UNITED STATES
The Open Tabernacle: Here Comes Everybody
Posted on January 23, 2016 by Betty Clermont
Last April, 56% of Americans surveyed viewed Pope Francis “in a positive light … By contrast, only 44% of Americans viewed Barack Obama in a positive light.” A Gallup poll published December 28 showed 17% of Americans named President Obama as their most admired man in the world; the pope and Donald Trump were tied for second with only 5% each.
Attendance in 2015 at the public audiences with Pope Francis at the Vatican was down almost by half compared to the previous year.
Although Pope Francis was prepared to intervene in the Paris Climate Change Conference in December, no one asked him to do so. No representative of the Vatican was in attendance.
Of greater consequence for this pontificate, after the Vatican indicted the authors of two books on November 21 for exposing financial corruption (Pope Francis: “I gave the judges the concrete charges because what is important to the defense is the formulation of the accusations”), freedom-of-the-press organizations quickly criticized the Vatican and called for the criminal charges against the journalists to be withdrawn. Among them were the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Reporters Without Borders, Italy’s National Order of Journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Foreign Press Association in Rome, the association of reporters accredited to the Vatican (AIGAV), the International Press Institute (IPI), the National Federation of Press in Italy (FNSI) and the European Federation of Journalists (EFI).
As a result, other than the pope’s trip to Africa and the routine Christmas message, the last time Pope Francis received the usual widespread fawning news coverage by the mainstream media was before the indictment when the two books, Avarizia (“Avarice – the deadly sin as a parasite in the fiber of the Church”) by Emiliano Fittipaldi and Merchants in the Temple by Gianluigi Nuzzi, were released on November 5. The books documented Vatican fraud, theft, trade scams and withholding money donated for charity from the poor during this pontificate. Unanimously, it was reported that the books proved that the pope’s “enemies” were blocking his “reform” of the Vatican, and that he was bringing transparency and accountability to his “Church of the poor.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.