Just a quick couple of thoughts on the whole Pope Francis surge in the news lately. You can get the genuine religious angle here, but allow the Czar to take some potshots at the Main Stream Media. Because he loves doing that at any opportunity.

The media have long been fascinated by Catholics (and increasingly Mormons, too). To the media, the Church still speaks the heavily coded Latin language to freeze out the uninitiated, the Pope is something of a rock-star warlock to his obedient zombie faithful, the Mass is full of magical hand-waving and weird audience participation, and Church festivals consist of a nutty blend of bingo, witch hunting, chanting with beads, and burning homosexuals on a stake.

These folks would be amazed to learn that the Church makes all of its teachings available for public inspection: it’s called the Catechism, and is even available in many languages, for free, on the web. It is lengthy, though, so there is a tendency of the MSM to TL;DR the entire thing. The Catechism is fully searchable.

And within there, as ‘Puter noted, everything Pope Francis said is explained in detail. He practically quoted from it. Seriously: ten seconds of research and the MSM would realize they had no story here.

Another thing that would stun the media if they bothered to thumb through the Catechism is how remarkably consistent Roman Catholicism is: if Situation A requires a certain response, you can pretty well bet that very similar Situation B requires a very similar response.

More interestingly, although the media portrays Catholics as living in the Middle Ages, few religions of any size have embraced the scientific method as fully as Catholicism. While interpretations vary, Pope John Paul II, for one, was instrumental in explaining why Catholics embrace modern cosmology, evolution, skepticism, and more: real faith, he famously declared, has nothing to fear from science. Science, in turn, should indirectly validate faith. This more than anything else is what fuels anti-Catholic sentiment among more fundamentalist, literal-truth-of-the-Bible believers: the Catholics have no trouble with modern science, and can point to the math in the Catechism as to why their faith is not threatened by dinosaurs.

Finally, there are some folks in the media who realize that the Catechism—again, what the Church actually believes—rejects nearly all modern liberalism. This idea that the Church is split between liberals and traditionalists is of course a fiction: liberals, particularly here in the United States and Europe, have effectively convinced fellow Catholics that such a sea-change is happening because, sadly, the Church as spent the last generation not encouraging people to even know that a Catechism existed. A quick read through the current Catechism is a death-blow to Catholics who think that abortion is okay, that same sex marriage is all right, that government control is a good thing, or that alternative lifestyles let you do your own thing as long as you love the Holy Spirit, man.

Of course, this is exactly why the MSM discourages itself from reading the Catechism.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.