On Pope Francis "Excommunicating" Members of the Mafia

Yeah, like the Catholic Church has any moral authority. Any person with a shred of dignity or the merest semblance of a conscience long ago severed all ties to that despicable organization when we discovered they were sheltering an army of child rapists. The Church of Rome makes the Mafia look like the Girl Scouts.

"Excommunicated." Fuck you. "Because ours is the only true religion, you are now eternally damned unless you repent," that's what excommunicated means. What gives any man the right to say that or assume his authority is derived from the creator of the universe if there is one?

This is where that hypocrisy I was talking about comes in. Everyone is hailing Pope Francis as this wonderful person. He may have done some good things for the poor in South America, but so did dozens of charitable organizations, and they didn't have to proselytize in order to help the poor the way the church does.

I don't care how much love you have, how many charitable deeds you've done, how fatherly you look and behave, or any number of other things. If you belong to an organization that preaches the sinfulness of condom use, that kept people like Cardinal Bernard Law from facing Justice by hiding him in the Vatican, and that offers assistance with the caveat that you accept their faith; I'm sorry, you have no moral authority whatsoever. In fact, you symbolize the epitome of immorality, hypocrisy, and the propagation of hatred. If Francis had a conscience, he would have left the church decades ago and helped people any other way he could. But he didn't; he stayed, and still believes in all of the magic and fairy tales and that lying to children is okay.

The hypocrisy is this: The Catholic church says that it wants to reconcile with other faiths, while simultaneously holding as true the ideas that the Pope is the Vicar of Christ on Earth, and that he has the power to send people to eternal damnation and hell fire. You can't have it both ways; you can't say, "sure, be a Muslim or a Hindu or Jew, by all means, but know that you're wrong and the only way to salvation is through Holy Mother Church."

Again, and I can't state this emphatically enough, Fuck - You.