Pope Francis Quotes
I made reference continuously to the killings, the death, the life taken by all of these narcotrafficking gangs and human smugglers. I spoke of this problem as one of the wounds that Mexico suffers. It's a great pain that I'm taking, because this nation [Mexicans] doesn't deserve a drama like this one.
Pope Francis. "In-Flight Press Conference of His Holiness Pope Francis from Ciudad Juárez to Rome." Vatican.va, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 18 Feb. 2016.
The DEA is the Drug Enforcement Administration.
This view is particularly ironic in that Italian immigrants to the U. S. have historically been unfairly associated with organized crime in Italy and America.
This quotation is typical of the anti-government intense feeling, paranoia, and hyperbole of the early 21st century. While a minority of the American population identify with the Tea Party, the Center for a Stateless Society, and other anti-government groups. However, the orthodox members of both of the major political parties tended to avoid publicly criticizing these individuals and organizations lest they end up with an opponent in their next primary election which did not succeed in the majority of cases, but in all cases, it cost the politician a great deal of money, time, and energy to run a primary campaign which often weakens them for the general election that follows.
This statement was published in a major magazine of the time. It referred to a notorious lynching in the South where the victim had been brutally tortured and burned to death. In this case the victim had apparently committed a horrible crime. The Bishop condemned the horrific nature or the lynching but took the view that it was an act of insanity and that the relatives of the child killed by the lynching victim may well have been driven to insanity by the act However, this lynching, like most all in the South was not just an act of vengeance—insane or not—by relatives of a victim, it was participated on by a large mob, many of whom had no relationship to any of the parties. Whites who committed horrible crimes were rarely lynched, but many accused Blacks were lynched even though they turned out to have been innocent.
Pope Francis is the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State. Francis is the first pope to be a member of the Society of Jesus, the first from the Americas, the first from the Southern Hemisphere, and the first pope from outside Europe since Gregory III, a Syrian who reigned in the 8th century.
