The Pope's Ten Suggestions

Have you read the Pope's Ten Suggestions yet?

The papacy of Jiminy Crickets.

Check this out.

Twenty-One seconds into the video -- isn't that the woman from the Pontifical Council on Culture?

The ten suggestions wouldn't have been so off-putting if the Holy Father hadn't spent two years making faithfulness to the Ten Commandments outdated talking points from God. These came across to me as in lieu of them. I just can't appreciate.

Some of them sound like Kahlil Gibran.


Take care of your spiritual life, your relationship with God, because this is the backbone of everything we do and everything we are.

True enough. But, the principles of that little piece of advice are not any different from this:

I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit.


I looked up some Dalai Lama quotes to compare and truth be told, this page of quotes was a rude awakening. It's the same shtick.

Which did the Pope say:


"Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others; to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.”

"Take care of your relationships with others, transforming your faith into life and your words into good works, especially on behalf of the needy.”


How about these:

"Take care of brothers and sisters who are weaker … the elderly, the sick, the hungry, the homeless and strangers, because we will be judged on this.”

“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.”


Ok, that one might be an exaggeration but it isn't that far off.

Maybe they have a Disney theme going. Didn't Snow White's Seven Dwarfs say something like this one?:

"Look after your work, doing it with enthusiasm, humility, competence, passion and with a spirit that knows how to thank the Lord.”


The role of a Pope is not that of an ambiguous philosophical leader who imparts words of wisdom to people of all religions about the happiness in acts of charity.

Believers of the Deposit of Faith know that whatever charity work we do, if we are flagrantly violating Commandments, God's judgment is the expulsion from Paradise. Eternally if we die in that state without absolution through the Sacrament of Confession.

Why is he trying so hard to make the people we love think otherwise?

I've gathered a few quotes from St. John Paul II to refresh our memory on the communications of a Catholic Pope.

The comparison speaks for itself.



“No one else can want for me. No one can substitute his act of will for mine. It does sometimes happen that someone very much wants me to want what he wants. This is the moment when the impassable frontier between him and me, which is drawn by free will, becomes most obvious. I may not want that which he wants me to want - and in this precisely I am incommunicabilis. I am, and I must be, independent in my actions. All human relationships are posited on this fact.”

“When a young man or woman recognizes that authentic love is a precious treasure, they are also enabled to live their sexuality in accordance with the divine plan, rejecting the false models which are, unfortunately, all too frequently publicized and very widespread.”

“Treating a person as a means to an end, and an end moreover which in this case is pleasure, the maximization of pleasure, will always stand in the way of love.”

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.”