“… the Catholic Church recognizes a religious and spiritual connection with Judaism that it does not recognize with other religions, including Islam.” – from a conservative’s blog post . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“MSM fail: Pope did NOT call Mahmoud Abbas an ‘angel of peace’” – That is the title of a blog post by conservative blogger J.E. Dyer, a retired Naval Intelligence officer whose writings have been featured by Hot Air and The Weekly Standard.
Here is the ending of Dyer’s post, in which she refers to information that a friend of hers gave her.
On the topic at hand, meanwhile, my friend puts it this way: “There’s a sense in which the Pope did the exact opposite of what the NYT and AFP reported: he urged Abbas to change his way.”
In light of all the facts from the Italian and Spanish reports, that case can indeed be made.
Meanwhile, Religion News Service has published a report titled “Once Pope Francis knows US capitalism he will love it, says Catholic theologian-economist“. Here is the beginning of that report.
The Rev. Martin Schlag is a trained economist as well as a Catholic moral theologian, and when he first read some of Pope Francis’ powerful critiques of the current free market system he had the same thought a lot of Americans did: “Just horrible.”
But at a meeting on Monday (May 11) at the Harvard Club, Schlag, an Austrian-born priest who teaches economics at an Opus Dei-run university in Rome, reassured a group of Catholics, many from the world of business and finance, that Francis’ views on capitalism aren’t actually as bad as he feared.
“You can get the impression that the pope is against capitalism,” said Schlag, who heads the Markets, Culture and Ethics Research Centre at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, located near the Vatican.
But he explained that what Francis — the first Latin American pope — understands as capitalism is in fact the “crony capitalism” that is found in the pontiff’s native Argentina and much of Latin America. Schlag defined “crony capitalism” as “a form of capitalism where people get rich not because of their work but because of their friendships and political connections and the privileges they have.”
That is quite different from the American system, he said.
Apparently, Pope Francis is aware that his remarks have been misunderstood, because in December of 2013, he openly proclaimed, “Marxism is wrong” in response to the claim by some pundits that he is a Communist.
