#and is the source of 90% of the trouble he and tatter both get into

[renegaderoyalty]

i don’t talk about him as much, but here’s queen next to all of Lark’s evos! lark is planned to be tatter’s boyfriend, and since he turns into a sword, he’s one of the blades tatter wields in his higher evo stages

[newssplashy]

World: In Ireland, Pope finds a country transformed and a church in tatters

DUBLIN — Nearly 40 years since the last papal visit to Ireland, Pope Francis arrived Saturday to a transformed country where the once-mighty Roman Catholic Church is in tatters.

As recently as a few weeks ago, the pope’s visit to Ireland mostly promised an awkward encounter in an estranged relationship.

Since the last papal visit — by John Paul II in 1979 — Ireland, once a cornerstone of the church, has abandoned its teachings by legalizing divorce and same-sex marriage.

The country now has a gay prime minister, and just a few months ago voted to lift a ban on abortion.

But recent revelations in the United States and Chile of the institutional covering-up of sexual abuse by clerics have lent sudden urgency to the pope’s visit, where he will speak at the church’s ninth World Meeting of Families. The issue threatens to overshadow the visit by Francis, who has struggled to grasp the enormity of the scourge throughout his papacy.

Catholics worldwide wait to see whether he would use Ireland, with its own painful history of abuse, as a symbolic stage upon which to announce concrete measures to combat a crisis that threatens the future of his church.

It was not clear how far he would go. Instead, the pope offered expressions of regret and anger Saturday at Dublin Castle, where he met with Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, who is gay and called on Francis to take action on the “legacy of pain and suffering” in Ireland. He has called the pope’s visit “an opportunity” to demonstrate that things are going to change.

“With regard to the most vulnerable, I cannot fail to acknowledge the grave scandal caused in Ireland by the abuse of young people by members of the church charged with responsibility for their protection and education,” Francis said.

“The failure of ecclesiastical authorities — bishops, religious superiors, priests and others — adequately to address these repugnant crimes has rightly given rise to outrage, and remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community,” the pope added. “I myself share those sentiments.”

Speaking in front of advocates for abuse survivors who have criticized him for not doing enough, Francis went on to cite the outrage expressed in a 2010 letter by his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, and the measures Benedict had demanded.

“His frank and decisive intervention continues to serve as an incentive for the efforts of the church’s leadership both to remedy past mistakes and to adopt stringent norms meant to ensure that they do not happen again,” Francis said, adding that in his letter this month to all Catholics, “I reiterated this commitment, or rather, a greater commitment to eliminating this scourge in the church — at whatever cost.”

The shadow cast by the scandals now reaches beyond Ireland and to the heart of the Vatican, where it threatens to darken the legacy and remaining influence of Pope Francis.

Well into his fifth year as pope, Francis has focused on championing migrants, the poor and the disenfranchised, all the while shifting the church’s emphasis away from divisive issues social issues such as abortion and toward a more inclusive, pastoral style.

That mission is imperiled by his slow response to a scandal that some of his top advisers argue is the central issue facing the church.

For decades, the Vatican’s top officials covered up abuse. It took the explosion of the first sex abuse crisis in the United States in the early 2000s to get the church to pay attention. Pope Benedict XVI eventually began ridding the church of what he called the “filth” of abusive priests, but an attitude of denial pervaded in the Vatican, where many considered the scandal the invention of an aggressive and anti-Catholic media.

By the time Francis was elected in 2013, many officials had come to acknowledge the scandal for the global and institutional threat it was, though many more considered the problem solved by new vetting procedures.

Francis instead promised to tackle what many advocates consider the heart of the issue by insisting on accountability for the bishops in the hierarchy who covered up abuse. But talk of special tribunals for bishops and other tough, centralized measures evaporated, and advocates grew so disillusioned with pope’s lack of action that some quit his pontifical commissions in protest.

Francis, who this month apologized for the church’s “delayed” response to the crisis, himself came late to it. It was only in January, amid the uproar over his reflexively believing a Chilean bishop and his doubting of Chilean survivors, that Francis has begun to act more decisively, sending investigators, accepting resignations of top Chilean bishops and promising victims that there would be further measures.

But more cases of abuse and cover-up keep coming to light.

The more than 1,000 cases of abuse discovered over 70 years in Pennsylvania, the accusations against Theodore E. McCarrick, the former cardinal of Washington, and the cover-ups of abuse in Chile have all cast a pall over the pope’s busy schedule and the triennial world meeting.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington withdrew as the keynote speaker at the World Meeting of Families to face accusations that he covered up for abusive clergy when he was the bishop of Pittsburgh decades ago.

Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley of Boston, president of the Vatican’s Commission for the Protection of Minors, canceled an appearance to address accusations of widespread sexual impropriety at the seminary of his archdiocese and his failure to heed warnings about McCarrick.

In Ireland, the question is less whether Francis will broach sexual abuse — the Vatican has said he will meet with abuse survivors, and he is certain to address the issue — than whether he will take new action.

Expectations are high among sex abuse survivors and their advocates that the pope will find time in his 36 hours in the country to announce historic measures that would show, rather than promise, that the church is serious about the issue.

Before the trip, Francis made it clear that he viewed the secrecy, ambition and self-preservation that came with a culture of clericalism — priests putting themselves above their parishioners — as the root cause of the crime. For years, he has scorned priests who raise themselves as unreachable elites invested with authority, infantilizing laymen in a vicious cycle.

“To say ‘no’ to abuse is to say an emphatic ‘no’ to all forms of clericalism,” Francis wrote in a remarkable letter of apology to all Catholics last week.

“The actions of the church do not match the words,” Marie Collins, a former member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors said at the world meeting’s panel on safeguarding children. “And in fact they are totally opposite.”

She called the pope’s speech “disappointing — nothing new.”

Others said the situation was even worse outside the United States, Ireland and a few other countries and urged the pope to do something.

“Words are sweet,” said another panelist, Gabriel Dy-Liacco, a Filipino psychologist who sits on the pope’s commission, “but love means deeds.”

On Saturday, Varadkar, speaking on stage feet from the pope, gave the forceful criticism of the church’s sins that many wish the pope would deliver.

“In place of Christian charity, forgiveness and compassion, far too often there was judgment, severity and cruelty, in particular, towards women and children and those on the margins,” he said, citing “stains” such as child abuse, illegal adoptions, forced labor and other sins. “People kept in dark corners, behind closed doors, cries for help that went unheard.”

He continued, “Holy Father, we ask that you use your office and influence to ensure this is done here in Ireland and also around the world,” recalling the pope had called for zero tolerance against child abusers.

Advocates, church officials and some clerics have articulated a wish list of what should happen. Among the demands are that each church diocese publish the names of abusive priests and hand over church records to civil law enforcement instead of fighting subpoenas.

Some have urged working with courts to aid, rather than hinder, prosecutions of abusive priests and ceasing efforts to indemnify the church from financial penalties. Others have called for enshrining zero-tolerance policies into the church’s canon law so it can be enforced globally, not only in specific countries.

As the sex abuse scandal exploded once again before the pope’s trip, a fierce debate about those contributing factors raged in Catholic journals and across churches.

But the one factor many seemed to agree on is that clericalism, from the seminaries to the top of the hierarchy, is insidious.

On Friday in Dublin, Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, who has blamed a “clerical culture” for the abuse, began a panel he moderated on “The Dignity and Beauty of Sexual Love: Finding New Language for Ancient Truths,” by lamenting “the woeful responses of bishops who failed to protect” abuse survivors.

Ireland knows the ravages of clericalism first hand, from its sex abuse scandals to forcing the adoption of the children of unwed mothers to many other exploitations of what was for decades authoritarian power.

The abuses the clergy committed, and their tendency to seek exaltation by parishioners instead of humbly serving and accompanying them through troubles cost the church a country where it once had more than 90 percent attendance at mass. Now it has about 30 percent.

But if Francis decides to make a bold policy change to protect his surviving flock around the world from the same threat, Ireland gives him a compelling backdrop from which to do so.

“It is my hope,” the pope said Saturday, “that the gravity of the abuse scandals, which have cast light on the failings of many, will serve to emphasize the importance of the protection of minors and vulnerable adults on the part of society as a whole.”

On Saturday afternoon, Tony Kelly, 58, a bar manager in Dublin, who waited outside the St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral for Francis, said he had watched the pope’s speech at Dublin Castle on television and found his apology sincere.

But, he said, “people are looking more for actions rather than words.”

The Irish church, he said, had suffered the consequences of “living in the past” and breaking its trust with the faithful through abuse.

“There was a lot of negativity, a lot of cover up, and they tended to protect themselves,” he said.

But Kelly said he hoped the pope would take everything he heard back with him to Rome and spur him to do something to protect children in other churches around the world.

“Maybe this country could lead the way in certain respects,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Jason Horowitz © 2018 The New York Times

source http://www.newssplashy.com/2018/08/world-in-ireland-pope-finds-country.html

[theconservativebrief]

Donald Trump has largely skated by as president, deferring to the policy consensus in Republican Party circles. He’s served as a rubber-stamp signatory of tax legislation he wasn’t involved in crafting and judicial nominations in which he had little say.

But sometimes things happen — like a surge of families with children arriving at the border to press asylum claims — that require leadership in the executive branch and don’t have obvious solutions.

Trump’s response to the crisis at the US-Mexico border — where toddlers are in internment camps and older kids are in tent cities at frightening expense while children sob, health deteriorates, and the long-term damage of toxic stress accumulates — reminds us that he does not know anything about public policy, diplomacy, constitutional law, or legislative strategy.

So you get instead what he’s delivered over the past two weeks — aggressive hostage-taking, lying, trolling, chaos, dissembling, and cruelty — none of which is going to advance Trump’s legislative goals or address the underlying issue of the northward flow of asylum seekers. Even the executive order he signed on Wednesday raises more questions than it will probably solve.

All presidents are tested now and again, and Trump is failing massively. It’s not quite the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last. Being president of the United States is a difficult job, and Donald Trump has no idea how to do it.

The fundamental reality of the situation that Trump has no idea how to grapple with is that the families showing up at the border aren’t faking it.

Whether or not one deems the asylum claims being made as meeting the formal legal bar, it should be obvious that nobody takes their children on the perilous route through Mexico with dim prospects of an ultimately successful asylum application without being seriously distressed back in their home country. By the same token, it’s not a coincidence that the family migrants are coming specifically from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador rather than the more stable countries to the north or south of that triad.

It’s not obvious that there was actually anything especially terrible about the status quo as it existed in 2016 — a lot of people came, they were typically released into the interior pending asylum hearings, most claims were rejected, and a certain number of people skipped their appointed court dates. In the Trump administration’s mind, the fact that crossings are occurring at a much higher rate in 2018 than they were in 2017 is a big problem, but the reality is that it’s simply a return to the level we were living with before Inauguration Day.

But while reasonable people can disagree about which problems are important, there’s simply no denying that the origin of this problem is in Central America. If Trump wants to make solving the problem a major priority, he needs to make Central America a major policy priority. Instead, he’s picked a secretary of state with no experience in the region, made himself politically toxic by calling El Salvador a “shithole country,” embroiled the country in pointless fights with Mexico over NAFTA and a border wall, repeatedly threatened to end aid to Honduras for no reason, and decided not to show up at the Summit of the Americas.

Drastically improving living conditions in the Northern Triangle would, obviously, be difficult. But Trump isn’t even trying. Meanwhile, he exacerbates his problems with the fact that he can’t even remotely get his story straight on what he’s even trying to accomplish.

After Chief of Staff John Kelly and Attorney General Jeff Sessions had both spent a considerable amount of time teasing a new policy of criminal prosecutions for asylum seekers as a deliberate means of separating parents from their children that would create a powerful deterrent, the White House’s communications strategy broke down immediately when the issue became controversial.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen repeatedly denied that there was any new policy at all, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar was nowhere to be seen even though his agency oversaw the children in detention, and Trump himself kept insisting that the new policy was somehow forced on him by some mysterious law that Democrats were allegedly responsible for. The one thing everyone could agree on was that the only possible solution was for Democrats to come to the table and agree to a broad series of sweeping changes to American immigration policy. Children were being held as literal hostages in a legislative negotiating strategy.

Not surprisingly, this didn’t work. On Wednesday, the administration admitted it had been lying all along and prepared to back away from family separation.

This combination of bluffing and hostage-taking would be a remarkable approach under any circumstances, but it’s particularly bizarre because Trump has repeatedly tried and failed to make this work. First he did it with the Affordable Care Act, where he spent months deliberately sabotaging the law and raising insurance premiums in the futile hope that this would bring Democrats to the table. He did it again with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, canceling it and then immediately labeling the cancellation regrettable but demanding legislative concessions in exchange for a fix.

But even in its new form, Trump is still going to shift resources away from prosecuting criminals and toward prosecuting people — babies and all — for misdemeanor illegal entry violations.

Before this policy roughly 90% of prosecutions in McAllen federal court were of detained immigrants with criminal records. Since the new policy it’s flipped!

90% of those being prosecuted have no record and are facing misdemeanor charges for first time entry.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 20, 2018

This may succeed in extricating Trump from the public relations disaster he made for himself, but nothing about this is going to induce Democrats to want to make a deal with him. If anything, the fact that once again his administration has been caught lying about significant public policy issues confirms the suspicion that he’s not a negotiating partner one can work with in good faith.

Meanwhile, the new approach violates earlier court orders and will be the subject of immediate legal challenges that will likely strike it down. Trump, in other words, isn’t fixing anything. He’s just continuing to flail.

So far in his 500 days in office, Trump has benefited from a fairly benign set of objective circumstances. He inherited a strengthening economy from Barack Obama and made a reasonable selection to head up the Federal Reserve.

His tenure has been marked by an extraordinary level of drama, but on some level, relatively little has actually happened in reality. But when things have happened, Trump has been unequal to the task of handling them. Last year’s hurricane season created a catastrophe. The return of Central American asylum seekers to their pre-Trump level immediately devolved into a humanitarian crisis. America’s relationships with its traditional allies are in tatters for no real reason. China is relaxing its enforcement of sanctions on North Korea, and Iran is opening a new nuclear facility.

And even though Trump is remarkably skilled at taking advantage of the news cycle’s tendency to move on, reality is less forgiving. Another hurricane season is coming. None of Trump’s border antics are going to stop people from coming north. Some trouble or another — whether in the realm of the economy or foreign policy — is essentially inevitable. And when the trouble comes, America will be facing it isolated and discredited, led by a team with no credibility or integrity, headed up by a man who can’t be bothered to put in a moment’s thought or hard work on even the topics he proclaims himself to be focused on.

Original Source -> The border crisis is a reminder that Trump has no idea what he’s doing

via The Conservative Brief