Swiss Guard veteran claims existence of 'gay network' at the Vatican | World news. A former commander of the Swiss Guard, the small force of men whose job it is to protect the pope, has said there is "a network of homosexuals" within the Vatican, the latest in a series of claims about gay priests working at the heart of the Roman Catholic church. Elmar Mäder, who was commandant of the Guard from 2002 until 2008, said his time at the heart of the Vatican had given him an insight into certain aspects of life there. "I cannot refute the claim that there is a network of homosexuals. My experiences would indicate the existence of such a thing," he told the Swiss newspaper Schweiz am Sonntag.
Famed for their striking uniforms of blue, red and orange, recruits to the Guard swear to protect the pope and his successors with their lives. Mäder, 50, from the canton of St Gallen, refused to comment on speculation that he had warned guardsmen about the behaviour of certain priests. "The Roman Curia [the Vatican's bureaucracy] is exactly this kind of environment. " In the war on the poor, Pope Francis is on the wrong side | George Monbiot. 'When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist. " So said the Brazilian archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara. His adage exposes one of the great fissures in the Catholic church, and the emptiness of the new pope's claim to be on the side of the poor. The bravest people I have met are all Catholic priests. Working in West Papua and then in Brazil, I met men who were prepared repeatedly to risk death for the sake of others.
When I first knocked on the door of the friary in Bacabal, in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, the priest who opened it thought I had been sent to kill him. That morning he had received the latest in a series of death threats from the local ranchers' union. Inside the friary was a group of peasants – some crying and trembling – whose bodies were covered in bruises made by rifle butts, and whose wrists bore the marks of rope burns. He now maintains that he "would like a church that is poor and is for the poor". Pope Francis' first moves hint at break with past. 16 March 2013Last updated at 13:11 GMT By David Willey BBC News, Rome The first 48 hours of the pontificate of Pope Francis have given the world a foretaste of what it is going to be like to have a Jesuit priest for the first time in history as leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholic believers.
Minutes after the election result was declared in the Sistine Chapel, a Vatican official called the Master of Ceremonies offered to the new Pope the traditional papal red cape trimmed with ermine that his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI gladly wore on ceremonial occasions. "No thank you, Monsignore," Pope Francis is reported to have replied. "You put it on instead. It was just one small sign out of many this week that as Massimo Franco, one of Italy's shrewdest political editorial writers, commented in the Corriere Della Sera, "the era of the Pope-King and of the Vatican court is over".
Pope Francis was known to use public transport in Buenos Aires Continue reading the main story “Start Quote. Pope Francis and Argentina’s military junta: Which side was he on? Now that he has become the leader of the world’s largest Christian church – a position of both spiritual and political influence – many people are beginning to ask what role Pope Francis played when Argentina collapsed into terror and dictatorship in the 1970s. The relationships between the Roman Catholic Church and right-wing regimes, including dictatorships in Europe and the Americas, has been a subject of controversy for decades. While more recent Popes have delivered sermons favouring democracy and human rights, Pope Francis is bound to raise questions about his role in one of the most horrific political conflicts in the modern history of the Americas.
For Argentines of any standing – and especially those within the Church – it was almost impossible to be neutral during the “Dirty War” and ensuing right-wing military dictatorship that consumed Argentina from 1976 to 1983. And Pope Francis, then known as Father Jorge Bergoglio, had considerable standing. The French Revolution and the Catholic Church. In this caricature, monks and nuns enjoy their new freedom after the decree of 16 February 1790In 1789, the year of the outbreak of the French Revolution, Catholicism was the official religion of the French state.
The French Catholic Church, known as the Gallican Church, recognised the authority of the pope as head of the Roman Catholic Church but had negotiated certain liberties that privileged the authority of the French monarch, giving it a distinct national identity characterised by considerable autonomy. France’s population of 28 million was almost entirely Catholic, with full membership of the state denied to Protestant and Jewish minorities. Being French effectively meant being Catholic. Yet, by 1794, France’s churches and religious orders were closed down and religious worship suppressed. The Decline of Catholicism? Historians are divided over the strength of Catholicism in late eighteenth-century France. The Nationalisation of Property Growing Suspicion Revolutionary Religion.