VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Bono, the lead singer of the Irish band U2, said he told Pope Francis that in Ireland "it looks as though the abusers are being more protected than the victims. And you could see the pain in his face."
Bono met the pope Sept. 19 to sign an agreement between his charity, ONE, and the Scholas Occurentes educational charity supported by Pope Francis.
During the half-hour meeting, Bono said, he brought up Pope Francis' recent trip to Ireland and the concerns there about the sexual abuse crisis.
The pope was "aghast," Bono said. "I thought he was sincere."
"I think he is an extraordinary man for extraordinary times," the singer said.
ONE is a campaign and advocacy effort working to end extreme poverty, especially in Africa. One of its current focuses, Bono told reporters Sept. 19, is education for girls and young women. Some "130 million girls around the world do not go to school, because they are girls," he said.
"Poverty is sexist" is the campaign slogan, he said.
Scholas began in Pope Francis' Archdiocese of Buenos Aires, supporting education in poor neighborhoods by pairing their schools with private schools and institutions in wealthier neighborhoods. The organization has grown to other countries and supports a variety of exchange programs aimed at promoting education, encouraging creativity and teaching young people about respect, tolerance and peace.
"We haven't figured out what we are going to do together," Bono said, "but we sort of have a crush on each other."
"We haven't figured out what we are going to do together," Bono said, "but we sort of have a crush on each other."
Describing the pope, Bono said that "honestly, he is quite a radical thinker and I felt quite old-fashioned sitting next to him." Bono was talking about teaching children how to read and write and "get to advanced math and art later. And he was like, 'Start with art. And start with the creative life and you'll get a better result.'"
Bono said the conversation touched on many topics, including poverty, commerce and meeting the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.
They spoke, he said, "about how we have to rethink the wild beast that is capitalism and how, though it is not immoral, it is amoral and it requires our instruction. He's very keen on that."
The children you so fondly speak of when referencing the gift of learning to read and write only had the chance because their parents supported life - unlike you, Mr. Henson who contributed heavily and campaigned heartily to allow abortions in Ireland.
As much as this may sound strange the criminalization of abortion actually causes more not less abortion to occur. This is so well evidenced it is as near to fact as it could be given the small period of time to gather data. The World Health Organization offers the stats and they are clear: every country in the world with strict abortion laws preventing access or where abortion is a crime entirely have the highest abortion rates. These countries also have the highest maternal death rates. The countries with fairly easy access like those in Western Europe have the lowest abortion rates globally and this has been true for decades now. When these countries also have free and easy access to birth control and parental supports like government funded quality daycare, and universal health care, and longer paid maternity and paternity leaves, they have some of the lowest abortion rates of all countries with one exception, Sweden. Sweden has a very high rate despite the benefits are excellent and birth control and abortion are fairly easy to access. However, that does not mean that Sweden's high rate would lower if laws were stricter as it is actually more likely they would simply increase even more than their current high rate.
South America with the least liberal abortion laws and the strictest punishments globally have some of the highest abortion rates and maternal death rates in the world. This is why several South American or South of the Border Countries, like Mexico and Brazil have changed their laws and why Argentina was considering legalizing abortion too.
So you are not saving the born or unborn with any laws prohibiting abortion in any country. In fact, you are more causing deaths of the unborn and of women. Ireland's women have notoriously gone to Britain for abortions for decades just like Poland's women have been going to the surrounding countries for their abortions. It is time to realize that certain sins are not best resolved by criminalizing them. You need to help women not corner them if you want to see less abortions which means offering services like the ones I mentioned above and offering free access to artificial birth control that works.
Rationalization beyond comprehension.....
Poverty is sexist.
Actually, it is more accurately stated that sexism causes poverty. Even if your country is not poverty stricken, adding sexism to your country's way of life, laws or customs will eventually lead to greater poverty. Also, when countries remove sexism from their cultures, laws and traditions, poverty often quickly retreats and even disappears. This is much like child abuse, including pedophilia. It is not wrong to state pedophilia is sexist but it is more correct to say sexism causes pedophilia and we have our own church's misogynistic sexism to prove this true.
Many of our abusive priests used their image of one who is more sacred and more prestigious than women to enter the lives of often mentally slow, emotionally damaged, recently widowed or divorced, or otherwise fragile women in order to get at their children. They far less often picked happy, mentally or physically healthy women's children. So without the clericalism mixed with sexist attitudes and the willingness to abuse and use weak women as mere objects to get to their kids, we would have had far less cases of pedophilia. Also, women priests would be half as likely to be pedophiles so would have lowered the amount too. Also, women are more likely to blow the whistle on sexually abusive men who harm children so that would have lowered our cases. Lastly, our church ordained and kept known pedophiles because of the shortage of priests and if women and married people were being ordained many of these clearly troubled priests would never have been allowed ordination or would have been defrocked after being caught the first time. This ordaining any man with male sex parts who could walk helped enormously to increase the pedophile victim amounts.
Hatred of any group never reaps a reward but only damage and self destruction of the haters in the end and sadly the destruction of their victims too.
A casual eye would say the author hates men....
Long live Pope Francis. God bless.