Former CFO on Food Stamps After Controversial Viral Video About Chick-Fil-A

GOD IS NOT MOCKED!!! Justice for all!! Sodomy an abomination to God!

A former CFO is now on food stamps after a video he posted on YouTube two and half years ago criticizing Chick-Fil-A went viral and destroyed his career.

Adam Smith, 37, was the CFO of a medical device manufacturer in Arizona, until the summer 2012, when he — and thousands of other people — started protesting against Chick-Fil-A for the fast-food chain’s anti-gay stance.

One day, Smith decided to go through the drive-thru at his local Chick-Fil-A, where he ordered a free water — the fast food chain offers customers free water — and videotaped himself telling the drive-thru attendant how much he despised Chick-Fil-A.

“Chick-Fil-A is a hateful corporation,” Smith said, in part, to the drive-thru attendant. “I don’t know how you live with yourself and work here. I don’t understand it. This is a horrible corporation with horrible values. You deserve better.”

Smith then posted the video on his personal YouTube channel, but when he got back to work, he received a major shock.

“I got into work and the receptionist, the first thing, big eyes, ‘Adam, what did you do?’ … she said, ‘The voicemail is completely full, and it’s full of bomb threats,'” Smith said in an exclusive interview with ABC News’ “20/20.”

Smith was fired that same day. He said at the time he was earning $200,000 annually and had over $1 million in stock options.

“It was taken when I lost my employment,” he said.

After losing his job, Smith, his wife Amy and their four children also lost their home. They were forced to sell and give away their possessions and move into an RV. A few months later, Smith found a new CFO job in Portland, Oregon. It was the fresh start he needed.

“I felt like, ‘Yeah, I got it. I am back,'” Smith said.

About two weeks later, Smith was fired from that job after his new boss discovered he was the guy from the Chick-Fil-A video. Smith told “20/20” in subsequent job interviews, he was very honest about the video and while prospective employers seemed empathetic and understanding in the end the companies would rescind the offers saying they didn’t want the distraction.

Looking back at the video now, Smith said he was emotional.

“I don’t regret the stand I took, but I regret… the way I talked to her,” he told “20/20.”

He even apologized to the drive-thru attendant he was angry with in another video posted to his YouTube channel, which also went viral. She has forgiven him. But Smith says even people who agreed with his pro-gay opinions won’t hire him.

“I think people are scared,” Smith said. “I think people are scared that it could happen again.”

Kevin O’Leary, an entrepreneur and panelist on the hit ABC show “Shark Tank,” said he always looks up potentially employees online before hiring them.

“Every time I look at hiring somebody, I go and gather their digital footprint from every source I can get,” O’Leary said. “We look at who they are online, and we actually hire them in our minds before we actually ever meet them. And so the interview process is to just prove what we have already assessed online.”

O’Leary warns that all the emails, texts, tweets, selfies and status updates we send out into the world can be career threatening.

Smith, with his spotty digital footprint, is still looking for a job nearly three years later, and has turned to meditation. He has also just written a new memoir, “A Million Dollar Cup of Water,” detailing how his public shaming led him from riches to rags and the intensive soul search for healing.

Smith said he doesn’t know if his viral video will ever go away. “It feels like it just happened,” he said.

Source

Pope Francis under pressure after appointing bishop suspected of protecting a pedophile priest!!

Pope Francis’s decision to appoint a Chilean bishop suspected of protecting a pedophile priest has alarmed the Vatican’s own child protection watchdog, its members told AFP.

Several members of the new commission set up by the pope to stamp out child abuse in the Catholic Church expressed their shock at the decision, with pressure building up for the decision to be overturned.

Juan Barros, who took up his post as Bishop of Osorno last Saturday, has denied that he knew about the abuse committed by Fernando Karadima, once an influential figure within the Chilean church.

Commission member French child psychiatrist Catherine Bonnet told AFP Friday that speaking personally she was “worried” by the appointment.

“While the commission cannot intervene in individual cases, I want to meet Cardinal Sean O’Malley (the American president of the commission) and the other members to see how we can pass our anxieties on to Pope Francis,” she added.

Another source said that the pope may have been badly advised.

British commission member Peter Saunders, founder of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, told the US National Catholic Reporter that “one of two of us are suggesting we go to Rome to talk with the pope.”

The pope had pledged to crack down hard on the culture of cover up within the Church, and had personally taken up the cases of abuse victims in Spain and Italy recently.

Source

George Pell: Pope’s decree will cement or unhinge Australian cardinal’s rising star!

Cardinal George Pell: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

When Pope Francis gives the stamp of approval for his much anticipated reforms of the Vatican’s finances, it will also dramatically reshape the roll call of power behind the tiny city’s ancient walls.

Expected any day, the Pope’s decree will change the way the Vatican does business – and cement or unhinge the ascendant star of his “czar finanziario”,  former Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell.

The restructure of the Holy See’s financial activities began last April when the Pope anointed 73-year-old Pell to head a powerful new ministry known as the Secretariat for Economy and charged him with improving financial transparency and accountability in the historically shadowy Roman Curia.

Pope Francis is due to make his decree on the reforms in coming days.

During the past fortnight however, mounting internal tensions over the shape of his proposed reforms have erupted into the public domain with the publication of two devastating exposes in Italian current affairs magazine L’Espresso.

The first, titled “Peccati Cardinali” (“Cardinal Sins”) outlined in forensic detail his attempt to seize and centralise control of Vatican investments and the multi-million-dollar asset and property portfolio, including hospitals, into his bailiwick.

Fellow cardinals were reported to have mounted a “counter-attack to the Australian’s blitz”, seeking an audience with Pope Francis who blocked the transfer of property to Pell’s secretariat.

The second article, headlined “I Lussi del Moralizzatore” (“The Luxuries of the Moralizer”) included this week’s spectacular leaking of Pell’s expenses, replete with detailed receipts on six-figure apartment renovations, business class flights, bespoke robes, a generous payroll for personal assistants and even a $6650 kitchen sink.

The stories made headlines the world over.

According to insiders, this attempt to paint the Pope’s chosen financial reformer as a profligate big spender obfuscates  and oversimplifies the much more complex cultural and power struggle inside the Vatican.

Pell’s supporters, they say, believe his tough, take-no-prisoners approach to administrative and budgetary reform is desperately needed to break through the old ways of doing business and to guarantee a new era of fresh accountability and vigilance.

However his critics are adamant that Pell has taken on much more than the day-to-day financial management of the Vatican, launching a strategic campaign via media worldwide – from the Boston Globe to the powerful Catholic Herald in the UK – to sell himself as the Pope’s sole champion of the new style of “accountability and transparency”. This, they argue, has been portrayed deliberately as a battle between the efficient, Anglo-Saxon style of management and the Italian “fare gli affari” (do business) approach.

Pell’s final aim, they insist, is to create a powerful new economic fiefdom in which he can consolidate personal power rather than achieving real reform.

Andrea Tornielli, the “Vatican Insider” columnist for Italian newspaper La Stampa, told Fairfax Media that nobody doubts Pell’s honesty or desire for reform.

“The problem is that transparency doesn’t mean vesting super powers into one person,” he says. “Yes, there is a need to give new vigor to the checks and balances across the whole system. But Pell and his close collaborators want to create and control a centralized Vatican Asset Management body for both investments and property.”

“Pell is a powerful character and has a strong personality and demeanor that comes from his 15 years Episcopal experience: as a bishop of a big diocese, you command and you have power over everything and everyone. The Roman Curia however is a more collegiate organism. The problem is that he [Pell] has been responding to every situation or debate as if there are only goodies and baddies … with himself as the goodie on the side of transparency and anyone who goes against [him] accused of being bad managers, bad custodians”.

Last year, in a long interview with the powerful American Catholic News Service, Pell was unabashed about his vision, confirming that under the new structures, the “secretary for finances reports directly to the Pope, not via anyone else”

“You report directly to the Pope?” the interviewer pressed.

“That’s right,” responded Pell.

“As you know, some are saying now Cardinal Pell is “numero uno”, the Pope’s No.1. What do you say to that?” asked the interviewer.

“I’d say that’s nonsense, from every point of view. I don’t think money is the most important work of the church. If you’re looking for inadequate political analogies, you might look at, say, the Westminster system, as something like a prime minister and a treasurer. But that’s an analogy, it’s not an exact model” said Pell.

Under the reforms awaiting papal imprimatur, the Vatican would legislate to formalize three new financial oversight bodies:

• A 15-member Council for the Economy which would, for the first time, comprise both lay people and cardinals with equal voting rights to drive policy. This has been widely read as a laudable desire to tap into top, international expertise.
• The Secretariat for the Economy, headed by Pell, which is ostensibly charged with the day-to-day financial management of the Holy See.
• Appointment of an independent overseer, a kind of auditor-general, to test and ensure accountability.

Ultimately, it will be Pope Francis who decides the shape of the final reforms and exactly who will control, supervise and oversee the Vatican’s biggest financial centers, the Secretariat for State and the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA) .

It was he who announced on his election that he wanted to see “a poor Church, for the poor” and his decision will pave the way for the opening of a new and important chapter in the modern Catholic Church – and seal the fate of his antipodean cardinal.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

Related: Cardinal in charge of Vatican finances ‘clean-up’ – Attack on Pope Francis’s man smacks of ‘Vatileaks’ scandal

Sexual abuse crisis and Cardinal Pell

Cardinal George Pell failed to act like a Christian, report into child sex abuse finds

Cardinal George Pell compares priests to truck drivers as he claims Catholic Church leaders should not be held responsible for child sex abuse!!

Abuse victims shocked by Pell’s Vatican post – http://www.theherald.com.au/story/2112446/abuse-victims-shocked-by-pells-vatican-post/