All you Catholics out there who throw away your hard-earned money by giving it to this corrupt trillion-dollar organization, the Roman Catholic Church, now know where much of the money goes.
Your ticket to that non-existent heaven is costing you a great deal, while the Pope and his entourage live in opulent luxury. And just to add insult to injury, the Church pays no taxes! Now is this the biggest scheme ever devised or what? A relative handful of con artists living off of the hundreds of millions of gullible Catholics, not to mention the one and a half billion people if one includes Christians of all denominations! Amazing but true… TGO
Refer to story below. Source: Associated Press
VENICE, Italy – Pope Benedict XVI arrives in Venice Saturday for a two-day pastoral visit, the first by a pope since his predecessor John Paul II plied the canals 26 years ago in a gondola built for Venice’s Byzantine-era rulers.
The 27-hour visit began with a stop in a nearby town, Aquileia, where Benedict was greeted by hundreds of flag-waving faithful.
The visit, taking place under tight security, includes a visit to a medieval basilica, an appearance at St. Mark’s Square, an open-air Mass on the Venetian mainland and a gondola ride to the Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health.
Aquileia is the site of an ancient Roman port upon which was built a basilica considered the mother church for a broad swath of territory uniting the Latin world with the Germanic and Slavic populations during the Middle Ages. Tradition holds that St. Mark evangelized the region, what would become during the period the second most important diocese after Rome.
Inside the basilica, resplendent with ancient mosaics, the pope will address bishops from northeastern Italy as well as from Germany, Austria, Slovenia and Croatia in a meeting aimed at renewing ancient ties.
From there, the pope will travel to St. Mark’s Square, where he will greet the faithful gathered in the arcade-lined piazza. Inside the domed St. Mark’s Basilica, he will consecrate 60 hand-blown glass chalices decorated in gold created for Sunday’s open-air Mass by artists from the Venetian island of Murano.
The highlight of the visit will be the open-air Mass on Sunday, expected to attract as many as 300,000 faithful to a park in Mestere, part of Venice located on the mainland. Workman have created an enormous domed stage, replicating St. Mark’s Basilica and its golden mosaics, to accommodate hundreds of priests who will assist Benedict in the Mass.
Later Sunday, Benedict will return to St. Mark’s for an assembly of bishops, stopping outside to again greet followers and well-wishers. Then he will ride in the same gondola from which John Paul greeted admirers along the Grand Canal in 1985. Benedict, instead, will be taken from St. Mark’s Square to the Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health across the mouth of the Grand Canal, where he will meet political, economic and cultural leaders.
The visit is being held under tight security. The center of the town of Aquileia east of Venice was closed to traffic in anticipation of Benedict’s arrival, and police began clearing St. Mark’s hours before his arrival there, forbidding entrance to anyone with a backpack or luggage.
