The Waning of the Roman Catholic Church

Shortly after the 13 November 2015's violent and sudden change that rocked Parisians
and the world, Pope Francis pontificated in his third-grade teaching voiceas all Jesuits
are wont to dothat we were ambling on our ways to World War III. This unveiled
threat was not much hefted up by the Italian media, even much less so by those
international newshounds in their know. The pope is supposed to press on about peace
and lovenot bullets and bombs, n'est-ce pas? Why this bellicose affectation?
There are two stopping points that have to be immediately flagged here so that the
correct orientation can be gapped. One is that His Sanctity's utterance is an out-ofbounds political stance (separation of church and state?); the other is what might be
thought of as his interpretation of the Roman Catholic church's (quod erat
demonstrandum: the Roman Catholic god's) very own thoughts about warthe pope
being the so-called closest on-Earth representative of the Supreme Being's wishesthe
one who can speak ex cathedra on behalf of the ever-present creator of the world and
the Roman Catholic church's service and worship of himor her!
The Sovereign of the Vatican City State's easy gait into the political arena is nothing
new for Vatican, Incorporated. Ever since St Peter laid the foundation for his new
Roman Catholic church, the history of it has been rather lacklusteroverflowing
with intrigues, assassinations, poisonings (cups of coffee and poisonous snakes!), sex
scandals, political machinations, witch hunts, inquisitions, persecutions of gay women
and men, corruption and other embarrassing clerical naughties including, in modern
times, and according to a New York Times editorial (28 November 2015), the Vatican's
Kafkaesque prosecution of journalists. Nothing novel here except that today the
ambling into politics by the Roman Catholic church smacks as being a hurried up,
desperate maneuver. Why? Simply because it is now on the defense. We all know that
a good defense is an offense. Vatican ecclesiastics are on the attack. A well thought out
media onslaught is in act.
There is indeed much reason for the Roman Catholic church to be motivated into
employing extreme measures in an attempt to escape defeat and frustration. A very lot
of rational motives. It is losing the religious popularity contest. All over the world, its
moneyed churches are closing. The Diocese of New York, one of the flushest ones in
the United States, has closed nearly 200 churches. In Germany, the Vicar of Jesus
Christ's churches are being turned into discos, restaurants, gyms and wellness centers.
Confessionals are, nowadays, used to store mops and cleaning fluids. Christians are
flocking to commercial centers, not churches and cathedrals. In Italy, you best wear a
hard hat when you enter a lop-sided house of worship. 89% of Americans believe in a
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god; but, only 53% want to have anything to do with religion according to the Pew
Research Center. Americans want to have their cake and eat it, too! (They believe in one
of the world's 4,200 gods yet not even one of these Supreme Beings believes in them!)
For decades the Italians have extolled the pope as a political figurean international
rock star who can draw crowds and give the Italians, these experts in the manipulation
of Visual Aspect, the sensation that they are reasoned somehow to be all important on
our globe, they being the most cunning book cookers (Thou shall not steal!) in the
whole of Europe. Italians do very little to abide by the Ten Commandments! Little
peace and love. Loads of hubris and chauvinism. The Roman Catholic god, not dog, is
their co-pilot.
It is impossible to speak about Vatican, Incorporated without noting the driving force
of business. In Italy alone, roughly 20% of The Boot's real estate is owned by the
Roman Catholic church. Not one euro cent in taxes is paid for these propertiesnor
for the other Roman Catholic church's holdings populating the planet. The
interminable decline of the European and American business worlds is eating up the
earnings reaped from the rentals of these material possessions. The Vatican's
management organization is wanting of professional personnel because it is
exceptionally difficult to recruit individuals who would desire to become a priest or nun.
More and more, Vatican, Incorporated has to depend on secular outsourcing and the
obvious difficulties these new relationships incur because now the priesthood and
sisterhood are open to more back-stabbing scrutiny and disclosure. As this essay is
being written, in Rome there exists a Spanish woman (nicknamed The Popess) and
her computer expert husband who have been accused of leaking compromising
documents to two Italian journalists detailing the dishonorable, often childish,
Alzheimic shenanigans of high-ranking Roman Catholic prelates. The Roman Catholic
church's secrets have become less closelipped. There is no money to rebuild churches,
to repair those ones collapsing. Yet, chubby bishops and cardinals, with Rolex watches
and chauffeured Mercedes-Benzs waiting to take them to the most opulent restaurants
in town, are infuriating parishioners so much, many of them are bidding farewell and
even becoming atheists. (The devil made me say that!)
But that which caused the Vatican's economic kettle to boil over, has to be its
overwhelming foolishness concerning how it violently shook and tried to hide from its
faithful churchgoers the pedophilia scandal. This revelation has caused a mass exit of
Sunday Catholics. The flow of the cushy, basket and poor box income it once relied on
from the laity has come to a trickle. Mischievous nuns and priests throughout the world
have caused an astounding drain on the Vatican's financial gainnot to mention the
cash needed to buy off those abused by the Roman Catholic church's ministers.
Expensive under-the-table deals have been reasoned a better solution than putting the
nuns and priests in civil prisons. One consequence of this outrage against the Roman
Catholic church is that there is not a mother who will today leave her child alone with a
nun or priest when her kids attend catechism classesif they even do so. (Strangely,
there exists SNAP [Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests], but there is no
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SNAN [Survivors' Network of those Abused by Nuns]. Why not?) The Black
Popeguess who he isis as distraught as anyone else over this grim affair. Members
of Masonic-like clandestine Catholic organizations such as Opus Dei and The Knights
of Malta are squirming in their elegant leather swivel chairs. Business is bad. Very, very
bad.
So, what choice has the Roman Catholic church? It has to retaliate. Defend itself. Can
it? No! But it will try. How? The Roman Catholic church will do itself over. Change
its style. The analog church exists no more. A virtual church has to be created.
When Mussolini travelled through Italy visiting Italian towns, construction crews went
days in advance painting the home fronts that would be exposed along Il Duce's route.
Later, newsreels would be shown in Italian cinemas giving the impression that the
Fascist movement was on a roll. Adolf had whispered this trick to Benito. (So too,
later, German film specialists escaping Nazism would settle in Hollywood [Hollywood
is a place where they will pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your
soul. Marilyn Monroeand she should have knownsaid that!] where they would take
up bamboozling the American public!) Italian television crews have long been
accustomed to tilting their cameras to effect a larger-than-real audience for the Vatican.
The Roman Catholic church must have a look that defies its medieval physiognomy.
It cannot any more say: Sex before marriage is a sin. Masturbation is a sin. Divorce is
a sin. Same sex marriage is a sin. Stealing is a sin. Prophylactics are a sin. No one still
believes these moral program lines that pertain to past centuries. Yet, the Roman
Catholic church has until now thought that. Now it must change its strategy. It does
not want to lose its high and mighty Authority. It knows better than everyone that
most people are incapable of believing in themselves and require something or
someone to believe in. The Vatican wants to fill this lucrative space. The religious
dot.com revolution will turn the church upside down. We might even see the Earthly
Prince of the Apostles dressed in a Gucci business suit with Ferragamo shoes and RayBan sunglasses! Oh, how sad will it be for Roman Catholics to see no more their
corpulent bishops and cardinals wobbling around St Peter's Square in their medieval
monkey suits! (Remember when the United States' Department of State bribed South
American and African dictators into wearing Italian and French-made tailored suits
instead of uniformsto get the democracy ball rolling?)
Nevertheless, there exists a potentially insurmountable difficulty: If the Roman
Catholic church is virtual, will it be able to reel in real funding. When the analog
church existed, at the time the basket was passed around the congregation,
worshippers could check on each other to see if they were tossing in small change or
those paper mediums of exchange. Robbing the poor box to prop up corrupt Italian
governments was once thought of as a sort of medieval Spiritual QE! How will
www.vatican.com be able to keep Internet subscribers from falling into the temptation
of spending their money not on the Roman Catholic church but for Amazon, The
Virtual Supreme Being of Consumerism superintended over, on Earth, by the High
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Priest, His Holiness Jeff Bezos?

Pobrecito Papa Francesco! Coming all the way from Argentina, where Roman Catholic
priests waited to hear the confessions of returning Argentinian army helicopter crews
whose death missions had just dropped political protesters into the sea, and where
oodles and oodles of Nazis were offered refuge at the end of the Second World War
after being processed in Italian churches before being granted permission to escape to
that eighth largest country in the world, Pope Francis was still to have more ethical
quandaries to lose sleep over. How could this Pontiff have known that the Roman
Catholic church, his church, is a criminally organized occult inner circle moderated by
fanatically authoritarian, masterfully mealy-mouthed, septuagenarian and octogenarian,
ofttimes overweight, often senile, unmated menfreaks of perhaps some strange
species belonging to a third sexwho mesmerize and indoctrinate their fellow travellers
with ancient folkloric fantasies promising these pathetically nave protgs
compensation, for their wretched lives, in some nonexistent future time and state? Or,
did Francis know! He certainly is not new to the inside goings-on of the Roman
Catholic church. He became pope on 13 March 2013 after passing years in different
ecclesiastical executive berths.
But, let us give him the benefit of the doubt. Let us suppose the Roman Catholic god
blindfolded him when His Holiness spread the Roman Catholic faith in Argentina. In
Rome, he could not be clouded over about the rampage caused by the pedophilia
scandal, nor now the latest flagrant misconduct of the Vatican's bank, the IOR (Istituto
per le Opere di Religione). In this affair, the Vatican has done, to date, a pretty good job
squelching the misbehavior of its clerics, its financial bureaucrats. Money laundering
and drug money trafficking are accusations that must still be proven. But because the
Vatican is its own state with its own judicial system, it would be nave to think the
Roman Catholic church is going to put high-ranking bank clerics in prison, just as it
would be likewise ingenuous to think we might be given a glance at the Vatican's stock
portfolio. The blameworthy actions, nevertheless, have been acknowledged by Pope
Francis, and he has not only personally made promises to clean up the bank's
corruption, he has chopped the heads of some prominent IOR administrators in the
Vatican's financial institution.
Not wanting this unethical conduct, this financial wickedness, to spread like wildfire in
the media, the Roman Catholic church resorted to an old Jesuit trick that has been
employed very frequently over the centuries: When accused, accuse! Pope Francis
was summoned by the Roman Catholic god to write a book about corruption:
Corruption and Sin: Some Thoughts on Corruption. If the Vatican had been accused of
corruption, it would, very Jesuitically, go on the attack of others known to be corrupt!
(Parenthetically, since becoming pope in 2013, Francis has, miraculously, written the
following books: True Power Is Service; The Nation To Be Built; On Heaven and Earth; On
Care for Our Common Home; Open Mind, Faithful Heart; The Way of Humility; The Light of
Faith; The Joy of the Gospel; I Ask You to Pray for Me; and, In Him Alone is Our Hope: The
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Church According to the Heart of Pope Francis! One happening after the other!)
Corruption and Sin: Some Thoughts on Corruption (the Vatican should know!) has come in
particularly handy in thwarting the unfavorable criticism the Roman Catholic church's
IOR has had to sustain. How could the Roman Catholic church be corrupt if the pope
is against corruption? Are you crazy to think so? So, when the pope got out of town
recently during the heavy unfavorable judgments blasting, all over the world, hisand
his god'sbank, his trip to Africa would be used as a sounding block against corruption
in the entire worldthanks to the Better Be Christian and the Christianity, Now or
Never news affiliates. African bishops and cardinals' eyes popped out in disbelief when
Pope Francis urged them to stop being corrupt! What else is there for them to do?
How many times had these big shot African archpriests been to the pagan Vatican
commercial enterprise! Was the pope drinking too much vin santo? The Roman Catholic
god, and his Jesuits, work in strange ways, no?
*

Now to the nitty-gritty. Is the Roman Catholic god a warmonger? Is the Roman
Catholic popein virtue of his supreme apostolic authority and the one who defines,
ex cathedra, what is to be held by the entire church while he preserves it from the
possibility of error when he delimits doctrine concerning faith and moralsa militarist,
too? Much evidence suggests this. But, let us concentrate on just two: one from
ancient times; the other with us today.
The Italian Dominican friar, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), attempted to modify
Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism for the Christian world, and is today regarded as one
of the most influential, if not the most authoritative Roman Catholic philosopher. In
the second part of his Summa Theologica he touts three conditions for a just war, jus
bellum iustum, a war theory that is Roman Catholic church doctrine. Aquinas did not list
three prerequisites for peace, nor did he offer any hypothesis for achieving harmony.
His was the acceptance of the notion of war. Today his corollaries serve as a mantra
for right-wing, fanatical Roman Catholic Central Stupidity Agency agents who parrot
the Scholastic philosopher's idea that might is right, and hum it when they are about to
endorse another bombing mission somewhere around the world. (Americans are a
wonderful peopleif they aren't bombing you!) That they can justifiably posit
hundreds of military bases throughout the world to be at the ready to start warsas if
the Lord wishes them to do so! The Vatican made a saint of Aquinas; the Noble Peace
Prize was awarded to President Barack Obama! Is there not here some kind of warped
perspective?
During the undeclared Vietnam War (1 November 1955-30 April 1975), the Pentagon
needed an expanded officer corps to fill not only slots in Vietnam, but others around
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the world. To help do this, the Reserved Officer Training Corps (ROTC) was muscled
up. University students who chose to study military science for four years, would be
awarded on graduation day not only their university degrees, but also a commission in
the United States' regular army with a two-year duty obligation. Universities, including
Roman Catholic institutions, were given perks (classroom buildings, dormitories,
residences for teaching priests, chapels, etc.) from the Pentagon if they permitted the
United States' armed forces to build the structures necessary for their military programs
to be held on the their schools' campuses. Naturally, Roman Catholic teaching
establishments enthusiastically joined in on the bonanza; they gave the go-ahead to the
Pentagon to prepare officers for duty in Vietnam and other in-country and out-ofcountry military installations. In the United States, the Roman Catholic spiritual leaders
encouraged college students to defend their country against the heathenish Asians; in
Vietnam these tight-fisted authoritarians brought the word of the Roman Catholic
religion to as many as they could. They blessed B-52 bombers. These Father Duffys
fanned crosses over the bombs that would be dropped on innocent civilians in North
Vietnam. These moralistic storm troopers fanned crosses on implements of war. They
gave general absolution to Jews, Protestants, Buddhists, Baptistsand anyone else
belonging to one of the 4,200 religionswho were geared up to go on dreaded combat
assaults. The self-righteous twerps conducted raids in enlisted men's barracks in
division base camps and ripped down the troops' centerfolds from Playboy magazines
that had served as one of the only sane connections, with the real world, that these
kidsmany of whom were uneducated teenagers who had been given a choice by some
judge: Prison or Vietnam?possessed in an insane, for them, perplexity. Who could
have depended on them to be advocates of feminine rights in the 1960s when hardly
anyone else wasincluding unwed Pentagon chaplains dressed in olive drab uniforms?
This makes you think. Could a good, loving, super intelligent, caring, loving, everyplace,
all-powerful god let these ministers of his or her words run amuck with their holierthan-thou homilies and disingenuous advice, with their often ungodly ways on how to
live a good and sanctified life in the eyes of their god? Along with banksters in
London, New York and Frankfurt, corrupt sports' executives taking bribes from the
Fderation Internationale de Football Association, Volkswagon executives in charge of
pollution prevention, politicians, ad infinitum. Was the pragmatic philosopher, Sidney
Hook (1902-1989), of New York University, correct when he theorized that there is
more proof, in this troubled world, that if there exists a supreme being it would likely be
a devil?
There was a time when Roman Catholic churchgoers went to confession on Saturday
afternoons and acknowledged that they had cheated on their income tax returns,
cheated on their wives, cheated on their business partners, cheated, cheated, cheated and
then cheated some more. They had warmed to the idea that they could offload their
troubled consciences. With a few Hail Marys and Our Fathers, they were given a clean
slate so as to continue to sin some more until next Saturday's confession. This
religious luxury exists no more. Roman Catholics have been left alone to swim for
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themselvesmorally speaking.
Even Roman Catholic clinical psychologists,
psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have priced themselves out of the market. What are
Roman Catholics to do until the Vatican gets its confessional system up, loaded and
working on the Internet (a dream for Pentagon and Internal Revenue Service electronic
snoopers!)of course, with the most secure and sacred, blessed by the pope, online
credit card payment facilities!
When will the human race stop wishing to hop on and instead hop off the
Gravy Train of Greed & Corruption?
When will the human race exit the
Sea of Hypocrisy?
When will the human race refuse to be controlled by
tyrannies that keep them imprisoned
in a Pit of Stagnation?
When will the human race cast off those who wield the
Iron Rule of an Unaccountable Greater Number?
When will the human race insist upon a
Non-religious Ethics?

Authored by Anthony St. John

1 January MMXVI
Calenzano, Italy

@thewordwarrior