Catholic school kids can’t wait to meet Pope Francis

This summer, bishops in Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio have held news conferences on the encyclical, urging political leaders to take up the pope’s call for bold leadership and pledging to reduce carbon emissions or water and power usage in their own dioceses. John Gehring, Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, a liberal advocacy group in Washington, said, “some progressives naively expected him to overturn church teaching on abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage”.

“And quite honestly, given the volume of pedestrians in the area, in on our streets at that time, we really don’t recommend a lot of driving”, he said.

What St. Paul refers to is the “false spiritualism of some who live off the backs of their brothers and sisters without doing anything”, the Pope said. In June, New York Times writer Laurie Goodstein, a well-known critic of the Catholic Church, chose to investigate whether priests had absorbed the content of the Pope’s letter on the environment and preached about it in their Sunday homilies. She says her family is from Togo.

Schools run by the New York archdiocese claim to among the most diverse in the United States: 45 percent of pupils are white, 29 percent Hispanic, 15 percent African American and five percent each Asian and multi-racial.

“I’m gonna tell him that we’re helping out the environment by recycling and not littering and using less paper because you waste trees”, he said. “That makes his family feels comfortable”.

“We’re in a battle right now”, he said, “we’re working with the Conference of Catholic Bishops where they aren’t allowed to participate in certain grants from the Obama administration because they refused to give up their views on contraception and abortion”.

The pope’s visit is a “serious matter”, the Kansas Republican said, even though many might see it as “just another celebrity in their mind coming”. “So, too, the common good is served, as witnessed by the example of so many fathers and mothers who teach their children the value of work for family life and society”, he said.

Hundreds more Catholic schoolchildren, from the elementary through high school level, will be outside Our Lady Queen of Angels on that Friday afternoon to greet Francis. His favorite classes are math and science.

“The pope is opposed to technologies that are profit driven and industry directed that may have direct or collateral damage for Mother Earth and her citizens”, said Ribeiro. Marronaro has several questions lined up to ask Pope Francis.

The prospect of walking considerable distances to simply see Pope Francis on a jumbo screen on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway also may have some potential attendees rethinking their plans.