A positively p*ssed off Pontiff punished a pilgrim for pulling his paw.
It would seem that Pope Francis still has to work on developing a few virtues listed as the “Fruit of the Spirit” in Galatians 5.22-23, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”
He wasn’t exactly exhibiting patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control on Tuesday evening in St. Peter’s Square — and right in front of the Nativity scene, too!
Pope Francis was walking through the square in Vatican City and greeting pilgrims on his way to see the large Nativity scene set up in the huge, cobbled esplanade.
After reaching out to touch a child, the pope turned away from the crowd only for a nearby woman to seize his hand and pull her toward him. The abrupt gesture appeared to cause him pain and Francis swiftly wrenched his hand free.
Source: Reuters
WATCH: Visibly disgruntled Pope Francis pulled himself away from a woman in a St. Peter's Square crowd after she grabbed his hand and yanked him toward her https://t.co/2nap3R0iQ4 pic.twitter.com/QbGyJDbdPH
— Reuters (@Reuters) January 1, 2020
Yikes.
She did reach out and yank him, but even the Pope shouldn’t be touched if he doesn’t want to be. I get his frustration.
Besides, he’s apparently just not a touchy-feely kind of guy.
https://twitter.com/courrielche/status/1212428887226904576?s=20
To his credit, Pope Francis realized how that moment looked — the head of the Catholic Church slapping a woman for simply wanting to shake his hand.
He apologized at the New Year Mass on Wednesday.
“So many times we lose patience, even me, and I apologise for yesterday’s bad example,” the pope told thousands of pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday at the end of the traditional New Year Mass.
He then went on to condemn all violence against women.
“All violence inflicted on women is a desecration of God,” he told a packed St. Peter’s Basilica.
“How often is a woman’s body sacrificed on the profane altar of advertising, profit, pornography,” he said, adding that the female body “must be freed from consumerism, it must be respected and honoured”.
He added that women, despite being the creators of life “are continually offended, beaten, raped, forced into prostitution” and made to have abortions, he said. “We can understand our level of humanity by the way we treat a woman’s body.”
The Pope then got political and made “immigration” a women’s issue and suggested that border control in first world countries lacks compassion.
“Today even motherhood is humiliated, because the only growth that interests us is economic growth,” he said.
“There are mothers, who risk perilous journeys to desperately try to give the fruit of the womb a better future and are judged to be redundant by people whose bellies are full of things, but whose hearts are empty of love.”
Source: Reuters
Is this guy serious? The Pope, the head of a religious organization whose religious leaders have systemically sexually abused children as well as women, (some of whom were nuns and had taken vows of chastity,) forced them to abort any resulting offspring that were conceived, and covered the whole damned thing up for decade upon decade while shuffling the perpetrators to start anew in a different hunting ground, is now lecturing the rest of us on how we’re to think of illegal immigration? Give me a freaking break!
I’ll listen to the Pope about “women’s issues” when some definitive action is taken on the priests that have preyed on women and children by the Pope that seems to just want the perpetrators to die off instead of dealing with the problem.
