“Amoris Laetitia” sums up everything that’s awesome and frustrating about Pope Francis.
It is striking how many Catholic organisations seem to do a whole range of lucrative things they were never set up to do, while still enjoying tax exemption as religious institutions. On closing these books many readers will feel that the only way out of the Vatican impasse would be to wind up the territory's anomalous statehood, hand it over to the Italian government and free the Church and above all Pope Francis to get on with their Christian mission. Right...
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Further distancing itself from Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, Vatican says Pope only had ‘real audience’ in Washington with a former student of the Pope and that student's partner.
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The pope's contribution to the climate debate builds on the words of his predecessors...He also cites the pathbreaking work of Bartholomew, the Orthodox leader sometimes called the "green patriarch"...Still, Francis's words fall as a rock in this pond, not a pebble...He has, in effect, said that all people of good conscience need to do as he has done and give the question the priority it requires.
I respond that I am not here to broker a merger between the secular climate movement and the Vatican. However, if Pope Francis is correct that responding to climate change requires fundamental changes to our economic model—and I think he is correct—then it will take an extraordinarily broad-based movement to demand those changes, one capable of navigating political disagreements.
Pope Francis is a reform-driven pope that has huge popularity with rank-and-file Catholics who have hungered for a figure to transcend an age of scandal. But, does even a powerful and popular pope have the power to change church doctrine? The advancing story line of Francis’s papacy is how far can a pope go in making reforms against an embedded culture of cardinals and bishops who are averse to change?
Pope Francis broke with Catholic tradition Monday by declaring that the theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real, and remarking that God is not “a magician with a magic wand.”
“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” the pope said at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, during a plenary meeting dedicated to evolving concepts of nature.
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Announcement - Call for Tributes and Reflections: The Life and Work of Rod Bush - San Francisco - Aug. 18, 2014
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