VATICAN CITY (CNS) – People who act shocked that a priest would bless a gay couple but have no problem with him blessing a crooked businessman are hypocrites, Pope Francis said.
“The most serious sins are those that are disguised with a more ‘angelic’ appearance. No one is scandalized if I give a blessing to an entrepreneur who perhaps exploits people, which is a very serious sin. Whereas they are scandalized if I give it to a homosexual – this is hypocrisy,” he told the Italian magazine Credere.
The interview was scheduled for publication Feb. 8, but Vatican News reported on some of its content the day before when the magazine issued a press release about the interview.
Harken, to the the tale of the birth of Massachusetts…
Help, I’m too European to know anything about the birth of Massachusetts
It was settled mainly by Puritans, a Calvinist flavor of Christians that thought the Church of England was too Catholic. If you’ve heard the term “puritanical” it comes from them.
The pilgrims specifically, were the sect that was the first to land in Massachusetts, and sought to break away from the Church of England.
The basics are that the first colonies were created by a splinter faction of the Church of England known as the Puritans. There were other Puritan groups who formed colonies in New England, but the Pilgrims are the group most people think of when talking about the birth of the US, who were distinct from other groups of Puritans for pushing for complete separation from the Church of England. The Puritans basically believed that the Church of England didn’t go far enough in separating from the Catholic Church.
Thanks for the explanation! I knew about the Puritans in the sense that I knew they were influential in the early days of the US and were known for being… err, pretty uptight, but that’s honestly all I could remember from high school history classes I took about 3000 years ago.
To be honest, despite my hometown being one town over from their original landing site (iirc, not technically where they first landed, but where they actually disembarked), I had to look them up because all I could really remember about them is that I tend to call them “a bunch of never-nude prudes.”
I’m still not exactly clear on what their issues with the Church of England were, but I was surprised to learn that they were apparently pretty against slavery, especially for the time period. Slaves made up like 3% of their total workforce and had almost all the same rights recognized by the government as any other citizen, apparently.
So, I fell in to a wiki-hole (help) – so far I only know that they were cranky about how the English Reformation didn’t go far enough, and coincidentally that Oliver Cromwell was a Puritan, but no specifics yet