Pope Says If You Turn Away Strangers, You Turn Away God Himself. Got That?

IS THAT TOO SUBTLE FOR YOU, TRUMP NAZIS?

Hello, Moral High Grounders, and Merry Christmas if you are doing that sort of thing! If you like this newsletter and you like me, and if you care about supporting independent media in these Bari-Weiss-i-fied times, AND you like sticking it to loser MAGA Christian nationalist motherfuckers, PLEASE upgrade your subscription to PAYING and/or founding subscriber! It’s just 5 bucks a month!

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One more thing real quick:

I’m not Catholic, but I agree with Rachel Maddow when she says that there’s no position quite like the pope on Earth when it comes to being a person who can speak about spiritual/religious matters and have a whole lot of people listen all at once.

So it’s interesting to hear what Pope Leo, the first American pope, the Chicago pope, had to say during his Christmas Eve midnight mass last night in St. Peter’s Basilica.

To turn away others is to turn away God, pope says on Christmas Eve

That’s the headline the US Conference of Catholic Bishops put on it.

Let’s see exactly how Pope Bob said it:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- If people refuse to make room for others -- like the poor, children and the stranger -- then they also refuse to make room for God, Pope Leo XIV said as he celebrated the birth of Jesus.

“Where there is room for the human person, there is room for God,” the pope said in his homily Dec. 24 as he celebrated the nighttime liturgy in St. Peter’s Basilica.

“While a distorted economy leads us to treat human beings as mere merchandise, God becomes like us, revealing the infinite dignity of every person,” he said. “While humanity seeks to become ‘god’ in order to dominate others, God chooses to become man in order to free us from every form of slavery.”

Yes, and:

“To heal our blindness, the Lord chooses to reveal himself in each human being,” Pope Leo said. “As long as the night of error obscures this providential truth, then ‘there is no room for others either, for children, for the poor, for the stranger,’” he said, quoting from Pope Benedict XVI’s homily on Christmas Eve in 2012.

His predecessor’s words “remain a timely reminder that on earth, there is no room for God if there is no room for the human person. To refuse one is to refuse the other,” he said.

That sure wasn’t subtle.

One wonders what the third of Donald Trump’s Nazi Cabinet that’s Catholic — Sean Duffy, John Ratcliffe, Marco Rubio, among others — and his Catholic vice president J.D. Vance think about all that. Oh, and Nazi Fillers Barbie who lies with her every godforsaken breath from the press room podium. What does she think about it?

Just kidding, we don’t have to wonder what they think about it. We know they reject it like vampires reject sunlight. Their souls are reprobate, hollowed-out carcasses, the fruits of their spirits irredeemably rotten. They’re the kinds of people who put an asterisk next to every command of Christ they choose to ignore — which is just about all of them — because they value their hate, their bigotry, their greed, their gluttony, their pride, their sloth, and their white supremacy far more than anything else.

These people hate Christ, in word and deed, 24 hours a day, seven days per week.

May they have whatever kinds of Christmases their God sees fit to give them.

I’ve been talking a lot this year about how, whether or not you are personally a spiritual or religious person, what’s being done in the United States in our names — the Trump MAGA Nazi pedophile-protecting campaigns of evil against immigrants, the poor, LGBTQ+ people, women, racial minorities, religious minorities, etc. — is being done by people who explicitly believe, and demand that we agree, that they have the moral high ground over the rest of us, that they are chosen by a Christian nationalist God to have dominion over the earth, over the United States, over everybody who doesn’t look, dress, live, laugh, love or believe like them, and so on and so forth.

It’s one of the many ways they are literally just like the Nazis.

That’s why I think it’s so vital that as we continue this fight against American Christian Nationalist Fascism, we speak about it increasingly in moral terms. That the language of our fight be framed morally, that we should always be staking out the moral high ground and mocking the shit out of these pigs for thinking they ever actually possessed it.

We should be doing this generally, in a non-sectarian, non-religious, universal way, one that includes everyone of any religion or no religion at all. But I believe fervently that it should also be done specifically in scriptural terms, to make it absolutely clear that if these vile Christian nationalist motherfuckers think for one goddamned second that there’s a God out there that they’ve created in their own image who supports what they’re doing, they’re in for a rude goddamned awakening.

We all can participate in telling this story in our own ways, based on wherever we come from, whatever we believe. I have my way. (It’s why I quote Matthew 7 and Matthew 25 every five seconds.). You have your way.

Pope Leo, the first American pope, the Chicago pope, clearly has his.

And I sure as hell intend to amp that message up as we continue to travel through to the other side of this, in 2026 and beyond.

WITH THAT SAID, thank you all for reading this year, all of the almost 15,000 subscribers this little place has picked up so far! If you are celebrating Christmas today, merry merry! Whether you are or aren’t, I hope your day is full of peace and joy and rest and healing, or whatever you need.

I’m especially grateful to all who are paid subscribers, who are helping support the work I’m doing with your dollars. If you value what I’m building here and you’re able, today would be an amazing day to upgrade to a paying subscription! (Or if you are already a paid subscriber and want to upgrade to Founding, you could do that if you wanted.)

Again, thank you, thank you, thank you. Be well, everyone, and I’ll see you with another newsletter or two before the year is out.

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-Evan