MAGA Declares Pope ‘Un-Christian’ For Being Too Nice To Poor People

Of all the arguments I truly cannot believe people make anymore, I think the top one has to be that the only reason anyone is poor in the United States is because they don’t work hard enough. I mean, I understand why they make it — it certainly makes it easier to not care about poor people and to vote for things that hurt them — but at this point, you would have to be actively ignorant to …

On Friday, Pope Leo XIV did a very standard pope thing and dropped a tweet encouraging people to be more understanding of the circumstances faced by the poor.

“The poor are not there by chance or by blind and cruel fate. Nor, for most of them, is poverty a choice. Yet, there are those who still presume to make this claim, thus revealing their own blindness and cruelty,” he wrote. If you are a normal Catholic, or just a normal person, you may be thinking “Yep! This sure is some boilerplate pope stuff!”

But, because “X,” as it is now called, is now a right-wing MAGA cesspool of the worst humanity has to offer, the pontifex received approximately 2,600 responses from people who were more than a tad miffed to see their blindness and cruelty described as blindness and cruelty. There were several who said they were now considering leaving the Catholic faith entirely, and others who were eager to help him out with some lessons about how Jesus himself hated the poor and what the Bible says about how poor people are bad.

“I no longer support you as my Pope. You have betrayed the Catholic faith,” said STATENDD2023.

The Bible is anti-welfare,” wrote Anthony Galli, who accessorized his post with a picture of a very buff AI Jesus hanging out in his wood hop, next to an American flag and a wooden cross that we can assume he made himself. Because, surely, if American Jesus had a woodshop, he would spend all day making souvenir copies of his own method of execution.

Galli, who seems to be unaware of the existence of the working poor, continued: “The OLDEST part of the New Testament is Thessalonians, which says, ‘The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.’ (3:10) The Church should say, ‘If you’re able-bodied we aren’t going to give you food, but we’ll give you a chance to work for it.’”

From what I can tell, this seems to be the most popular Bible passage for MAGA Americans who are somehow unaware that the vast majority of those living below the poverty line are, in fact, working.

“No serious Christian claims the poor ‘choose’ poverty. “The real cruelty is keeping them dependent on the systems that profit from it – governments, NGOs, and moral grandstanders who need poverty to justify their power,” said a fella named Heinz.

If he thinks “governments, NGOs and moral grandstanders” need poverty, wait until he finds out about capitalism.

“I was so hopeful I could be a Catholic again after the disaster that Francis was, guess we just get Francis 2.0 now and I am heartbroken. How do I stay a Catholic now..I don’t want to lose faith but I am. You belong to someone else, not God,” wrote BuckleysChoice in a now-deleted post.

“You’re generalizing there popie. Many ARE poor simply because they have no internal drive – certainly in the United States they all have opportunity. Jesus didn’t drag people to it, they had to want it first. Maybe ‘I’ should be pope a while. Self-responsibility is still a thing,” said Equi Distant, who probably should not be pope.

“If you are the ‘poor’ in the USA throughout 1960s to late 2000s, you are poor by choice, or engulfed in a cycle of poverty bc that’s all you knew. There’s no chance, it’s called free will. Everyone here has the same exact opportunities to rise above. If you’re too lazy to chase that, that’s on you. You’re a victim BY CHOICE.,” wrote CHICK ON THE RIGHT, a self-professed Catholic who definitely understands how the world, and especially this country, works.

Forty-four percent of Americans do not make a living wage. They are not making the amount of money they need to cover the basic necessities of rent, bills, food and transportation. As productivity has increased over the decades, worker pay has not kept up, while executive pay has skyrocketed. So people are explicitly being less “lazy” than they ever have been, while still not being able to survive.

As we learned during the pandemic, the vast majority of the jobs that we actually need people to do, the jobs that are most “essential” for all of us to survive, are jobs that pay poverty wages. The people that provide the services most of us use every day, and which make our lives comfortable, are the people who are not being paid enough to live.

Kant’s categorical imperative holds that one should “act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Now, I’m not saying it’s unethical or immoral to “rise above,” but I do need to point out that if everyone in this country were to do so, everything would fall apart and we would cease to be able to function as a nation. That is how you know it is a deliberately fucked system. Capitalism, specifically the kind of capitalism practiced in the United States, absolutely requires a large underclass of the working poor in order for everyone else to have the kind of life they want to live.

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What I do find interesting is that it’s also the Right that is so gosh darn excited for AI to replace all of the white collar jobs — i.e. the jobs where people are most likely to make a living wage — so that Americans can do more backbreaking physical labor again. They are also, clearly, excited for Americans to replace migrant workers on farms, doing jobs that are frequently exempt from standard labor protections like minimum wage, overtime and the right to collective bargaining.

If we were a society of reasonable people, we would think something along the lines of, “Well, we clearly need people to work these jobs, so why don’t we make it possible for them to do so without starving to death or not having healthcare?” That, in fact, would be the most responsible thing to do — to figure out what we need as a society and then determine how to maintain that in the way that produces the most good for the most people. Or that is at least slightly less objectively cruel than the way we have decided to go about it.

The Pope is absolutely correct to say that “the poor are not there by chance or by blind and cruel fate.” They’re not. They are there by design. They are there because that is how we have chosen to design our society. Would it be better if he could say it while not leading a religion that asks poor people to tithe 10 percent of their income to the Catholic Church while the Vatican is filled with endless riches? It sure would. But I guess we’ll take what we can get.

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