Some of Pope Francis’s closest allies in the Catholic Church are alleged to have secretly given more than €2 million to an Italian migrant rescue charity whose senior staff are charged with people smuggling. They include Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, Archbishop of Bologna, who is among other things the papal peace envoy to Ukraine, and Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, Archbishop of Luxembourg. These senior figures in the Church organised payment of the money, it is claimed, at the bequest of the Pope who had established a special rapport with the far-left founder of the charity. The payments were kept secret for fear of adverse publicity.

The disclosure has been made in internet chatroom conversations between members of the charity’s staff, recorded on the orders of prosecuting magistrates in the Sicilian city of Ragusa, as well as in seized documents. Transcripts of the intercepted conversations and copies of the documents were subsequently leaked to the Italian weekly, Panorama, which has since published them. The Church allegedly continued to make the payments, which began in August 2020, even after the news in March 2021 that the Ragusa magistrates had placed senior staff at the charity, Mediterranea Saving Humans, and the company that owns its rescue vessel Mare Jonio under formal investigation for people smuggling.

Is the Pope a Marxist?

Frank wrote on Jan 27^th, 2024 at 1:29pm:


Surely not?

Why was Adbul Ezedi, the suspect in last week’s horrific alkali attack in south London, allowed to roam the streets of Britain? After all, this was a man who was rejected for asylum – twice – before being convicted of sexual assault. We now know that he was later granted leave to remain mainly because he had ‘converted’ to Christianity. In this, he had the backing of at least two churches, one Baptist and one Catholic, who vouched for his supposedly unwavering Christian faith to the authorities. This made his deportation to Afghanistan nigh-on impossible, as he would have been deemed at risk of persecution as a religious minority. In reality, in the words of a friend, it seems Ezedi remained a ‘good Muslim’ all along. He was recently spotted buying halal meat.

...

Like so many other British institutions, the Church of England has allowed itself to be consumed by the culture war – and it has started to sing from the same hymn sheet as the rest of the woke elite. This is not just true of the migration debate. Take the trans issue. The Anglican church encourages the ‘unconditional affirmation’ of transgender identities. Its leaders are also open to adopting gender-neutral pronouns to describe the entity previously known as God, the Father.

Similarly, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, churches were ordered to ‘decolonise’ themselves by removing any statues and monuments with connections to slavery. These days, Church of England schools teach both trans ideology and critical race theory as if they were scripture.

With the church captured by wokeness, and institutionally suspicious of border controls, it is perhaps no wonder that sham conversions have been allowed to spiral – often with disastrous consequences. Adbul Ezedi’s case follows that of Emad al-Swealmeen, the Islamist terrorist who tried to blow up Liverpool Women’s Hospital in 2021. He, too, had failed twice to gain asylum and would likely have used his apparent conversion to Christianity in a third attempt.

Concerns about sham conversions have been raised for almost a decade now. Speaking in 2016, Reverend Pete Wilcox, then the dean of Liverpool, claimed his cathedral had baptised about 200 asylum seekers over a period of four years. He said he could not think of a single example of somebody who already had British citizenship converting from Islam to Christianity.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/02/06/the-church-of-england-needs-to-wise-up-...

Former Toowoomba priest Father James Byrne accused of raping schoolboy after mass

Former Bishop of Broome Christopher Saunders charged following years of sex abuse denials

Brian Ross wrote on Feb 8^th, 2024 at 4:25pm:


The right wing wankers don't care about Catholic Priests raping children....Now if it was a Muslim Iman charged with historic sex crimes we would never hear the end of it....Why is it that religious people are usually the ones that commit the most horendous crimes???



Rational arguments don't usually work on religious people. Otherwise, there wouldn't be religious people.
Doris Egan, House M.D., The Right Stuff, 2007

philperth2010 wrote on Feb 22^nd, 2024 at 10:56am:



You are a bit schrizophenic there, Clarence.

You lunge at religion but then pull your punches with the sons of Mohammed.
So telling, so spineless, so bbwianesque.