Pope Francis, a man of courage and love

[prasad1]

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This is a man who, when addressing the United Nations General Assembly, took the time to thank the security guards, the maintenance crew, the cleaners and the cooks for the important work they do. This is a man who at age 78 is traveling all over the world, taking no stops or breaks, to be with the people he serves.
He is a man courageous enough to bring together peoples of different faiths and stand on the hallowed grounds of the 9/11 attacks, where ignorant people abused religion to cause pain. Who said that to bring true healing, we have to come together and then move forward with one another.
Pope Francis, to me, is a religious man; a man with whom I might not share a faith.

Religion and faith are vehicles for good. Our issues with religion today stem not from critics and skeptics deconstructing and disproving religious belief, but the way we approach it ourselves. Religion has become too mechanical, and the mechanics are all that we know. For many of those who practice a faith, the rituals become legalistic and habitual, held not in our hearts but expressed in rote gestures through our limbs.

We find ritual to be an end in itself, rather than a means to something bigger. When our faith loses lived compassion, love and hope, the potential of religion to be transformative, a catalyst for positive change, diminishes.
That potential weakens even more when religion is used as a tool to push people down. We see that today when leaders use religion to tell people only what they cannot do or have. A love for power takes precedence over the power of love. We justify our ill treatment of society's underserved and underprivileged, those of different racial, ethnic and social classes, those who simply are different from us, by claiming that is what God wants us to do.
We say this without embodying God's unconditional love, compassion, or mercy in our actions.
This is why Pope Francis is so important today. Where governmental apparatus at times unfortunately fails, people of faith, people like Pope Francis, can play a pivotal role in challenging the social injustice and disparity so prevalent throughout the world.
The Pope helps us to understand that changing the world begins by taking a pause and changing the world within us. We cannot give peace to people if we don't have peace inside ourselves to give in the first place.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/26/opinions/latif-pope-francis/index.html

 

[tks]

Fareed Zakaria - Indian born reporter had this following opinion

[h=1]If you have a problem with Pope Francis’s message, you have a problem with Christ[/h]

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Jairo Diaz of Fort Lauderdale, FL attends a climate rally the National Mall on Thursday September 24, 2015 in Washington, DC. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

By Fareed Zakaria Opinion writer September 24https://twitter.com/@FareedZakaria
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I am not a Christian. But growing up in India, I was immersed in Christianity. I attended Catholic and Anglican schools from ages 5 to 18, where we would sing hymns, recite prayers and study the Scriptures. The words and actions of Pope Francis have reminded me what I, as an outsider, have always admired deeply about Christianity, that its central message is simple and powerful: Be nice to the poor.
When I came to the United States in the 1980s, I remember being surprised to see what “Christian values” had come to mean in American culture and politics — heated debates over abortion, abstinence, contraception and gays. In 13 years of reading, reciting and studying the Bible, I didn’t recall seeing much about these topics.
Fareed Zakaria writes a foreign affairs column for The Post. He is also the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS and a contributing editor for The Atlantic. View Archive

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That’s because there is very little in there about them. As Garry Wills points out in his perceptive new book, “The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis,” “Many of the most prominent and contested stands taken by Catholic authorities (most of them dealing with sex) have nothing to do with the Gospel.”
The church’s positions on these matters were arrived at through interpretations of “natural law,” which is not based on anything in the Bible. But because those grounds looked weak, conservative clergy sought to bolster their views with biblical sanction. So contraception was condemned by Pope Pius XI, Wills notes, through a pretty tortuous interpretation of a couple of lines in Genesisthat say Onan “spilled his seed on the ground” — since it involves ejaculation without the intent of conception.
The ban of women in the Catholic clergy is a similar stretch. When the Anglicans decided to ordain female priests in 1976, Pope Paul VI presented a theological reason not to follow that path. Women could not be priests, he decreed, because Jesus never ordained a female priest. “True enough,” Wills writes. “But neither did he ordain any men. There are no priests (other than the Jewish ones) in the four Gospels. Peter and Paul and their fellows neither call themselves priests nor are called priests by others.”
Highlights of Pope Francis's historic address to Congress
Play Video3:35



Pope Francis discusses immigration, climate change, the death penalty and more during his address to Congress. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)

Wills even takes on abortion, opposition to which some Catholics have taken as fundamental to their faith. “This is odd,” Wills writes, “since the matter is nowhere mentioned in the Old Testament or New Testament, or in the early creeds. But some people are convinced that God must hate such an immense evil and must have expressed that hatred somewhere in his Bible.” In fact, Wills points out, the ban is based on a complex extrapolation from vague language in one verse, Psalm 139:13.
If you want to understand the main message of Jesus Christ, you don’t have to search the Scriptures. He says it again and again. “Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.”
Jesus has specific advice on how to handle the poor. Treat them as you would Christ himself, sell your possessions and give to the poor. When you hold a banquet, Jesus says, do not invite the wealthy and powerful, because you do so in the hope that they will return the favor and reward you. Instead, invite the dispossessed — and you will be rewarded by God. It is because he expects so much from the rich that he said that it was easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven.

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We live in a meritocratic age and believe that people who are successful are more admirable in some way than the rest of us. But the Bible notes that “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise . . . but time and chance happeneth to them all.” In the Kingdom of Heaven, it warns, “the last shall be first, and the first last.” In other words, be thankful for your success, but don’t think it makes you superior in any deep sense.
Commentators have taken Francis’s speeches and sayings and attacked him or claimed him as a Marxist, a unionist and a radical environmentalist. I don’t think the pope is proposing an alternative system of politics or economics. He is simply reminding each of us that we have a moral obligation to be kind and generous to the poor and disadvantaged — especially if we have been fortunate. If you have a problem with this message, you have a problem not with Pope Francis, but with Jesus Christ.

 

[prasad1]

Tksji,
I watched this telecast, it was brilliant. I was looking for the transcript, Thanks for posting it.
It shows that people other than those "selected few in India" too have human values.

 

[yesmohan]

Tksji,
I watched this telecast, it was brilliant. I was looking for the transcript, Thanks for posting it.
It shows that people other than those "selected few in India" too have human values.

Christian missionaries have a dedicated team not only for spreading their mission but also education and health facilities.Definitely they have a share in the rural development of various parts in several states of India..
We can attribute that their ulterior motive is the growth of their religion;But we have to honestly accept that they value human life.