#liberal catholic

[katyacannon]

" the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law... If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. Let us not become boastful, challenging one another, envying one another. "

- Galatians 5:22-5:26

[emjee]

Thinking about how the main character of Conclave is a man with doubts who is not enjoying himself and his name is Thomas Lawrence which in terms of saints translates to Man With Doubt Being Roasted Alive. It’s so on the nose and I absolutely love it and wouldn’t change it for the world.

[ohholydyke]

See the thing about fundamentalists and trads and Christian nationalists and MAGA evangelicals and ethnocratic bigots is that they render the faith so boring.

I take no issue with the fact that they would look at me and say that I’m not a member of the faithful because their faith is radically, inherently, ontologically distinct from mine. My God is too big and too loving and too esoteric to fit neatly into the gendered understanding of an authoritarian white father disciplining his children for not perfectly falling into lockstep. My Savior is the man who told the religious leaders “Caesar can have his idolatrous blood money, but give God your heart and your faith,” challenging the notion of an earthly ruler. My apostles wrote of the throne of man being empty—there are no masters or kings or governments, there is only Jesus Christ, Basileus Basileōn, king of kings. I believe in radical oneness with God through Christ—one flesh and one body, biblical marriage with the bridegroom whose flesh and blood make up the holy Eucharist. My faith is Queer, ancestral, esoteric, anarchist, insurrectionary, anticolonial, antiracist, unorthodox, disruptive, free. When I encounter the divine, or pray to the saints, or sit in the chapel to pray, I am experiencing communion with the sublime, in every sense of the word, the same presence that made the apostles fall to their faces before the transfiguration, that shaped the world from void, that animates the deep care and rage which boil into every aspect of my being.

When conservatives tell me I am not a Christian it is only because they cannot conceive of a Christ and a faith so big, so all encompassing, so beyond anything our human minds can comprehend, and they cannot conceive being in tune with this divinity and being left senseless by the knowledge that the divine above all else is us and loves us more than we could ever comprehend, such that experiencing this love is enough to leave one fundamentally, ontologically changed down to the fiber of their being. I feel sorrow for them. I pray that Christ may reach into their hearts and open their eyes, that they may see not only the horrors that they commit but also the deep love and freedom that awaits them through abandoning their fundamentalism and their bigotry.

Or, in other words, me every time I see another conservative Christian whining about how people aren’t doing Christianity right because they don’t adhere to a super narrow and watered down version of the faith:

[agnesandhilda]

watched conclave last night and then read the wikipedia entry for the book and now I'm wondering about the category ten shitstorm that a publicly intersex pope would cause

[traditionaldream]

Obesity is not cute, healty or normal. It shouldn't be celebrated or encouraged. Lying to fat people saying they look beautiful and empowered are just pitiful lies.

Going to the gym, working out and caring for your body, as well not wanting to be fat, isn't "fatphobia", is just what normal beings do.

Fat liberation is a dangerous lie.

[memecucker]

Bodily autonomy to do what, exactly?

Recreational abortions

[queerliblib]

okay but it’s even funnier on mobile, because what’s the news of the day?

the pope saying ‘faggotry’ and your very own queer library 🌈 ✨

you can read the full article here

🏳️‍🌈 help QLL thrive for another year! 🏳️‍⚧️

[avidabsurdist]

Hey folks, My family is trying to relate to each other more and we're all going to start doing things the other people like to try and get closer.

I want to watch a Dimension 20 season with them and I don't know which to pick

(we have 3 adults, 2 are early 50s, one 20 y/o that's me, and a 17 y/o shithead I love dearly)

[importantandunavoidable]

did anyone else grow up atheist not because you were raised by atheist parents but because you went to church every week as a kid and you kind of figured it was a community thing and everyone else was just speaking metaphorically/playing along re: god

[many-sparrows]

I love you social justice oriented Christians. I love you Gary (my pastor) who presided over gay weddings before they were legally binding and before the church had come to a decision on it. I love you Conrad (old pastor I work with) for getting arrested for protesting the Iraq war and performing a lesbian wedding the minute it became legal for a couple who'd been together for decades. I love you Dr Donald Hertz for your sermons on Acts 20:27 and your life spent living out that verse and for causing trouble when you were still a student assigned to a segregated church in Birmingham and for spontaneously joining a grape boycott picket line outside of a Safeway in Berkeley because that verse says we cannot shrink away from our duty to each other. I love you Martin Luther's common chest. I love you Charles de Foucauld. I love you Oscar Romero. I love you Dorothy Day. I love you for giving me a legacy to carry on.

[ffcrazy15]

An article in the NYT this morning on the immigration surge was blanketed with comments of people saying things to the effect of “I’m a progressive/liberal/democrat but…” And then some of the most bigoted shit I’ve ever seen. How they support the mass deportations. How “cultural unity” is important. How we need to “take care of Americans first!”

I weep for this country. How quickly we are swayed by fearmongering and the mere threat of inconvenience, while our fellow human beings beg us, literally beg us, for help. Starving families, people seeking a new life—people with children, damn it!

The greed and ignorance on display is nauseating. I want to scream or kick something. Christmas barely two weeks away, and the whole country sneering that the inn is full, that they’ll shut their eyes to whatever it takes to make it happen.

God have mercy. Christ have mercy. Break our hardness of hearts!

[a-typical]

Majorities of White Christian groups say the large number of migrants seeking to enter at the border with Mexico is a “crisis” for the United States:

70% of White evangelical Protestants

64% of White Catholics

57% of White nonevangelical Protestants

Many other people in these religious groups say the large number of migrants is a “major problem” for the U.S, while fewer than one-in-five people in each group say it is only a “minor problem” or “not a problem.”

[nyiki]

I hope y’all know that “Love thy neighbor” means being willing to help and show up for people even if you disagree with them, even if your religious and political beliefs are different, even if they hate you just for your existence.

The difference between them and you is your willingness to help them in times of need not out of what you can get from it, but out of what’s right.

It’s doing something for a person that wouldn’t do the same for you.

Hence the difference between them and you.

ALOT of you that call yourselves Catholics, Christians, Muslims, Jews, etc hide behind and cherry pick your holy values for it to benefit you when it benefits you. You can’t claim to love God and Jesus then act in ways that would disappoint them both.

You don’t even have to be religious to adopt the ‘love thy neighbor’ mentality, this should just be decent human behavior teachings.

[idylls-of-the-divine-romance]

May Jesus the Christ break every weapon!!! May he bless the peacemakers!!! May he bring the total abolition of the use of death as a weapon!!! May he bring life and life more abundantly!!! May justice flow like a river, and justice like a never ending stream!!! May the Day of the LORD come in his timing!!!

[gregoriaofnyssa]

The Forgotten Cost of Immigration

I'm not really anti-immigration. My ancestors are immigrants, and most of my greatest friends are either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants. I am actually kind of indifferent, politically, to immigration. But there is a fruit of immigration that I think does not get spoken about often enough-- in fact, I've never heard it spoken about. Immigration tears children away from their homelands. It is a naive, liberal fantasy to say people do not possess blood memory, to say that land does not carry a spirit and does not imbue that lasting spirit in its people. It does. We can all feel it.

My most recent non-domestically (US) born ancestors were my great-grandparents, who came from Western Armenia and Iran. This is on my Father's side. I am far removed from that place, but I still ache to see, to touch, to smell my homeland. I love my country, yes-- America is the place that raised me. But my blood never spilled to protect this land. I mourn the factors that drove my family away from the places that raised them, and the land over which their blood did spill. Today, many immigrants come to America because of conflicts that America caused or exasterbated.

I have to wonder why, instead of accepting immigrants, why we don't try to put to a stop, at least to our part, of what is causing their need to migrate. It is a tragedy to leave one's homeland. It is a tragedy to raise children away from where their blood was designed to be. It creates a feeling of lifelong mourning. Americans complain sometimes of the recent influx of Palestinian immigrants. If it bothers you so, why not advocate against the billions and billions of dollars America lavishes upon the israeli war machine, which is the very thing causing those migrants in the first place? I know, because I have seen it, because I know them, they don't want to come here. They want to live in the place their blood belongs. No one really wants to leave their homeland-- they want to leave conflict, poverty, and danger.

I am mourning a past I never possessed. A heritage I will never be able to fully embrace.

[angelx1992]