Vatican to Beatles: I forgive you!

Beatles to Vatican: fuck off!

(This is probably the coolest thing Ringo has ever done, not that that's saying much.)

Whatever happened to the Catholic Church?

Perhaps that's a stupid question. After all, the Church's history is marked with atrocities more frequent than its great works of charity. That said, there was a period following Vatican II where the Church finally started to look like something the Christ I know would have endorsed, except for one little problem, which they tried tirelessly to hide (but not correct)...

I'm not happy about this. I'd say I'm more not happy about this than most recovering Catholics (I like the sound of "recovering" better than "lapsed," don't you?). The more I hear about the pedophilia and cover-ups within the Church, the efforts of Church leaders to blame everyone but themselves, and the efforts of Pope Nazipants to play this off as a smear campaign against him, the more I don't want to hear about it anymore. I want it to stop.

But, of course, it's not going to stop. What this miserable failure of a pope fails to realize is that whether or not he was directly (or indirectly) involved in any of these scandals, he is responsible for them. As the head of the Church, it is his responsibility to ensure that it adheres to its own moral code and does right by its members. We can quibble about specifics, like abstinence and homophobia, but this problem is greater than either of those things. Adults who want to have premarital sex, whether gay or straight, have options. They can find a way to reconcile their non-adherence to Church dogma and remain Catholic (which many of them do), they can leave and find another denomination that is more accepting (which many of them do), or they can leave the faith community all together (which many of them do... I wonder why the Church's numbers are dwindling...). Children who are being abused, however, don't have the same options. They cannot defend themselves, and the Vatican has chosen not to defend them either. This is a big, big problem.

Look, I can quote Bible verses to you explaining why this is wrong, but nobody really needs the Bible to explain something this simple. You know it's wrong. I know it's wrong. The Vatican knows it's wrong. Hell, even Pope Nazipants knows it's wrong. What he is more concerned with than righteousness, however, is the sanctity of the priesthood. No, not in God's eyes, but in his own. Pope Ratzi the Pedophilia-Endorsing Nazi has his own interests, and what he believes are the interests of the Church (structurally, not spiritually), at heart. He is not a man of faith, but a man of power. In short, he's a stodgy old douchebag who doesn't give two shits about anybody but himself.

As most of you probably know, the Bible as we know it today was canonized in the 4th century. There were many other Christian texts and Gospels circulating before that time, some of which became part of the apocrypha, and others of which were deemed heretical. One of the Gospels NOT endorsed by the early Church was the Gospel of Thomas. Here's a little bit of it, taken from The Essential Gnostic Gospels, translated by Alan Jacobs:

These are the secret words of Almighty God,
which Lord Jesus Christ uttered
and were scribed by his disciple Thomas.

He said, "He who comprehends the inner meaning
of these words will be immortal.

Permit whoever seeks never to cease
from seeking until he finds.

When he succeeds he will be turned around;
when he's so turned he'll be amazed
and shall rule over the All.

If those who lead you say 'God's Kindgom's in Heaven,'
then birds will fly there first.
If they say 'It's in the sea,'
the fish will swim there first.

For God's Kingdom dwells in your heart and all around you;
when you know your Self you too shall be known!

. . .

Make the two into One
and the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner,
the above as below, the male and female into a single One.

So the male isn't male and the female isn't female any more.
When you make two eyes into a single eye,
and a hand into a hand, a foot into a foot,
a picture into a picture, then you'll enter the Kingdom.

. . .

Show me the stone that the builders have rejected;
that one shall be my corner stone.

He who understands all but lacks Self Knowledge lacks all.

. . .

I am the Light above them all; I am the All;
the All issues from me and reaches me.

Cut wood, I am there; lift stone, I am there

. . .

He who knows the real Mother* and Father,
can he be called the son of a whore?
When you make two into One you'll be sons of Man,
and if you command a mountain to movie, it will move. . . .

You can probably see why this wasn't included in the Bible. Beyond the concept of gender equality and the possible reference to sex as a means to salvation, the biggest issue with the Gospel of Thomas is that it doesn't endorse anything that resembles organized religion (aside from a one-sentence recommendation to keep the Sabbath holy). No, the ideas espoused in the Gospel of Thomas are about self-discovery as a way to reach the divine. This concept must have been very threatening to a political body operating under the pretense of religious authority (aka the early Catholic Church).

I feel like there's something to this concept of salvation through self-discovery. It crops up again and again in countless religions throughout history and geography. Aside from the spiritual argument for humanism, though, let's examine the practical benefits: without an organized Church, there'd be no priests to molest little kids (or youth pastors to rape teenage girls, as happens in many evangelical sects); without an organized Church, there'd be no laws of priestly celibacy, which arguably contribute to priestly pedophilia (but even if they don't, they're still pretty dumb); without an organized Church, there'd have been no cruisades, no near-universal condemnation of homosexuality, no Pope Nazipants to tell Africa that condoms will give them AIDS, no evangelical, right-wing blowhards to try to argue with science...

If I wanted to get really tacky, here, I'd quote John Lennon. Instead, however, I'm going to move this argument back into the realm of pragmatism. Organized religion isn't going anywhere anytime soon. And really, organized religion is also responsible for a lot of good. The Catholics are great about pulling out all the stops when tragedies strike. There were a lot of priests and nuns and lay people helping to rebuild New Orleans after Katrina. I'd imagine there are a lot of them helping to rebuild Haiti right now as well. There are church groups fighting for the rights of gays to marry even as there are church groups fighting against them. Religion is not uniformly bad, nor is the Catholic Church.

No, what the Catholic Church needs, rather than dissolution, is more reform. I'm sure you've heard it elsewhere in recent weeks, but you'll hear it here again: it's time for Vatican III. And since we know Pope Horrendous Failure the ∞th isn't going to do it, nor is he going to resign, let's just keep our fingers crossed that his age will catch up with him and that the College of Cardinals will have enough sense to elect someone with equal parts morality and pragmatic vision for the next Holy Father.

Lets hope the next pope is someone who gives a rat's ass about WTF Jesus would do.

*If the other Gnostic Gospels are any indication, the "Mother" mentioned in the Gospel of Thomas refers to the Holy Spirit, which was apparently female in many early Christian traditions. Good thing they got rid of that idea, or we'd have a Trinity that makes sense, not to mention a bunch of women running around thinking they're worth something.

OMG check out that huge plank in the Vatican's eye!

From the New York Times:

A singer in an elite Vatican choir and a jailed Italian public works executive who served as a papal usher were let go by the Vatican this week amid allegations that they were involved in what prosecutors believe was an organized network of gay prostitution, Italian news media reported.

Ghinedu Ehiem, a Nigerian who sang in a choir that performs at St. Peter’s Basilica, was dismissed after the center-left daily newspaper La Repubblica reported Wednesday that he had procured men, including seminarians, for Angelo Balducci, a former member of the board of Italy’s public works department who was arrested and jailed last month on corruption charges.

After his arrest, Mr. Balducci was removed from his Vatican post in The Gentlemen of His Holiness, an elite group of ushers who serve at the Apostolic Palace when visiting dignitaries meet the pope, the ANSA news agency reported Thursday, citing Vatican sources.

Raise your hand if any of this surprises you. Yeah, that's what I thought. I suppose what's most shocking about this recent revelation of sub-holy behavior on the part of the Catholic Church is that the prostitutes in question were actually adults.* But seriously, here's what Ratzinger had to say about the gay back in 1986 (back when he was just Cardinal Nazipants):

The Church, obedient to the Lord who founded her and gave to her the sacramental life, celebrates the divine plan of the loving and live-giving union of men and women in the sacrament of marriage. It is only in the marital relationship that the use of the sexual faculty can be morally good. A person engaging in homosexual behaviour therefore acts immorally.

To choose someone of the same sex for one's sexual activity is to annul the rich symbolism and meaning, not to mention the goals, of the Creator's sexual design. Homosexual activity is not a complementary union, able to transmit life; and so it thwarts the call to a life of that form of self-giving which the Gospel says is the essence of Christian living. This does not mean that homosexual persons are not often generous and giving of themselves; but when they engage in homosexual activity they confirm within themselves a disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent.

Now, there are those who might argue that the Church is not being entirely hypocritical in this situation, as it promptly removed both the man-loving usher and his choir-boy pimp from their positions. But those people would be wrong. The fact is that the Church is full of gay people. There are communities of gay Catholics who, unable to come out to their parishes (and often families), find each other. These communities are not often talked about, nor are they known to the greater public, but they don't exist without notice. In my life, I've known gay nuns, gay cantors, and a whole host of lay gays who actively participated in both Church and gay life. These are people of faith who, had they revealed their sexuality to the community at large, would have been removed from their positions within their own churches faster than you can say "not my Pope."

Which makes sense, of course, because the Catholic Church condemns homosexual behavior. And really, if that were the whole story, it would be fine. The Catholic Church has a right to hold its particular definition of sin and enforce it. As discussed in the previous post, however, the Vatican chooses to enforce its definition of sin selectively. You'd be hard-pressed to find a person, even within the Church, who would argue that consensual gay sex between two adults is a worse sin than an adult using his power within a church community to sexually abuse children. Why then would the Church, a supposed pillar of morality, choose to immediately fire two lay participants guilty of the former while willfully protecting scores of priests guilty of the latter? WTF is even up with that?


It becomes more and more clear to me every day that the singular purpose of the Catholic Church is to maintain its own hierarchy. The Vatican clearly does not care about lay people. After all, they tell us from birth that we are filled with sin and need to atone; they condemn practices associated with good sexual health (the kind that exists in reality); and they sit in what is perhaps the grandest palace on Earth knowing full well that if they sold off their vast collection of priceless art and artifacts, they could do a lot more in their so-called quest for social justice than they've ever been able to do in the past.

No, the Vatican cares about itself. It cares about the priests who are willing to support the hierarchy, even if they can't fight the urge to rape babies now and again, and works to suppress the members of the clergy who don't (like how it's investigating America's nuns for being too awesome).** So while they, the members of the Vatican, sit pretty in Rome engaging in and indulging all kinds of unsavory behavior, the rest of us are condemned and ostracized for simply being who we are. This is not the Church in which I thought I grew up.

Matthew 7:1-5 says:

Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

You know the Bible, Pope Nazipants, and so do your cronies. Perhaps, then, it's time that you heeded some of its more relevant passages. WTFWJD?

*ZING!

**Kind of like the Mafia

Leave them nuns alone, Pope Nazipants!

From the New York Times:

The Vatican is quietly conducting two sweeping investigations of American nuns, a development that has startled and dismayed nuns who fear they are the targets of a doctrinal inquisition.

Nuns were the often-unsung workers who helped build the Roman Catholic Church in this country, planting schools and hospitals and keeping parishes humming. But for the last three decades, their numbers have been declining — to 60,000 today from 180,000 in 1965.

While some nuns say they are grateful that the Vatican is finally paying attention to their dwindling communities, many fear that the real motivation is to reel in American nuns who have reinterpreted their calling for the modern world.

In the last four decades since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, many American nuns stopped wearing religious habits, left convents to live independently and went into new lines of work: academia and other professions, social and political advocacy and grass-roots organizations that serve the poor or promote spirituality. A few nuns have also been active in organizations that advocate changes in the church like ordaining women and married men as priests.

If you'll allow me to speculate for a moment, I believe a major reason that the current Catholic hierarchy refuses to even discuss the possibility of female ordination is the rampant liberalism running through today's convents. The nuns of the 21st century are not your daddy's Catholic school nuns. The only thing they slap with rulers these days are the archaic laws of Catholicism. Now, I know I'm over-generalizing, but I've known a few nuns and a few members of the clergy in my day, and it's the nuns, not the clergy, who refuse to refer to Pope Nazipants as anything but "Ratzinger;" who, through years of work with impoverished families, have realized that abortion is sometimes a necessary evil; and who told me on several occasions during my high school career that they'd rather be in Vegas, and if they hadn't become nuns the day they graduated from high school they never would have done it. It was the nuns who told me that women were smarter. It is a nun who loves and accepts her gay cousin. It's the nuns, man. I can see why the Vatican is mad at them.

Now, I realize I'm over-generalizing. I'm sure there are plenty of conservative nuns who want nothing more than to lead lives of cloistered prayer and never piss off the Vatican. But those are not the nuns I know. The nuns I know are strong, smart, educated women whose faith in the Church means believing it can change. These are women of faith, of piety, and of chastity (I'd hazard a guess that there's a lot more chastity in the convents than in the priesthood). They're not attacking the Church. They are simply working to make it better with the little power they have. The Vatican cannot hope to effectively antagonize them (however passive-aggressively they try to do it) without losing them, which it cannot afford to do.

There is one important point that the Vatican is overlooking in their efforts to exert more control over American nuns: these women are, much more than the Vatican, living reflections of Christ's love.

Mark 10:17-21 says:

As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. "Good teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

"Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good—except God alone. You know the commandments: 'Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, do not defraud, honor your father and mother.'"

"Teacher," he declared, "all these I have kept since I was a boy."

Jesus looked at him and loved him. "One thing you lack," he said. "Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

My mother went down to New Orleans after hurricane Katrina to work on the reconstruction. Among those she met down there were nuns from all over the world who were also working tirelessly - giving up their comfortable lives to give to the poor. To my knowledge, she met no priests. To my knowledge, the Vatican has not given up its vast wealth to make change in the world.

Matthew 3:29-39 says:

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, 'If we had lived in the days of our forefathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.' So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of the sin of your forefathers!

"You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell? Therefore I am sending you prophets and wise men and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. I tell you the truth, all this will come upon this generation.

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'"

If history has taught us anything, it is that new religions start with the best of intentions and, over time, become hopelessly corrupt. In the end, the leaders of a particular religious movement come to represent exactly the kind of hypocrisy that the forefathers fought against. The Church is lucky to have these women in their ranks, yet they are trying to subvert them. These women, more than the Vatican, represent the Body of Christ. WTF would Jesus do? Ask the nuns.

Note to self: not even all of the Vatican sucks!

Finally, someone in the Vatican has some goddamn sense (from the Associated Press):

An influential prelate said Brazilian doctors didn't deserve excommunication for aborting the twin fetuses of a 9-year-old child who was allegedly raped by her stepfather because the doctors were saving her life.

The statement by Archbishop Rino Fisichella in the Vatican newspaper Sunday was highly unusual because church law mandates automatic excommunication for abortion. Fisichella, who heads the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life, also upheld the church's ban on abortion and any implications of his criticism of excommunicating the doctors and the girl's mother weren't clear.

. . . Fisichella criticized the archbishop's public denunciation, writing that the girl "should have been above all defended, embraced, treated with sweetness to make her feel that we were all on her side, all of us, without distinction."

Fisichella stressed that abortion is always "bad." But he said the quick proclamation of excommunication "unfortunately hurts the credibility of our teaching, which appears in the eyes of many as insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking mercy."

That's very Christ-like of you, Archbishop Fisichella. Nice work.

Ugh, Vatican. SHUT UP!

(From Reuters)

"Bankers should assume moral responsibility and ask God for forgiveness for these complex sins," said Stafford, former archbishop of Denver and one of the highest-ranking Americans in the Vatican.

OK, Vatican, listen up. YES, the douche-bags responsible for the economic meltdown should be held responsible. YES, they have a lot for which to apologize. But when you tell them they need to ask forgiveness, it just sounds stupid. Especially since you guys keep pulling the assholiest shit. I think maybe you should look inside and maybe ask forgiveness for your own assholery. OR, better yet, just stop being assholes (there's a thought). Then maybe you can tell other people what to do.

John 8:1-11 says:

But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group 4and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?"

"No one, sir," she said.
"Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin."

Just sayin'. WTFWJD?

The beginning of the end?

(From Oregonlive.com)

Oregon has found itself at the center of an international story after a federal appellate court ruled that a former Portland man can sue the Vatican in a U.S. court over his alleged molestation as a teenager by a parish priest.

It is the first time in history that a victim has won this right. The decision also means that top Catholic officials may be deposed for Rome's role in the case.

Victims have long argued that in a rigid hierarchy such as the Catholic Church, decisions come from the Vatican and, therefore, Rome should be held responsible for ongoing coverups of clergy sex crimes.

Read the whole thing here.

Is it wrong to be delighted about this? In a religion where children are supposedly considered sacred and precious, it seems atrocious to me not only the extent of the child abuse on the part of the clergy, but the cover-ups as well. I really can't help but feel overjoyed that the people at the top are going to have to answer for this, even if it does mean the fall of Catholicism (which, in all likelihood, it won't). Now if only someone would take George W. Bush to court for war crimes...

Matthew 18:5-6 says:

And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me. But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

Matthew 23:25 says:

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.

Serves you right, Vatican officials. Perhaps you should have read the Bible a little more closely. WTFWJD?