Admit it: You want more, don’t you?

Well, you’re in luck! Jokewiththepope.org, a website launched by the Pontifical Mission Societies to coincide with the upcoming visit of Pope Francis to the United States, is chock full of similar jokes submitted by users around the world.

When users submit their jokes, they can “donate” it to one of three causes: “Help Children in Need” in Buenos Aires, Argentina; “House the Homeless” in Addis Abada, Ethiopia; and “Feed The Hungry” in Nairobi, Kenya. At the end of the campaign, the person who submitted the funniest joke is to be dubbed the first-ever Honorary Comedic Adviser to the Pope, and the cause they “donated” to will receive a $10,000 donation.

The campaign has tapped comedian Bill Murray to serve as Honorary Adviser for Pontifical Comedy.

Jimmy Nagle, a doctoral candidate at Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education and a project research and senior writer for the Pontifical Mission Societies, said the campaign is part of an effort to drum up interest in a newly revamped app called Missio.

Nagle said the app, which he helped redevelop (it was first unveiled in 2013) as a way to reach out to younger Catholics, is “Facebook meets Tinder for do-gooders.”  Once a simple aggregator of news stories, the revamped Missio lets users interact directly with project managers and anyone else who has “liked” and become part of the app’s community. In addition to donating money to a project, users can create an event and share awareness of it across their wider social media network.

“Virtual communities area not so virtual. Real relationships develop, and real things happen in these communities,” he said. “We’re trying to harness that, to allow people to create communities around shared interests or causes—whether it be water, women’s education, or various causes around the world.”

Working the campaign is a great fit for Nagle, who taught high school in Portland, Oregon for 10 years and was a former Franciscan novice. His doctoral research focuses on members of Generation X and Millennials who are on the margins of the church.

He admits the joke campaign is a little unusual, but then again, Pope Francis is “not a typical Pope.” In fact, Francis gave the contest his official endorsement last week in a statement in which he asked Catholics to become “missionaries of joy.”

“I like to laugh a lot. It helps me to feel closer to God and closer to other people. When we laugh with each other—and not at each other—God’s love is present in a special way,” the pope said in a statement.

“I invite you to share your joy with a laugh! God longs for you to be happy! Share your jokes and your funny stories: the world will be better, the Pope will be happy and God will be the happiest of all.”

Nagle said Francis represents all the things that he finds life-giving in the church.

“I feel like I’m not so crazy for sticking with this institution and walking along with it as it struggles. I think he owns the wounds really well,” he said. “He’s the pope I’ve been hoping for in my lifetime.”

And for the record, Nagle said his favorite joke so far is Murray’s contribution:

Did you hear about the two antennas that got married?

The wedding was just ok, but the reception was great.

For more coverage of Pope Francis’ visit to the United States, visit http://www.fordham.edu/papalvisit.

“In the last years of Elizabeth’s rule people believed something was rotten in England—though perhaps not rotten enough to justify regicide,” as in Hamlet, “a play inordinately preoccupied with king-killing,” said Marotti, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Wayne State University.

In his lecture “Shakespeare, Tyrannicide, and the Papal Deposing Power,” Marotti laid out the prominent religious and political struggles of late 16th-century England and discussed how they informed Shakespeare’s plays.

“William Shakespeare repeatedly dramatized king-killing and the planning of king-killing,” Marotti said, a dangerous act in a country that could stretch the definition of treason to include even thinking about the death of a monarch. “Perhaps this is one reason why the act itself often takes place offstage, instead of being presented vividly onstage for absorption in the memory and imagination of spectators.” Regicide is depicted or alluded to in many of the bard’s plays, including Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear, with threats to nobles in Henry IV, Part 1 and The Tempest.

William ShakespeareIn Richard II, for example, Shakespeare depicts a weak monarch, King Richard II, who is succeeded by a strong leader, King Henry IV. Henry takes the crown following an onstage assassination “prompted by a clear signal from the new king that [Richard] needed to be killed—though Henry pretended he had expressed no such wish,” said Marotti.

Richard II was written and performed during an especially tumultuous time in England, when assassination attempts on Queen Elizabeth abounded. It was also a time of great tension between Catholics and Protestants. In 1570, Pope Pius V issued Regnans in Excelsis, a papal bull formally excommunicating the Protestant queen, declaring her a heretic and absolving her subjects of any allegiance to her.

Marotti said that the papal bull was “an extreme case of [the Catholic Church]using the power the papacy claimed it had,” the power to exert both religious and political influence in England. But it was “a watershed event” for the country, contributing to “the nascent historical narrative of England as a fundamentally Protestant nation threatened by international Catholicism.”

When Pope Gregory XIII came to power in 1572, he tried to ease the bull’s harsh effects on English Catholics, who feared retaliation from authorities. Marotti said that Catholics were urged by the papacy to continue practicing their religion, but, if possible, should work to overthrow, or even kill, the queen as a “heretical tyrant.”

The queen was haunted by worries of assassination. Religious fanaticism in the late 16th century brought about the deaths of several European rulers: Henry III and Henry IV of France and William of Orange. But killing a reigning monarch, because it was both morally wrong and sacrilegious, said Marotti, required compelling political and theological justification.“On neither side was toleration or religious pluralism a desirable policy since all conceived of church and state as inextricably bound,” Marotti said.Where did Shakespeare’s sympathies lie? Recent scholars conclude that it’s impossible to determine whether he was a Protestant or a Roman Catholic based on his writings, said Marotti, but the plays do show sensitivity to his religiously mixed audiences.

“He consistently avoided crude religious or political propagandizing,” Marotti said. “Political resistance, regicide, and tyrannicide were for him good dramatic materials, but they led him to explore their human, social, moral, and religious dimensions and to engage his audience in this effort.”

Four hundred years later, Marotti said, the playwright’s words continue to test theatergoers’ moral imagination.

“The prompts are Shakespeare’s; the conclusions we reach are ours.”

The lecture was sponsored by the Department of English, the Comparative Literature Program, and the Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University. It marked Marotti’s first time back on the Rose Hill campus since 1961, when he earned a bachelor’s degree in English. He spent part of the day touring the campus and meeting with students at the University and at Fordham Preparatory School, his high school alma mater.

“I spent eight years here and they did leave an indelible mark on me,” he said before his lecture in Tognino Hall. “I learned how to study, how to work hard, and those qualities …. have stayed with me since that time.”

— Rachel Buttner

Members of Fordham’s theology faculty have been weighing in on the Pope’s historical decision through live television, news interviews and blog posts:

Terrence Tilley, Ph.D., Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., Chair in Catholic Theology and chair of the department: This was a real stunner, but as I begin to think about it, it is not entirely a surprise. Whether you agree or disagree with this Pope… this man has the good of the church at his heart and rather than put the church through a long, extended illness, he has chosen a quick and simple resignation [which also]makes it possible for future popes to have this as a live option.

This act will change the memory of his pontificate. He is remembered for his conservative intra-church concerns and his very progressive views on war and peace issues, economic issues, and green issues. But this symbolic gesture says no servant is bigger than the church.
As far as who will replace him, popes contrast with their predecessors. He’s an academic. We will probably get somebody who’s stronger in pastoral and administrative work. That’s the only guess that makes sense.

  See more of Tilley’s comments here,  here and here.

Maureen Tilley, Ph.D., professor of theology: What do you do with an ex-pope? What kind of power does he have, especially as we go into the next conclave? Based on the unprecedented nature of his announcement, we don’t have a way that people won’t seek his advice, I’m sure the next pope will seek his advice.
I think the final days of Pope John II really influenced him [as]John Paul II was incapable of exercising his office and probably legally incapable of resigning. Given advances in modern medicine the church could be in a situation of having a pope physically or mentally incapable of executing his resignation—I think Benedict wanted to spare the church that sort of situation.

Joseph Lienhard, S.J.. professor of theology and editor, Traditio: There will be guessing about who the next pope will be. He could be from Europe, he might also be from French Canada or Africa. Cardinal Dolan is one of the 117 electors, but it seems unlikely that he would be chosen: the fact that the United States is a superpower militates against it.
Read more of Father Leinhard’s comments here.

Michael Peppard, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology: As many seasoned observers have already noted, the Catholic Church is about to enter uncharted territory. Relatively few details of what comes next are known. Of all the musings I’ve had, for me the biggest question has been: after Feb. 28, where physically will Pope Benedict . . . reside? And how will his physical presence affect those around him?
Read more of Peppard’s comments here.

See more from Fordham experts on the Pope’s Resignation:

George Demacopoulos, Ph.D., associate professor of theology, on ABC News.
Patrick Hornbeck, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology, at Huffington Post
James McCartin, director of the Center on Religion and Culture, on Fox News

Tom Beaudoin, Ph.D., Fordham’s associate professor of theology in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, weighed in yesterday in a USA Today article on Pope Benedict XVI’s new Twitter feed.

The new handle, which launched today  in Rome, is @pontifex, and it is expected that the Pope will tweet answers to questions about faith (#askpontifex). He has some 900,000 followers, the article states.

You can read Beaudoin’s comments, and the entire article, here. And you can sign on to follow the Pope  here.

“To some, he is representative of leaders around the world who knew what was happening, but did nothing.” Vatican Commission members Michael Marrus, dean of the Graduate School of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto, and the Rev. Gerald P. Fogarty, S.J., professor of religious studies and history at the University of Virginia, based their discussion on a letter Pope Pius XII wrote to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in July 1943. Pope Pius XII wrote about the war, saying, “I pray that everywhere civil populations will be spared the horror of war … We are calling on God to hasten the dawn of the day where all members of the vast human family have peace, justice, happiness … and love for their fellow man.”

What was explicitly missing was mention of the Jews and their persecution, said Marrus, one of several experts investigating published documents of Pope Pius XII and the Holy See during World War II. Fogarty’s assessment is that the letter was a response to Roosevelt’s assertion that the war would not end until Germany surrendered. At that time, after Sicily was invaded and Rome bombed, the war was taking a strong toll in Italy.

The pope “was shaping himself as a diplomat. This was one of his problems and one of his strong points,” Fogarty said. “There was a papal policy of impartiality, which placed the Vatican above any conflict. But even in the Vatican, people objected to the silence of the church.” Although there were no clear answers to many painful questions, the dialogue opened the lines of communication, said John W. Healey, Ph.D., the evening’s moderator and former director of the Archbishop Hughes Institute.

“We’ve made enormous progress answering some of the difficult questions,” Healey said. “There may be no answers tonight, but hopefully we can go on together with a greater mutual understanding and hope.” Fordham’s annual Nostra Aetate Dialogue can be traced to the Nostra Aetate (In Our Time) document, a declaration by the Second Vatican Council stressing the importance of relationships between the Church and non-Christian religions. The program contributes to the interfaith dialogue between Catholicism and Judaism.