Concerning the priest-sex-abuse scandal, see Robert Blair Kaiser's book WHISTLE: FR. TOM DOYLE'S STEADFAST WITNESS OF CLERICAL SEXUAL ABUSE (2015) and Kieran Tapsell's book POTIPHAR'S WIFE: THE VATICAN'S SECRET AND CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE (2014).
In the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, I should give Pope Francis credit for appointing a Pontifical Commission for Protecting Minors to advise him about possible positive steps that he as pope might take to protect minors in the future. Fr. Tom Doyle is a consultant to that Pontifical Commission. However, it remains to be seen if it will make any salient recommendations for significant changes in the church's canon law that Pope Francis could enact.
No doubt the church's culture and ideology of absolutisms contributed to "a numbing of conscience" in the Roman Catholic popes and bishops (see par. no. 49).
In addition, Oreskes stresses the pope's emphasis on "our mutual interconnection with one another and with nature in all its complexity" (page xxii).
In various places Pope Francis invokes St. Francis of Assisi's "Canticle of Brother Sun." In addition, Pope Francis repeatedly endorses the spirit of communion that St. Francis of Assisi expresses in his "Canticle."
The general orientation that Pope Francis favors and recommends is consistent with the medieval creation spirituality that Matthew Fox writes about in his book SHEER JOY: CONVERSATIONS WITH THOMAS AQUINAS ON CREATION SPIRITUALITY (1992) and in his book PASSION FOR CREATION: THE EARTH-HONORING SPIRITUALITY OF MEISTER ECKHART (2000).
On a more personal level, the spirit of communion that Pope Francis endorses (see par. nos. 91 and 92, for example) involves the dimension of communion in the human psyche that David Bakan, a Jewish faculty member in psychology at the University of Chicago, discusses in his book THE DUALITY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE: AN ESSAY ON PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION (1966).
Pope Francis' emphasis in his eco-encyclical on the importance of love is consistent with Martha C. Nussbaum's emphasis on love in her book POLITICAL EMOTIONS: WHY LOVE MATTERS FOR JUSTICE (2013).
Now, in the paragraph numbered 114, Pope Francis asserts, correctly in my estimate, that "[s]cience and technology are not neutral."
Similarly, the Roman Catholic Church is not neutral. On the contrary, its culture and ideology of absolutism is like a cancer eating away at practicing Catholics.
In response to Pope Francis' call to action, we need a call to action against the Roman Catholic Church and its culture and ideology of absolutism. The church's culture and ideology of absolutism encourages practicing Catholics, including bishops and priests, to be Catholic fundamentalists.
Pope Francis' inveighing against various forms of what he himself styles as "relativism" shows that he is uncritical about his church's mistaken and misguided claims of absolutism (e.g., the claim that the pope can make infallible statements about faith and morals).
His church's and his own implicit absolutism bespeak closed-systems thinking, not open-systems thinking.
Nevertheless, Pope Francis repeatedly refers to openness as desirable (see par. no. 119, for example). But he is closed to changing a wide range of misguided and mistaken church teachings. For him, all church teachings are non-negotiable. But otherwise he favors openness and dialogue.
Concerning open-systems thinking, see Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi's book THE SYSTEMS VIEW OF LIFE: A UNIFYING VISION (2014) and Ong's essay "Voice and the Opening of Closed Systems" in his book INTERFACES OF THE WORD: STUDIES IN THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND CULTURE (1977, pages 305-341).
In the paragraph numbered 121, Pope Francis says, "We need to develop a new synthesis capable of overcoming the false arguments of recent centuries."
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