The Vatican announced on Wednesday that Pope John Paul I, the Italian pontiff who reigned for only 33 days before his death in 1978, will be beatified after a miracle was attributed to him, bringing him one step closer to sainthood. Ny Times – The Vatican announced …
What is this bullshit? Did anyone tell the Roman Catholic Church that it is 2021 now? The witches are gone, the Inquisition is gone, the miracles are gone, the magic is not afoot.
Pope Francis has authorized this step, adding to my disappointment with his appointment.
A sick young girl in Argentina was allegedly healed mysteriously by an “invocation of the Venerable John Paul I” according to the chief miracle detectors and busters office of the Vatican, the “Congregation for the Causes of the Saints”. Any hospital could point you to dozens of similar “miracles”– unexplained sudden recoveries.
Make sure, Pope Francis, that you appoint your friends to this august body: that’s how it works. That’s how you ensure that you too will reach the pinnacle.
And popes are not saints. Saints are not saints. Olga of Kiev, who brutally murdered thousands of Drevlians (a tribe living in what is now the Ukraine) is not a saint. But the Catholic Church thinks she is.
What we have is this: each pope for the last 50 years has come to realize that his own canonization depends on establishing a precedent or model that will provide the framework for his own beatification. I predict that every single pope from now to eternity will be Canonized. It’s like sports halls of fame: every chief executive in the league offices has arranged it so that his own induction will seem inevitable, by establishing the kind of vague, loosely defined criteria that can be buffed and customized to suit any succeeding executive even if he is as mediocre a person as Gary Bettman.
It’s almost as bad as Franklin Graham inheriting his father’s divine mandate to lecture us all on how Donald Trump is really Jesus.