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Surprised so few people talk about Brasil here. Their election (2nd round) is today. It looks like Lula is the slight favourite but even his supporters concede that Bolsonaro has a good shot. For those not in the know, Lula is the social democrat with Bolsonaro best described as "Trump of the Tropics".
Yet a complicating factor is that the new congress has already been elected and it was much more right-wing than expected. So Lula's room for maneuver will be significantly constrained if he happens to win.
There does seem to be a structural undercurrent at play here. A very fast-growing demographic in Brasil are the evangelical Christians, who overwhelmingly favour Bolsonaro. Traditionally, Catholicism has been the bedrock of the nation's social fabric, inherited from the Iberians. So a very fervent form of Protestantism is unquestionably a break from the past where Catholicism was viewed as intertwined with national identity. Whoever wins this presidential election will have to grapple with this changed reality in Brasil.
Incidentally, this also suggests the lazy assumption that "as America gets more diverse it will invariably get more liberal" could potentially not come to pass.
I'm surprised this isn't a more widespread phenomenon in Catholic countries (or maybe it is and I'm just uninformed). Pope Francis is a walking counterexample to the infallibility of the Church. The natural response is either to give up the faith entirely, or go full sola scriptura.
Funny, because I see Pope Francis' insights as refreshingly coherent with the teachings of Jesus. If you think the natural response to the pope making a decree you disagree with is to abandon faith, then i would suggest you aren't a catholic to begin with.
It has to be admitted, whether you agree with pope Francis’s theology or not, that almost none of it is either insightful nor in straightforward accordance with the most established teaching of the church on those topics. His leadership from an administrative perspective has also been astonishingly poor and unusually given to corruption, foot in mouth disease, and inconsistency.
That the current pontificate is causing a crisis of faith isn’t a mystery; you have a pope who is both a poor administrator and who commits a series of unforced theological errors that reach their pinnacle in literally worshipping a pagan idol, and there are no Catholics alive today who remember a pope worse than mediocre.
Can you elaborate on this? The papers here in Northern Europe don't really talk about catholic church much for rather obvious reasons.
Here's one collection of examples of poor management(yes, a lot of this is preexisting issues that the current pope has made worse, unraveled recent progress, or simply failed to improve after it blew up): https://www.forbes.com/sites/magteam/2021/10/03/the-popes-corruption-problems/?sh=19bffb1c54c9 Becciu has since been allowed to appear as a cardinal in public at the recent consistory of cardinals.
Some other examples include elevating Kevin Farrell(notorious for having lived with the ex-cardinal McCarrick and having received large, unexplained cash gifts while bishop of Dallas) to the cardinalate, a "reform" of the knights of Malta that appears to be little more than revenge against his ideological enemies that he himself put there, making large breaks with precedent in poorly worded motu proprios(a category of church legislation heavily used in regulating the application of canon law), with his suppression of the latin mass in particular seeming to have managed to alienate at least a few left wing cardinals who don't like traditionalists very much, and revocations of previously granted permissions to one group or other within the church for little to no reason alienating almost everyone, sacking of a sitting bishop in Puerto Rico with no explanation(sacking a sitting bishop at all being rarest of rare), and a controversy involving ecumenism with the Russian orthodox church that I don't claim to understand but which has something to do with Ukraine. There's also some vague plans to completely change the relationship of the clergy and religious to existing church structures.
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I think most people today don't realize Catholics had a Pope literally declared a heretic at one point. We've had much worse popes. The Catholic claims do not rely on a perfect pope who believes, professes, and acts perfectly all the time. This post has a good summary of what Catholics mean and don't mean about papal infallability.
It's just weird that Catholics had a run of fairly upstanding and holy popes compared to the historical norm. Pope Francis is a regression to the mean.
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I think having the fertility statues present on the church grounds is odd but to suggest their presence is evidence that the pope worships them is a huge stretch to me. If the pope was saying "lets all pray to gaia" i would agree with your alarmist stance, but he didn't, and he wouldn't. Perhaps in a changing world, God is instructing Pope Francis differently than popes past.
The pope actually literally worshipped that statue on at least one occasion at the opening ceremony of the synod on the Amazon- although there's no documentation that he's done so since then, he has defended having done so.
Well, I guess you can't prove what he was thinking/intending. But prostrating before a statue of a fertility goddess while offerings are being made to it fits most definitions of worship.
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Ironically, you would think that Catholics would not lump these two together, given how often they get accused of idolatry towards saints and icons of saints. I mean maybe the pope is in fact worshipping some pagan gods, IDK his heart. But if anyone should be expected to have a nuanced distinction between "having a representation of a thing" and "worshipping the thing", it should be Catholics.
Isn't how often they get accused of idolatry increasing the likelihood of other forms of idolatry in other forms?
Nah. That angle would make sense if it was Protestants criticizing the pope for this - a Protestant might say "he already practices idolatry towards the saints, it's hardly a surprise if he starts worshipping a pagan goddess too".
But we're talking criticism from Catholics. From their perspective, the accusations of idolatry are baseless, because they know that they aren't worshipping saints just because they have some icon representing a saint. So from that perspective, they should know damn well that if the pope has some pagan statue around, it doesn't therefore mean he's worshipping it.
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