Are The -Isms Working
On this day
Two former popes were
canonized.
Grounding principles
forever good,
Slowly, surely pulverized,
Politicized. Out of
the woods
The scoundrels:
Rascals who begin the
damage.
Transmutating courage into
Sludgey smudge.
You-name-it:
Social-, Commun-,
Capital-,
You name it – isms.
Can they work?
Do they succeed?
In their idealism,
Realism kicked around,
-Isms go to ground;
They fall.
They fail.
Bound
by laws inexorable.
Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the First Epoch of the Weimar Beer-Belly Culture -- Hannah Hoch
On 27 April 2014 pope Franciscus and former pope Benedictus XVI canonized 2 recent popes, Ioannes XXIII and Ioannes Paulus II. They were the 80th and 81st heads of the Catholic church to be granted sainthood. Ordinarily at least 2 posthumous miracles must have been performed through the intercession of the saint. However, a pope may waive the requirement if he, the Sacred College of Cardinals, and the Congregation for the Causes of Saints all agree that he lived a life of great merit proven by certain actions. So Ioannes was canonized because he convoked the 1st part of the reformist Second Vatican Council in 1962. The current process was authorized in 1983 by Ioannes Paulus himself, who was the church's foremost generator of sainthood -- between 1588 and 1978 330 people were canonized, but he canonized 483 during his pontificate (1978-2005). Among his changes was a reduction in the role of the promotor fidei (promoter of the faith, popularly known as the advocatus diaboli ("Devil's advocate") as the official who is tasked with arguing against a canonization in order to uncover any character flaws or misrepresentation of the evidence. The position was established by Sixtus V in 1587.
ReplyDelete"Ism" is a suffix derived from the Greek "ismos" ("taking side with" or "imitation of"). In Late Latin, the "-ismus" suffix became the ordinary ending for names of religions and ecclesiastical or philosophical systems or schools of thought, such as Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus' coinage of "chrīstiānismus." From the 16th century this usage became very common in English ("Christianism," for example), though Edward Pettit had already attested "ism" as a stand-alone noun in 1680. In the early 19th century Thomas Carlyle used the suffix to signify a pre-packaged ideology, and by mid-century in the US "the isms" was used as a collective derogatory term for the various radical social reform movements and spiritual or religious movements of the time.