Thank you, Dr Lee, for adding historical context to who Pope Francis was and who Pope Leo is. I am grateful that Pope Leo will serve as a counterbalancing voice to the global network of oligarchs that seeks to rule over us all.
I remember seeing some years ago that a variation on the phrase “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” exists in all (or nearly all) the world’s religions.
Perhaps Pope Leo will catalyze a movement amongst all the world‘s religions to push for a global transformation to that cooperative and love based reality
Thank you, Steve, for bringing your refined sensibilities to this forum. Let us hope that this is a shift in process. Let us have the patience to persevere with magnanimity.
Thank you for you kind comment, Ned. I am by nature oriented towards group cooperation. This was partially inspired by a visit to the UN when I was seven years old. And while that organization has failed to make cooperation amongst the worlds nations function in a way that would truly transform human society into a one world family, I continue to hope that someone can catalyze that kind of collaborative outcome. I pray Pope Leo has similar insights about the power of collaboration, as I see he is about my age (69) and was a math and science graduate from Villanova University in 1977. Maybe he learned collaboration from those two logical disciplines. Time will tell. 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
It is late and I need to crash, so I will not do your comment justice. One reason why the U.N. does not meet expectations lies in the abuse of the veto power by the permanent members, mainly the U.S. and U.S.S.R.(-lite). If my shrinking grey matter serves me still, a particular permanent member is a party to a conflict, that country is not supposed to be able to use that veto to evade responsibility. The U.S.S.R. started the abuse, but the U.S. went along with it out of national interest.
The UN is a failure because its design prevents it from achieving the objective it seeks. Systems thinking / systems redesign principles were not well known in 1945 when the UN was chartered. Its design is focused on preventing wars from expanding once they start. It should be working to eliminate the root cause of war instead. One of those root causes is the existence of separate nation states. War will not end until humanity sees itself as one human family (with many different cultures) living in the same home…. Kind of like how NYC functions (except NYC is mafia-infested).
A friend of mine has been trying to alert people to the consistent mis-use of the veto-power; he has cited language from within the Charter. I can not cite the language right now since I am travelling and lack the time. I will try to look it up. Since I am not a systems theorist, I can not comment critically (in the sense of thinking) upon your sensible statement.
Thank you. The fact that the UN has not kicked Russia off of the security council after it invaded Ukraine is a symptom of the organizations’s failed design. It is a symptom of the organization’s failed value system. There were compromises made when the UN was set up in 1945. In addition to the lack of use of systems thinking, political considerations doomed it to failure.
I'm glad, as is Dr. Lee, that Pope Francis was, and Pope Leo is, known to be kind and humble.
If we are to reduce violence and shift away from valuing force and. domination towards an attitude of partnership with one another, the Earth, and the 7th generation, men in leadership positions will have to demonstrate that they're not afraid of the innate intelligence and wisdom of women. Leaders like Barack Obama and Joe Biden have done that in the political arena and now it's up to Pope Leo, in his papal capacity, to grow in this direction. Here's an interesting article about the values that structure societies where men and women share authority:
One start, one I have hoped for is the ordination of married men; followed by ordination of women; followed by ordination of people with differing gender and partnership preferences. It will take a generation or two, at least, for the latter two stages of inclusion to come into practice and dogma.
Some additional things about Pope Francis. He was a relentless worker. I am amazed by the amount of people he touched in his life. Not just his cardinals and other religious figures. Francis was always busy meeting politicians, economists, workers, activists, survivors, global influencers etc for all kind of diplomacy & understanding global issues. Just a small example, the back channel diplomacy of Francis to repair US-Cuba relations. Things were on right track up until Trump arrived on scene and wrecked everything.
Francis was busy mediating on wars and conflicts and most strongly on Israel. In fact the Genocide started by Israel 2 years ago consumed much of his attention. Although some people say that Francis also needed to condemn Russia more vehemently for its aggression in Ukraine.
Francis was against inequality, concentration of wealth and power, Xenophobia and all kinds of social ills. But one of my disappointments with Pope was US elections in 2024 when he said people should choose between lesser of two evils - Trump & Harris. This was due to Papacy's position on abortion. However, the choice of evil was clear as daylight - Evil was Donald Trump.
RIP Pope Francis.
On Pope Leo, i don't know what he will do. I was also personally skeptical of American Pope in this darkest hour. But let's see how he performs.
Thank you, Sanjeev, for bringing your 'uncommon' sense, your knowledge, and, most of all, your compassion to this discussion. There were actions and utterances by this Pope which disappointed me. Stepping back and looking at the balance sheet of behavior and beliefs, however, Pope Francis's assets far outweighed his liabilities leaving a substantial amount of 'sweat-equity', or the Holy Spirit, to carry the day and life of this ordinary man.
I have a ten hour drive ahead of me today. Until reading this fine, fruitful essay, Dr Lee, I could say only my car was revved for the tire-tiring-trek ahead. Now, I am, too. Thank you, Ma'am, for putting that M.Div. to work for our benefit. 🥳
As an erstwhile R.C. and now slack Unitarian, there is much grace to be found in the wisdom of the Church distilled over centuries. Pope Leo XIV surely will be no King Louis XIV, but will truly be a 'Son King' for the R.C.s and bring sun-light for the rest of us.💡
Pope Leo XlV brings catholicity back to Roman Catholicism. Pope Francis made strides I failed to appreciate through inattentiveness. May Pope Leo XIV build on that. Per my misconception of Maoist thinking, we are in the qualitative change that precedes the quantitative one.😇
I really don't care for your religion, having been born Catholic and gone to first 12 yrs to Catholic schools, I quickly rejected it after the US Council of bishops came out in favor of the US war in Vietnam. I've never been back to Mass, and have never missed it. Glad I rejected it. The Catholic church is a paternalistic, misogynistic home for sexually distorted males with major psychological problems. I'm totally surprised you can't see that, doctor.
Whoa! I had the same complaint about 'distorted males' until my sister called me to task and asked me for data that show the R.C.s being worse with paedolphilia. Sure enough, notwithstanding vague information, the data that I reviewed showed such transgressions occurred in parochial schools, at most, at the level as -- likely substantially less than -- those reported publicly in public and private schools.
What I mourn about these abuses is that the Church hierarchy covered them up. In my own life, my high school did a study of such abuses. The study, released publicly, showed that two teachers, whom I still respect, engaged in writing good rec. letters to get all but one of the wrong-doers out of the school into a similar institution without public blemish.
Apparently a grade school teacher of mine -- whom I still remember with respect and affection -- apparently crossed that line behaviorally. What he did was wrong, absolutely, and he deserved prison-time. Nevertheless, in the narrower scope of my direct experience, he was one the best teachers and more charitable persons I have ever met.
Lastly, as to your push-back against Dr Lee's profession of faith, I recall the thinking of then Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVl, in 1983 when he stated that a young Catholic's open profession of faith in modern culture -- then as now -- stands out as an act of public courage and private conviction.
millions have been deceived worldwide especially Christ followers , how can someone who openly speaks against biblical principles be reverence or called father
Deceived by whom? If you mean Christian nationalists -- the guns and G-D crowd -- I quite readily agree. Yet their followers have signed up for the agenda and disordered interpretations of their evangelical leaders.
Indeed, religious leaders contribute a significant voice in regard to social justice and human development. Spiritual persons of all persuasions are able to positively impact society through a living faith in a living God.
I could have saved all those people a lot of time. The ideas were all expressed at least as eloquently by the late Carl Sagan in 1990. In the last pictures taken by a Voyager spacecraft, photos of all the planets inside the orbit of Neptune were sent home to Earth. As it turned out, at the distance of the photograph, our beautiful Earth, all we know and where we spend our entire existence, is barely visible; a pale blue pixel almost washed out by a sunbeam. Here is what Carl Sagan wrote in contemplation of the Pale Blue Dot:
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
I picked up on an important, if implicit, point in your homage to Popes Francis and Leo, Bandy: that perhaps the most valuable, exigent -- and deeply psychological -- contribution that organized religion can make to help counter the proliferation of dehumanized autocracy and its congeries of human evil is demonstrating and modeling human goodness and its manifold characteristics, notably empathy, understanding, other-directedness, respect for humanistic reason and empirical, practical science, meaningful communication, reciprocal nonviolent behavior, holistic human integration with our natural environment, the ethical acquisition and use of knowledge and the perpetual need to question our presuppositions, etc.
Religious leaders, along with atheistic and agnostic ones, with a ‘catholic’ -- but not necessarily ‘Catholic’ -- purview are what truly matter in encouraging us to acknowledge and embrace intrinsically and extrinsically good human values, irrespective of one’s personal faith in any metaphysical sense. A Pope, or any other spiritual leader in the broadest sense of that term, who stands in antipodal contrast to the human depredation and evil of Trumpism and its kindred cohort of violence, self-aggrandizement and oppression of freedom and happiness, etc. is a key to human salvation and continued progress in our infinitesimal corner of a vast and incomprehensible universe or nexus of multiverses.
Especially as a psychologist, here's my materialist viewpoint about any religious belief within organizations. Given the anatomy and physiology of the human brain, people sense and perceive to explain things for adaptation ("what is it, and good or bad?"). Also, given that the human animal seeks pleasure and avoids pain, the easiest and fastest way to explain something is to make it up, through controlling authorities that personally benefit from it. It's why religious beliefs have occurred since prehistoric times in various different forms in various hierarchical cultures and areas of the world far apart from each other (the human brain being the common factor). The advent of science to explain things has come from people willing to do the hard work of the scientific method for eventual, immense practical benefit. And it has become sustained by it's rewarding function. Based on independent, objective and material evidence (and not only self-appointed authorities), science has become a huge threat to religious belief (and authorities), hence the anti-science movement among radical (not just conservative) religious groups--Christian, Moslem, Hindu, etc. The U.S. model with the First Amendment is a most practical way of handling things to minimize horrible, even tragic, conflict based on differences in religious belief (otherwise, see Middle East for example). Our Founders wisely knew this fact. As that Amendment is properly interpreted and administered by prioritizing secular law, it promotes equal justice for all based on material evidence (no kangaroo courts, please). In tandem, people are still free to believe something supernatural, as directed by certain authorities.
POPES ARE man made and they are not direct successor from Jesus Christ or Peter, but direct successor from Emperor Constantine who used his influence to deceive Christ followers and renamed all their pagan gods as we have Esther and Christmas or mothers day today.
have you notice their helmet is fish mouth shaped, that is fish god dagon, this is biblical as we are in the last days of the earth history and REVELATION 13 CLEARLY STATED THE ROMAN CATHOLIC IS THE BEAST OF REVELATION...
One of the beauties of the R.C.s over time: subsume the culture of a particular place and time as the medium for truly 'catholic' and timeless message.
I'm not a Catholic, but I loved Pope Francis and I like Pope Leo XIV very much. They're what I expect in religious leaders.
Copy that, orno-bud!
The hope Pop Leo brings is a very welcome 'note' to our current disharmony. I am glad your church made this intriguing choice!
Me too!
Thank you, Dr Lee, for adding historical context to who Pope Francis was and who Pope Leo is. I am grateful that Pope Leo will serve as a counterbalancing voice to the global network of oligarchs that seeks to rule over us all.
I remember seeing some years ago that a variation on the phrase “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” exists in all (or nearly all) the world’s religions.
Perhaps Pope Leo will catalyze a movement amongst all the world‘s religions to push for a global transformation to that cooperative and love based reality
Thank you, Steve, for bringing your refined sensibilities to this forum. Let us hope that this is a shift in process. Let us have the patience to persevere with magnanimity.
Thank you for you kind comment, Ned. I am by nature oriented towards group cooperation. This was partially inspired by a visit to the UN when I was seven years old. And while that organization has failed to make cooperation amongst the worlds nations function in a way that would truly transform human society into a one world family, I continue to hope that someone can catalyze that kind of collaborative outcome. I pray Pope Leo has similar insights about the power of collaboration, as I see he is about my age (69) and was a math and science graduate from Villanova University in 1977. Maybe he learned collaboration from those two logical disciplines. Time will tell. 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
It is late and I need to crash, so I will not do your comment justice. One reason why the U.N. does not meet expectations lies in the abuse of the veto power by the permanent members, mainly the U.S. and U.S.S.R.(-lite). If my shrinking grey matter serves me still, a particular permanent member is a party to a conflict, that country is not supposed to be able to use that veto to evade responsibility. The U.S.S.R. started the abuse, but the U.S. went along with it out of national interest.
The UN is a failure because its design prevents it from achieving the objective it seeks. Systems thinking / systems redesign principles were not well known in 1945 when the UN was chartered. Its design is focused on preventing wars from expanding once they start. It should be working to eliminate the root cause of war instead. One of those root causes is the existence of separate nation states. War will not end until humanity sees itself as one human family (with many different cultures) living in the same home…. Kind of like how NYC functions (except NYC is mafia-infested).
A friend of mine has been trying to alert people to the consistent mis-use of the veto-power; he has cited language from within the Charter. I can not cite the language right now since I am travelling and lack the time. I will try to look it up. Since I am not a systems theorist, I can not comment critically (in the sense of thinking) upon your sensible statement.
Thank you. The fact that the UN has not kicked Russia off of the security council after it invaded Ukraine is a symptom of the organizations’s failed design. It is a symptom of the organization’s failed value system. There were compromises made when the UN was set up in 1945. In addition to the lack of use of systems thinking, political considerations doomed it to failure.
IN PRAISE OF GENTLE MEN.
I'm glad, as is Dr. Lee, that Pope Francis was, and Pope Leo is, known to be kind and humble.
If we are to reduce violence and shift away from valuing force and. domination towards an attitude of partnership with one another, the Earth, and the 7th generation, men in leadership positions will have to demonstrate that they're not afraid of the innate intelligence and wisdom of women. Leaders like Barack Obama and Joe Biden have done that in the political arena and now it's up to Pope Leo, in his papal capacity, to grow in this direction. Here's an interesting article about the values that structure societies where men and women share authority:
https://thepeoplescommunity.substack.com/p/the-matriarchal-possibility-ancient
One start, one I have hoped for is the ordination of married men; followed by ordination of women; followed by ordination of people with differing gender and partnership preferences. It will take a generation or two, at least, for the latter two stages of inclusion to come into practice and dogma.
P.S., thank you, Dr Madeline; I always enjoy what you have say.
Some additional things about Pope Francis. He was a relentless worker. I am amazed by the amount of people he touched in his life. Not just his cardinals and other religious figures. Francis was always busy meeting politicians, economists, workers, activists, survivors, global influencers etc for all kind of diplomacy & understanding global issues. Just a small example, the back channel diplomacy of Francis to repair US-Cuba relations. Things were on right track up until Trump arrived on scene and wrecked everything.
Francis was busy mediating on wars and conflicts and most strongly on Israel. In fact the Genocide started by Israel 2 years ago consumed much of his attention. Although some people say that Francis also needed to condemn Russia more vehemently for its aggression in Ukraine.
Francis was against inequality, concentration of wealth and power, Xenophobia and all kinds of social ills. But one of my disappointments with Pope was US elections in 2024 when he said people should choose between lesser of two evils - Trump & Harris. This was due to Papacy's position on abortion. However, the choice of evil was clear as daylight - Evil was Donald Trump.
RIP Pope Francis.
On Pope Leo, i don't know what he will do. I was also personally skeptical of American Pope in this darkest hour. But let's see how he performs.
Thank you, Sanjeev, for bringing your 'uncommon' sense, your knowledge, and, most of all, your compassion to this discussion. There were actions and utterances by this Pope which disappointed me. Stepping back and looking at the balance sheet of behavior and beliefs, however, Pope Francis's assets far outweighed his liabilities leaving a substantial amount of 'sweat-equity', or the Holy Spirit, to carry the day and life of this ordinary man.
Thank you, this was a really interesting read.
I have a ten hour drive ahead of me today. Until reading this fine, fruitful essay, Dr Lee, I could say only my car was revved for the tire-tiring-trek ahead. Now, I am, too. Thank you, Ma'am, for putting that M.Div. to work for our benefit. 🥳
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7320457314853912576/ 🙏🏾
As an erstwhile R.C. and now slack Unitarian, there is much grace to be found in the wisdom of the Church distilled over centuries. Pope Leo XIV surely will be no King Louis XIV, but will truly be a 'Son King' for the R.C.s and bring sun-light for the rest of us.💡
https://nedmcdletters.blogspot.com/2014/05/letter-98-just-what-is-human-dignity.html ⚖️
Pope Leo XlV brings catholicity back to Roman Catholicism. Pope Francis made strides I failed to appreciate through inattentiveness. May Pope Leo XIV build on that. Per my misconception of Maoist thinking, we are in the qualitative change that precedes the quantitative one.😇
I really don't care for your religion, having been born Catholic and gone to first 12 yrs to Catholic schools, I quickly rejected it after the US Council of bishops came out in favor of the US war in Vietnam. I've never been back to Mass, and have never missed it. Glad I rejected it. The Catholic church is a paternalistic, misogynistic home for sexually distorted males with major psychological problems. I'm totally surprised you can't see that, doctor.
Whoa! I had the same complaint about 'distorted males' until my sister called me to task and asked me for data that show the R.C.s being worse with paedolphilia. Sure enough, notwithstanding vague information, the data that I reviewed showed such transgressions occurred in parochial schools, at most, at the level as -- likely substantially less than -- those reported publicly in public and private schools.
What I mourn about these abuses is that the Church hierarchy covered them up. In my own life, my high school did a study of such abuses. The study, released publicly, showed that two teachers, whom I still respect, engaged in writing good rec. letters to get all but one of the wrong-doers out of the school into a similar institution without public blemish.
Apparently a grade school teacher of mine -- whom I still remember with respect and affection -- apparently crossed that line behaviorally. What he did was wrong, absolutely, and he deserved prison-time. Nevertheless, in the narrower scope of my direct experience, he was one the best teachers and more charitable persons I have ever met.
Lastly, as to your push-back against Dr Lee's profession of faith, I recall the thinking of then Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVl, in 1983 when he stated that a young Catholic's open profession of faith in modern culture -- then as now -- stands out as an act of public courage and private conviction.
millions have been deceived worldwide especially Christ followers , how can someone who openly speaks against biblical principles be reverence or called father
Deceived by whom? If you mean Christian nationalists -- the guns and G-D crowd -- I quite readily agree. Yet their followers have signed up for the agenda and disordered interpretations of their evangelical leaders.
Indeed, religious leaders contribute a significant voice in regard to social justice and human development. Spiritual persons of all persuasions are able to positively impact society through a living faith in a living God.
I could have saved all those people a lot of time. The ideas were all expressed at least as eloquently by the late Carl Sagan in 1990. In the last pictures taken by a Voyager spacecraft, photos of all the planets inside the orbit of Neptune were sent home to Earth. As it turned out, at the distance of the photograph, our beautiful Earth, all we know and where we spend our entire existence, is barely visible; a pale blue pixel almost washed out by a sunbeam. Here is what Carl Sagan wrote in contemplation of the Pale Blue Dot:
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
— Carl Sagan
I picked up on an important, if implicit, point in your homage to Popes Francis and Leo, Bandy: that perhaps the most valuable, exigent -- and deeply psychological -- contribution that organized religion can make to help counter the proliferation of dehumanized autocracy and its congeries of human evil is demonstrating and modeling human goodness and its manifold characteristics, notably empathy, understanding, other-directedness, respect for humanistic reason and empirical, practical science, meaningful communication, reciprocal nonviolent behavior, holistic human integration with our natural environment, the ethical acquisition and use of knowledge and the perpetual need to question our presuppositions, etc.
Religious leaders, along with atheistic and agnostic ones, with a ‘catholic’ -- but not necessarily ‘Catholic’ -- purview are what truly matter in encouraging us to acknowledge and embrace intrinsically and extrinsically good human values, irrespective of one’s personal faith in any metaphysical sense. A Pope, or any other spiritual leader in the broadest sense of that term, who stands in antipodal contrast to the human depredation and evil of Trumpism and its kindred cohort of violence, self-aggrandizement and oppression of freedom and happiness, etc. is a key to human salvation and continued progress in our infinitesimal corner of a vast and incomprehensible universe or nexus of multiverses.
Especially as a psychologist, here's my materialist viewpoint about any religious belief within organizations. Given the anatomy and physiology of the human brain, people sense and perceive to explain things for adaptation ("what is it, and good or bad?"). Also, given that the human animal seeks pleasure and avoids pain, the easiest and fastest way to explain something is to make it up, through controlling authorities that personally benefit from it. It's why religious beliefs have occurred since prehistoric times in various different forms in various hierarchical cultures and areas of the world far apart from each other (the human brain being the common factor). The advent of science to explain things has come from people willing to do the hard work of the scientific method for eventual, immense practical benefit. And it has become sustained by it's rewarding function. Based on independent, objective and material evidence (and not only self-appointed authorities), science has become a huge threat to religious belief (and authorities), hence the anti-science movement among radical (not just conservative) religious groups--Christian, Moslem, Hindu, etc. The U.S. model with the First Amendment is a most practical way of handling things to minimize horrible, even tragic, conflict based on differences in religious belief (otherwise, see Middle East for example). Our Founders wisely knew this fact. As that Amendment is properly interpreted and administered by prioritizing secular law, it promotes equal justice for all based on material evidence (no kangaroo courts, please). In tandem, people are still free to believe something supernatural, as directed by certain authorities.
POPES ARE man made and they are not direct successor from Jesus Christ or Peter, but direct successor from Emperor Constantine who used his influence to deceive Christ followers and renamed all their pagan gods as we have Esther and Christmas or mothers day today.
have you notice their helmet is fish mouth shaped, that is fish god dagon, this is biblical as we are in the last days of the earth history and REVELATION 13 CLEARLY STATED THE ROMAN CATHOLIC IS THE BEAST OF REVELATION...
One of the beauties of the R.C.s over time: subsume the culture of a particular place and time as the medium for truly 'catholic' and timeless message.
The body of the fish goes to the back