Like a bank with branches everywhere, the Catholic Church will go after its own when circumstances permit, wherever they are. In other instances, it will take the opposite tack, shielding the detractors or deviants from local scrutiny, and concealing them from the burden of accountability. Italian Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, former adviser to Pope Francis […]
Global warming is the biggest challenge of all time. It impacts every living species. However, the inherent dangers are very difficult to comprehend. As such, people brush it off as one more issue in life that will somehow be handled, fixed, no worries, human ingenuity will prevail. But, what if it’s not that simple? Stuart […]
The post Religion Meets Climate Change first appeared on Dissident Voice.
As chief conductor of the saint factory, Pope John Paul II was always going to be, in time, canonised. Almost 500 saints were created under his watch. The previous 600 years had seen 300. But declaring him a saint in 2014, a mere nine years after his death, was speedy by the standards of the […]
The post Dim Halos: Suppressing the Cult of Pope John Paul II first appeared on Dissident Voice.
The Vatican comes with its ills, contradictions and blatant hypocrisies in the field of moral theology and human existence, but on the issue of atomic and nuclear weapons, the position has been fairly consistent, if marked by gradual evolution. On February 8, 1948, Pope Pius XII held an audience with members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. “What misfortunes,” he asked, “should humanity expect from a future conflict, if it should prove impossible to arrest or curb the use of ever newer and more surprising scientific inventions?”
Several years ago, the renowned linguist and thinker, Noam Chomsky, asked me, point blank, as we were working on our book: On Western Terrorism – From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare:
“Do you think it is possible that most of Europeans really don’t know about crimes their countries committed all over the world?”
“They don’t know… They don’t want to know… They make sure that they will never know,” I replied.
No matter what Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas does, his popularity is declining. In some ways, Abbas’ threshold for popularity was really never impressive to begin with, a trend that is unlikely to change in the near future.
