christmas presents
Angelina wanting something and achieving something are two different things
True, but in my limited experience with Muslim girls here in the US they are so much more serious about their religion. They put us Catholic girls to shame. The priest has even complained that nobody gets married anymore.
Angelina divorce is not forbidden in any western country.
True. But, e.g., in Brideshead Revisited, Julia declines to marry Charles, both being divorced, because she believes she will then be living in sin and feels she cannot be thus separated from God. She and Charles then both unfulfilled lives. Because she believed divorce was forbidden to her.
Angelina i think the church should stop showing a double standard when it comes to love. anyone can make a mistake at their wedding, that's human
A couple of changes which I can't see them ever making (who knows what will happen in 100 years) are the stands on abortion, gay people and divorce. Maybe divorce, at a stretch, because one can get an annulment so what is the real difference. Women priests are a possibility, I think, but it's practical, because it is increasingly hard to find men who want to be priests. Allowing priests to marry would help too. At least we have now had one pope who resigned because he was too old to do the job. That's progress.
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Angelina
Doctors are famous for having very very dark sense of humour.
Besides, you know he was head of the congregation of faith before becoming pope?
In case you don't know, that institution was previously called holy inquisition. So from my perspective, that joke is more than well deserved.
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Ines but Catholic Church is by far, the biggest benefactor of the world.
Why not tell that to the millions and millions of people all over the world who have been "christianised" by the sword (yes, the European type of sword with the hand guard as cross bar resembling a cross is no accidental similarity) and were brutally killed if they did not took up the new faith.
Why not tell this to the thousands of native people in New Zealand and Australia, who were taken as young children from their parents and placed into the care of the church in order to be "raised as good christians", because in the eyes of the church non-christian parents were unfit for that role. (Known as "stolen generation" and the governments of both countries have apologised, but not the catholic church.)
Why not tell this to thousands of victims of sexual abuse by priests where the church actually worked to protect the priests rather than the victims?
Why not tell this millions of women (and some men) who were burned alive for witchcraft and herecy under the order of the chruch, who actively engaged in these actions via the "holy [!!!] inquisition" and for which the church until today has never apologised or even admitted it was wrong? (Actually, as I pointed out before, the institution of the "holy inquisition" still exists, if was just renamed to the "congregation of faith" of which then Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI.) was the head).
Why not tell this to millions of muslims and naive but faithful christian Europeans, who died in the crusades?
Why not tell this to about 7 million jewish people who died in Nazi Germany's concentration camps when Pope Pius XII. stood by and signed a contract with Nazi Germany not to interfere? And many Nazi criminals evaded allied justice in Europe after WW2 because the catholic church actively helped them escape to countries in South America.
I could go on and on like this.
There are actually very few organisations (if any at all) in the world that have more blood on their hands than the catholic church.
I do not want to judge whether any church is a force for good or bad in the world (that would be off-topic), but a few thoughts:
In raw numbers, there are few philanthropists that rival the RCC. But the RCC is also one of the wealthiest organizations in the world when it comes to land ownership, sheer assets and contributions from the masses. So it does not take a lot for them to outcompete many smaller charities that dedicate a much larger share of their assets to a cause.
As @curious mentioned above, an overall judgment needs to take both the positives and the negatives into account. Any organization that is over a thousand years old is going to have a lot of skeletons in the closet, and some of those skeletons might be the very reason they have so much wealth to put to charitable causes today.
Finally, to me Benedict represents pretty much the hard core of the church. He pretty much embodied all the good and bad that the church stands for today. Anyone who strongly identifies with the late 20th / early 21st century RCC will have lots of admiration for the man, but at the same time, the values he stood for and the things he did are also one of the principal reasons why all the people that are leaving the church these days do so.