Benedict XVI more proud than John Lennon

40 years later and Benedict XVI try to usurp the popularity of the Beatles. What is there exactly to pardon with John Lennon -- that he said he was more popular than Jesus Christ? Benedict XVI is trillion times worse than that sin of John Lennon because as Pope and with the Opus Dei priests – he & they claim to be CREATING the flesh of Jesus Christ instantly through their priestly formula at the Eucharist. Imagine when he went for World Youth Day and he turned 1 million tiny hosts into the real flesh of Jesus Christ. There is no amount of pardon for Benedict XVI and the Opus Dei priests, not in 40 years, not in the eternity of Hell. Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II and St. Josemaria Escriva will dance in the fiery ring of pride in Hell.

Now when did mankind ever have the power to CREATE God? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around – that God create mankind…not mankind creating God.

Benedict XVI and the Opus Dei are worse than John Lennon’s pride and Satan’s pride in Heaven. It took St. Michael the Archangel to drive down Satan into Hell, but now Satan got Benedict XVI and John Paul II into his circle of pride. That is why the demise of the Vatican is imminent with all this witchcraft of turning the flour-into-the-flesh of Christ.

The Jesuit Jon Sobrino which we featured a lot here wrote books that “Without the poor there is no salvation”. Benedict XVI, like Herod’s conscience being bothered, silenced Jon Sobrino through the Opus Dei Bishop in El Salvador. Jon Sobrino dared criticise John Paul II but the Opus Dei are hurriedly trying to get him canonized – so he can be partnered with his Mystical Husband – St. Josemaria Escriva in the Vatican and the Catholic church.

Benedict XVI and the Opus Dei will never dare diry their hands like the Jesuit Jon Sobrino and the Jesuits who work in Latin America with their Liberation Theology…so because they want to remain the palace of the Vatican and live a luxurious GAY life, they silence the Jesuit Jon Sobrino on the pretext that his definition of Christ might mislead other Catholics. Benedict XVI and the Opus Dei are the worst LIARS and the PROUDEST, even more proud than Satan. Their Vatican pardon on John Lennon is hypocrisy par excellence!

=================

Vatican forgives John Lennon for Jesus quip

Sat. Nov. 22, 2008

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican's newspaper has finally forgiven John Lennon for declaring that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, calling the remark a "boast" by a young man grappling with sudden fame.

The comment by Lennon to a London newspaper in 1966 infuriated Christians, particularly in the United States, some of whom burned Beatles' albums in huge pyres.

But time apparently heals all wounds.

"The remark by John Lennon, which triggered deep indignation mainly in the United States, after many years sounds only like a 'boast' by a young working-class Englishman faced with unexpected success, after growing up in the legend of Elvis and rock and roll," Vatican daily Osservatore Romano said.

The article, marking the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' "The White Album," went on to praise the pop band.

"The fact remains that 38 years after breaking up, the songs of the Lennon-McCartney brand have shown an extraordinary resistance to the passage of time, becoming a source of inspiration for more than one generation of pop musicians," it said.

Lennon was murdered in New York in 1980.


=================

Jesus H. Christ! Vatican Pardons Lennon!

“It’s quite suspicious
To say the least
Even mentioned it to my priest
One Our Father, three Hail Marys
Each Saturday night. . .”
—from “Vatican Blues,” by George Harrison.

November 25, 2008 at 17:55:39

JL vs. JC Again

I read the news today, oh boy, about Obama possibly naming Monsanto shill Tom Vilsack as secretary of agriculture (help!), and Donald Rumsfeld opining in the NYT about strategy in Afghanistan (cough), and Ahmad Chalabi -- the Zelig of the Middle East -- kissing Obama’s ring in the New York Times in yet another slimy bid to become emperor of Iraq. . .

And how the Vatican pardoned John Lennon. Eh?
As I recall, Lennon is still dead, and therefore not in much of a position to enjoy a pardon. As I also recall, Lennon never attacked the Vatican, or the Pope, never killed anyone, never helped turn Wall Street into a slot machine.

Funny -- when you read about someone being “pardoned,” especially by the Vatican, isn’t it generally for a rather nefarious deed? Didn’t Pope John Paul forgive that nutso who shot him?

Lennon did, of course, once suggest that The Beatles might be a bigger draw than Jesus Christ, but then, Christ was dead at the time (still is), and his talents as a performer remain open to question.

I checked the rest of the news today, oh boy. Nope. Nothing about the Vatican meeting with Generalissimo Francisco Franco, or urging that nations try to stave off World War I. I checked my watch. Yup, just as I thought. 2008. No new Beatles music since 1970.

Yet there was the Reuters copy: The Vatican's newspaper has finally forgiven John Lennon for declaring that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, calling the remark a "boast" by a young man grappling with sudden fame.

And from the Guardian: But L'Osservatore Romano turned the other cheek on Saturday, dismissing Lennon's remarks as "showing off, bragging by a young English working-class musician who had ... enjoyed unexpected success."

So some fellow, or fellows, or the holy editorial board at L’Osservatore, decided that poor old Lennon has not committed a sin against Gawd, after all. Forty-two years later. The countless thousands -- millions? -- of so-called Christians in this country who burned Beatles albums and frothed at the mouth, many demanding Lennon’s death, were wrong, after all.
Well, as the Church Lady used to say, “Isn’t that special!” Isn’t it special that the Il Papa and his minions would concern themselves with this! You know, they really have many more important things to do. Like psychologically enslaving the poor, ignorant, helpless of the world by indoctrinating them into the Big Catholic Guilt Trip, and condemning anyone to hell or purgatory who wears a condom or interruptus-es their coitus. Generally rah-rahing to make every ejaculation count, and foment still more little human greedball needballs to wahhh and puke and consume and cry and destroy and get tattooed and play Super Smash Brothers III.

Then there are trifles such as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, genocides, famines, AIDS, Madonna. . .Yet the Vatican took a little time out to “forgive” Lennon. How very Christian of them!

Okay, just for fun, sinners, let’s roll back the clock to the foggy old year of 1966, when men were men and Beatles were Beatles. It was then that journalist Maureen Cleave wrote an “at home with” London Evening Standard profile of Lennon, who was still married to first wife Cynthia and living in a posh suburban London enclave with three-year-old son, Julian. The man was all of 25 years old.

It’s a nice article, actually, half-substantial and half-chocked full of gossipy details heavily in demand at the time, casually related, and without apparent awareness of Lennon’s frequent use of psychedelics. (Put it this way: there were at least several days that year when he was not tripping out.) Ringo and George are apt to stop in, Cleave jauntily reported, and “they while away the small hours of the morning making mad tapes -- Bedtimes and mealtimes have no meaning as such.”
My favorite part of the article: Lennon’s prized possession of the moment seems to have been a gorilla suit. He tells Cleave how he suggested that the other Beatles each get one, too, so they could all go driving around London in them. The others weren’t as keen on this idea. Pity!

It is fully eight paragraphs into the piece that this candid little aside crops up, in passing: “Experience has sown few seeds of doubt in him: not that his mind is closed, but it's closed round whatever he believes at the time. 'Christianity will go,' he said. 'It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first -- rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.' He is reading extensively about religion.”

Uh-oh. . . As we know all too punishingly well, the world press promptly filled with headlines, “LENNON SAYS BEATLES BIGGER THAN JESUS,” and the Beatle-album-burning orgy began. Now, 42 years later, the Vatican has suddenly adjuged this comment to merely have been a harmless “boast” by an “English working-class musician who had enjoyed. . .unexpected success.”

Holy See, Batman! They’ve gotten all it wrong again. Cue “Strawberry Fields.” Misunderstanding all you see. . .Il Papa? Il Poopoo.

First, the statement was about the decline of so-called Christianity, not Lennon or The Beatles' fame. He was simply stating the obvious: that the modern version of Christianity -- hollow, hypocritical churchonsundee ritual -- was losing support. And so it was, especially in the wake of the youth movement of the ‘60’s, which was rooted in rejecting seemingly empty conventions of the day. This was a perfectly valid observation well in the context of the time. Just one month later, Time Magazine ran one of its most famous cover stories, “Is God Dead?”

What’s more, as any half-serious student of Beatles history knows, Lennon could not have cared less whether The Beatles were more popular than Christ, The Rolling Stones, or Dylan (Well, maybe the Stones!). At the time of the interview, Johnpaulgeorgandringo had stopped touring -- repeat, stopped touring -- deeply repulsed by all the screaming, fetishizing idolatry.

Boasting of fame? Why, the man was practically a recluse, and never performed a concert tour again in his life! The remark was just off-handed musing, an excerpt from a long, free-ranging discussion. Never mind that Cleave included it as an illustration of Lennon’s sometimes willful statements and skeptical nature, not merely for its content. She hardly played the angle up.

Again, Lennon’s comment was meant to illustrate the widely known decline in popularity of so-called Christianity -- not to trumpet the rise of The Beatles. Note that he did not tout rock ‘n’ roll or The Beatles as being better than Christianity, declaring that all were transitory phenomenae. What's more, JL actually compliments JC -- something he also did, not incidentally, in interviews throughout his life. The man was a Christ fan. The salient part of his statement, really, is how Jesus’ “disciples were thick and ordinary -- it’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”

Yowzah! Can you say. . .Pat Robertson? John Hagee? Boy, did JL hit the nail on the head here, pardon the metaphor. It’s the televangelists, the martinet priests and pastors and ministers, and the poor dunderhead intolerant true-believers who know that they are gwyne up to hebbin’ because The Babble tells them so. . .who screw up the whole deal. It is these guys who have turned the unassailable goodness of Christ’s ideas into stupidity, hypocrisy, tyranny, evildoing, insanity. Mormon underwear, anyone? I have a personal relationship with Christ.

Any thoughts of Lennon “boasting” about “enjoying unexpected success” should finally be allayed by a statement made later in the article, one that addresses the songwriter’s now fabled restlessness. It is, in retrospect, eerily prophetic: “You see, there's something else I'm going to do, something I must do -- only I don't know what it is,” he said. “That's why I go round painting and taping and drawing and writing and that, because it may be one of them. All I know is, this isn't it for me.”

By “this,” he meant wife/house/six cars/9-to-5 world-famous John-the-Beatle. Not exactly embracing the old Elvis lifestyle, was he! Of course, it would not be long before Lennon would find Yoko Ono and try to turn his gargantuan fame into something constructive: a quixotic ongoing music and PR campaign on behalf of peace, cooperation, understanding. You know, all the kinds of little notions that Christ stood for. This “something else I’m going to do” statement renders as ludicrous the Vatican’s remark implying that the young “working class musician” was a punk kid drunk with unexpected “fame.” Quite the contrary, he was hiding from it, trying to figure out how to accomplish something fulfilling as a private human being.

By the way, almost all of the articles summarizing the Vatican’s comments used that word “fame,” or “famous,” instead of accurately quoting Lennon’s “popular.” (Exactly which Italian word was used in the Vatican press, and how it was translated, I don’t know.) Attention, journalists: there is a big difference between fame and popular. Jack The Ripper is famous. You've gotten the whole point wrong, right out of the starting gate. In the ‘60’s, it absolutely did feel as though The Beatles were more popular -- popular -- than Jesus. I remember.

And so this sad old story never dies. Short-sighted, unthinking "Christians" and sophomoric writers will continue to resurrect it and “stir up the controversy” ad nauseum, as long as it will turn heads and compel ears (and advertising bucks.) The mere fact that feeble minds the world over still argue about it, and still castigate Lennon’s old ghost, and that the Vatican -- the Vatican! -- would issue a wrongheaded “pardon” that winds up trivializing Lennon as a braggart kid intoxicated with fame and fortune. . .just proves the ever-so-thoughtful 25-year-old Beatle’s central point...

Christ’s followers are thick and ordinary.

by Rip Rense (Posted by Rip Rense) Page 1 of 1 page

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Jesus-H-Christ-Vatican-P-by-Rip-Rense-081125-323.html

Comment:

...so does the church maintain the moral high ground?


It should be us, if we haven't done so already, who should be pardoning the stupidity of the church.

Screw the church. Everybody knows they're idiots except for their sheople. If they get the last word in - they get the last word in this issue - and retain ultimate judgement.

Seems to me that the move by the Vatican is another PR attempt to retain/gain followers and even more so, excuses THEMSELVES for their stupidity, gives reasons to forgive THEMSELVES, and gives THEMSELVES a reason to "pardon" Lennon. If they didn't have the wisdom to recognize a hot-headed (???) young adult, why should their present judgement of him be trusted or considered well-reasoned

==============