Saturday, June 06, 2020

Is Pope Francis really Catholic?

This is a repost of a question I asked a little while ago. Every time Francis speaks I wonder...

Is Pope Francis really Catholic or is he just a cultural and career-wise Catholic? I'm not trying to be funny and I'm not being sarcastic.  Argentina has a lot of witchcraft and I don't mean silly college girls playing with love spells and candles. I mean the real stuff; the pre-Columbian paganism and folkways mixed with frank Satanism. This is not unique to Argentina or Latin America. Here in America  there are people don't have a problem going to a root doctor (a witch) and still going to church. Someone will point out that Francis is Italian. Well yes, his parents came from Italy but they raised him in Argentina.  The thought about how Francis was raised and what he marinated in as a young man came to me a few years ago when I was watching a nature program of all things. The host was in the country-side in  Argentina and saw a crossroads shrine to a bandit-"saint", The host noted that the villagers were Catholic but also were at ease with something close to voodoo or santeria. I wondered if this doesn't explain part of what is wrong with Francis. 


Remember when he joked that he doesn't go to the doctor instead he goes to the witch? Ever wonder why he's so anti-normal Catholicism and saving souls but seems to love pagans and primitivism? This all came back to me when I read about the pope's latest joke.  My father-in-law used to say that when he was deployed to Turkey he found Istanbul to be quite sophisticated and modern but when he went out to the rest of the country and saw the villages it was like going back centuries. Maybe outside of Buenos Aires it's like that too, to an extent and perhaps, Francis consciously or not,  embraces the old folk ways and the "simple" people  as part of his cultural heritage.