Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Pope Francis: insult comic/snarky prophet




Excerpt from  The Week's article


Pope Francis, insult comicHailed for striking a gentler tone, the pope is actually the vicar of snark

...The unnoticed part of the "new tone" in the church is that Francis is practically an insult comic. Where Benedict sought to condemn errors in the abstract, Pope Francis makes it personal and attacks tendencies within certain groups of people, usually in highly stylized papal idioms.

He has condemned "airport bishops." Christians who complain too much, he called "Mr. and Mrs. Whiner." Can we even imagine how much crap Pope Benedict would have taken from the media if he told nuns not to become "old maids?" Francis said just that, though.

Sometimes it is not exactly clear whom the pope intends to lampoon. The pope has dumped rhetorical acid on "Christians of words," who "are rigid! This type think that being Christian means being in perpetual mourning." At other times Francis is much too clear, like when he said journalists run the risk of "becoming ill from coprophilia and thus fomenting coprophagia" — that is, journalists turned on by shit might get sick from eating it.
Catholics of a more traditional bent really cause Francis to bring out the stick. He has called them "triumphalists" and "restorationists." He dubs those that send him notes enumerating the number of rosaries they have prayed for him "Pelagians," after the heretic who denied the necessity of divine grace for salvation 
..One Catholic blogger has been commissioned to compile all the Vicar of Christ's invective into The Pope Francis Little Book of Insults.
 Insults aren't foreign to Christianity. Jesus himself was brutal when condemning the "whitened sepulchers" and the "brood of vipers" among the religious leaders of his day.  
.. link.

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