The Lottery Of Pope Francis

Rosie

Rosie

Community Member
Apr 6, 2013
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Have you guys heard?

Pope Francis is organizing a lottery or contest of raffle, anyway, he's selling tickets for €10 each (that's about $13 - $14, I think), to raise money for the poor.
The tickets for the "lottery" are available for sale, people buy them and wait for the raffle draw, which will be sometime in January (the Guardian says it's the 8th, although some other websites say a different date.. the truth is out there :P).
The prizes include a brand new Fiat Panda 4x4, some bicycles, a video camera and some other stuff. The full prize list is in the article.

The reactions to Pope Francis initiative, however, are very controversial!
Many say that he shouldn't have done this, he received all those items as gifts, and you don't re-gift a gift (even if it just sits there, gathering dust!), others say it's a good initiative because it's helping the poor, although he could have sold the items...

What do you think?
Is the Pope's initiative a good one or did he make a mistake?
 
I think his intentions are good but I think the word "lottery" wasn't a good choice. If he makes profit from it then, in my opinion, it is a terrible idea. If he donates the money to a charity/family in need (I'm sure there are a lot of those), then I think it's fine.

But still.... there could of been a better choice of words. Maybe give-away instead of lottery?
 
I don't think he used the word lottery, I'm the one who put it this way :) My bad :P I'm not a native English speaker.

He only said that he thought of this idea, to sell these tickets so he can donate the money to the poor. The fact that someone will win some prizes makes it sort of a contest... like a lottery :P The pope also made a joke about it, when he was on TV, saying that all the money will be donated, except for the cost of printing the tickets :D

I have read about the news online and everyone uses the word "raffle", which can also mean "rubbish; refuse", but it also is synonym to the word "lottery" (source).

Again, sorry for the bad choice of words, I thought the same thing about the ones who referred to this as a raffle, because many of the internet reactions are pretty bad, many people say that he received these items as gifts and it is rude to get rid of them.

In my personal opinion, I think it's an awesome thing he's doing, he didn't ask for these gifts and he is trying to do something good, to help the needy, instead of living a life surrounded by money, gold and expensive gifts, which he doesn't actually need.
 
I think it's a bit of a joke. The Catholic church is one of the richest institutions, (I was almost going to say "corporations") in the world. Alone the money that is regularly collected during every church service could be used to help the poor instead of being used for renovating churches, or for paying top lawyers dealing with pedophilia cases.
I think the whole idea is ridiculous.
 
This news makes it a lot easier for me to forgive all the "you won a lottery" email sent to me circa 2012. Research studies on spam conducted after 2011 was more informative, and news on the findings made it to online media. Lottery may not even be related to spam in the first place.
 
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