The Papacy and Its Saints and Sinners
- mrymntcpw
- 12 minutes ago
- 3 min read
People across the world this week are mourning the loss of Pope Francis, who died on April 20,2025 at the age of 88. “He was a Pope among the people, with an open heart towards everyone,” Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re said in the homily. “The guiding thread of his mission was also the conviction that the church is a home for all, a home with its doors always open.”
“I am not a believer, but what Francis said always touched my soul,” one woman in Rome said. “I felt his humanity.”
I concur, but I have strong feelings about the myths associated with organized religion, and the power, wealth, and abuse of the Catholic Church.
"What's the difference between a saint and a sinner?" Answer: One has been canonized.
Life experience has taught me to be skeptical of organized religion and Timothy Egan’s book entitled, A Pilgrimage to Eternity has strengthened my skepticism. Egan’s story is a well-written, humorous account of his adventures along the Via Francigena, a story providing historical evidence of the entanglement of power, corruption, abuse, and massive death perpetrated on selected communities by leaders of the the Catholic Church and the Crown..
Amazon describes Egan’s book as:
A thrilling journey, a family story, and a revealing history [that] looks for our future in its search for God.
Moved by his mother’s death and his Irish Catholic family’s complicated history with the church, Timothy Egan…embarked on a thousand-mile pilgrimage through the theological cradle of Christianity…along the Via Francigena, once the major medieval trail leading the devout to Rome. [Along the way] Egan finds a modern Canterbury Tale in a chapel where Queen Bertha introduced Christianity to pagan Britain; parses the supernatural in a French town built on miracles; and journey’s to the oldest abbey in the Western world, founded in 515 and home to continuous prayer over the 1,500 years that have followed.
Egan is an agnostic and is led in his personal search for God by his reasoning power and intellect. His search is steeped in his mother's strong Catholic faith, but it conflicts with his experiences with priests from that same church, and with research into the lives of "saints" canonized by popes throughout the history of the Catholic Church.
So this sinner asks, "Is Beatification and Canonization a stringent, sacred process or "Much Ado About Nothing"? " I refer you to:
In conclusion, I thoroughly enjoyed Egan's account of his pilgrimage along the Via Francigena, and recommend it to both the faithful and to agnostics.
CPW
P.S. While we are on the subject of sinners, I can not leave without mentioning an excerpt from an article in the news recently that I will call:
Sanctimonious Sinners.
The Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the nation’s largest, has agreed to pay $880 million to 1,353 people who say they were sexually abused as children by Catholic clergy. The settlement, which experts said was the highest single payout by a diocese, brings Los Angeles’s cumulative total in sex abuse lawsuits to more than $1.5 billion.
“I am sorry for every one of these incidents, from the bottom of my heart,” Archbishop José H. Gomez said in a statement. “My hope is that this settlement will provide some measure of healing for what these men and women have suffered.”
Now to the Conclave:
Saints or sinners?
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