Pontiff slams "wealthy few who feast on what belongs to us all."

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I listen to the message of a Bishop and the Pope regardless of his address or his dress.

Though I agree that wealth should be shared and a concerted attempt to reduce poverty.
 
bullish1 said:
kick the Bishops, who are in mansions, out of those digs.
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And how many other Americans live in mansions? Americans need to share what they have with the poor who have taken the drastic step of forming caravans to leave their poverty and enter America. And it is time that the Americans do something about the huge number of homeless living in tents or sleeping under a bridge.

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The bishops have to decide to do so by themselves. They hold the highest position in the church. Jesus Christ is also a bishop.
But just like he didn’t force anyone to follow him we shouldn’t either. The bishops who live luxurious lifestyles need illumination. Otherwise it’s just a popular revolution.
Bishops are God’s children too who also need Salvation. A clerical position does not guarantee this. That is why it is no surprise so many bishops and patriarchs still don’t see it.
They have to see it.
 
bullish1 said:
This is true, it has always been true, and it will be true in the future. I suggest that if you really want to demonstrate a pastoral example that all will applaud, kick the Bishops, who are in mansions, out of those digs. Let them live less like royalty and more like the original Apostles!
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I couldn’t agree more, for a while host of reasons!
 
One-third of the world’s population uses smart phones. One half of the world can get online. FB gave 100M limited internet access phones away.

85% of children have been vaccinated against DTP. Since 1990, the number living in extreme poverty has been halved.

These and many other improvements in the lives of the poor have been brought about by the rich.
 
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I am familiar with only a few bishops residences. In my former diocese, the bishop’s residence is attached to the chancery offices and is far from luxurious. The buildings are aging and the area is declining. Some of the diocesan rectories are far more comfortable and modern.

In my current dioces the bishop’s residence was built to last a long time. A non-Catholic relative once remarked to me that it was the “best house in the neighborhood.” That’s becase it is of stone contruction intended to last 100 years. But the building comprises not just the bishop’s living quarters, which are modest, but also a chapel with seating for daily Mass goers, and other offices. I used to go to daily Mass there on occasion. It’s also located in a declining neighborhood. My parish church has a better rectory with better amenities than the bishop.
 
Abortion on demand and contraception have been brought to the poor by the rich as well.

You know what they still haven’t provided? No one has ensured access to clean water and a safe and sufficient food supply. Malnutrition and water borne diseases combined still kill over approx. 7-9 million people each year (over 40,000 a day!). Add to that mosquito borne illnesses, killing another 1 million people each year. What good to provide luxuries when basic needs go unmet?

Women walk for miles to collect water. In these same communities, instead of building sewage systems and indoor plumbing (or even a shared communal source of clean, potable tap water that wouldn’t require the hike), they are wiring homes for internet access and providing electronics. Instead of providing sufficient amounts of safe foods or malaria medicines or even mosquito nets, they hand out contraception and push abortion. Instead of education about safe food handling and providing refrigeration and safe ovens and stoves for food preparation, they are educated “family planning” and provided with devices to have fewer babies.

Meanwhile the rich are tossing food that people are starving for, wasting water that women fall down cliffs or are raped while trying to collect, and polluting everyone’s water sources with their “medicines.” The rich ban pesticides proven safe for people that reduce mosquitos and still don’t provide netting to protect sleeping babies.

It’s a sad world when people having electronics instead of food is a bragging point.
 
You sound like you have a wonderful bishop or bishops in your area!
 
You are right that not everything is perfect yet. I guess every so often I get tired of being hit over the head with how evil we are without anyone’s mentioning the fact that before Walter Reed, we didn’t know how those diseases were spread. That many of those who now have safe drinking water have it because of people who developed plumbing, sanitation, lightweight pipes (without lead). That the rate of starvation in the world used to be much higher, and the rate of poverty, and all the other bad rates, and that most of them have gone down, and they have gone down because of capitalism.

So yeah, there are people living high on the hog, and too many funding “family planning” over clean water, but because of capitalism, many people alive now survived their childhoods who once would have died, etc.

Or we could all be living at a subsistence level with no hope at all.
 
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All of that is true as well @13pollitos and we all should be doing what we can. It is very much an individual decision as to what we will do. I don’t think it does any good for P Francis to demonize an entire subset of the population. He is falling into the rabid polarization of identity politics. Encourage everyone to do the correct thing. Encourage everyone to avoid sin. He is right to bring up the plight of the poor. He is right to bring up the plight of the aborted. He would never demonize the mother’s who get the abortions and it would be wrong to do so.

As far as bishop mansions, I said for those that live in them. Our bishop in Omaha does not live in a mansion but there are plenty of those that do. Bishop Malone in Buffalo of 60 minutes coverup fame, is renovating a 40 room former convent for his new digs for 2 people. He says he can’t share it with others who will be coming and going all the time because he values his privacy above all else. I wish that he and other’s like him would value the existence of the abuse victims past and future above “almost” all else and put God 1st.
 
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Most of the poverty in the world is caused by the dictators of their own countries. The US and its citizens are the most generous benefactors in the world. Poverty is not caused by lack of money.

Read:

www.barnesandnoble.com

Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass|Paperback

Here is a searing account-probably the best yet published-of life in the underclass and why it persists as it does. Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychiatrist who treats the poor in a slum hospital and a prison in England, has seemingly seen it all. Yet in listening to and observing his patients,...
www.barnesandnoble.com www.barnesandnoble.com
 
Is your point that things are not yet perfect? I already said that.

The very fact that many rich nations have committed to this goal shows that the rich nations are not trying to keep everything for themselves as the Pope alleges, but are instead trying to improve things for those suffering poverty throughout the world.
 
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