NOTE: The regular Friday newsletter will ber out lunchtime/early afternoon-ish today!
There’s a new pope! Therefore, a bonus Thursday night post on The Moral High Ground.
I’m not Catholic, but I know many of you were brought up in the Church. And today there is a new pope, an American one! Cardinal Robert Prevost, hereafter known as Pope Leo XIV. And MAGA has already turned on him like he’s some kind of woke Marxist Christlike guy who loves people just for the sake of loving them. For example, Mike Cernovich called him a “shitlib.” Sean Hannity says he’s been “indoctrinated.” Rick Santorum whined about him using “buzzwords of the left.” Laura Loomer literally tweeted “WOKE MARXIST POPE.”
They’re really telling on themselves here.
In that second Bluesky post, if you click on the skeet from Sean Feucht — he’s that weird Christian nationalist pastor who had such a conniption about awesome Christian drag queen Flamy Grant he sent her album straight to the top of the Gospel charts — he whines, “They chose a globalist and woke Pope from the West ON PURPOSE to stand up and criticize the leaders of the Free World.”
Bless their hearts. Everything is a conspiracy. It can’t be that the Catholic cardinals simply chose the guy they wanted to choose.” Also, “Free World”? Not so sure about that anymore, Champ. Not with these shitheels in charge.
But it does strike me as an interesting development, an American pope who seems very much in the same mold as Francis, who appears to be quite focused on the plight of migrants and, in general, the “least of these,” to use Jesus’s lingo. That seems timely. And he hasn’t been shy about criticizing Donald Trump and JD Vance, two vile, cruel, Christless authoritarians who happen to be running the US right now and kidnapping people and sending them to concentration camps.
For instance:
The first American pope, at this time, who says things like that.
Well, this just got interesting!
It’s also a very Moral High Ground Moment. We have discussed, quite recently, how there is nothing Trump, MAGA and conservative Christians hate more than Jesus. Nothing. They recoil at people who are actually Christlike.
Whether or not you’re a religious believer — my cussy Bible studies are for everybody and I ain’t tryin’ to convert you — it’s interesting to note how the Bible speaks to this directly, when Jesus talks about how “the world” will hate people because they hated Jesus first. Read Matthew 10.
Fundamentalist and conservative Christians — AKA the MAGA Christian nationalist base — think those verses are about them. They think that when they are rightly criticized, rejected and shunned for being hatemongers, for being Nazis, for being anti-LGBTQ+ bigots, for being misogynists, for being cruel, uncharitable, racist creeps and so forth, that this must be what Jesus meant when He said people would be hated for His sake.
They are full of shit.
I like to point that to them that if that’s what Jesus meant by that, He likely would have followed it up with “So feel free to go out and be total fucking garbage humans!”
Jesus did not say that.
But note how these people are recoiling from the new pope like vampires recoil from crosses, and for what.
Interesting, huh?
Regular newsletter will be out tomorrow, but ATTENTION, ACHTUNG!
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Yep, I reckon the first American pope who isn’t afraid to read Trump and JD Vance for filth will make for quite a few interesting Moral High Ground moments over the next few years.
Again, the regular newsletter will be out tomorrow. It’ll be an update on this project, where I’m tracking all the Christian pastors and youth group leaders and gymnastics coaches (really) who actually are a threat to kids, as opposed to the drag performers and LGBTQ+ people the Christian nationalists and Republicans are always accusing. (You know, speaking of the Catholic church. And the entire conservative Christian church in general.)
So I’ll see you in the morning!
Meantime, one more subscription box:
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The Opus Dei crazies hating him was the only thing on my bingo card.
While the Pope is totally irrelevant to me, I am glad to see he’s already riling the MAGAs.