Here’s a bit from Catholic theologian Tracey Rowland:
Thus, in order to destroy their power [i.e., the power of the ruling classes in Christian countries], it followed that one had to undermine the so-called cultural hegemony of Christianity itself.
(I wrote what follows while over the Atlantic aboard a United Airlines flight. I just discovered that this Dreamliner has Internet access. Greetings from somewhere over the Labrador Sea.)
Ross Douthat finds that Pope Francis and Donald Trump have a lot in common:
Neoliberalism needs critics, as the Republican Party needs reinvention and the Catholic Church needs reform. At the same time, as Schmitz notes, what both Trump and Francis promise — deliverance “from inconvenient and unresponsive institutions, with all their strictures and corruptions” — downplays the value of rules, customs, and traditions in protecting people from the rule of novelty and whim.
An Irish priest based in the United States, claims he has been “frozen out” of the Catholic Church after calling the police to investigate a fellow clergyman who had shown child-porn images to a 14-year-old boy. The 48 yr old priest says he was told by an official at the Church to put the pedophile priest on a plane back to India rather than cooperate with the police. Father John A Gallagher, originally from County Tyrone, is now living in a friend’s home after locks at his parochial house were changed and he was placed on medical leave by his bishop in the Diocese of Palm Beach, Florida.