Bad-tempered pope
What’s the pope furious about?
[The pope] has reiterated the existence of Hell and condemned society for not talking about eternal damnation enough. A furious Pope Benedict unleashed a bitter attack during a sermon while on a visit to a parish church and said: “Hell exists and there is eternal punishment for those who sin and do not repent. The problem today is society does not talk about Hell. It’s as if it did not exist, but it does.”
He’s furious because today society does not talk about Hell? That makes him furious? Really? Well what a horrible sadistic cruel wicked little man then. (Little morally, mentally, ethically, cognitively. I don’t know whether he’s little physically or not, and I don’t care.) What a very nasty piece of work – wanting everyone to be more terrified of eternal punishment; thinking the fading away of that foul idea is a bad thing. I’ll tell you what: his being furious about that makes me furious. I’ll tell you why: because this is no joke: people who believe it really do suffer torments of fear, for themselves or for other people. The good ones do – the nasty ones, like the pontiff, relish the thought.
And another thing. How does he know? Whence comes this ‘Hell exists’? Where does he get this ‘It’s as if it did not exist, but it does’? How does he know it does? What’s his evidence? Why should anyone believe him?
Pope Benedict unleashed his fury during a visit to the tiny parish church of St Felicity and the Martyr Children…Using the Gospel reading of John where Jesus saves the adulterous woman from death by stoning by saying “let he who is without sin cast the first stone”, Pope Benedict said: “This reading shows us that Christ wants to save souls. He is saying that He wants us in Paradise with Him but He is saying that those who close their hearts to Him will be condemned to eternal damnation.
So, in the pope’s view, Jesus is saying love me and you get to join me in Paradise, but if you refuse to love me, you’re condemned to eternal damnation and eternal punishment. Well that’s an interesting idea. The first thought that occurs to me is how difficult it is to love someone like that, which means that the whole deal is a trap – a double bind – a lose-lose bet. ‘Love me or I’ll tear you to bits slowly.’ That doesn’t work, you know. Really – it doesn’t; it backfires. I’ll explain. It’s the ‘I’ll tear you to bits slowly’ part – it puts people off. However well-intentioned they may be, however willing to comply, those six words simply make it impossible. My advice would be to stop with the ‘Love me’ bit – wait and see what happens. There’s always plenty of time to come in with the threats. But to include the threats right in the same sentence where you command love – that’s bad planning. Is that still not clear? I’ll explain more carefully. We can’t love people who promise to torture us for not obeying them. (Yes yes, unless we’re masochists; never mind that.) We can’t even admire or respect them; we can’t even be neutral. No – we develop an instantaneous low opinion of them; very low indeed.
It’s also odd given that Christians set so much store by free will. What kind of free will is that arrangement? Either love this guy on command, or be tortured forever. There’s no freedom about it, not in any direction, neither if you say yes nor if you say no; not even if you do nothing but just stare aghast like a rabbit in the headlights.
What a very nasty piece of work.
The plus side of this particular expression of humanity-hating religion is its timing. Just as atheism is starting to be talked about more and its opponents claim we’re all strawmanning, along comes this arsehole Ratzinger to remind us all that nobody’s strawmanning and that this is the most official face of mainstream religion in the 21st century. The sooner people are horrified into letting it be swept away with the rest of the mediaeval cobwebs the better.
Hell hath no fury like an artist inspired………… Pope Benedict wants to revive the concept of hell? Well dear heart can I inform you that hell here on earth has never gone away for all the innocent children that were abused by the clerical sexual terrorists of the Catholic Church…….. Pope Benedict regrets . . . that hell is not talked about anymore. He said so in a sermon on a visit to Rome’s Fidene suburb last Sunday. “Jesus came to tell us everyone is wanted in paradise, and that hell, about which little gets said today, exists and is eternal for those who shut their hearts to his love,” he said. So, hell hasn’t gone away, you know, not even in Ireland this week, when so much else has. Theologians would have it that,like love and marriage, it’s the same with heaven and hell: you can’t have one without the other. Though they wouldn’t put it like that. Important to belief in both is the concept of free will – if everyone were predestined for heaven, where would the freedom be there? Hell, then, is that state designated for those who willingly, “with full knowledge and full consent”, as the old catechism would have it, turn their backs on God. Belief in hell, of late, is not what it used to be. This, it must be said, is not something many regret. It is unlikely there will be much celebration at the revival initiated by Pope Benedict. One group, however, may greet its return with more enthusiasm than most. I refer to our artists, that segment of humanity who put such vivid flesh on the concept in literature. There was Dante, famously in his Divine Comedy (not the group fronted by Neil Hannon). Dante lived from 1265 to 1321. He saw hell, so to speak, as a great inverted cone that pierced the centre of the Earth. At the top was the point where Lucifer and his angels hit the earth, like a meteorite, when cast from heaven. Over the gates to the underworld are inscribed the words, “All hope abandon, ye who enter in!” At its core of nine circles resides the arch-traitor himself, Lucifer, weeping as he relentlessly chews on the bodies of three other traitors, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. With Jeffrey Archer nowhere to be seen. Then there was John Milton who, in his Paradise Lost (1667), described hell as A dungeon horrible, on all sides round/As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames/No light, but rather darkness visible/Serv’d only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doelful shades, where peace/And rest can never dwell, hope never comes/That comes to all. We learned it at school. Just the thing for adolescent imaginations. And then there was Fr Arnall’s hellfire sermon in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , just in case Milton didn’t get to us. Hell, said Fr Arnall, is “an abode of demons and lost souls [ a bit like our class at school] filled with fire and smoke . . . It is a never-ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air . . . All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as a vast reeking sewer . . .” Not much left to the imagination there. Personally, I am attracted to the attitude of John Pake Casserly, an old neighbour at home in Ballaghaderreen. Once asked whether, when he died, he would go to heaven or hell, he replied “I don’t mind. I have friends in both places.” He died in 1999 and has been resting with friends since.
I read this the other day on a site that was set up for victims/survivors of institutional abuse and was going to mention it, however, you got there first. I do not know identity of article. Hope it is not to long?
I hope he was really, really angry. Stamping his foot and shouting ‘Fear me, fear me.’
I agree with Stewart, this has a serious plus side. It’s so unequivocally and transparently vile.
“Hell is a place or state of punishment where the wicked undergo everlasting suffering with the devil and his angels.
This was the mantra that was stuffed down my throat for a whole childhood. By God did I not feel immense fear at doing any kind of wrongdoing.
The fear of HELL virtually each week, drew me, in an obsessional manner into the confessional box.
Bless me Father for I have sinned. The worry never went away. Hell and damnation was for me a very real dact.
The following is taken from a comment on, I think,- Dawkin’s. site.
“It will be said that the Catholic Church no longer preaches hell fire in its full horror. That depends on how upmarket your area is – and how progressive your priest.
But eternal punishment certainly was the normal doctrine dished out to congregations, including terrified children, back in the time when many of the priests now facing expulsion or prosecution committed their physical abuses.
Most of the victims bringing or supporting lawsuits are now in their middle years. They therefore, along with many others who were never physically abused, probably experienced mental terrorism of the hell fire type.
The long retrospect of the law entitles middle-aged victims to lucrative redress, decades after they suffered physically.
Nobody thinks the physical injuries of sexual abuse could possibly last decades, so the damages now being claimed have to be the mental consequences of the original physical abuse.
A typical claimant, now 54, said that his “life was marred by inexplicable confusions, anger, depression and lost faith.” (Parenthetically, one can’t help marvelling at the idea of a life being marred by lost faith.
Perhaps it would get the sympathy of a jury.) But the point is this, If you can sue for the long-term mental damage caused by physical child abuse, why should you not sue for the long-term mental damage caused by mental child abuse?
Only a minority of priests abuse the bodies of the children in their care. But how many priests abuse their minds?
Why aren’t Catholics and ex-Catholics lining up to sue the church into the ground, for a lifetime of psychological damage?
“Pope Benedict unleashed his fury during a visit to the tiny parish church of St Felicity and the Martyr Children at Fidene on the outskirts of Rome, in his capacity as bishop of the Italian capital”
The pope went to an insignificant, poor parish church to bash out, like one does a dusty dirty carpet his “hell, fire and brimstone ire. What was so wrong that he could not do it from St. Peter’s balcony. Would it upset the lucrative tourist business?
I agree with me, too. Of course, I wonder how the fury was actually unleashed. Was the writer embellishing or did Ratzinger actually raise his voice when saying the quoted words? Did he shake his fist? Did he glare at the congregants? In any case, I think we know what to think when someone gets angry because people are no longer afraid.
Ah (claps hand to forehead – yes, I really just did), I know what comparison has been struggling to get out through the synapses: I’ve suddenly had a flash of Ceausescu, standing on the balcony, as it dawns on him that the thousands of people down there are no longer afraid, meaning curtains for him.
Yes, Ratzinger should definitely get plenty more angry about people’s dismissal of the bullshit he represents.
“The worry never went away. Hell and damnation was for me a very real fact.”
Eg-zactly. And you weren’t the only one! As you know all too well. Even I, in mild latitudinarian America, have friends who were terrified in childhood – one not for herself but for her father, who was an atheist. As I said – this stuff is no joke.
“What was so wrong that he could not do it from St. Peter’s balcony.”
Exactly, again. Apparently the church has a lot of parishioners who are impoverished immigrants from the Philippines; so they’re the ones he goes to bully.
Ceausescu indeed. A poster boy for atheism. Rock on, Ratzy.
As Monty Python put it…
Oh Lord, please don’t burn us,
Don’t grill or toast your flock
Don’t put us on the barbecue
Or simmer us in stock
Don’t braise or bake or boil us
Or stir-fry us in a wok …
Oh please don’t lightly poach us,
Or baste us with hot fat
Don’t fricasse or roast us
Or boil us in a vat,
And please don’t stick your followers
In a rotissomat…
Or this bit: “”We are impregnated by a culture that has taken away the sense of man’s guilt, the sense of one’s own guilt.”
It’s all about fear and guilt. Get people feeling scared and guilty, and then you can tell them what to do (and not to do).
From the moment the old farts in the red hats elected this evil old man to wear the big white hat that rules them, I’ve exclusively referred to him as der Popenfuhrer – refusing to use either his papal nom de plume or his family name, yet never being in any doubt that everyone will know exactly who I’m talking about. This piece of human trash headed the Inquisition for Christ’s sake (pun definitely intended), under whatever less-ominous name they use for it these days. This is the guy who willfully and knowingly used his personal authority and that of his church to spread lies about condoms being ineffective at stopping HIV – and where that lie found fertile ground in Africa, the harvest in misery and death has been astounding. Given that record of what I can only call deliberate murder, his sturm und drang speech for a return to the bad old days of paralyzing fear of hellfire is hardly a surprise.
He continues to live down to my expectations spectacularly. Can’t say as I’m particularly happy about it, though.
It will be fascinating to watch what happens to the Catholic Church under a Pope who, it seems, wants to take the church back towards, if not right to, the middle ages.
The reforms in Vatican II seem to be in the process of being repealed along with most traces of modernism in the church.
Will the “notional Catholics” using birth control and such be forced to leave the church entirely?
Will there be a fundamentalist core of Catholicism, like the evangelical core of Anglicism?
Though it doesn’t matter to most of us non-believers, as a spectator I find it fascinating to watch.
I told you so.
“All religions are blackmail”
– and that is what this is, an attempt to revive the traditional blackmail of the church’s “techings”.
It is vile.
Thank you Ms O’Loughlin, btw, I thought of adding some Dante, from the great Sayers’ translation, but how about ….
Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate ??
But applied to anyone who is gulled into believing this religious stuff ….
So who’s the new Heironimous Bosch ? Mel Gibson ?
Nick S I nominate the Chapman brothers.
Yeah.
266 Popes – 7 – 10 corrupt. 20 if you do not believe Church teaching on infallibility, original sin and homosexual acts ~~ 77 if you are an old Catholic. 78 canonised, 10 married – 6 of these canonised.
Pope Benedict IV sold papacy to Gregory VI for love ( and 3/4 ton of gold. Hell, indeed, what price does one think the Panzer should sell his papacy…. for? I will give him Hölle, Feuer und Verdammung. If you can better the offer please contact: Betsy Prig, she is, after all, an expert on torture, and the Panzer is big into it as well.
“I told you so.”
Did you ??? When???!! Where ???????!!!!!!
(slams self in face with familly bible, exits left)
It seems like this guy is reviewing all Catholic doctrine – wasn’t there a big conference to study limbo a few months back? What was the result? I wouldn’t be surprised if they cashiered it – probably because, unlike hell, it couldn’t really be used to manipulate the faithful’s fear and guilt.
Yes, there was. The result was something along the lines of ‘Umm…maybe not.’ It was declared not part of doctrine, or something like that. Lots of ‘scholarly’ mumbling then ‘Never mind.’
Yep, that grammar balls-up is there in The Scotsman – I checked. ‘Let he?’ What sort of English is that? Oh, the ‘Let he who is …’ is to be found here and there, but it’s wrong. My KJ at John 8:7 has it thus, ‘He that is without sin [that’s where the ‘he’ comes from], let him [yes, the object, not the subject] first cast a stone at her.’ OK, off topic a bit, but I do wish journos would quote properly instead of just writing what they think the quote is. Oh, it’s so well known, isn’t it, that I don’t need to look it up? A bit like ‘The best-laid plans …’ (‘schemes’) and ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ (‘learning’). And, yes, Ratzinger is an odious shit of the first order, Opehlia, and I agree with every word you say.
Actually it’s a little complicated about object not subject – that phrase is just hard to translate into English. It’s a hortatory subjunctive (as in ‘God save the queen’ ‘long live [whoever]’). The ‘let’ is not the usual permissive – the ‘let’ in ‘let he’ is not a commandment in the second person, it is a hortatory subjunctive in the third person. The hort. subjunctive is just weird in English, and it’s not used much. But because it is a hortatory subjuntive ‘let he’ isn’t really wrong – it’s awkward, and in modern English it’s certainly confusing, but it’s not really wrong.
The journo misquotation could rather be just a different translation?
Also – of course – Ratzo wouldn’t be using the KJ bible, nor would he be using one in English.
“wasn’t there a big conference to study limbo a few months back? What was the result?”
Babies to be freed from limbo
“It is an odd place. The inhabitants include Plato, Moses, Abraham and lots of babies. Now after more than 700 years of shadowy existence, limbo faces closure. The world’s 30 leading Roman Catholic theologians were meeting behind closed doors in the Vatican yesterday to discuss a document which would sweep the concept out of the church’s teaching.
Limbo was concocted in the 13th century as a solution to the theological conundrum of what happened to babies who died before they were christened
According to doctrine, they could not go to heaven because their original sin had not been expunged by baptism. Yet they had done nothing to harm anyone so they scarcely deserved purgatory, let alone hell. Limbo also proved a useful solution to other problems such as where to put holy people who lived before Christ and who also had no chance of baptism. Dante added the classical sages.
John Paul II was deeply troubled by limbo and had it dropped from the church’s 1992 catechism, a summary of its beliefs. He also asked the International Theological Commission, which advises the Vatican, to take up the issue. When he was still a cardinal, the present pope, Benedict, said he was in favour of dropping the concept so it is unlikely that the theologians will decide otherwise. The issue of where that leaves Plato is, as they say, in limbo.
DROP LIMBO BUT BRING ON HELL!
Despite what some in the Church may have thought, in 1984 Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, stated that “the doctrine of limbo has never been a definitive truth of the faith but merely a theological hypothesis”.
Thousands of Irish families were traumatised by the crazy limbo teaching before the Church saw fit to ‘clarify’ its position in relation to this utterly disgusting theory concerning the afterlife.
The same Catholic Church condoned and covered up the horrendous abuse of countless boys and girls in industrial schools throughout Ireland and the world.
THERE WILL BE NO FEAR OF THE RC CHURCH EVER GETTING RID OF “INDULGENCES”. That would not suit its deep embroidered pockets.
I’d like to bring the comments back to what Benedict XVI ACTUALLY SAID. (Comments above launch off into their own rantings & ragings which are far longer than his 2 sentences so the comments look a bit exaggerated to me.)
He said: “Hell exists and there is eternal punishment for those who sin and do not repent. The problem today is society does not talk about Hell. It’s as if it did not exist, but it does.” For Christians (any–Catholic and non-Catholic), this shouldn’t be a ‘new thing’ or a revival. We really shoudn’t be that ignorant. Also, who said he’s “FURIOUS”? Take his statement and don’t decorate it with what you don’t know is true. Were you there in the audience? Did you see him angry? If you have seen this pope or READ HIS WRITINGS (his encyclical “God is Love” for starters), you wouldn’t be saying the things you say. You don’t read the pope, pure and simple.
It is very disappointing that so many of us take things on hearsay and then spout out our own ‘rantings.’ That kind of unthinking attitude destroys civilized conversation. Please, read and think.
Cheers and God bless. Freedom and conscience go together: you can’t have one without the other.
“For Christians (any–Catholic and non-Catholic), this shouldn’t be a ‘new thing’ or a revival. We really shoudn’t be that ignorant.”
Oh, I’m not, don’t worry – I’m well aware that it’s not a new thing. In fact we all are – that’s part of what the discussion is about. Marie-Therese for instance knows very well how not new it is. The point is not at all that the idea of hell is new, it’s that it is foul and disgusting. I notice you present no argument that it is not.
The reporter in the article linked said he was furious. Read the article. That doesn’t necessarily mean he was, of course, but I did get the word from somewhere.
It’s all very well to say ‘God is Love’; that’s easily said, and very pretty, but if one also tells people that hell is real and their destination if they don’t love God back, then we are at liberty to point out that that’s a funny idea of ‘Love.’
Keep your God bless. If you love the God who threatens people with eternal punishment, I want no part of the monster. Could you explain what conscience has to do with eternal – I repeat, eternal – punishment?
‘it is a hortatory subjunctive in the third person. The hort. subjunctive is just weird in English’ – OB
Yes, but subjunctives usually show themselves in verbs (if it be, if it were, would that it were, lest it be, demand that he say (not says)). No way can you use any form of a verb – horatory or not, and that only means urging – and follow it with the subject. Bit like those people who say ‘This is a gift from John and I’ or ‘She gave the thing to John and I’. Theone in question is still exhorting someone to let someone else do something. Turn the sentence round a bit. You wouldn’t say, ‘I wonder if she’d let I go out today.’ Hmm. We’re off topic a bit, aren’t we. It’s Opelia’s fault entirely. Me blame she.
“Yes, but subjunctives usually show themselves in verbs”
Not in English they don’t. That’s the problem with uninflected verbs. To be, as you noticed (perhaps without actually noticing it), is the only verb that has a real subjunctive in English; in all the others it shows up only in the third person singular. The result is it’s often expressed with auxiliary verbs instead – should, for instance, or the phrase ‘were to’ (if I were to see it, I would etc). The hort subj just doesn’t show up in English except in the third person, and it’s not always comprehensible there. It would be gibberish to say ‘He without sin throw the first stone’ – an auxiliary verb has to convey the hortatory aspect if it’s going to be conveyed at all. The aux verb is ‘let’. Using it is not a mistake; it’s an inherent difficulty in translation. And it’s just not true that ‘No way can you use any form of a verb – horatory or not, and that only means urging – and follow it with the subject’ – that’s not at all like people who say ‘from John and I.’ Hear ye, hear ye – it’s not a mistake.
Did you look at any other translations?
Meanwhile – I’m terribly curious as to what Jenny Romero thinks is the connection between conscience and punishment, especially conscience and eternal punishment. I’m curious as to what anyone who defends the idea of hell thinks about that. I wonder if we’ll find out.
who said he’s “FURIOUS”?
I’ve exclusively referred to him as der Popenfuhrer
Ceausescu indeed. A poster boy for atheism. Rock on, Ratzy
Lasciate ogni speranza, voi chentrate??
“Hell exists and there is eternal punishment for those who sin and do not repent’entrate ??
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here and continue with your rantings and ragings.
Furthermore, about ‘let’ – it’s not wrong to say ‘let he’ in that construction because ‘let’ there is not the same let as the let in, say, ‘please let me have the apple’ (as Eve said to the serpent). It’s a different word, so the grammar is different. It’s not the let of let me go, it’s the let of ‘let it snow let it snow let it snow’ (that’s in some corny song or other). That ‘let’ isn’t asking anyone to permit ‘it’ to snow, it’s expressing a hortatory subjunctive in the awkward way that English is forced to do it. It is exactly equivalent to ‘long live the queen’ – another case of the subject following the verb, by the way; the queen is decidedly not the object of the verb in that sentence, she is the subject.
Look it up, Andy; you’ve got it wrong.
Vatican sources ascertain that the pope was speaking in straight forward parish priest lingo at the time of his “two powerful sentences” on hell, fire and damnation in the unknown peripheral Italian parish Church.
I would thoroughly agree with that, it was part of the plan.
The pope knew ecactly what he was doing in saying these “two powerful sentences” in the guise of a parish priest IN THAT PARTICULAR CHURCH.
He chose carefully his territory and manipulated in the process the humble parishoners. “He read” them very well.
They were in the finality just a means to an end, a tool, a prop.
It will in all probability be the last time he will ever enter that Churh.
IT SERVED ITS NEED. IT WAS A PLATFORM.
An instantaneous captive humble SAFE audience gave him the golden opporunity to spout out these “two powerful sentences”.
But really they were only scapegoats, his main target was indeed the whole world.
He kept the Vatican papacy carpets, clean. But, instead wiped his dirty TWO POWERFUL SENTENCES feet on the carpets on the little known church.
A lot of ‘thinking’ went into the planning of this clever ruse.
Politicians also play the same game. They, like the Church do not want black stains on their territory.
“He kept the Vatican papacy carpets, clean. But, instead wiped his dirty TWO POWERFUL SENTENCES feet on the carpets on the little known church.”
That’s a brilliant metaphor. I’ve said it before, Marie-Therese – you have a powerful vein of poetry in you.
“If you have seen this pope or READ HIS WRITINGS (his encyclical “God is Love” for starters), you wouldn’t be saying the things you say. You don’t read the pope, pure and simple”.
Jenny,
I read that the pope’s encyclical “God is Love” was given in Rome, at Saint Peter’s, on 25 December, the Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord, in the year 2005, it was the first of his Pontificate.
The “two sentences” FOLLOW UP was albeit given – in a less salubrious environment on an insignificant “lent” occasion. DID HE WANT TO GET IT OUT OF THE WAY BEFORE THE BIG EASTER CELEBRATIONS IN ST PETERS IN ROME?
DO YOU NOT SMELL A RATZ, I DO?
Oh, by the way, I SHOOK HANDS WITH THE LAST POPE, DID YOU?
Thank you, OB,
Posting of queens in a different perspective.
Queen Mary (1516-1558) of England, who won her title “Bloody Mary” by torturing and murdering non Catholics. She justified her actions, proclaiming “as the souls of heretics are to be hereafter eternally burning in hell, there can be nothing more proper than for me to imitate the divine vengeance by burning them on earth.” Bloody Mary’s image of God lives on today.
Condescending, pharisaical attitudes which continually divide the body of Christ, justify themselves because of a perverted image of God. “My little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen.
I saw Queen Elizabeth on several occasions whilst residing in London. She did her her early morning at the Army& Navy House of Fraser Stores before the commoner customers arrived.
Gosh, must not let the head swell.