Not always real
Frank, you do realize that if you say this about one you’re implying it about all?
Apparitions of the Virgin Mary are “not always real”, Pope Francis has said, in what appears to be an indirect reference to a woman who drew thousands of pilgrims to a town near Rome to pray before a statue that she claimed shed tears of blood.
Right but so Frank how do we know which is which? How does the church know? How do you know? How does anyone know?
“Don’t look there,” the pontiff said during an interview with Rai 1 on Sunday when asked about apparitions of the Virgin Mary.
“There are images of the Madonna that are real, but the Madonna has never drawn [attention] to herself,” he said. “I like to see her with her finger pointing up to Jesus. When Marian devotion is too self-centred, it’s not good. Both in the devotion and in the people who carry it forward.”
Yeah. See, she’s a woman. We can’t be doing with women in the god biz. Women are the other sex, the lower sex, the inferior sex, the weak sex, the stupid sex. Women are servants. Women can be nuns, but not priests. Women can be mothers of jesuses, but there is no Jessica or Jessalina who gets to sit next to Jesus. Women aren’t good enough, ok?
The interview was aired a few days after residents in Trevignano called on Francis to intervene against Maria Giuseppe Scarpulla, who has been nicknamed “the Saint” and “clairvoyant”. For five years she has organised monthly ceremonies in a park overlooking Lake Bracciano where a statue of the Virgin Mary sits in a glass case.
The statue sits there because Scarpulla put it there. I suspect it works much the same way with all those statues of Jesus we see around.
Scarpulla is facing a judicial investigation after a private investigator alleged that the blood stains on the statue came from a pig, and after some of her followers claimed they had been scammed.
Scarpulla, who in the past had been convicted of bankruptcy fraud, created a foundation through which she collected donations, which she reportedly said would go towards setting up a centre for sick children. One man told La Repubblica that he and his wife had donated €123,000 (£106,000) to her foundation.
Terrible. On the other hand all those billions of donations to Catholic churches are absolutely fine.
It’s funny how these supposedly celestial beings are absolutely incapable of pulling off “miracles” that can’t be duplicated by means of fraud. Wouldn’t convincing the great masses of unbelievers (including poaching the other faiths’ believers) be most effectively acheived by doing something completely impossible outside of actual supernatural means, and visible to everyone? Something like writing a message on the surface of the Moon, or using the stars in the sky. But NOOOO. That would somehow violate our “free will,” depriving us of the freedom to choose faith in God. Instead we’re supposed to believe in books written by “divinely inspired” human hands. Yeah, right.
On a related note, the church believes there are witches (I’m not sure the higher ups do, but they certainly won’t argue with the bible). If there were witches, don’t you think the church would be finding a way to convince them to create “miracles” for them, so they wouldn’t have to resort to pig’s blood?
Also, why pig blood? It’s not hard to obtain enough human blood to create bloody tears; a simple finger prick would do it.
Hahahaha yes it would but the trouble with that is it keeps not happening, so they have to go with the little tinpot local ones that are just people playing tricks. Must be so frustrating for them!