Pope clears way for 'God's influencer' to become a saint
A London-born teenager - whose proficiency at spreading the teachings of the Catholic church online led to him being called "God's influencer" - is set to become a saint.
Carlo Acutis died in in 2006, at the age of 15, meaning he would be the first millennial - a person born in the early 1980s to late 1990s - to be canonised.
It follows Pope Francis attributing a second miracle to him.
It involved the healing of university student in Florence who had bleeding on the brain after suffering head trauma.
Carlo Acutis had been beatified - the first step towards sainthood - in 2020, after he was attributed with his first miracle - healing a Brazilian child of a congenital disease affecting his pancreas.
The second miracle was approved by the Pope following a meeting with the Vatican's saint-making department.
It is not yet known when he will be canonised.
Carlo Acutis died in Monza, in Italy, after being diagnosed with leukaemia, having spent much of his childhood in the country.
His body was moved to Assisi a year after his death, and it currently resides on full display alongside other relics linked to him.
The Tomb of Carlo Acutis in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, Assisi
As well as designing websites for his parish and school, he became known for launching a website seeking to document every reported Eucharistic miracle, which was launched days before his death.
Mr Acutis' nickname, God's influencer, has been attributed to him after his death due to this work.
His website has now been translated into several different languages, and used as the basis for an exhibition which has travelled around the world.
His life is also remembered in the UK, where in 2020, the Archbishop of Birmingham established the Parish of Blessed Carlo Acutis incorporating churches in Wolverhampton and Wombourne
And there is a statue of the soon-to-be-saint in Carfin Grotto, a Roman Catholic shrine in Motherwell.
Miracles are typically investigated and assessed over a period of several months, with a person being eligible for sainthood after they have two to their name.
For something to be deemed a miracle, it typically requires an act seen to be beyond what is possible in nature - such as through the sudden healing of a person deemed to be near-death.
The most recent person to be canonised was Maria Antonia de Paz y Figueroa, also known as Mama Antula, an 18th Century religious sister who became Argentina's first female saint.
No, Gene, Bergoglio has not nailed anybody simply by saying that homosexuals are sinners. The Pope does NOT define what is and is not a sin. You have to get out of the habit of thinking that the fundamentalist Catholic view is the definitive word of God, Gene. It isn't, and it never has been.
ReplyDeleteAnd he has nailed your hypocrisy - you have ruptured yourself trying to say that offering a blessing to a same sex couple is not a blessing, a task only someone as barmy as you would attempt, let alone persist in.
And I can't believe you actually said this:
"The blessings may hopefully confer on the practising homosexual the grace and courage to leave their lives of sin."
You are actually so pig ignorant that you think that homosexuals can CHOOSE their sexuality? and that they are forbidden by God to exercise their sexuality - which is, of course, God given, just as it was God-given to your Uncle Nancy when he was one of the most notorious buggers in London? Woe betide the man who dropped the soap in the showers at the Covent Garden public baths in Uncle Nancy's day...
And your answer, please, to this question [you've avoided it now three times, so I shall go on asking it until you answer]:
"How on earth can you confer a blessing on a couple that excludes their relationship from that blessing?"
And, lest we forget:
ReplyDeleteIn the meantime, let us not forget what this blog is really about - taking apart and destroying your dirty minded prejudices.
I have already acknowledged - TWICE - once at 00.01 PDT today and once yesterday, that I was incorrect to say that you had claimed Jesus condemned sodomy in the gospels. As follows:
"You are correct to correct me: you never said
"Christ condemned sodomy in the Gospels".
You said only that Christ condemned sodomy, a claim you have repeated and maintained.
A claim you have repeatedly failed to justify with textual evidence. The sooner you admit your complete failure to do so, as well as the sheer preposterousness of your using the same "argument" to evidence support for a point of view and condemnation of it, the sooner I will stop pointing out the humiliation you have undergone by making a statement with no basis in fact and then failing to evidence it. As well as these two other humiliations.
FACT ONE : the criminal negligence of Joseph Ratzinger in refusing to laicise Fr Stephen Keisle in 1985, such that he was enabled, with Ratzinger's connivance, to go on buggering small boys and raping little girls for a further three years. You have tried everything you know to refute this fact, but you have failed.
FACT TWO: in connection with fact one, you attempted to prove that people on the left wing of British politics supported and still support paedophilia. In this self evidently preposterous enterprise you failed, not least because you claimed that anyone who had not condemned the Paedophile Information Exchange must have supported it. Worse that that, you persisted in this self-evident fuckwittery when it was put to you that, as you yourself had never been known to condemn driving while drunk, you must therefore advocate drivers' drinking a bottle of Scotch and then driving their cars into queues for the school bus.
"There is no textual evidence from the Gospels - and this was the basis of your original claim that we do not know the view of Jesus on sodomy."
It is a fact that we do not know the view of Christ on consensual anal sexual intercourse, whether heterosexual or homosexual, because he never pronounced on the matter.
On the other hand, because it chimes with your dirty-minded bigotry, you infer that he condemned it, thus:
"We certainly do know that Christ condemned sodomy along with bestiality and paedophilia although none of these are mentioned in the in the gospels."
which is a demonstrably nonsensical statement. All you are doing is using the ultimate logical fallacy of the Appeal to Authority, in this case the word of the Son of God in order to give your own spurious and bigoted prejudices a bogus validity.
You used the same fallacious crap in connection with same sex couples adopting children, with same sex marriage, and now to oppose your own Holy Father's liberalising policy towards blessing couples in same sex marriages.
It was bullshit then and it still is.
"How on earth can you confer a blessing on a couple that excludes their relationship from that blessing?"
ReplyDeleteThey are not being blessed as a couple in a relationship. They receive blessing as individuals who ask for God's grace. That grace will hopefully help them to leave their sinful lives. READ WHAT THE POPE HAS SAID.
Stop blustering, Gene.
ReplyDeleteA person consists of who s/he is and this includes their sexuality.
How can you bless the person but somehow exclude their sexuality from the blessing? To maintain that you can is simply ridiculous.
Sr Bergoglio has to come out with the waffle about not blessing sin in order to appease bigoted idiots like you.
"That grace will hopefully help them to leave their sinful lives."
What crap is this? Are you saying that sexuality - which is God given - is something that homosexuals have to abjure? Jesus Christ, Gene, you are getting worse.
Don't patronise me, you bombastic bellend.
ReplyDelete" But to bless each person, yes. The blessing is for everyone."
How do you separate a person from their sexuality - which is inborn and hence God given? Simple yammering about "read what the Pope has said" is pointless. He is talking nonsense - and I suspect he knows it. He only comes out with specious waffle like that to appease those filled with self-righteous hatred, like you?
Are you saying that Uncle Nancy would have had to renounce his sexuality, pretend to be heterosexual and get married? Are you saying that Uncle Nancy, once one of the most notorious buggers in London [woe betide anyone who dropped the soap in the showers at the Covent Garden Turkish Baths when Uncle Nancy was on the prowl] would have had to abjure his real nature. Talk sense, why don't you?
"So why did he not stipulate that couples in same sex relationships could not be blessed unless their relationship was asexual?"
ReplyDeleteAgain you don't seem to be taking any of this in. Pope Francis acknowledges that each individual soul can be blessed even though that soul may be in sin. What cannot be blessed is the union that brings about that sin.
"How do you separate a person from their sexuality ?"
ReplyDeleteYou do not separate the person from their sexuality. You still can't get through your head that one is not a sinner because of their homosexuality. One is a sinner if one engages in homosexual activity. Homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered and always grave sin. That's Church teaching.
Remember St Paul: no sodomites will ever enter the Kingdom of God.
Until you accept this Detterling you will never make any progress in the Faith.
That is nonsense and you know it. A heterosexual marriage would be blessed notwithstanding the fact that the husband regularly raped the wife - a far viler sin than consensual homosexual lovemaking. You are talking crap and you know it.
ReplyDelete"consensual homosexual lovemaking"
ReplyDeletePass the sick bag Alice.
As usual, Gene, evasion and bluster. What an appalling advertisement for Catholicism you are. Two faced, a bully, a liar, dogmatic, bigoted, merciless, cruel and vicious.
DeleteOoh! Matron!
DeleteI am not evading or blustering about anything. That is your territory.
ReplyDeleteI have told you that you will never make any progress in the Faith until you accept and learn to live with Church teaching. Homosexual acts have been anathema always - the Church teaches that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered and grave sin. An active homosexual union will never be acceptable in God's sight. A celibate homosexual union? Yes, no problem.