April 21, 2008
Pope Benedict XVI arrived in the United States last week against a macabre backdrop featuring reports of torture, execution and war. He chose not to notice.
Torture: Fresh reporting by ABC from inside sources depicted George W. Bush’s most senior aides (Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Rice and Tenet) meeting dozens of times in the White House during 2002/03 to sort out the most efficient mix of torture techniques for captured “terrorists.”
4 comments:
Last week I left the Episcopal Church after 57 years. I was a cradle-to-grave Episcopalian; now I'm just a cradle-to-disgusted one. I went to church in Calhoun County, Alabama, home to one of the largest concentrations of WMD's in the world. For five years, our priest has only talked about Christ's "peace" in generalities: never once has he said the words "Iraq War," and when I asked him about waterboarding, he quoted the "ticking time bomb" scenario to me. Asked why he has never addressed the war directly, he excused himself by saying that he didn't want to upset the military parishioners unnecessarily. I asked him to at least inform the parish that our national church has condemned the war and waterboarding; he would not do that either: so sayonara, Episcopal Church.
Thank you, Ray McGovern, for expressing the great disappointment I feel in the Pope.
I am a new Catholic, received into the Church at about the time of Benedict accession - I admire and respect this Pope. But his speech at Regensburg disappointed me (although he later tried to make amends) and now this visit. It was very painful to see BXVI pictured with Bush. Thanks you for expressing so well what has been troubling me.
The problem in America, as far as mainstream "organized" (and how!) Christianity is concerned, is that politicians have used pulpits as political rallying platforms for so long that "believers" cannot today separate what they say their "moral" beliefs are, from what they say their political beliefs are. Long sentence? Yes. But also true.
Recent U.S.-based "mega-preachers" have used the political microphone in order to mix religious generalities with partisan political verbal theatrics in order to further their own mix of dogma and hunger for political power.Then the big-bucks flow in.
Popes are just as prone to this attempt to mix religion and politics as are TV ministers.
PS. Most of those ministers live in mansions. Not the heavenly kind.
The Vatican and other institutions are also here on earth.
Now, what was it about the message on Bush/Cheney's immoral, lying war in Iraq, with attendant torture of detainees, etc.? I think they got lost in the "mix."
McGovern brought up so many issues
that it would take another article to answer all of his complaints about my religion. My immigrant Irish ancestors suffered great discrimination on their arrival to this country by bigots who used the same old anti-Catholic canards that modern day attornies are now
employing to cash in on the "victim"
scandal for billions. My late father was a war hero who lost many friends in WWII actually fighting the Nazis. Ever read about that? And finally, I am old enough to remember when our Pope
(the last one) publicly pleaded time and again to a Texas governor for the life of condemned capitol punishment prisoners. What other
religion can claim that?
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