoliberal economic policies throughout Latin America.
I went to a predominantly black Catholic grade school and then to a predominantly white Catholic high school. Both schools were shaped culturally, not just by Catholicism but by local racial histories and ethnic cultures. Yes, there were racist white kids at that school, its the society and homes they came from. A former Black Panther I know told me about watching Catholic, working class, Polish men punch Catholic nuns in the face as they marched acrossed the famed viaduct that separated "Poland from Africa" in Milwaukee in the 60's. Thos Polish Catholics were not the mixed-race morenas and mulatta Catholics in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. I understand this easily as do the multitudes of Latino Catholics who view Catholics as looking like me. Who's right, who's wrong, is the truth somwehere in the middle? Does your "truth" become the infallible truth?
I know Americans (United Statesians) view "Catholic" as = "white," "male," "Pope in Rome," and "rich chuches." People can deny this all they want but I hear it in the tone and I see it in the diction of the posts and or comments. People of the United Stastes also view "America" and "American" as = "the United States" and "U.S. citizens." Europeans often fall into this line of reasoning too.
As for me, I admire the Pope for his ability to speak several languages, but I also am a product of the Generation X, Black-American males, and specifically in the culture of the Midwest and Milwaukee. The post-industrial experience of the U.S. has been significantly different for us. The "economy is bad" now for White-Americans so it's consequently "a national problem." The economy has been "bad" for fuckin years for us. In my world cats my age - and often younger - are killed or go to prison for the better part of their life. I have friend my age right now in prison doing over 30 years each. A good friend of mine - raised Protestant (though he never was an active Christian) - has just been sentenced to 10 years in prison. None of these men have college education. Their education was the streets. A very refined, and highly educated, Black-American Priest advised me clamly and spoke to me like a man, several years ago, stating: "You need to go back to school, so that if you have a family you can adequately take care of them." Two of my friends in prison right now left children behind out here in Milwaukee.
So, yeah, the Pope speaking several languages to you might not mean anything, but for me I look at him and find some little encouragement to endeavor for similar.
Was that Priest that advised me spreading "evil"? Was his suggestion to me something that could harm Black-American women and families?
It doesn't matter how you answer that. I know how to answer it for myself. And for me that's what's important.
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