Pope Francis has urged Vatican bureaucrats to avoid “rigid ideological positions” that prevent them from understanding today’s reality
Pope Francis urged Vatican bureaucrats Thursday to avoid “rigid ideological positions” that prevent them from understanding today’s reality, an appeal made days after he formally allowed priests to bless same-sex couples in a radical change of Vatican policy.
Francis used his annual Christmas greeting to the Holy See hierarchy to encourage the cardinals, bishops and laypeople who run the Vatican to listen to one another and to others so they can evolve to truly offer service to the Catholic Church.
Speaking in the Hall of Blessings, Francis told them it was important to keep advancing and growing in their understanding of the truth. Fearfully sticking to rules may give the appearance of avoiding problems but only ends up hurting the service that the Vatican Curia is called to give the church, he said.
“Let us remain vigilant against rigid ideological positions that often, under the guise of good intentions, separate us from reality and prevent us from moving forward,"the pope said. "We are called instead to set out and journey, like the Magi, following the light that always desires to lead us on, at times along unexplored paths and new roads.”
I hate the religion, I hate that there’s even a pope. But this guy, He’s the fucking best.
Honestly as Christianity goes the Catholics are fucking moderates these days. Which really is saying something.
Also the Pope has like, the world’s best hat.
We’re a non-religious, casually Christian affiliated family and we’re seriously thinking of sending our daughter to a Catholic school just for the far higher quality of education. (No concerning priests or nuns btw, these are government run schools)
I never would have even considered it as an option 10 years ago. But they really do seem to have their shit together, terrible acts in the past notwithstanding
I don’t pretend to know where you are time vs money. And it could be that private school is your best option. I’m also assuming that you’re in the US but that may not be the case. And what you can throw away everything I’m saying here because I know public and private schools in Europe and many other places are entirely different.
I did private for a few years. The only substantial difference for me was that the private teachers would make sure you do your homework and punish you if you don’t.
YMMV, but I will have to say that probably 40% of those kids in my private school were Grade-A assholes. Zero compassion, every little thing was a do or die competition. The teacher would do the best she could to control social situations but, there’s only so much she can do. She’s not going to fight the other parents for you by kicking little Jimmy out for being a jerk. They bring the two sets of parents together and that’s about the point where you find out why Little Jimmy is the way he is.
The state schools are being pressured pretty hard for testing scores, so it’s not so much that they don’t want to teach your kids or can’t teach your kids, but they’re underfunded and overworked and are going to pick the ones that are easiest to teach to raise that number.
But you can probably get the same outcome from using public school and pulling in a tutor after say middle school. Your school might even provide tutelage, but you’re probably going to have to realize that it needs to happen and ask them for it.
If you have some time, even just getting marginally involved in your kids education you can pull off approximately what the private schools do. Order the common core teacher manuals that your schools use, once a week go over the same things they did in school. Tell your public teachers you want to get on the same page as them they’d probably be delighted no matter how useless the seem.
Again if you’ve got excess cash, The private schools will absolutely get the job done. Just do some due diligence, find some families locally that take their kids there start asking them particular questions that would suit your kids well.
Anything before around 10th grade, just make sure that they’re keeping up grades and knowledge in algebra, calculus, trig, science and english.
All those high school grades and scores are honestly trash as long as they get into the college they want.