Headdesk. (link fixed)
No word on the death penalty.
Or war.
Or the continued and obvious screwing of the meek, the poor, the powerless.
No word on whether it’s okay to take communion while you spew bigotry and call for the extermination of your political enemies.
No word on any of that.
But the widdle babies, we can get all gooshy over that without any ambiguity.
You know, it’s not like I don’t know my childhood church has problems. It’s not like I haven’t read about the Vatican and Hitler and all of that. It’s not like I think anything Benedict’s done so far is exactly a recruitment poster for Catholicism.
So I don’t know why I’m so fucking disappointed and angered every time something like this happens, every time they prove that Democratic sins are worse than Republican ones, that dictatorial thinking and pointless self-denial are still the rules of the day, and that some kind of Cosmic Just Say No is deemed to be enough in a church with theology so complicated you could study your whole life and never understand it all.
Except that I guess I still hope. And I still push. Just BE BETTER, God, Benedict, everybody. Just … be better than this shallow, unworthy tool you’ve become. Be more complicated than this. Be deeper, stronger, more able to grasp the complexity of the issues of the day here. Be able, for the love of your little plastic Jesus, to grasp that there are more powerful forces at work here than just a question of doctrine.
Act like grown-ups. God.
A.
Link goes to First Draft. Is that correct.
so glad lutherans ain’t got a pope.
not that i go to church anymore.
Whoops, link fixed. More coffee, less posting.
A.
I’m missing something.
I think it’s the subject.
🙂
.
Yeah, good luck with that. The grownups are most definitely not in charge, and the kids are selling the electronics, the furnace and the good silver out the back door.
Well, to be fair to the Pope (the first and last time I ever hope to write those words) he has been a pretty vocal critic of the war, both as a cardinal and after his elevation to the papacy. His comments against the war have gone virtually unreported in the US media, as did JPII’s declaring the war “a defeat for humanity.”
What I’d like to see the Vatican do is come down on US churches and “professional” Catholics (I’m looking at you, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity) for breathlessly promoting the war.
One of the many things I like about you, A., is that you *are* disappointed by things like this. That means you care. If you ever get to the point where you blow off this kind of stupidity, that’ll be a sad day.
I’ve never been a church-goer, but I have a healthy respect for the good works the church has done through the centuries. All the great music, the great architecture, the great art, and, more than anything, the great goodness that sometimes bubbles up out of the teachings of the church–those are all things to value. Those things are debased by these policies. Which is a good reason to be disappointed.
In reading the linked article, the first question that pops into my head, reading that the church may excommunicate anyone who commits a grave or mortal sin, is :
“When is the church going to start excommunicating the priests who molested children, and excommuniate the bishops and cardinals who covered and enabled them?”
Oh, never mind…
And the thing is that nowhere in the Gospels did Jesus so much as mention abortion. In fact, He spoke very little about sexual sins at all. Seems to me (a lifetime of going to church as well as 9 years of Catholic school for me and 12 years for my daughter) that Jesus was much more concerned with how people treated the poor and homeless and prisoners and the like than with what they did with their genitals. I am so tired of the Church’s focusing so exclusively on abortion as the sin that leads to excommunication. If Jesus were asked, I’d be willing to bet that there would be other sins He would rate as more deserving of that penalty.
as joe rogan said on his showtimje 2003 stand-up. there are no grown-ups. it’s a figment of our imagination.
If Jesus didn’t “spend much time” talking about sexual sins, it is because his Jewish audience was already quite familiar with them. He spent more time teaching about loving our neighbor and helping the poor because this is what was missing from the faith. Loving our enemies, acting out of humility and meekness, reaching out to tax collectors and prostitutes – these were radical concepts to a 1st century Jew. But did Jesus ignore sexual sins? Hardly. He called fornication gravely sinful, forbade divorce, and even went so far as to say that a married man who even THINKS impurely about another woman has committed adultery. He said that sex outside of marriage was evil, and that marriage consisted of a man and a woman, negating the modern homosexual advocates’ assertion that Jesus never denounced homosexuality.