Pope Francis Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

April rambling: humanity in motion

Metonymy and metalepsis

To Understand Global Migration, You Have to See It First. New estimates based on location data from Meta reveal a picture of humanity in motion.

‘60 Minutes’ Calls Out Paramount for Executive Producer’s Exit in Rare On-Air Rebuke; Has ’60 Minutes’ Run Out of Time? Shari Redstone’s Big Decision. The Paramount mogul is stuck in the middle of an impossible choice. Fight djt and blow up her $8 billion Skydance deal, or cave to the president and torch the most valuable news property in her media empire. Tick, tick, tick…

RFK Jr. & HHS: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Fraserherman: Why, yes, diversity is a plus.

In April in years ending in 5

1775: Ride Paul Ride – The 2025 Showdown between Patriots and Loyalists

1865: Lincoln assassination, end of the American Civil War

1925: The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was published, and Art Deco hit the international stage

1945: Hitler dies

1975: On April 30, “the city of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, was taken by the army of North Vietnam, ending the conflict that had grown out of the Vietnamese war for independence from France and a proxy war for the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union.”

1995: The bombing in Oklahoma City on April 19 killed 168 people. There was a woman I knew who worked for an SBDC in OKC. Her building was right across the street from the Murrah Building. She suffered severe injuries from flying glass and other items that acted as shrapnel. She wrote a very moving story about her recovery the following year, which I published in a newsletter. Another aftermath story, about forgiveness, I wrote about here.

The usual weird stuff

Three R’s: Resist. Rebel. Rebuild.

The US intensifies its crackdown on peaceful protests. Forty-one anti-protest bills in 22 states have been introduced since the start of 2025, according to the law tracker.

DEI Programs Are Lawful Under Federal Civil Rights Laws and Supreme Court Precedent

Pope Francis shames the crap out of JD Vance in final acts on earth; Pope dies at 88

A whistleblower’s disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data

Team That Investigates Line-of-Duty Fire Deaths slashed; cuts will also halt a first-of-its-kind study of the causes of thousands of firefighters’ cancer cases.

US FDA suspends milk quality tests amid workforce cuts

Law Firms Made Deals. Now He Wants More From Them

Environmental rollbacks would boost pollution and endanger lives

Congress’s Biggest Financial Priority Is “Stablecoin.” What the Hell Is That? Instead of tackling crashing markets, Congress is pushing a crypto sector in which FOTUS’ family is financially involved.

FOTUS Demands Investigations Into Negative Approval Rating Polls

Hegseth blames the ‘deep state’ for his being so bad at his job

DEMAND ACCOUNTABILITY. IMPEACH. HIM. AGAIN.

FOTUS, dementia, and the duty to warn

Also

Space Monsters #1 Kickstarter: “An all-new horror/sci-fi/fantasy magazine in a cool new format! The initial 200 copies will be serial numbered on the back cover.” by FantaCo Enterprises LLC

A collection of Street Academy of Albany / Harriet Gibbons High School yearbooks

From the Books: John Feinstein’s Where Nobody Knows Your Name

Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s tell-all memoir about her years running global policy for Facebook

My Mother, the Hollywood Scab

Wink Martindale, Prolific Game Show Host, Dies at 91

Will Hutchins, Star of ABC’s ‘Sugarfoot,’ Dies at 94

Jane Fonda is Far from Finished with Fitness or Activism

Oscars: Film Academy Establishes Stunt Design Award

Metonymy and metalepsis are two concepts that explain how we use substitutions in our speech.

Why are people never smiling in old photos?

The Oatmeal: Believe

Now I Know: Ben Franklin’s One Simple Trick to Save Sailors from Drowning and Maybe There Is an “I” in “Team” and The Childhood Terror That Turned Kind Of Nice and The Fashion Accessory That Prevents False Alarms and The Church of the World’s Oldest Tennis Ball

MUSIC

Lawyers, Guns, and Money – Warren Zevon

Traficano Rap – J Noa, LOWLIGHT

Streets of London by Ralph McTell

Tubthumping -Chumbawamba

Coverville 1530 The ABBA Cover Story V and 1531: The Buzzcocks Cover Story

Love In Real Life – Lizzo

Pump It Up -Elvis Costello & The Attractions

Annabel Lee – Sarah Jarosz

Purple Haze – The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Party at Ground Zero – Fishbone

A garden of flourishing paths by Jeffrey Mumford

We Are The World -USA for Africa

Eine kleine nachtmusik

How ‘Star Wars’ Is Changing Its Tune

The Catholic tradition

Jesuit

When the movie Conclave came to the area, I had to go see it because it was all about the popes. For a Protestant kid, I’ve been oddly obsessed with the Catholic tradition.

As a kid, I was probably trying to understand the difference between my traditions and Roman Catholic ones at some level. At my African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, we recited the Apostles Creed. There’s a line about the “holy catholic church,” and I was confused by that because we were Protestants. They were talking about the universal church, small c catholic, not big C Catholic.

“The term comes from two Greek words that together mean ‘throughout the whole.’ This single word, ‘catholic,’ means throughout all time and places and also points to the essential unity or wholeness of the church in Christ. No one English term captures that dual sense of this ancient Greek term quite as well as ‘catholic.’ So when the creed states, ‘I believe in the holy catholic church,’ it refers to the wholeness of the whole church in all times and places rather than to any specific branch of Christianity.”

When I went to public school, Daniel Dickinson in Binghamton, NY, at the bottom of a wide driveway was Saint Cyril’s parochial school, with the church nearby. The kids from Dickinson and Cyril’s would occasionally get into mild skirmishes. Dickinson kids would call them St. Cheerios, and I’m sure they also offered some nicknames.

The ashes

But I was fascinated that some of my Catholic friends at Dickinson would go out at lunchtime on Ash Wednesday and return with dirt on their foreheads. Or so I thought.

During the decade before 1982, when I wasn’t attending church very much, I’d occasionally attend a Christmas Eve service. As often as not, it would be at a Roman Catholic church. I liked the ritual, and I tended to love the music.

Around 2005, I attended a FOCUS churches’ Ash Wednesday service at Israel AME church in Albany. They applied ashes to the foreheads of the congregants. Huh. I thought it was a great idea because I’m pro-ecumenicalism. My current church follows this tradition.

It’s like when I went to the Cathedral of All Saints in Albany for an anniversary concert, and they allowed, even invited, the Protestants to take communion, something that was otherwise not done. As I noted, some of my Protestant friends refused, but I felt that if they offered, I’d accept.

Pontiffs

This morphed into knowing all of the popes in my lifetime. When I was on JEOPARDY in 1998, there was a question in the category PUT ‘EM IN ORDER. The clue was Paul VI, John Paul I, Pius XII. Easy-peasy.

I wrote about them back in 2013. The first pope in my lifetime was Pius XII (1939-1958). There’s been a reevaluation of his papacy regarding his attitude toward the Holocaust.

He was followed by John XXIII (1958-1963), who named the first cardinals to Africa, Japan, and the Phillippines. Paul VI (1963-1978) was followed by John Paul I (1978), who was in office for five weeks before he died.

John Paul II (1978-2005) was the very popular Polish Pope in many circles, particularly for his anti-communist cadence. He tended to oppose the death penalty. He did apologize for many of the sins of the church, from complacency in the African slave trade to, late in his tenure, the first recognition of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy and others.

I didn’t like Benedict XVI (2005-2013) from Germany as pope or afterward. But I didn’t know one could resign. “In 2019 [as Pope emeritus], Benedict released a 6,000-word letter that attributed the Church’s sexual abuse crisis to an erosion of morality driven by secularization and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The letter was in sharp contrast to the viewpoint of his successor, Francis, who saw the issue as a byproduct of abuses of power within the Church’s hierarchical structure.” He died in 2022.

The current guy

Francis (2013-) from Argentina “is the first pope to be a member of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuit Order), the first from the Americas and the Southern Hemisphere, and the first born or raised outside Europe since the 8th-century papacy of the Syrian pope Gregory III.”

“In December 2019, Francis abolished the pontifical secrecy privilege in sexual abuse cases, clarifying that bishops do not need authorization from the Vatican to turn over to materials from canonical trials upon request of civil law enforcement authorities. The lifting of the confidentiality rule was praised by victim advocates, but did not require the Church to affirmatively turn over canonical documents to civil authorities.”

While progressive in many ways, “Francis has categorically rejected the ordination of women as priests. Early in his papacy, he initiated dialogue on the possibility of deaconesses, creating in 2016 a Study Commission on the Women’s Diaconate to research the role of female deacons in early Christianity.” But his position seems to have hardened.

Anyway, that was part of the reason I had to see a movie about selecting a Catholic pope.

T is for Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Some of his works, on subjects such as original sin and evolution, were banned by Rome as early as 1939.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ was a “Jesuit paleontologist who worked to understand evolution and faith…. [he] fully participated in a life that included priesthood, living and working in the front lines of war, field work exploring the early origins of the human race, and adventurous travels of discovery in the backlands of China.

“[He] also participated fully in an intellectual life through the development of his imaginative, mystical writings on the evolutionary nature of the world and the cosmos.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was born 1 May 1881. “While both of his parental lineages were distinguished, it is noteworthy that his mother was the great grandniece of… Voltaire. He was the fourth of the couple’s eleven children and was born at the family estate of Sarcenat… in the ancient province of Auvergne.”

A biography notes: “Drawn to the natural world, Teilhard developed his unusual powers of observation.” He was deeply affected by the deaths of his brother Alberic in 1902, followed in 1904 by the death of Louise, his youngest sister, caused him to “momentarily to turn away from concern for things of this world.”

But he found his bearings, and developed a resume that is extraordinary. Among many things: he taught physics and chemistry in Cairo; served as a stretcher-bearer during World War I, for which he received several citations; and spent many years in China, taking part in the discovery of Peking Man. And writing throughout.

He died on 10 April 1955, Easter Sunday, in New York City and buried 60 miles north of there.

I found him interesting because, in 2017, participants at a plenary assembly of the Pontifical Council for Culture unanimously approved a petition to be sent to Pope Francis to remove the Vatican’s ‘warning’ from Teilhard de Chardin’s writings that dated back to 1962.

Some of his works, on subjects such as original sin and evolution, were banned by Rome as early as 1939. Read a rebuttal to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin here.

Read Teilhard for Beginners.

For ABC Wednesday