Respect: A Lost Art

450

Respect:  A Lost Art

 

                A couple days ago, I learned that Pope Benedict XVI had created a Twitter account, so I quickly found him and followed him.  I think it’s great that he has it in eight different languages, but they are all European, and I think he could get a lot of support from several East Asian countries if he got one in Chinese.  Whatever, it’s not that big of a deal.  Anyway, he also has his own hashtag for people wanting to tweet questions about their faith to him, and he promises to answer occasionally.  To see what people are asking about, I searched the hashtag.  I wish I hadn’t.

                I was astounded by the amount of hateful things that people were tweeting to the leader of the Catholic Church, whom over one billion look to for guidance in their faith.  I would estimate that I read through fifty negative tweets before I finally came upon one that had some legitimacy and asked the Pope a reasonable question, without sarcasm, about his/her faith.  I also searched the Pope’s Twitter name, @pontifex, to see if there was anything respectful there.  More vile remarks.  I then came across a tweet from a priest, who apparently shared my disgust.  Then, when I clicked on this tweet, I saw that it had many reply tweets, probably about ten different people, who started arguing with the priest and giving him the same crap that they were saying to the Pope.  It was all quite sickening.

                Yes, the Catholic Church has definitely had its dark ages since Jesus walked the earth.  There were many evil popes in the era from roughly 1000-1600 AD, who were greedy for money and power over Europe.  However, the Church has removed most of its flaws, and especially during John Paul II’s reign had returned to its former glory when Christ was in the world.  Treating the Church and the Pope with such disrespect, whether you are Catholic, Christian, or not, is totally obscene.  You don’t see Christians going to the Dalai Lama’s Twitter page and tweeting terrible things.  The only person that has to deal with even close to this amount of hate is probably Barack Obama, but I think it’s reasonable to say that the Pope gets ten times as much social media hate as he does. 

                It’s fine to have different views and beliefs, but if you just cannot accept different religions and cultures, you should at least find it somewhere in yourself to be tolerant of them.  If you don’t agree, then just don’t say anything!  Why do you have to be a jerk and say horrible things?  Acting like that is clearly looked down upon in any religion.