Try reading Deus Caritas Est at a start. He's very talented.
As for the whole encyclical thing, this is a Curia inside baseball thing which may have nothing to do with Benedict XVI at all. Prodi's a strong Catholic and a lefty. Some left-wing curial official (and nobody says that bishops put away politics) wanted to support Prodi so he launches a rumor. This is a very old game, trying to influence politics by a whisper campaign, consider yourself trolled by an expert in robes.
The bishop of Rome is also the Metropolitan of his Province and until quite recently the Patriarch of the West (there's a reorg brewing at the vatican). Are metropolitan and patriarch also just honorifics? If so you have a funny definition of title and honorific.
While it is true that an eastern prelate could spend an entire lifetime in the East without becoming embroiled in a controversy requiring intervention from Rome, that does not mean that when they cropped up that they did not sometimes skip their local metropolitans and seek intervention from Rome. We know of at least one action as early as AD96 in Corinth (see the link) and there are plenty of others that are pre-1054.
maternal hormonal imbalance will kill a certain number of unborn children, disfigure others, and cause emotional imbalances in still others and somehow all this is just "a part of nature, and all-natural" and thus should not be avoided if we can? Pray tell me why should we not avoid hormonal shifts that cause miscarriages and why the same logic wouldn't work just as well for homosexuality *if* you're actually correct that it's a hormonal issue?
You do realize that the "center of the universe" is an arbitrary notion, right? We move the center point around these days because it makes the math easier but making the math easier is not a theological requirement. In any case, geocentrism *and* heliocentrism are not valid for calculating the "center of the universe" by any modern scientific theory held as true so what exactly is your point on this one?
The Bible *always* was viewed as a mix of mytho-poetics, metaphor, and straight fact. The vast majority of christians hold to this both now and in Galileo's time. Whether a particular passage was metaphorical or should be taken literally can and has evolved as we got a better handle on the way the universe works. Long before Galileo was born, such adjustments were being made successfully. That's one important reason why sacred Tradition is held alongside sacred Scripture in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The Bible is not always crystal clear, never was.
You've gone and played fast and loose with the facts, perhaps unintentionally by not making the necessary differentiation between the heliocentrism as theory v heliocentrism as fact versions of the same works. Instead of coming to a reasonable agreement that the Church is not at fault for condemning scientists who try to push unproven (at the time) theories as theologically certain facts requiring changes in biblical interpretation, you're changing the subject to one of belief v. unbelief. Move goalposts much?
One can be entirely against Catholicism and be honest and grant that Galileo was not being scientific when he insisted that heliocentrism was proven in 1614. But that really collapses the whole "the Church is anti-scientific" propaganda line.
I was trying to get past the "dumbass" portion of your comments and try to seriously answer you. I say I love homosexuals as I love every other sinner, sincerely. I don't think that homosexuals are any worse sinners as a category than rapists, usurers, abusers of their parents or people who are guilty of any of the other serious sins on the Catholic list. All sinners are in danger of losing their souls and suffering everlasting punishment in Hell. I'd like that to befall nobody. The worst thing you can do to someone is set them up for Hell so for a practicing Catholic, preaching repentence and reconciliation is an act of love. You may not understand this alternative lifestyle but that does not make it any less valid or true.
In a country of 300M+, I'd be confident in betting that there's a bit of both going on. But the objective facts are that virginity is becoming more popular and thus the timeless Church teaching is being followed by more people, thus is not becoming more irrelevant.
Let me pick an analogy. Sometimes people don't jaywalk because there's a cop right there writing tickets and sometimes they do it because they don't want to get hit by a car. But in both instances a reduction in jaywalking rates is an increase in respect for the law.
No, picking up a girl in a bar when you have your beer goggles on and having sex with her is like russian roulette. You never know what you're going to wake up next to and what diseases you might have just picked up. That's pretty standard sex ed 101 and the Catholic Church agrees. The sex ed crew wants you to wear a condom so you have less chance (but still a nonzero chance) of catching a disease (waking up to coyote ugly has no cure other than sobriety). The Church says don't play that game at all and reserve your sex for your marriage bed where it's not russian roulette. Now which is the more reasonable position again?
The tradition in the eastern rites has always been to pray and preach in the language of the congregation. Unless you're in a hotbed of new immigrants, the language is probably english. The problem of the eastern rites in the US is a difficult one with some ugly history. Let's just say that we generally accept JP II's apology to eastern christianity. Orientalis Ecclesiarium is profitable reading as are the 1995 norms for eastern liturgies. You can visit another rite's church any time and at any frequency just as other rite adherents visit latin churches. Transfers can be done for good cause for the benefit of your soul and intergenerationally in families. If you fall in love with another rite, you can baptise your child into that rite and switch that way. You will find that eastern priests will be more reluctant to do such transfers than latin priests are going the other way.
You do realize that until very recently, people were routinely trained out of left-handedness, right? Also, that's just for the US. There are plenty of places in the world where people are trained out of left handedness as a matter of course to this day. In other words, this is a bad example.
Turning back to homosexuality, I do not favor eugenics in any way, shape, or form. I do my best to love my brothers and sisters despite their sins as I hope they love me despite my own. Do you know what a Catholic calls someone who is not tempted to sin? A saint. I'm not a saint.
You are misreading the situation. At the time, the copernican position was not actually proven and the final proofs wouldn't come in until centuries later (stellar parallax was the last bit of evidence that ended the scientific debate). The Catholic Church's position was that the Bible could be legitimately read to support the copernican or ptolmaic system and that things should be left with enough play to swing to either side until all the evidence was in. Galileo insisted that *in advance of the full evidence* the Church should take sides and start trying ptolmaic astronomers (Galileo's personal enemies) for heresy. He was also a great big SOB about the whole thing, pissing off all his supporters and leading to the Church's only real sin in the affair, the overzealousness of its condemnation of Galileo which really should have been a great deal clearer about its character as a theological and not scientific problem.
Already by 1620, Copernicus was reprinted in Rome with the correction of about 9 sentences, all changing the previous assertions that heliocentrism was proven fact to heliocentrism was a hypothesis. Again, until stellar parallax was observed in 1838, there were still outstanding challenges to heliocentrism that had not been resolved. The condemnation of heliocentrism *as fact* was running side by side as Church acceptance of heliocentrism *as hypothesis* decades before Alexander VII came on the scene with his papal bull. For a religious institution, this is pretty sophisticated adherence to the scientific method for the middle ages and turns the papal bull into a document that has to be examined very carefully to see which versions of these works are being banned, the ones that race ahead of the science of the day and make faith based claims that heliocentrism was fact or those that stuck to the actual evidence and forwarded the heliocentric hypothesis to the limits of the available evidence. The Church appears not to have had a problem with the latter and that, I hope you agree, was the correct opinion.
The Church wanted to avoid confusion and wanted everybody to shift together in a well thought out, planned way and were willing to squash authors who jumped the starting gun. In a world filled with religious war, is this desire really so incomprehensible?
Ok, you've decided that it's an inborn trait. Good luck talking to the gene therapy guys because people keep looking for that homosexual gene so they can turn it off and "solve" the "homosexual problem".
Of course people choose to be christians. If God wanted puppets, he would have never invented free will. You don't seem to be entirely clear on the concept of christianity. Baptism (the initiation ceremony of christianity) is a choice and has always clearly been presented as such. A sovereign may permit opposition and a wise one generally does ("the loyal opposition").
>>>How do you even have property, especially real estate? >>You get real estate by initial occupation or taking it (voluntarily or involuntarily) from someone else. Government, if it is even doing so today, only recently started mediating the majority of property transfers. >Um, real estate law in America has its roots in Medeival England. Governments have been involved in determining who owns what piece of property, and how that property is transfered, for thousands of years. Your idea is basically kill anyone you want and take their land.
You did read the word "voluntarily" in my original response, no? That means buying, often with government tax stamps on the transfer papers. The majority of property transfers worldwide do not run even today under english common law or any of its variants so can we get a little more global please? The warlords of china, for instance, never much cared for which hedman was handing over the yearly tribute for a particular village and who owned what inside the village was not really their major concern so long as it did not interfere with the tax collections. And when was China's last bout of warlordism? 1947 or thereabouts. But today, you yearly have thousands of riots over PRC illegal property transfers greased by bribery and the problem is currently getting worse.
One of the US' and other english common law countries major advantages is the preciseness of its property transfers and the ease and convenience in changing ownership in a legal sense. Most of S. America is not so blessed even today which is one of the major reasons why the poor stay poor there. Africa is also cursed with poor property transfer procedures with a lot of transfers being done without legal cover. Asia used to largely be in the same situation but it's getting much better there the last few decades.
>>>how would you even be able to buy a gun if there is no government regulating how business is conducted?
>>You give something the gunsmith or previous owner would like more than they like the gun. (boy, these are pretty easy).
>Again, this is another example of not really thinking through what you are saying. The reason you can go to a gunsmith (or anyone else for that matter) and conduct a >business transaction is that there are laws in place governing how the transaction takes place. What is to prevent someone from simply killing you and taking what you >have from you? The law and the enforcement of the law.
Actually, a lack of law makes the transaction much more difficult but plenty of economic deals are essentially negotiated from scratch. That's how much of N. Korea's trade is conducted right now because they are fundamentally untrustworthy so it's cash on the barrelhead and enough arms are kept around to keep the N. Koreans honest. Remember, these are people who gratefully accepted PRC food aid shipped in on trains and then stole the trains, claiming that was aid too. The PRC was not amused.
Do you really think that the blood diamond trade or the drug trade has recourse to a law court? Now who's being naive?
Government and the law are incredibly useful tools. So is fire. Both can be used profitably and both can get out of control. So where are you going with this and how does it relate to the Pope and his upcoming encyclical?
And I am not bothering to answer the stupid points so those are just going to have to remain largely undiscussed. History provides plenty of answers to those questions.
The "summary" was no summary. It was a political jab, most likely by an italian curial leftist looking to spin things in favor of Romano Prodi as much as possible. Prodi has been pushing for such a statement and such rumors help him advance his agenda of getting more italian money in the Italian government's treasury.
The document will come when it comes and I'm pretty confident that it will have significant differences from these early rumors.
There's a lot of rumors going around and the vast majority of them are bound to be wrong. I strongly suspect that certain forms of tax reduction are going to be condemned but that most of them are going to be along the lines of illegal tax evasion, not legal tax avoidance. The Pope has to make a rule that will guide a Catholic in Zimbabwe and N. Korea and the PRC as well as in Italy, France, and Germany. The media is not doing a very good job at conveying the complexity of the task. They usually do not.
Actually, the Pope's words carry a lot further than just the adherents to Catholicism. The list of people who actually don't "give a rats ass" about what the Pope says is rather short and neither includes the world's muslims or hindus or jews or protestants or orthodox or buddhists.
Jesus has no successor. Peter is the rock upon which His Church shall be built. That's a bit different.
The Pope is still called the Bishop of Rome, always has been since Peter. He's got an awful lot of titles.
The idea that the East never recognized the Pope's special role is very much disputed and, frankly, the historical facts are not on your side. The East was a rough place and plenty of Eastern bishops ran to Rome for dispute resolution over that first millennium.
The one Church of the time was both Catholic and Orthodox. Who left who in 1054 is a very long argument and somewhat superseded by recent events of the past few decades. Hopefully, the Church will soon be, once again, fully Catholic and Orthodox, and the Great Schism will have been healed.
You should note that the Church itself does not refer to itself as Roman Catholic. That's generally an outsider's label.
Catholics don't believe in throwing out the old stuff just because v2.0 came out. Prior to the creation of the Bible, apostolic authority and teaching were fairly well developed. The publication of the Bible does not invalidate any of that. Catholic doctrine is that the Tradition and Scripture are equally valid in describing the Church that Christ wants to be on Earth.
That being said, Peter has a bunch of stuff happen to him that points to a special role for him. A good argument for the Catholic view of things can be found here. Part of the argument is biblical. Other parts are historical.
>How do you even have property, especially real estate?
You get real estate by initial occupation or taking it (voluntarily or involuntarily) from someone else. Government, if it is even doing so today, only recently started mediating the majority of property transfers.
>how would you even be able to buy a gun if there is no government regulating how business is conducted?
You give something the gunsmith or previous owner would like more than they like the gun. (boy, these are pretty easy).
>If someone breaks into your house and you shoot him, what happens then?
Well, it very much depends what society you live in. If you're in Zimbabwe and you're ZANU-PF and the thief isn't, nothing happens. If you're in the US, an investigation happens to determine conformance with the law. If you're in libertopia, your protective association and the thief's powow together and work it out, or go to war.
>Clearly, the police have to get involved at some point.
Well, actually, in some societies, the police don't get involved. You've got a lot of unstated assumptions sitting there.
>How does this whole infrastructure get paid for and maintained?
Well, law enforcement usually gets paid for coercively, while some libertarians believe that it could work on a voluntary basis. I'm not personally convinced which is why my own fantasy of how a libertarian country comes into being leaves law enforcement toward the tail end of the process, where all the "hey maybe we can't effectively privatize this stuff" goes for most practical libertarians.
In the US at least, the Church's position is actually becoming less and less wishful thinking and more descriptive of reality. The number of virgin marriages are up, premarital sex is down. Practicality is disease avoidance, especially as more treatment resistant strains of STDs arise.
There's a myth that every generation from here on out is going to have more and more premarital sex. That's just not the case.
And I don't characterize him as just another theologian but rather as someone who said a correct thing with a particular spin, not the only spin. If there were only one valid way to tell the story, there wouldn't be four Gospels. Paul had many merits. He was a genius overall and a very holy man. That doesn't mean that his spin is the only spin or that there aren't other valid ways of looking at things. The Bible is not our paper God as Catholics. It's an extremely good tool to gain a full union with God as He initially intended.
You obviously have no idea how priests are supposed to be trained. Priestly formation is supposed to include very intensive examination of one's entire life including personal sexuality. Part of the freaking entrance questionnaire is whether you have ever had same sex attraction. What you're to do at seminary if the answer is yes has changed recently (they significantly tightened up the rules for homosexual seminarians) but they always asked.
Could you please give an example of a false infallible pronouncement of any Pope? When we're talking about papal infallibility, this is technical language. It has a precise, well defined meaning. If a pope says "looks like rain today", papal infallibility is not disproved by a lack of rain that day.
What do you expect from a Church that elevated whores (Mary Magdelene), tax collectors, betrayers (Peter), and other disreputable characters into its highest ranks? Do you understand christianity (much less the Catholic brand of christianity) at all?
Peter denied Christ 3 times before the cock crowed thrice. He was the first Pope. People do fail. They reform and can sometimes come back to do amazing things. Pope Benedick XVI obviously is not today the same boy that could not resist joining the Hitler Youth.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't know that the Pope has missed anything yet. Nothing he's actually written on the subject is available to either of us. This is all rumor.
Try reading Deus Caritas Est at a start. He's very talented.
As for the whole encyclical thing, this is a Curia inside baseball thing which may have nothing to do with Benedict XVI at all. Prodi's a strong Catholic and a lefty. Some left-wing curial official (and nobody says that bishops put away politics) wanted to support Prodi so he launches a rumor. This is a very old game, trying to influence politics by a whisper campaign, consider yourself trolled by an expert in robes.
The bishop of Rome is also the Metropolitan of his Province and until quite recently the Patriarch of the West (there's a reorg brewing at the vatican). Are metropolitan and patriarch also just honorifics? If so you have a funny definition of title and honorific.
While it is true that an eastern prelate could spend an entire lifetime in the East without becoming embroiled in a controversy requiring intervention from Rome, that does not mean that when they cropped up that they did not sometimes skip their local metropolitans and seek intervention from Rome. We know of at least one action as early as AD96 in Corinth (see the link) and there are plenty of others that are pre-1054.
maternal hormonal imbalance will kill a certain number of unborn children, disfigure others, and cause emotional imbalances in still others and somehow all this is just "a part of nature, and all-natural" and thus should not be avoided if we can? Pray tell me why should we not avoid hormonal shifts that cause miscarriages and why the same logic wouldn't work just as well for homosexuality *if* you're actually correct that it's a hormonal issue?
You do realize that the "center of the universe" is an arbitrary notion, right? We move the center point around these days because it makes the math easier but making the math easier is not a theological requirement. In any case, geocentrism *and* heliocentrism are not valid for calculating the "center of the universe" by any modern scientific theory held as true so what exactly is your point on this one?
The Bible *always* was viewed as a mix of mytho-poetics, metaphor, and straight fact. The vast majority of christians hold to this both now and in Galileo's time. Whether a particular passage was metaphorical or should be taken literally can and has evolved as we got a better handle on the way the universe works. Long before Galileo was born, such adjustments were being made successfully. That's one important reason why sacred Tradition is held alongside sacred Scripture in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The Bible is not always crystal clear, never was.
You've gone and played fast and loose with the facts, perhaps unintentionally by not making the necessary differentiation between the heliocentrism as theory v heliocentrism as fact versions of the same works. Instead of coming to a reasonable agreement that the Church is not at fault for condemning scientists who try to push unproven (at the time) theories as theologically certain facts requiring changes in biblical interpretation, you're changing the subject to one of belief v. unbelief. Move goalposts much?
One can be entirely against Catholicism and be honest and grant that Galileo was not being scientific when he insisted that heliocentrism was proven in 1614. But that really collapses the whole "the Church is anti-scientific" propaganda line.
I was trying to get past the "dumbass" portion of your comments and try to seriously answer you. I say I love homosexuals as I love every other sinner, sincerely. I don't think that homosexuals are any worse sinners as a category than rapists, usurers, abusers of their parents or people who are guilty of any of the other serious sins on the Catholic list. All sinners are in danger of losing their souls and suffering everlasting punishment in Hell. I'd like that to befall nobody. The worst thing you can do to someone is set them up for Hell so for a practicing Catholic, preaching repentence and reconciliation is an act of love. You may not understand this alternative lifestyle but that does not make it any less valid or true.
In a country of 300M+, I'd be confident in betting that there's a bit of both going on. But the objective facts are that virginity is becoming more popular and thus the timeless Church teaching is being followed by more people, thus is not becoming more irrelevant.
Let me pick an analogy. Sometimes people don't jaywalk because there's a cop right there writing tickets and sometimes they do it because they don't want to get hit by a car. But in both instances a reduction in jaywalking rates is an increase in respect for the law.
No, picking up a girl in a bar when you have your beer goggles on and having sex with her is like russian roulette. You never know what you're going to wake up next to and what diseases you might have just picked up. That's pretty standard sex ed 101 and the Catholic Church agrees. The sex ed crew wants you to wear a condom so you have less chance (but still a nonzero chance) of catching a disease (waking up to coyote ugly has no cure other than sobriety). The Church says don't play that game at all and reserve your sex for your marriage bed where it's not russian roulette. Now which is the more reasonable position again?
The tradition in the eastern rites has always been to pray and preach in the language of the congregation. Unless you're in a hotbed of new immigrants, the language is probably english. The problem of the eastern rites in the US is a difficult one with some ugly history. Let's just say that we generally accept JP II's apology to eastern christianity. Orientalis Ecclesiarium is profitable reading as are the 1995 norms for eastern liturgies. You can visit another rite's church any time and at any frequency just as other rite adherents visit latin churches. Transfers can be done for good cause for the benefit of your soul and intergenerationally in families. If you fall in love with another rite, you can baptise your child into that rite and switch that way. You will find that eastern priests will be more reluctant to do such transfers than latin priests are going the other way.
You do realize that until very recently, people were routinely trained out of left-handedness, right? Also, that's just for the US. There are plenty of places in the world where people are trained out of left handedness as a matter of course to this day. In other words, this is a bad example.
Turning back to homosexuality, I do not favor eugenics in any way, shape, or form. I do my best to love my brothers and sisters despite their sins as I hope they love me despite my own. Do you know what a Catholic calls someone who is not tempted to sin? A saint. I'm not a saint.
You are misreading the situation. At the time, the copernican position was not actually proven and the final proofs wouldn't come in until centuries later (stellar parallax was the last bit of evidence that ended the scientific debate). The Catholic Church's position was that the Bible could be legitimately read to support the copernican or ptolmaic system and that things should be left with enough play to swing to either side until all the evidence was in. Galileo insisted that *in advance of the full evidence* the Church should take sides and start trying ptolmaic astronomers (Galileo's personal enemies) for heresy. He was also a great big SOB about the whole thing, pissing off all his supporters and leading to the Church's only real sin in the affair, the overzealousness of its condemnation of Galileo which really should have been a great deal clearer about its character as a theological and not scientific problem.
Already by 1620, Copernicus was reprinted in Rome with the correction of about 9 sentences, all changing the previous assertions that heliocentrism was proven fact to heliocentrism was a hypothesis. Again, until stellar parallax was observed in 1838, there were still outstanding challenges to heliocentrism that had not been resolved. The condemnation of heliocentrism *as fact* was running side by side as Church acceptance of heliocentrism *as hypothesis* decades before Alexander VII came on the scene with his papal bull. For a religious institution, this is pretty sophisticated adherence to the scientific method for the middle ages and turns the papal bull into a document that has to be examined very carefully to see which versions of these works are being banned, the ones that race ahead of the science of the day and make faith based claims that heliocentrism was fact or those that stuck to the actual evidence and forwarded the heliocentric hypothesis to the limits of the available evidence. The Church appears not to have had a problem with the latter and that, I hope you agree, was the correct opinion.
The Church wanted to avoid confusion and wanted everybody to shift together in a well thought out, planned way and were willing to squash authors who jumped the starting gun. In a world filled with religious war, is this desire really so incomprehensible?
Ok, you've decided that it's an inborn trait. Good luck talking to the gene therapy guys because people keep looking for that homosexual gene so they can turn it off and "solve" the "homosexual problem".
Of course people choose to be christians. If God wanted puppets, he would have never invented free will. You don't seem to be entirely clear on the concept of christianity. Baptism (the initiation ceremony of christianity) is a choice and has always clearly been presented as such. A sovereign may permit opposition and a wise one generally does ("the loyal opposition").
>>>How do you even have property, especially real estate?
>>You get real estate by initial occupation or taking it (voluntarily or involuntarily) from someone else. Government, if it is even doing so today, only recently started mediating the majority of property transfers.
>Um, real estate law in America has its roots in Medeival England. Governments have been involved in determining who owns what piece of property, and how that property is transfered, for thousands of years. Your idea is basically kill anyone you want and take their land.
You did read the word "voluntarily" in my original response, no? That means buying, often with government tax stamps on the transfer papers. The majority of property transfers worldwide do not run even today under english common law or any of its variants so can we get a little more global please? The warlords of china, for instance, never much cared for which hedman was handing over the yearly tribute for a particular village and who owned what inside the village was not really their major concern so long as it did not interfere with the tax collections. And when was China's last bout of warlordism? 1947 or thereabouts. But today, you yearly have thousands of riots over PRC illegal property transfers greased by bribery and the problem is currently getting worse.
One of the US' and other english common law countries major advantages is the preciseness of its property transfers and the ease and convenience in changing ownership in a legal sense. Most of S. America is not so blessed even today which is one of the major reasons why the poor stay poor there. Africa is also cursed with poor property transfer procedures with a lot of transfers being done without legal cover. Asia used to largely be in the same situation but it's getting much better there the last few decades.
>>>how would you even be able to buy a gun if there is no government regulating how business is conducted?
>>You give something the gunsmith or previous owner would like more than they like the gun. (boy, these are pretty easy).
>Again, this is another example of not really thinking through what you are saying. The reason you can go to a gunsmith (or anyone else for that matter) and conduct a
>business transaction is that there are laws in place governing how the transaction takes place. What is to prevent someone from simply killing you and taking what you
>have from you? The law and the enforcement of the law.
Actually, a lack of law makes the transaction much more difficult but plenty of economic deals are essentially negotiated from scratch. That's how much of N. Korea's trade is conducted right now because they are fundamentally untrustworthy so it's cash on the barrelhead and enough arms are kept around to keep the N. Koreans honest. Remember, these are people who gratefully accepted PRC food aid shipped in on trains and then stole the trains, claiming that was aid too. The PRC was not amused.
Do you really think that the blood diamond trade or the drug trade has recourse to a law court? Now who's being naive?
Government and the law are incredibly useful tools. So is fire. Both can be used profitably and both can get out of control. So where are you going with this and how does it relate to the Pope and his upcoming encyclical?
And I am not bothering to answer the stupid points so those are just going to have to remain largely undiscussed. History provides plenty of answers to those questions.
The "summary" was no summary. It was a political jab, most likely by an italian curial leftist looking to spin things in favor of Romano Prodi as much as possible. Prodi has been pushing for such a statement and such rumors help him advance his agenda of getting more italian money in the Italian government's treasury.
The document will come when it comes and I'm pretty confident that it will have significant differences from these early rumors.
There's a lot of rumors going around and the vast majority of them are bound to be wrong. I strongly suspect that certain forms of tax reduction are going to be condemned but that most of them are going to be along the lines of illegal tax evasion, not legal tax avoidance. The Pope has to make a rule that will guide a Catholic in Zimbabwe and N. Korea and the PRC as well as in Italy, France, and Germany. The media is not doing a very good job at conveying the complexity of the task. They usually do not.
Actually, the Pope's words carry a lot further than just the adherents to Catholicism. The list of people who actually don't "give a rats ass" about what the Pope says is rather short and neither includes the world's muslims or hindus or jews or protestants or orthodox or buddhists.
Jesus has no successor. Peter is the rock upon which His Church shall be built. That's a bit different.
The Pope is still called the Bishop of Rome, always has been since Peter. He's got an awful lot of titles.
The idea that the East never recognized the Pope's special role is very much disputed and, frankly, the historical facts are not on your side. The East was a rough place and plenty of Eastern bishops ran to Rome for dispute resolution over that first millennium.
The one Church of the time was both Catholic and Orthodox. Who left who in 1054 is a very long argument and somewhat superseded by recent events of the past few decades. Hopefully, the Church will soon be, once again, fully Catholic and Orthodox, and the Great Schism will have been healed.
You should note that the Church itself does not refer to itself as Roman Catholic. That's generally an outsider's label.
Catholics don't believe in throwing out the old stuff just because v2.0 came out. Prior to the creation of the Bible, apostolic authority and teaching were fairly well developed. The publication of the Bible does not invalidate any of that. Catholic doctrine is that the Tradition and Scripture are equally valid in describing the Church that Christ wants to be on Earth.
That being said, Peter has a bunch of stuff happen to him that points to a special role for him. A good argument for the Catholic view of things can be found here. Part of the argument is biblical. Other parts are historical.
>How do you even have property, especially real estate?
You get real estate by initial occupation or taking it (voluntarily or involuntarily) from someone else. Government, if it is even doing so today, only recently started mediating the majority of property transfers.
>how would you even be able to buy a gun if there is no government regulating how business is conducted?
You give something the gunsmith or previous owner would like more than they like the gun. (boy, these are pretty easy).
>If someone breaks into your house and you shoot him, what happens then?
Well, it very much depends what society you live in. If you're in Zimbabwe and you're ZANU-PF and the thief isn't, nothing happens. If you're in the US, an investigation happens to determine conformance with the law. If you're in libertopia, your protective association and the thief's powow together and work it out, or go to war.
>Clearly, the police have to get involved at some point.
Well, actually, in some societies, the police don't get involved. You've got a lot of unstated assumptions sitting there.
>How does this whole infrastructure get paid for and maintained?
Well, law enforcement usually gets paid for coercively, while some libertarians believe that it could work on a voluntary basis. I'm not personally convinced which is why my own fantasy of how a libertarian country comes into being leaves law enforcement toward the tail end of the process, where all the "hey maybe we can't effectively privatize this stuff" goes for most practical libertarians.
In the US at least, the Church's position is actually becoming less and less wishful thinking and more descriptive of reality. The number of virgin marriages are up, premarital sex is down. Practicality is disease avoidance, especially as more treatment resistant strains of STDs arise.
There's a myth that every generation from here on out is going to have more and more premarital sex. That's just not the case.
And I don't characterize him as just another theologian but rather as someone who said a correct thing with a particular spin, not the only spin. If there were only one valid way to tell the story, there wouldn't be four Gospels. Paul had many merits. He was a genius overall and a very holy man. That doesn't mean that his spin is the only spin or that there aren't other valid ways of looking at things. The Bible is not our paper God as Catholics. It's an extremely good tool to gain a full union with God as He initially intended.
You obviously have no idea how priests are supposed to be trained. Priestly formation is supposed to include very intensive examination of one's entire life including personal sexuality. Part of the freaking entrance questionnaire is whether you have ever had same sex attraction. What you're to do at seminary if the answer is yes has changed recently (they significantly tightened up the rules for homosexual seminarians) but they always asked.
Could you please give an example of a false infallible pronouncement of any Pope? When we're talking about papal infallibility, this is technical language. It has a precise, well defined meaning. If a pope says "looks like rain today", papal infallibility is not disproved by a lack of rain that day.
What do you expect from a Church that elevated whores (Mary Magdelene), tax collectors, betrayers (Peter), and other disreputable characters into its highest ranks? Do you understand christianity (much less the Catholic brand of christianity) at all?
Peter denied Christ 3 times before the cock crowed thrice. He was the first Pope. People do fail. They reform and can sometimes come back to do amazing things. Pope Benedick XVI obviously is not today the same boy that could not resist joining the Hitler Youth.