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Not really a good of a comeback when you find out that this blessing was in response to a Satanic Panic against Pokémon in the 90s. The fucking Vatican had to tell fundamentalists who likened Pokémon as demons to chill.
Pokémon controversies - Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia - https://m.bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_controversies
Pokémon movie earns Papal blessing - https://nypost.com/2000/04/21/pokemon-earns-papal-blessing/
The pope did what
Edit: ok so I had to look into this because lol, and I can't find any reputable sources actually confirming this. Did find an NY Post article on it from 2000 but I'm not in the habit of trusting conservative tabloids
As an older gentleman, I do recall this happening. It was spread here in the UK at the time as well.
Main reason I remember it was because I'm not religious myself, but thought that the church of all things acknowledging evolution over any Young Earth rhetoric was pretty progressive.
This is obviously all anecdotal evidence, but I can testify that the NY post article in this case may be accurate.
Edit: of course, I want to make perfectly clear that misinformation was still a thing back then as well - after digging myself, I should conclude that this is something that could easily have been stirred online at the time and wasn't actually true.
I'm going to keep digging though, because it definitely stirred a memory for me.
Edit 2: it does strike me in the article that these quotes are not from the Pope himself but rather Sat2000.
I believe what this could mean is that someone from the network was talking about the game (perhaps on one of their shows), and because of the apparent ties between the station and the Vatican, people may have misconstrued this as the Pope having said this, or "this is what the church says" sort of thing.
My next task is to see if I can track down the source of those quotes... Which I imagine are in Italian... And I don't speak Italian... Yay.
but thought that the church of all things acknowledging evolution over any Young Earth rhetoric was pretty progressive.
Funny enough, that's been the Catholic Church's position for a while now. Before most of us were born, even.
1950s if I recall?
It's always nice to get clarification when people start to push back, though!
Yep! My grandmother was a liberal (if serious) Catholic, and my mother was a fundie evangelical, so I had a kind of window into the differences between the two. As I broke away from the fundamentalist tradition in my teenage years, I didn't get any closer to the Catholic tradition, but I made good use of my grandmother's library of theological and philosophical books. Funny, discussing Darwin and Marx with an old lady who still kept holy water and relics in utter seriousness.
Yeah I could only find Sat2000 being quoted as the source but nothing further than that, and I stopped bothering when I would have had to switch to Italian.
Good hunting!
Thank you for your service
🫡
Was it just for water-type pokemon or for all pokemon. I need to know as I won't let my kids near any filthy unblessed abominations.
Let's be real, if he actually blessed everything including Cubone, it must have just been on accident.
... Stop making me feel old
