L.R. Knost
St. Augustine
Pope Leo XIV, May 14, 2010 at Conference of Latin American bishops.
An Englishman in love with Bucharest's blowsy charms
Pope Leo XIV (of course) chose his name to signal his interest in the social policy of Pope Leo XIII, but in at least one American election Leo XIV was a registered Republican. So there is that.
One of his brothers likes Donald Trump. So the Pope has heard the arguments against illegal immigration.
The Romanian presidential election was an enormous surprise for me and all the clever people.
Plenty of waiters and taxi drivers foresaw it.
I had assumed that the right-wing sovereignist candidate George Simion would win the first round of the election with 30% of the vote but lose in the second.
He won 41% instead.
It is now likely, not certain but likely, that he will win the presidency.
Many of the Social Democrat (ex-Communist) Party voters share Mr Simion's anti-American (pre-Trump), pro-peace, socially conservative views.
Every party in Romania is conservative but the left-wing party is most so.
Former Social Democrat Prime Minister Victor Ponta, who won 13% of the votes, also claimed to be a sovereignist. His voters will mostly go to Simion.
People voted for George Simion because they are very angry that the court cancelled the first election in November in which a right-wing candidate won the first round and then banned him and another rightist from standing in the new elections six months later (why six months later not one month later?)
For a long time the court did not even explain its action. That was very Romanian.
Had the court let the original Romanian election proceed the president would now probably be an inoffensive though stupid woman who loves the European Union.
Assuming Romanians could tolerate a woman president, which they probably would, faute de mieux, and an idiot, again yes.
Among business people and the people employed by international companies the outlook is very gloomy and frightened this week. They know that a hard right president will be very bad for the Romanian economy because he will scare foreign investors.
But, as an international company employee said to me yesterday, the Romanian election is part of a universal trend.
It's not about Romania. It's a backlash against endless wars, international organisations usurping the place of nation states, social liberalism, but more than any of this lack of democracy. It is happening everywhere.
Inevitably populists will win in every country - Hungary and US first, UK and Germany last.
A very senior businesswoman who knows people at the top in more than one party told me on the morning after the vote that they think a victory for George Simion is going to happen and therefore politicians will ally with him to be in the winning team. She says that Simion has highly educated and responsible people around him.
The president has relatively few powers but does control the secret services and so will have power over part of what most people here think is the deep state.
He can also, if he cannot find a Prime Minister to form a government, call an early parliamentary election.
The resignation of the Prime Minister after the results of the first round of the election will give the new President the opportunity to put together a new government or call elections in which the right will do very well.
George Simion has said he wants Calin Georgescu, the man who came first in the November election and was banned for standing in this one, to be Prime Minister.
'Truth must prevail over false piety, especially when a conclave looms. And the cold, hard truth is that in governance no less than on matters of doctrine, Francis’s pontificate was, in Cardinal Pell’s words, “a disaster in many or most respects; a catastrophe”.' Edward Fese, an American Catholic philosopher.
This article puts in one place the four biggest stories about the late Pope that Damian Thompson has been writing about for years.
They are examples of how the late Pope protected sex offenders and crooks in the clergy including in the College of Cardinals - the Mail should have published it while Francis was alive.
1989 was a turning point for many reasons and not just in Eastern Europe. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, condemned Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and demanded that the government expand the Blasphemy Act to cover other religions, including Islam. But was it blasphemous even from a Muslim point of view? Reza Aslan , the Iranian-born American Muslim writer, thinks the passages about the satanic verses 'are perfectly in line' with many traditional commentators on the Koran.
"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." Jonathan Swift
"I was recently informed by someone close to the subject that about half of all post-graduate science students at British universities are now Chinese. This is not necessarily a bad thing
"The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine, but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight."
'There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable.'
'Jesus didn’t write a book. He founded a Church.
'The Bible came from the Church, not the other way around.
'To accept Scripture and reject the Church is to forget who preserved, discerned, and canonised the Word.-
Patrick Coffin
How many very tedious and uninformed discussions would be avoided if everyone accepted this obvious historical fact. Educated Protestants do.
Two very admirable things Pope Francis did were to call for peace in Ukraine and Gaza.
Saying Russia was not entirely to blame for the Ukrainian war and calling the Israeli actions genocide were very unpopular in the Western media, unlike most things he said which non-Catholic journalists loved.
He called up the people in a Catholic church in the Gaza strip each day.
Thinking about his outspoken condemnation of Israel I feel like quoting Gideon Levy quoting Daniel Blatmann, in an article in the English edition of Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz three days ago.)