New Pope?

[CobGobbler]

So I'm not real educated on catholic beliefs, but it seems they just chose one and maybe y'all can help me here. The idea is that the pope is god's messenger on earth right? How can that be when he's chosen by a simple vote from the other ones. Furthermore, they've had multiple votes, so isn't it a bit disingenuous to say this was the first choice? I guess in my mind, if I actually believed in this religion bull, that there should be some divine intervention and they wouldn't need four or five votes.

[callmeslick]

well, they didn't pick me, so I'm disappointed.......

[Will Robinson]

But god works in mysterious ways....so it's all as it should be.

[Foil]

I gather that the belief is that God's will is done through the conclave, somehow in spite of any error introduced by human nature, so that the chosen person must be correct.

Personally, I think it's a "self-fulfilling" type of fallacy by design.

[CobGobbler]

Yeah, that's kind of my line of thought. Doesn't make much sense to me but here I am watching this shag on tv. May not believe it but it's still a pretty big deal.

[CUDA]

that's what the Catholics believe if I understand correct.
Biblically anyone can be Gods messenger on earth and all believers are supposed to be "messengers". and Biblically Titus talks about appointing elders, and effectually that is what the Conclave does. they review the potentials and choose the one they feel is the most qualified. qualified men choosing the most qualified of them to lead the Church

[snoopy]

This is related to one of the big issues of the reformation:

The catholic church (and I believe the eastern orthodox church as well) believes that ultimately the clergy know/communicate the word of God (even over the Bible); while reformed tradition holds that the Bible is the ultimate word of God, and the clergy are responsible to responsibly interpret it.

It roots in the idea of apostolic authority - The new testament cannon was chosen based on the authority of the writers as apostles. It's believed that a special inspiration was given to the apostles to communicate the word of God to others - most familiarly in the form of writing the books of the New Testament. Now, the catholic church holds that this special apostolic inspiration can and has been passed on from person to person through the ages... hence how the clergy can be said to communicate directly the word of God.

It comes down to a question of the ultimate authority - the reformation split off because they said that the special inspiration died with the first generation of apostles, while the orthodox say that it's been passed down by the clergy through the ages.


Hope that at least clarifies the logic behind some of it...

[Aggressor Prime]

Catholic belief holds that the Pope is chosen by the Holy Spirit, which naturally acts through humans. It is the same Spirit that brought about the writing of the Bible, the picking of its acceptable books, the decisions of the Church's councils, and really any act of a priest performed in persona Christi (in the person of Christ) as well as the Church at large when she acts in holiness.

The Pope is not immediately chosen because it takes time to know what the Spirit wants. One needs to be reflective, looking inward to the unifying order within oneself which allows for intellection (basic philosophical explanation, see Plotinus for more on interiority of the person; though a pagan, he contributes much to Catholic thought). This unifying order within each human being is God in the person of the Spirit. Again, reference to Plotinus' writings on interiority will help one understand this Catholic belief and how this does not fall into a plural view of God/multiple gods.

Cardinals understand the qualities of a good Pope and spend their time trying to find which Catholic male best fits those qualities and the needs of the Church today. These men have the power to elect due to the succession of the Apostles. Jesus picked the first leaders of the Church (12 Apostles) and left the future of the Church in the hands of these men. They in turn choose the leaders under the guidance of the Spirit.

For more, see here:
http://www.catholic.com/tracts/apostolic-succession

Being human, the Cardinals don't know every Catholic male, but their choice is made from the best use of their power. Upon being elected Pope, the new Pope then receives the grace of God by which he can fulfill his role. The Cardinals do not pick an infallible man, but God grants a man infallibility in moral and religious issues upon being made Pope when speaking from the seat of Peter (acting in the power of Pope as opposed to making a joke or speculating) (type of infallibility aka the Keys of Peter with that loosing and binding language).

As to God's messenger on earth, etymologically, only angels are messengers of God.
Now the Pope takes the special role of being the authority figure (not by his own power, but by the Spirit) on matters of the Spirit, matters which affect (grow out of) the whole Church. So really, the whole Church can act as interpreters of God's will, and are encouraged to do so (see Vatican Council II), but the Pope unifies the Church's interpretations to prevent contradictions and bad belief. Recognizing who will be receptive of the Spirit's guidance is important for the Cardinals to consider. This openness to the Spirit is best seen in a person's openness to the gifts of the Spirit:
http://catholicism.about.com/od/beliefs ... Spirit.htm

I hope this helps. This is the best I can gather being myself a Catholic, a Theologian, and a Philosopher.

[woodchip]

Well I hope this Spirit rids the church of all the pedophiles that invest it.

[Burlyman]

You people can't even do 15 minutes of research and yet you act like you know everything. You can invoke childhood memories all you like, but it won't save you from being naive and smug.

[Spidey]

There is a new pope?

[Burlyman]

Yeah, and he's still as much of a sell-out degenerate as whoever the monkeyists care about.

[woodchip]

Yeah, and he's still as much of a sell-out degenerate as whoever the monkeyists care about.

Feel the love!

[Top Gun]

I wonder if his posts make the slightest amount of sense if you're stark-raving drunk.

[CUDA]

I'm not sure even he knows what he said

[Tunnelcat]

The whole circus around choosing a new Pope is absolutely crazy. White smoke, black smoke????? Heck, why don't they just raise up a flag on a pole when they've made their choice? I'd be much simpler and quicker. The whole ritual is ridiculous, overblown hyperbole.

Maybe Catholics think a Pope is someone God speaks through, but the whole worship a human being thing smacks of idolatry. The Pope is a human man, chosen by a vote of his sycophants. He's not a God and probably not a telephone through which God speaks to us either. If God actually did speak through him, God would surely know what evil BS his priests are doing to children behind closed doors, since God sees all, and would TELL him to FIX the problem. So on that basis, he's obviously not in communication with God, since most Popes have clearly covered up the pedophilia they've found out about through the ages.

[Aggressor Prime]

We don't consider the Pope a god or even someone to be placed above everyone. The reason we honor him is because he acts as the lowest servant on earth, the servant of all who holds the responsibility to serve us correctly in guiding our faith. No Cardinal wants to be Pope because a Pope is not a leader like a president or a king. A Pope leads through perfect servitude, a servitude that is difficult because:
1. It requires constant intentionality to reach the wisdom and the love of God.
2. Reaching out that wisdom and love to the whole world is a massive task. Married people do this on a much smaller scale to their partner and children (at most, a grandparent will care for ~100 children). The Pope has 1.2 billion children under his roof, and 5.9 billion children who are missing (that said, really of the 1.2 billion Catholics, many have run away from home and need to be found again, but my emphasis is on the calling of us all to the faith, even those who are not Catholic due to how Catholics understand true religion; for more on true religion, see Augustine's Of True Religion). And yes, the use of children is intentional, because the love a Pope has for the Church is supposed to be as strong as a parent for a child (the strongest love there is).

People do not choose to become servants. We only actively choose to serve ourselves (think people of the Temple who dropped their donations to make more noise). We must be called (from the Spirit, or the interiority in ourselves that transcends the separation of persons, and depending on the Philosopher you read, whether an Aristotelian or Platonist, transcends the Intelligible, being the Source) to serve from the heart (the poor widow who only drops two coins in the Temple's donation, whom Jesus praised).

[Will Robinson]

We don't consider the Pope a god or even someone to be placed above everyone. The reason we honor him is because he acts as the lowest servant on earth,.. ..

I get where you are going with that but just an bit of perspective from the outside-

If you have people:
*refering to you as "Your Eminence"
*bowing to you and kissing your ring
*serving you everyday items on ornate, jeweled and perfumed, pillows
*bringing you, as per your instructions, 10% of their wealth
*building you a fancy bullet proof car named after you
*visiting you in your home/castle that is, in itself, a sovereign city state....literally...

Then you probably aren't what most people would call a "servant". Maybe a Congressman or Senator...but definitely not a servant.

[Tunnelcat]

I don't mean to demean the leadership of your religion AP, but I'm with Will here. The whole hierarchy of the Catholic Church seems to me to be self-serving and overdone in ceremony. Maybe the new Pope, who comes from more austere beginnings will change some of that, but all that pomp and circumstance, the most gay dress code ever and all the other worthless trappings of the Roman Catholic Church that caters specifically to the leadership probably has a lot of inertia and will be very resistant to change. It will be interesting to see if the new Pope can change things that have had a couple of thousand years to set in.

[Burlyman]

More useless trivia for complete idiots like top gun.

[Aggressor Prime]

All that stuff goes in the league of why we build churches covered in gold and pay artists millions of dollars to draw the best art in these churches. It all reflects back to God. The Pope does not use Church donations on himself. The money is spent on maintaining dioceses, schools, and charities.

If you are going to criticize a culture planted in 2000 years, you might as well criticize ancient Greek and Roman civilization as uncivilized, for the Church is the last, best preservation of classical civilization.

Skip if you don't want to read through my philosophical ranting. Read if you want to hear my reasons. If you have read Aristotle's Politics, then you really don't need to read this.
[The Church comes from a tradition in which not all are equal, but all are judged by an equal standard. As Aristotle said, treat equals equally and unequals unequally. The Pope's greatness is found in his servitude, his willingness to bear the burden of maintaining something as great as our 2000 year tradition, something that normal people would easily throw away for the modern, having not studied all the wisdom rooted in the golden age of thought and law (time of the Greek and Roman philosophers). This is a tradition that holds Democracy to be evil, as evil as Oligarchy and Tyranny. The failures of these governments are that they rule for the benefit of the powerful (the poor, the rich, and the monarch in these three cases). Aristotle instead proscribed the governments of Kingship, Aristocracy, and Polity by which the good individual, the good few, or the good many rule for the benefit of the whole (whether the individuals of that whole know what is beneficial for them or not). In modern times, this is unconstitutional and unamerican. But the Church upholds this standard by putting the most virtuous person, a king, if you will, in power. Not a king of a tyranny, but of a kingship, as Jesus was a king, what the world would view as the scum of the earth (the modern idea of a king is a tyrant; we have lost our view of virtuous kings). And today, many people view our Pope exactly as this, for he does not work to improve his image, only to improve the human condition. (Who would want to be ridiculed by the world as our Church leaders are?) Popes really don't care if the world thinks Catholics are terrible people (whose beliefs are totally misunderstood, e.g. that we must believe in creation or that we oppose science and reason, and by an unreflective metaphysics, judged poorly, for the world is so wrapped up in image and advancing control without realizing the standard will always determine reality; we can never be God, no matter how hard we try to become masters and possessors of nature) or that he himself is viewed as a criminal, because perception /= reality (and the Church deals with the really real, the forms, not extended reality of space and time reinterpreted as the root of reality as moderns do, but extended reality as just that, image, whose true purpose is to act as a mirror to the intelligibles).]

As Catholics, we freely protect the Pope and honor his servitude through our customs, recognizing him to be the just leader. No one forces us to perform our customs of honoring the Pope as we do. We see these customs as good and therefore perform them. Over time, however, Popes have been putting away our customs of honoring them. We no longer use the papal crown for instance, for Pope Paul VI was the last to wear that. Ones were made and offered to Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. They have refused to wear their crowns however. And this Pope will probably put away more customs. This does not make the customs bad. The Pope is merely calming our zeal to honor his service.

The most common misconception of our Pope is that he yields power. No Catholic is forced to follow the Pope, and those that do, follow Him for guidance, recognizing the Good and seeing the Pope as wise enough and blessed by grace to lead us back to the Good. We would be lost without his protection.

[flip]

I'm not a Catholic and think that a lot of their traditions and beliefs obscure the central message of Christianity, that message being that through Jesus Christ obedience to God and through his sacrifice, we became children of God and brothers and sisters of Christ, because we will become the exact image and representation of Christ, just as Christ is the exact representation and image of God. That being said, AP is write, their is no older establishment from ancient times except the Catholic Church. It has out survived them all except maybe the Jewish State. If not for the Catholic Church, Christianity would probably never had the chance and ease to flourish as it has. I disagree with their obscurity, but count them as brothers and sisters.

[Jeff250]

I remember a parable I heard via Catholic mass (my two sentence version): there was a man in the church who was known for his humility, and so they gave him a medal. The next day he wore it, and so they took it away.

[Top Gun]

More useless trivia for complete idiots like top gun.

lol

Putting Aggressor Prime's comments aside, because I can't really speak on them either way, but TC, the thing I think you're missing is that most Catholics, myself mostly included, find that ceremony and ritual to be one of the most appealing things about their faith. I mean, just speaking for myself, I think the whole process around electing a new pope is really cool: the smoke, the ringing of the bells throughout Rome, the whole shebang. Much of the Catholic faith is steeped in traditions passed down for hundreds, if not thousands of years: it's a unifying bond to the very earliest days of the Church. There really aren't many other places in the modern world where you get that kind of active continuity with the past, at least not the type where you can actively participate in it. You may not put much stock in that yourself, but a lot of people do.

[Burlyman]

[removed by mod]

[Aggressor Prime]

You know, I ended up writing way too much in response. So I'm deleting my previous paper (since no one reads papers in forums) and replacing it with this short comment.

We don't believe that. Read more on the Catholic faith before you judge it, because most of your angers are placed at the correct evils, but at the wrong belief. Sure, there are Catholics who act in the manner you critique, but those Catholics don't even understand their faith. It is not our members that determine us, but God. We are not a democracy determined by the parts (because Atomism is illogical), but parts determined by the whole (Platonism).

[CUDA]

Ignore him Aggressor.everyone else does

[Krom]

I read it...

[vision]

... those Catholics don't even understand their faith.

How lonely you must get being the only true Scotsman...

[Aggressor Prime]

I did't say they weren't Catholic. Catholicism is less about principles and more about community (in order to be a member), but that community is still based on principles (in order to flourish). We reach our arms to everyone (like how parents reach out to all their children), but people are called to come to the Truth, not to be popular (like how parents still want their children to grow up in a morally respectable way, knowing that such is best for them).

I'm just commenting on how many just don't understand their faith which can lead to behavior that doesn't reflect our teachings. And this happens in all religions. The mistake we make is when we take this behavior as representative of the religion, when in fact the religion may condemn such behavior.

[Tunnelcat]

More useless trivia for complete idiots like top gun.

lol

Putting Aggressor Prime's comments aside, because I can't really speak on them either way, but TC, the thing I think you're missing is that most Catholics, myself mostly included, find that ceremony and ritual to be one of the most appealing things about their faith. I mean, just speaking for myself, I think the whole process around electing a new pope is really cool: the smoke, the ringing of the bells throughout Rome, the whole shebang. Much of the Catholic faith is steeped in traditions passed down for hundreds, if not thousands of years: it's a unifying bond to the very earliest days of the Church. There really aren't many other places in the modern world where you get that kind of active continuity with the past, at least not the type where you can actively participate in it. You may not put much stock in that yourself, but a lot of people do.

Oh, I agree all the tradition is attractive and cool, helps attract followers and keeps people entertained and engaged, but doesn't it cloud the original message of Jesus Christ? When you peel the onion of all that pageantry and glitz, is the original message still there in it's original form? The new Pope is definitely a different type of leader than all the previous Popes. He's at least trying to stand with his followers and mix with them, instead of surrounding himself with pomp and glitz in a gold cage like some king. I can only hope that he is not targeted by some crazy nutcase like John Paul was. I've noticed he's eschewed the use of the bullet proof Pope Mobile when going around the square to meet his faithful.

[Aggressor Prime]

Ultimately, I do agree with you tunnelcat. Tradition means nothing without love. The proof of this is greatly evident in the New Testament when Jesus abandoned tradition for love (working on the Sabbath, mixing with the unclean, and countless more instances).

[Burlyman]

You idiots moderate my posts but not his.

[CobGobbler]

Get used to it Burlyman, that's the kind of moderating we get with Foil at the helm.

[CUDA]

Get used to it Burlyman, that's the kind of moderating we get with Foil at the helm.

Is that why you stopped using your real login and chose to hide under this one? Zu err cob

Oh anf FYI you do have a choice. You don't have to post here.it is after all a privately owned BB

[Jeff250]

You idiots moderate my posts but not his.

If you want us to consider a post for moderation, the procedure is the same as it has been: hit "report post," and we'll either take action or send you a PM on why we didn't think action was necessary.

With that said, when I skim this thread over again, the most objectionable post in this thread is still one of yours, so if I were pressed to take action, it would start there. (If I missed something, then see the previous paragraph.)