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In May 2018, the sensationalist, unreliable blog NeonNettle.com reported that Pope Francis had waded into the ongoing debate in the United States over gun rights and gun control, denouncing people who own guns as hypocrites and saying gun-owners can no longer call themselves Christians: The article is something of a case study in cherry-picking real quotes and placing them in a misleading context to create an inaccurate impression of what someone actually said. It also wrenches away the broader context of Francis's remarks (international warfare and the weapons industry) and attempts to shoehorn it into the ongoing American debate about civilian ownership of small arms, and the United States Constitution. In brief, Pope Francis said in 2015 that those who manufacture or sell weapons created mistrust if they also call themselves Christians, and that those who defend their financial investments in the weapons industry are engaging in hypocrisy. He did not refer to those who own guns. Here is his speech to children and young people during his pastoral visit to the Italian city of Turin, on 21 June 2015. You can watch the original speech in Italian here, or read the Vatican translation below, emphasis ours: The week of anti-gun comments refers to one single tweet sent by the pontiff on 29 April 2018, nearly three years later, in which he called for all weapons to be banned, in the interest of achieving peace: Neon Nettle creates a false sub-narrative here by inaccurately claiming that the Pope made two major criticisms of the weapons industry in the same week. The same article continues: Francis's criticism didn't extend to owners at all. Neither did he call out those who support the right to bear arms. When he referred to duplicity (being two-faced) he was specifically referring to those who defend their financial investments in the weapons industry. Neon Nettle goes on: This is an outrageous and false recontextualization of the Pope's remarks. When he said If you only trust in mankind, you have lost, he was specifically referring to the choice faced by a voter, in deciding whether to trust a political leader not to lead [their] country into war. As fascinating and important as the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is, it is not something that every world leader focuses on at all times or in every speech. It is possible that Pope Francis might in the future condemn civilians who own guns in the same way as he criticizes those who foster warfare by manufacturing and selling weapons. But so far, he has not. The kind of misleading sensationalism seen in this article is fairly typical for Neon Nettle, an unreliable web site which regularly fabricates and twists quotations, promotes baseless conspiracy theories, and appears to have a fixation on the Catholic church and child sexual abuse. In another example of outrageous context-stripping, the web site claimed in August 2017 that Australian Archbishop Denis Hart had described pedophilia as a spiritual encounter with God through the priest. Hart did say those words, but he was describing the Catholic ritual of confession — not child molestation.
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