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Your little children are coming: Church leader Francis loves everyone (archive photo)
Photo: Franco Origlia / Getty Images
More than two thousand years later, there are still doubts as to whether Jesus had brothers and sisters.
Depending on the translation, interpretation and interests, there are several interpretations in circulation: Sometimes Jesus is seen as the brother of several siblings, but mostly as a worried only child who, while still hanging on the cross, recommended the adoption of his most loyal friend to his mother - so he founded with his last Breath another blended family.
There is no doubt that the Catholic Church, with its sexual morals, family doctrine and alleged concern for children, has made earthly life hell for countless people throughout history: from the prohibition of contraception with condoms even in the worst HIV times to the abuse of children in care to cover up the crimes of pedophiles. The children of God have not always been in good hands with the Church.
Pope Francis, who has no children or celibacy and who is presumably celibate, has now criticized in this unhappy tradition all those who do not want to have any or hardly any children.
"So many couples don't have children because they don't want one, or they only have one because they don't want any more, but they have two dogs, two cats," complained the 85-year-old at the beginning of the New Year in the Vatican audience hall.
And, no, he didn't give the impression that he had eaten too much altar wine over Christmas and New Year's Eve.
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Why Francis embarks on this verbal children's crusade is a mystery. The fact that he, as CEO of those department heads who love to molest children, calls for more children is not only difficult from a PR point of view and a great opportunity for cabaret artists. After all, he advocates adoption, i.e. redistribution.
But, Lord in Heaven, no one who is still at ease can seriously believe that the planet is underpopulated. The garden of Eden has long been over-fertilized, paradise exploited, creation exhausted. It is more likely that Francis, with his happy fertility message, is not concerned with
all
children under God's wide sky, but only with those of Christians in the affluent western regions, where birth rates adjust to the number of members of his association: Both are falling. So it's not about the well-being of the world and its people, rather about children for the church leader, an exit strategy from the impending exodus. In principle: religious racism.
The founding myth of the church, in which the almighty father sends his only son to earth as savior, knowing that he will be nailed to the cross, testifies to little empathic competence in family planning: the junior had to endure the will of the patriarch.
In this logic, a man who is unfamiliar with the subject is now demanding something that, according to all the rules of nature, women would literally have to carry out again: children, kitchen, church.
Welcome to the fifties.
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To summarize the higher life expectancy of people with lower birth rates as "demographic winter" sounds, incidentally, age-discriminatory.
If you think that through to the end, Francis could also describe the pandemic as God's just punishment - to clean up the age pyramid.
He himself is sitting in a securely isolated ark.
Perhaps Francis will still find those original plates of the Ten Commandments carved in stone by Moses in a dusty corner of the Vatican archives.
This Decalogue says that one should honor father and mother, but nothing about having children instead of cats or even a healthy quota of offspring to get into the kingdom of heaven.
One can assume, but that is an innocent, naive, childlike belief: that would not have happened to a Popess.
