Bird is the Word

An interesting story about the unofficial portrait painter of the Vatican...

Shen Jiawei

VATICAN CITY — Artist Shen Jiawei’s paintings of Chinese soldiers during the Cultural Revolution were so popular with Mao’s regime that 250,000 copies of his most famous work were made into propaganda posters and distributed throughout the country.
Four decades later, Shen now has a different patron commissioning his work: He has become, somewhat inexplicably, the unofficial portrait artist of the Vatican. He painted the first official portrait of Pope Francis and recently completed a huge rendition of the second most powerful man in Rome, Cardinal George Pell, the Vatican’s money guy.

Here's the portrait.

Reminds me of....

Nancy Pelosi (Catholic) Is Smarter Than The Pope!

  Katherine Connell writes in National Review:


A reporter from CNS News today asked Nancy Pelosi: “Is an unborn child 20 weeks into pregnancy a human being?”
That’s not a question Pelosi is interested in addressing for obvious reasons, so she didn’t answer it. 
So the reporter asked again, “When it comes to the matter of whether or not an unborn child is a human being at 20 weeks gestation, what is your personal take on it? If it is not a human being, then what do you believe it is?”

That incensed her. “You know it is really interesting that you would come to these meetings to talk about it,” she replied. The nerve of a reporter coming to a press conference to talk to a member of Congress about the central point of a bill being considered in the House.
She continued: “As a mother of five, in six years, I have great standing on this issue, great understanding of it, more than my colleagues. In fact, one day many years ago, perhaps before you were born, when I was a new member of Congress, as a Catholic and a mom of five, opposing some of the initiatives similar to what — in the same vein as — what we have today, one of the Republicans stood up and said: Nancy Pelosi thinks she knows more about having babies than the pope. Yeah, Yeah. That would be true.”

Connell sums it up:

Actually, no one doubts that Nancy Pelosi has more direct knowledge of what it’s like to bear children than the pope does. What some people find hard to comprehend is how “as a mother,” she’s totally fine with letting unborn children be killed right up to the point of exiting the birth canal, and how as a “devout Catholic” she has no problem publicly disregarding clear and longstanding Church teaching on the issue while also claiming that the professed devoutness of her Catholicism somehow gives her more credibility to do so. 

NEWS FLASH! POPE SAYS THERE IS A DEVIL! Film at 10....

The Washington Post published an absolutely appalling article about Pope Francis. It would be funny if it weren't so...STUPID.

he headline reads:

A modern pope gets old school on the Devil

I would argue that should read "Pope", but it gets weirder than that:

VATICAN CITY — A darling of liberal Catholics and an advocate of inclusion and forgiveness, Pope Francis is hardly known for fire and brimstone.
Yet, in his words and deeds, the new pope is locked in an epic battle with the oldest enemy of God and creation: -The Devil.

After his little more than a year atop the Throne of St. Peter, Francis’s teachings on Satan are already regarded as the most old school of any pope since at least Paul VI, whose papacy in the 1960s and 1970s fully embraced the notion of hellish forces plotting to deliver mankind unto damnation.

So Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict XVI were soft on Satan? Who knew? Suprisingly, the author of this is not a Harvard graduate.