©2005 UrbisMedia
When a guy dressed in expensive garments, surrounded by sycophants and privilege, who has lusted after power and likely orchestrated his own election, calls himself “a simple, humble worker,” you want to get out the ole polygraph. It was this “simple, humble worker” that sent a letter, with the weight of the Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to (reputedly) only American bishops, to counsel the refusal of holy communion to any politician who supported abortion. It just happened that John Kerry was running for president when this letter arrived. But this was only the new pope’s latest rat “zinger.”
Right about here I’d love to tell my favorite pope joke, but this guy is no laughing matter. Many RCs, including this longtime apostate, have known about him for years as he has headed the equivalent of the Church’s “Gestapo” unit enforcing strict orthodoxy of a pile of dogma that has about as much to do with the message of Christ as the rigidities of the Pharisees that got the Romans to do their bloody work for them. In the ironic cycle that afflicts so many human institutions that run on power, the Church that Christ built upon this “rock” (he really didn’t mean that) has gone, in a couple of millennia, from its “founder’s” reform of (Jewish) orthodoxies and a regard for the “least of these,” to a rigid club of old men in silly suits. But the faithful sheep turned out in St. Peter’s Square to cheer their new shepherd.
Many more will drift away from the Church, already in decline in many countries. Others, the nuns and real simple, humble priests, will continue to convince themselves that the people of little power and no privilege to whom they minister are not sinning when they pick and choose their dogma to suit the realities of life. Many will go to mass comforting themselves that it is really “their” church; priests will give absolution for sins for which bishops and cardinals would fling them into hell.
The boys in the Vatican know their politics, though. They know that these days their Church grows mainly by the high birthrate of the poor below the equator (like the Republicans, the Church has a “southern strategy’ too). A flock deprived even of condoms, living sick and ignorant in countries under weak or oppressive governments, are as easy marks as a bunch of suckers in a revival tent. The Church knows the formula as well as Karl Rove: keep them ignorant, keep them poor, feed them on the Rapture and eternal reward, and don’t forget to get them to tithe and cough up “Peter’s pence” (after all, these papal garments aren’t cheap, and there may be more reparations for the pedophile prelates).
Now this is the point where the faithful begin making novenas to bring plague and pestilence to my private parts. So let me say this. It was said by some Vatican insider that Joseph Ratzinger “has forgotten more theology than most theologians have learned.” Note: the Ratzman has made his career running theologians who challenge the orthodox theology out of the Church. But I’m going somewhere else with this. Theology. And I know a bit of it, having been required to take 12-units of it at my Jesuit college. Theology is what I call a “joke discipline.” Unlike other “-ologies,’ which are based on things that can be sensed and “known,” learned by observation, test, experiment and application, theology is based on an entity that nobody, not even the pope, has ever seen, touched, spoken to, or even knows exists ! It is a disciple founded on the totally confabulated!
Ergo, the Ratzman knows no more than an illiterate peasant (maybe less). I’ll have more to say about this later, because theology, and popes have nothing, in my view to do with the essentials of faith. When it comes to what we know of God, if God is there to be known, I set myself above no other, and below no other—I don’t care whether he calls himself Benedict XVI, or Pope Sponge Bob. But there is one significant difference between us: I’m not pretending that I know.
Now, about my favorite pope joke: The pope is having his annual physical and his doctor says, “Holiness, for the good of your health I have to respectfully recommend that you have . . . ah . . .er . . . intimate relations with a woman. The pope says, “ . . .”
Nah, I think you should send me an email for the rest of that one.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 4.27.2005)