I don’t idolize money, I just don’t have enough to make through the next few weeks. Fortunately, a bunch of awesome readers have chipped in and I’m now only about 200 bucks away from enough to see me through. If you can join them with a small donation, thanks! Here in the US there is a thing called the prosperity Gospel, rife with scoundrels and conmen fleecing the devout. It’s all about how God-eh wants some to be rich, some to be middle-class, and many like me to be poor.
Pope Francis brought down the hammer on that shit this weekend, saying in part money sickens faith and is indeed a false idol:
Rome Reports — People will say, ‘But Father, I read the Ten Commandments and they say nothing about the evils of money. Against which Commandment do you sin when you do something for money? You sin against the first one! You worship a false idol. And this is the reason: because money becomes an idol and you worship it. And that’s why Jesus tells us that you cannot serve money and the living God: either one or the other. The early Fathers of the Church, in the 3rd Century, around the year 200 or 300, put it in a very blunt way, calling money the root of all evil. An so it is. Because it turns us into idolatrous, fills our thoughts with pride and leads us away from our faith.
”Money sickens our minds, poisons our thoughts, even poisons our faith, leading us down the path of jealousy, quarrels, suspicion and conflict. It drives to idle words and pointless discussions. It also corrupts the mind of some people that see religion as a source of profit. ‘I am Catholic, I go to Mass, everyone thinks well of me… But underneath I have my businesses. I worship money’. And here we have the word we usually find in newspapers: ‘Men of corrupted minds’. Money corrupts us! There’s no way out.”
I’m starting to like this guy.