How I wish he had sung it! That would have been funny and maybe entertaining. Otherwise this kind of pronouncement is 100% useless and insulting, while making too many people dumber.
Speaking to executives and staff from Italy’s ITA Airways, the first U.S. Pope proved he could be as fatuous as other Popes by saying, “No one should have to fear that threats of death and destruction might come from the sky. After the tragic experiences of the 20th century, aerial bombings should have been banned forever. Yet they still exist … this is not progress; it is regression!”
Well, if we could have the marshmallow world John Lennon imagined, “nothing to live of die for” and no countries or religion, that might be slightly less ludicrous, but only slightly. Now that I’ve roused those banished brain cells where I store “Imagine,” let me take a few minutes to run “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” in my mind to cleanse it.
There! Much better!
Ethics Alarms 
Aerial bombardment should be banned, eh? And when you see that some nation has built itself a fleet of bombers, or an array of long-range missiles, how will this ban be enforced? You aren’t allowed to bombard it from the air. Should other nations invade from the ground, fighting for every inch of the hundreds of miles from the nearest border to the objective, turning every village along the way into a war zone?
Dave, Dave, Dave. The U.N. will ban aerial bombardment with Russia and China joining in! Come on. Pay attention.
What rock has this Leo guy crawled out from under? At least he doesn’t seem to be as much a Commie as Francis was.
I dunno. He just made another call for universal government-funded health care.
Maybe you’re right.
Where does universal government-funded health care appear in the Bible?
In the New Testament…3rd Peter.
3rd Peter ?
Psalm 151
Sorry, Joel…. missed that 😉 I was particularly dense last night.
…and sometimes my jokes just aren’t that funny.
Maybe our boy Leo would be OK with armies decked out in striped tunics and feathered helmets going at each other with halberds. He could hole up in Castel Sant’Angelo until things blew over.
This is an embarrassment. Benedict the 15th was strongly opposed to World War I and wanted to try to stop it, but he couldn’t, because Germany wouldn’t listen to a Catholic pope and anti-clerical France was not interested in what he had to say. So he took it upon himself to try to relieve the suffering of the victims of that war. The Pope during World War II remained officially neutral and helped no one.
Now the pope is spouting wishful thinking that somehow Air forces should be outlawed. Air power is what won World War II. Air power is what took out most of the Japanese carrier Fleet at Midway. Air power covered The landings at Normandy. The Battle of the bulge was mostly won because the foggy weather that had grounded American and British aircraft lifted and they were able to pulverize the Germans. Air power was a big part of what forced the armistice in Korea at time and again air power has proven to be the battleship of its day in terms of stopping problems before they start or keeping problems from getting bigger.
Yet the pope wants it all outlawed? Sorry your holiness, but that statement is just plain absurd and the leader of the world’s largest Christian sect needs to do better than be absurd.
The Pope is clearly over his skies in speaking on military tactics and health care insurance. This is a temptation for churches, to pick a side in a political debate, and wrap political talking points in theological language and allusions to Bible texts. The result is that people who should spiritually lead the church pontificate on matters they have no specific and relevant understanding of, hereby diminishing the authority of the church. Somebody’s views on how to govern are not magically elevated because the speaker wears vestments and precedes his words with “Thus says the Lord”.
More and more I see the wisdom of the framers of the Constitution to separate church and state. The Reformed scholar D.G. Hart in his book A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State argues that bringing the Christian faith into the political sphere makes the secular sacred, elevates political tensions, and causes the church to lose focus on its core mission as witness to Christ’s work on our behalf, and God’s purpose for government, which is as a temporary restraint of evil and promote justice until the dawn of a new period in the history of salvation.
The Pope however is influenced by liberation theology, which sees an expansive role for government to establish “social justice”, a term which in practice often denotes leftwing policy.
No one should have to fear the threat of death from above? Not even the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah? Or do they get a special exemption? Where’s the line between death from above is bad, and death from above is bad, but these guys are bad enough that we’ll allow it, anyway?
I am a little confused with your assertion that the Vatican is a Holocaust accessory when it is well known that Pope Pius XII was instrumental to the defeat of Nazism, encouraged covert action against the Nazis, and was personally responsible for the protection and escape of many Jews. There is a book called Hitler’s Pope that has been thoroughly debunked and a play written at the command of the KGB after the Soviet Union tried to break away from Catholics in 1945, but again, these have been found to be substantially false. In fact, most of the “evidence” they had were documents from the Vatican that referred to people of Jewish heritage as Jews (the horror), as well as a falsified claim of the Pope committing scandalous behavior with women and children, usually twisted reports from his attempts to sneak them out from under the noses of the Nazis.
One statement I have seen, in looking this up, complains that the Pope did not speak out much against Nazi Germany. He spoke out infrequently, such as in 1931, condemning their actions. He did sign a concordant to defend the rights of Catholics and keep them mainly out of concentration camps in 1933. This was historically relevant as it was the tactic used with Napoleon, and it worked about as well as anticipated, which is to say not a lot. He published an encyclical in 1937 that was very strongly anti-Nazi which encouraged people to speak out against the Nazis. The pope quickly became aware that any actions he would take against the Nazis would bring further harm to both Jews and Catholics.
By 1941, the private secretary to Adolf Hitler, Martin Bormann issued a secret (at the time) decree regarding the true intentions of the Nazi regime towards the Catholic Churches. The Kirchemkampf was clear. Being Catholic, while not immediately illegal the way being a Jew was, was a clear invitation to persecute, torture, arrest falsely, and deport to concentrations camps, especially Dachau. At the time, Catholics were protesting the treatment of Jews in the Netherlands. Germany declared that if the protests stopped, all Jewish born Christian converts and Jews married to Christians would be immune to deportation. The Catholic Church in the Netherlands, under the guidance of the bishops and pope did NOT capitulate, unlike the vast majority of the Protestants in the country. Catholics helped thousands of Jews escape the Netherlands, and hid another 40,000. 49 priests and many laity gave their lives during the month of July, to make this happen.
The Pope, while using very specific language to not call the wrath of the Nazis down on innocent Catholics, continued to encourage these actions. In 1942, he said, Catholics should not forget “those hundreds of thousands who, without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked for death of progressive extinction.” It is documented by Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide, in 1967’s The Last Three Popes, that between 700,000 and 860,000 Jews were saved from death by the Church. It should be noted that while numbers are tough to come by, during the time that Polish Catholics were being crushed, Catholic clergy and religious, under Pious’s covert encouragement saved between 15,000 and 50,000 Jews in Poland alone. And Catholics paid for this greatly. Dachau was filled with Catholic Poles. Dachau imprisoned 2,720 members of clergy from various religions. 2,579 of those clergymen were Catholic priests. At least 3,000 priests from Poland were shipped to other concentration camps and over 6,000 other European priests died in concentration camps, as well as thousands of seminarians, monks, and nuns. These numbers don’t even count the Catholic clergy who were killed outside of the camps, only the ones that made the rolls. People of the Catholic faith were targeted for Catholic resistance, encouraged by the Pope, to Nazis. Some historians count up to ten million Catholics killed throughout World War II, though of course, the numbers are questionable as they do not differentiate between soldiers, civilians killed because of the war, and those who were killed for opposing Germany outright or in camps.
The Pope did not use his bully pulpit much against the Nazis, but not from love of the Nazis, but out of prudence. The Nuremburg Trials US deputy chief of counsel, Dr. Rober M.W. Kempner wrote, “Ever propaganda move of the Catholic Church against Hitler’s reich would have been not only ‘provoking suicide’…but would have hastened the execution of still more Jews and Priests.” Albert Kesselring, German field marshal, testified “If [Pius XII] did not protest, he failed to do so because he told himself, quite rightly, ‘If I protest Hitler will be driven to madness—not only will that not help the Jews, but we must expect that they will be killed all the more.” We can not speak to what could have been differently without being guilty of Presentism when the people of the time recognized what had to be done.
Instead, we have plenty of evidence that Pope Pius XII was a man of action. He could not legally help the Jews with his pulpit. So he directed all under his command to give aid and shelter where they could. He fed and clothed Jewish refugees. He vacated his apartment to hide pregnant Jewish women, so they could give birth in safety. He was vilified for this, though further investigation showed that rather than abusing women, he was giving them asylum. He distributed false documentation to help Jews avoid Nazi deportation, and he passed confidential intelligence on to Allied Leaders whenever he felt it was prudent. The man smuggled Jews out of Europe whenever he could. For crying out loud, the Pope secretly funded operations to assassinate Hitler.
Excellent rejoinder, Sarah. The Pope was in a terrible position. Speaking out against Hitler and Nazis without an army or military force to back it up was suicidal.
jvb