Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts

Monday, August 21, 2017

Blogging Christianity

Yesterday I reached the end of the trail of what became a Sunday blog about the history of the Christian faith. I had started it for a friend preparing for confirmation as an adult; she wanted to hear the outline of the Christian story in order, so she could grasp how Christian beliefs, morals and rituals developed.

The result was my blog Let Mountains Hear, its title drawn from Micah 6:2. It originally was just a tag in a blog about faith, generally and haphazardly, as ideas came. Then the history came to dominate, then it became a weekly blog, one post every Sunday.

Yesterday was the final, 140th post since April 2013.

Anyone interested in reading it through, from beginning to end (and correcting, corrections are always welcome), may

(a) start at the beginning Story of the Christian Faith and click on the Newer Post link at the very bottom of each entry; or

(b) use the menu at the top, which organizes the posts by era, starting with Abrahamic Faith, then Bethlehem through Chalcedon, Middle Ages, Renaissance & Reformation, Modernity, Our Time.

It grew like Topsy, with some posts longer than others, a few topics spread over posts — all guided by the inexorable march of historical time, with some attention to complexity.

Describing the setting and themes of the Nicene Creed took five weekly entries. The Protestant Reformation and various reactions took about 20. Looking back, I see I did not cover every possible detail, but I would argue that all the major developments that help define modern Christianity are there.

The idea was to write something by an ordinary person — I am neither a professional theologian nor historian —for ordinary people. My biases are my biases, I wear them on my sleeve, but I tried in general to be fair as I am fair in my professional work, journalism.

So, it is done.

Sunday, July 16, 2017

Why the pseudo-religious website Patheos should be really called Atheos

The Tldr (too long, didn't read): truth in advertising. Patheos (dubbed in its header as "hosting the conversation about faith") promotes itself as "the premier online destination to engage in the global dialogue about religion and spirituality," when in reality it is all about promoting atheism and anti-religious bias.

Atheos uses three tools of intellectual dishonesty to accomplish this:
  1. Postings attempt to present U.S. Protestant Evangelicals as mainstream Christianity instead of a minuscule set of U.S. sectoids made up of undereducated people who confuse memorizing Bible verses with knowledge and Christian faith. Yes, Evangelicals are a wet dream for people who like to wield straw-man arguments against Christianity; but they're not widely representative.

  2. Atheos prefers its bloggers to be either fringe people who are marginal even in their own tiny denominations, non-denominational, Unitarian (not Christian) and occasionally rabbis (to whom Christianity is, understandably, apostasy). Their pieces, time and time again, reflect a bias in favor of anything that makes adherents of Christian religion, specifically a Bible-belt caricature of Christianity, look like lunatic haters.

  3. The message is always that, if you strip the layers of (alleged or Evangelical) Christian belief, you come up empty. The truth always lies elsewhere. Some of the remembered fragments of Christianity from childhood may be comfort food for the soul — but never anything approximating truth.
You think I'm kidding. I'm not and I can show you this is what Atheos is really all about.

In fact, in an online discussion I challenged my good friend Peter Kirkwood, who thought I was being a little too harsh on the website, to come up with "an article in Atheos that has a positive faith-inspiring piece, that is not about how so-and-so (absurdly unknown evangelical pastoroid) hates gays, sex and secularism."

He came up with 7 examples. I put the links and my response to each one immediately after.

  • What I Learned in Seminary: Doubt is Overrated. Here is a minister of a marginal Protestant church (the Church of Christ has about 2 million members) admitting he doesn't have any answers and his faith does not speak to the concerns of people. Not great advertising for his church, his ministry or his faith; nor inspiring.

  • The Church Is Political, But How?. An evangelical admits that all [evangelical] "voter guides" are pro-Republican. Stop the presses! The evangelicals are a collection of miniscule churchlets (the biggest of which is the two or three Baptist groups, which are about 13 million) that have no common policy and have, by their own admission, a very narrow point of view. This is not Christianity, this is Evangelical World, an amusement park where some preachers get very rich selling "Bahbles."

  • The Strange Task of Preaching: Isaiah 55:10-13. This  can be summarized as "God is dead." However, let's pretend otherwise and keep on praying anyway so the author, a professor of preaching, can keep his day job. You don't believe, say so; don't hide behind Charlie Brown's favorite verses.

  • Rosenzweig and Weil Are Dead. At last, Diogenes, we have an honest man: a rabbi. Franz Rosenzweig and Simone Weil were two 20th century Jews who dabbled in Christianity. R became every Hillel club's the poster boy for why youthful modern Jews should not convert to Christianity; W became the poster girl who couldn't bring herself to convert for a number of neurotic reasons. (I happen to like both R and W and have read a fair share of their writings, but they are not exactly on anyone's road to Damascus.) Again, Atheos posts models of not becoming Christian.

  • Wonder Woman and Pinchas: The Persistent Appeal of Zealotry Here another rabbi, a convert from Christianity, effectively equates faith with "zealotry." He whimsically, but ineffectively in my view, taps Wonder Woman (no doubt to appeal to hipsters), then copies Richard Dawkins' argument (see my post Going to the Atheist Church) about violence in the Hebrew Bible (aka Old Testament). Thank you, Atheos, for the propaganda from someone who left Christianity (a fact omitted on the site, of course).

  • A Timeless Winning Trifecta for Every Age. I was willing to give this one a few points, but its Methodist author spends most of his time talking about being old. Eventually he wends his way to St. Paul and love, hope and faith, concluding they are worth it even for new generations (even though Boomers have it all wrong). What? Come again? Half a point for not saying anything overtly hostile to the faith; but Atheos gets subtle here: when it is a believer, make sure it is someone too distracted with himself to stay on topic.

  • Christian: You Are Upset About the Wrong Things. In the final example of uplifting faith-inspiring propaganda from Atheos, we get a Baptist, but one who left ministry to make money, citing pseudo-sociology to remind us — stop the presses, again! — that Evangelicals care more about the evils of saying "shit" than 30,000 children dying. Cleverly, the author says "Christian," not "bigots who like to think the 'Bahble' makes them right."

Peter's examples did make me aware of one thing. Atheos is really an anti-evangelical site. Of course, Evangelicals' religious illiteracy (aside from their memorized Bible verses) make them very much like the kid who walks around high school unaware that someone has taped a sign that reads "kick me" on the back of his shirt.

They are supremely mockable pseudo-Christians, whose faith derives from an originally well-intentioned movement (see from my other blog the post Awakenings). Admittedly, so are almost all of us who believe in Jesus the Christ, hope for improving and try, often failing miserably, to love.

The subtlety and disingenuous approach of Atheos, however, demonstrates malicious and malevolent intent. They should change their name and let their atheist colors fly.

    Wednesday, September 07, 2016

    Why the rush to make saints?

    First it was Karol Wojtyla (aka Pope John Paul II), now it’s Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu (aka Mother Theresa).Why does Jorge Bergoglio (aka Pope Francis I) insist on sprinkling saints hither and asking questions later?

    We all know that neither Wojtyla (pronounced woy-TEE-wah) nor Bojaxhiu (bo-YAH-joo) will withstand the test of time.

    There’s a Rasputin-like murky figure who stowed away evidence of Wojtyla’s hiding pedophile priests in Krakow; that will eventually all come out. Then there’s Bojaxhiu’s little romp with Charles Keating, the 1980s savings-and-loan fraudster whose donations of ill-gotten money she took, then refused to return (perhaps thinking she was paid for the character witness testimony she delivered to a U.S. court on his behalf).

    Apparently, there’s more in Bojaxhiu’s dossier, concerning her disregard for needs of poor people in Calcutta and her outrageous celebrity seeking.

    There is nothing even remotely redeemable in Wojtyla’s life to warrant putting him up as a model of Christian behavior, even if we dismiss his efforts to avert a scandal he personally did not cause. But Bojaxhiu appears to be downright reprehensible.

    Couldn’t the Vatican, which usually thinks in centuries, have waited a tad and investigated more thoroughly?

    Sunday, October 26, 2014

    RCC doesn't mean what it used to now that Francis and the Jesuits have gone off the deep end

    This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

    Monday, April 28, 2014

    All Hail St. Karol Wojtyla, Patron Saint of Priestly Pedophiles!

    Jorge Bergoglio, aka Pope Francis, has sold out. For the 30 (million?) pieces of silver from tourism and holy trinkets that the Vatican is surely to reap, he has put on a spectacle sainting two popes in an unscrupulous and totally unnecessary way.

    The Roncalli-Wojtyla compromise—meaning the balancing of the canonization as saints of John XXIII, the "good pope" beloved by many reform-minded people, with John Paul II, every conservative Catholic's favorite ecclesiastical fascist—has been in the works for some time. It's one of those deals favored by politicians, union leaders and the Mafia: a little bit for everyone, not enough for any one constituency and, most importantly, no power base gets rolled.

    It's the sort of thing I would have expected from his predecessor, Pope Nazinger, the bemoaner at Auschwitz of how the poor Germans suffered (see here).

    To be fair, Guiseppe Roncalli, aka John XXIII, could be called a good man. During the Holocaust, while he was a Vatican diplomat in Turkey, he personally forged hundreds of baptismal certificates to put under the protection of the pope a boatload of children being shipped to certain death by the Nazis. Years later, at the outset of the Second Vatican Council, he gathered the periti, or experts, in his office (one of them was Nazinger) giving them the warning: "the Church is not a museum."

    Roncalli was an astute man of faith. He wanted to a faith that was alive. His view meshed with that of historian of religion Yaroslav Pelikan: "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living." Still, was he a saint?

    No such doubt arises with the Polish pope, Karol Wojtyla, who was from the outset the false John Paul. The original one, John Paul I, died in still suspicious circumstances at the onset of a money laundering scandal affecting the Vatican Bank. He had adopted the papal name John Paul as a way of signalling that he would steer a middle course between the openness of John XXIII and the retrenchment of successor Paul VI. Instead, JP1 died, and Wojtyla was elected, after which he effectively closed every window Vatican II had opened.

    Back came the enormous rugs under which to sweep the corruption of the clergy. Wojtyla was especially protective of one Marcial Maciel, founder of a religious order called the Legionnaires of Christ (tip: mistrust religious groups with military or monarchical names). Maciel was found to have operated what was essentially a seminarian man-on-boy rape mill.

    As John Paul II's press secretary, an Opus Dei operative in the Vatican, put it, Wojtyla could not imagine such a thing because of "the purity of his thought." Right! A man who lived through World War II, precisely where some of the worst crimes of the Holocaust took place, could not imagine pedophile or sex-abusing priests.

    I know for a fact altar boys knew about "funny priests" for at least the past half century. Also that particular U.S. bishops knew such a thing was going. One of them thought he was making a joke when he remarked behind closed doors and in my presence, "We have to make sure seminary rectors don't screw the Hispanic seminarians." That double meaning was intended was shown by his own laughter and that of his peers.

    You're going to tell me the pope at that time did not know? I have nice bridge for you in Brooklyn at a bargain price.

    The Vatican may not care about raped altar boys and the Roman Curia may not give a damn about Pope Francis' the blessed poor, but they sure care about tourism to Rome. So I learned when I received the one direct contact from the Vatican while I worked for the U.S. conference of bishops quite some time ago.

    They sent an officious little man to see if I could help organize a "pilgrimage." Johann Tetzel, the infamous seller of indulgences who enraged Martin Luther, put the religious marketing in slightly different but no less mercenary terms: "As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs."

    They're still selling indulgences of a sort in Rome. This week it has been the massive orgy of tourism and saint swag selling brought on by the canonization, or sainting, of Roncalli and Wojtyla.

    This is not good Christian leadership. It's a bad imitation of Elmer Gantry: put on a show for the fools who will always go for one (and sell them travel and baubles). All "for God." Because God needs your pilgrimages and your shopping for saint cards.


    Referencing the Vatican's own purported beliefs, sainthood merely means that a dead person is living in the presence of God. Add to that the theology in the Nicene Creed and you get "the communion of saints," in which those in heaven are believed (at least by Catholics) to be able to hear from and intercede for the living here on Earth.

    This is what the whole Catholic saint shtick is all about. Johnny is incurably sick, they pray to St. Holyguy. So St. H goes to God, "Hey, Creator of All, Johnny's sick, how about you slip him one of those superduper aspirins of yours and make him better?" Presto! A miracle through the influence of St. H!

    The notion of revering certain Christians goes back to when they were killed for their beliefs during the Roman Empire. To be a martyr meant to be a witness to the faith to heroic proportions. Vatican press releases to the contrary, neither Roncalli nor Wojtyla quite qualify. OK, but not all saints on the church calendar were martyrs.

    Indeed, my favorite children's hymn in the Episcopal Hymn Book begins "I Sing a Song of the Saints of God":
    I sing a song of the saints of God,
    patient and brave and true,
    who toiled and fought and lived and died
    for the Lord they loved and knew.
    Then it goes on to say that "one was a doctor, and one was a queen, and one was a shepherdess on the green" and later "one was a soldier, and one was a priest, and one was slain by a fierce wild beast." But my favorite part comes in the third verse:
    You can meet them in school,
    on the street, in the store,
    in church, by the sea, in the house next door;
    they are saints of God, whether rich or poor,
    and I mean to be one too.
    And here's where Saints Roncalli and Woytyla make absolutely no sense as models. Who in this day and age can realistically draw for personal moral example from the deeds and circumstances of the chief gerontocrat of a worldwide religion of about 1 billion lemmings?

    I mean, I'm not planning to issue an encyclical letter any time soon. Or ride around a 500-year-old piazza in a converted golf cart. O wear white dresses and a white yarmulke. What does a pope have to do with the problems and moral dilemmas facing thee and me?

    Here's where Francis the rock-star pope has tripped up in his marketing of a faith we all now know he completely lacks. Pity. He had me fooled.

    Saturday, March 02, 2013

    Secularism USA

    As a former resident of Quebec (1970s), and in partial (and belated) response to a post by my good friend Bill (see here), I'd say I witnessed the effects of the Revolution Tranquille in declericalizing and secularizing the province. I can't quite see a parallel in the United States for two reasons:

    (a) Quebec, like Ireland and Poland, was fiercely Catholic as a matter of national identity because it faced a Protestant conqueror (in the case of Poland, one that was Orthodox, later Communist, but in an Orthodox way). Remove the British and the Russians and religious fervor waned. Poland legalized abortion just a few years after the Soviet Union collapsed.

    (b) The USA is a predominantly Protestant society, with a Protestant epistemology. Protestantism itself was the major secularizing force in northwestern Europe, transforming religion from an artifact controlled by a clerical caste based in Rome to an assertion of the freedom to engage in individualistic profession of an endless variety of idea systems.

    The origin of secularism in Christian Europe across confessional lines lies, paradoxically, in Christianity. The Christian acceptance of nominalism in its ranks between the third and sixth centuries of our era, when missionaries started converting entire Barbarian tribes by convincing their king or chieftain sowed the seeds of secularism.


    Christendom (RIP...DG!) was an edifice built on compulsory religious affiliation that never developed authentic deep roots of faith among the mass of Europeans. They were what we would call cultural Christians and nothing more. The continued existence of pagan shrines throughout supposedly Christianized Europe as late as the 12th and 13th centuries gives witness to this.

    Enter industrialization and capitalism, both arguably the children of Protestantism (see Weber), and the Church and churches lost the working class. That happened in the 19th century.

    What we have witnessed in our lifetime is a belated echo in America, where religion was socially compulsory, a matter of manners more than conviction. Among urban, educated Americans the compulsion has slackened to the point that religious ignorance is the prevailing coin of the realm. Maybe that's more honest.

    Tuesday, February 26, 2013

    Catholic blackmail isn't the real papal news

    Catholic blackmail isn't news, but the level it has verifiably hit is. As someone who once worked within the structure, let me explain.

    Blackmail runs rampant throughout the church. In our day of high public standards and behavior that falls below even the most private ethical realms of the confessional, the number of supposedly chaste and celibate clerics caught with their fingers in the sexual cookie jar is high.

    Years ago, I did everything in my meager power to prevent the elevation to cardinal of one archbishop who had long been blackmailed by one then-prominent Catholic layman. Although -- deo gratias! -- the weakness in that case involved adult women.

    We don't yet have a good handle on the number of clerics who died of AIDS linked to sexual contact, but I suspect that will one day shock the world.

    What did you expect, that "Father" was a saint? He's just a guy. Even Joseph Ratzinger put on his Hitler Youth uniform pants one leg at a time. There are trousers underneath the ceremonial clerical dresses and underneath the clothes a full complement of testosterone.

    Think you're far away from that? Next time you go to church watch the people who collect baskets. Is there one who has been doing this forever? That man, it usually is a man (just like Catholic priests are usually men), is probably skimming off the collections protected by knowledge of a sexual indiscretion committed by the pastor, or one of the priests in the parish staff.

    Oldest scam in the book. Those candle- and incense-smelling men who are always in church, who are long-time church employees although they seem to do nothing. They're blackmailers.

    Notice priests coming out to collect the baskets at the offertory? A countermeasure. Grab the dough before anyone else gets it.

    Corruption is highest, of course, in the rich countries, where the Church is rich: in the United States and Europe. As bank robber Willie Sutton reputedly said, that's where the money is. And let's be fair, this happens in other churches, although usually it's more naked larceny.

    The national office of the  Episcopal Church had a classic accountant-skims-off-millions scandal a few years ago.

    But how can you embarrass the Catholic Church after the Borgia pope? A Nazi pope? Done that and seemingly no one except me wondered what the cardinals were smoking that day.

    What appears to have shocked even Ratzinger out of the papacy is not mere corruption, but corruption involving bishops and those who could be pope, cardinals. Of course, corrupt bishops and even popes are not new. Any more than corrupt politicians.

    What's new is that more get caught out publicly and that the public expects them to fall on their proverbial swords. Especially if the cookies in the forbidden sexual jar are boys.



    Friday, June 22, 2012

    Sunday I found myself in New York City ...

    Sunday I found myself in New York City, my home town. As I do from time to time, I went to the old neighborhood where I know no one any more. I even ambled over to the church where I was baptized. I walked in for a moment, to see the tiny church I once perceived as large as Canterbury.

    The priest was finishing his sermon; they'd read Mark 4:26-34 and he was wrapping up. His New York accent assaulted me. I don't live there any more. So I have gone to search for the reading (http://tinyurl.com/6v36x6z) and see if I can formulate my own sermon.

    The meaning of the opening simile parable that hits me in the face first off is the message that the reign of God is not in my hands.

    So often I read the papers, which I can do at work as part of work (great job if you can get it), and become despondent. As a journalist I know that the one bias all reporters have is for the negative: someone died, so-and-so is corrupt, the world is falling apart. Yet I get caught up in it as I scour for the disasters to make sure I can find the news-of-the-day angle to my stories.

    These days I am mindful of Yeats: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." I could recite all the headlines to you, but you don't need me to do that. You can go get depressed on your own.

    So here comes Jesus saying that the reign of God, the state of being he is announcing to the world, is "as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how."

    He does not know how.

    There is nothing I need bother my little head about it, because even if I were the seed scatterer, I would still not know how it sprouts and grows. Yet it does by some process I don't know. The conclusion reminds me of Julian of Norwich: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

    The reign of God is at hand, despite all the darkening clouds. Perhaps the clouds just bring rain. Then the seed will become a tree and birds will nest in its branches, as the remainder of the passage says.

    I don't know for certain that this is "the message." I was spared living in first century Palestine as a poor devout Jew who followed a Galilean woodworker-preacher, so I was not told what Mark intimates is the secret of the gospel. At least, I was not told as the disciples were told.

    But here's my guess.

    Tuesday, December 13, 2011

    Maybe there's a messiah among us already

    A new acquaintance of mine was waxing admiringly about a particular rabbi whose wisdom he reveres. Maybe, he wondered, that rabbi is the Messiah and we are just not ready to understand that. I was reminded of the branches of Buddhism whose devotees search in each age among the living for an Enlightened One.

    Although, with all due respect, I doubt my new friend's rabbi is the one, I particularly like the notion of humanity just not being ready to recognize the Messiah, Enlightened One or Grand Whatever. Anyone familiar with the Christian story who looks around at Christmas or Good Friday knows amply that no one has ever really paid attention to, much less understood, the Galilean woodworker some of his day thought was the Messiah.

    So maybe there is someone walking around among us today with a message to which it would behoove us to listen. Someone who, if we really listened to her or him, would change everything in all the ways that global enlightenment and the coming of a Messiah should.

    Even though I get the feeling that whoever the one is, we're not going to listen any time soon ... what if we did?

    Monday, August 22, 2011

    On Changing One's Mind About God

    A friend from France writes to ask what changed my mind about God. I try to find an explanation. Belief is not a rational thing, otherwise everyone would believe. It's not knowledge, it's belief. Still, what changes profound, near-atheist agnosticism into faith in God?

    To regular followers of this blog, I will make it simple: a reverse process. I am not alone in undergoing this, in either direction, which is why I now attempt to share this. Your mileage may vary; this is not to convert anyone, merely to inspire some thought.

    You'll recall that the likely nonexistence of a god led me to a minimalist ethic of survival (see Godless Ethics and Godless Law) and an encounter with modern neurophamacopeia led me to deny, or profoundly doubt, the existence of a soul (see Save Our Souls and Biochemical Soul).

    In the same way, I "discovered" the limits of biochemistry, therapy and philosophy. In particular, the inability of the many medications to make a functioning, but rationally sad person "happy" (see All Unhappy People) made me question my insights about the soul. The process of reversal (see How the Christian God came to clash with the Universal Echo and links therein) was, from that point, inevitable: the soul is the foundation of all spirituality and religion.

    That's the how. Next come some of the whys and wherefores. Stay tuned.

    Monday, July 11, 2011

    How the Christian God came to clash with the Universal Echo

    It takes going to a Sunday Eucharist after years of absence to notice with an unaccustomed clarity that the Christian God, by belief, is so particular so clearly "out there" and distinct from us, that this divinity could not easily fold into my admittedly diffuse notion of the Universal Echo (see here).

    The Christian God does not easily submit to the idea of being a figment of our imagination. No, She insists on being triune, transcendent, incarnated, the giver of specified promises, the forger of everything. Her only Son insists on being a first-century Palestinian Jew from a small, nay insignificant, little town that was not even part of Judea, the then-existing vassal-kingdom of the Jews.

    Jesus, or Joshua, as the name more likely was, insists on having been born of the Virgin Mary and executed by Pontius Pilate. This is by whom, in whom and to whom Christians pray.

    I'm no longer sure this divinity can be conflated into the Universal Echo. The Christian God demands to be accepted on Her own terms.

    Monday, May 30, 2011

    What did they mean by "Jesus Is Lord"?

    The first Christian statement of faith was simply "Jesus is Lord." One modern hearer gathered from this the meaning that "Jesus will care for me," much in the vein of the 23rd Psalm's "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want." Perhaps. But what did the ancients, the first century Christians, mean?

    Let's examine the three words.

    Jesus. Not Christ (really a title, meaning Messiah). Not just anyone who occupies a particular office. Not some spiritual or celestial being. A particular person that some of them said they had met and talked to just like you and me in the flesh-and-blood here and now. Yeshua bar Josif, some postulate as his full historical name.

    Is. Not was when he was alive. Not was long ago when the dinosaurs roamed. Not was at all. Is. Exists today.

    "But how can that be? We saw him executed by the Romans!" The Roman officials themselves, asked who this "Chrestus" was, reported to superiors that he was an executed Jewish woodworker whose followers said he had risen from the dead. That was what spread like wildfire in the Roman Empire. This one, it was said, cheated the Emperor's executioner!!!

    The Christians believed it.

    Finally, Lord. In our Eurocentric conception, to us lords are medieval landowners, some of whom built castles. In some European countries, their heirs hold legal title to the lion's share of the land. But to the ancients an ordinary lord was a master or guardian, the head of household, the landowner, the king, the emperor -- all of whom had power of life and death over their subjects (by divine right, Paul wrote). "Lord" was also a substitute for "God" and in that world the Caesar was a god.

    When Christians held "Jesus is Lord," the Romans knew they had to kill them.

    All Christian statements of belief have always arisen by the "via negativa" or denial of an assertion of its time. Hail, Caesar! No, Jesus is Lord.

    Friday, October 01, 2010

    A Plan for the Pope

    A heated post-mortem on Ratzinger's trip to Britain prompted me to come up with some way that the pope could allay all the criticism of his papacy. The problem is that Ratzinger has yet to apologize for many things personally, so that his mealy mouth mumblings about the faults of others in countries in which he has never set foot are meaningless.

    Here are three steps that would silence, or at least subdue, critics:
    1. Release Archbishop Bernard Law (emeritus of Boston and now a Vatican official), and all others like him, who are hiding from prosecutors, investigators and lawsuits behind the sovereign immunity of the Vatican, from charges arising out of their conspiracy to hide or protect the rape of children, as well as to aid Nazis in exile and other criminal elements, and extradite them to countries with jurisdiction over their crimes.
    2. Depose, without retirement pay or any benefits, and hand over to secular authorities every single bishop worldwide who headed or in some way administered a diocese at the time of a rape of even one child by a cleric or employee of the diocese and its associated organizations.
    3. Release all capital of the "Institute for Religious Works" (aka Vatican Bank, aka Mafia and CIA money laundering machine) to pay for the treatment, rehabilitation of, and restitution to victims of conspiracies in which church officials engaged worldwide, ordering all dioceses in the world to do the same, without demanding onerous court processes from claimants (perhaps a simple process of claim arbitration would do).
    If Ratzinger did all this without reservations and clever loopholes for friends, a papal apology for the actions of others would not even be necessary. Of course, by the logic of these steps, Ratzinger himself would have to resign from the papacy without retirement benefits, given his tenure as archbishop in Munich.

    This would still not allay personal charges against him.

    To do that, Ratzinger has to come clean concerning his own personal complicity (albeit minor) for the deeds of the Hitler regime he supported. He has to reconsider the authoritarian, Germany-first worldview he suckled at the Nazi teat as a teenager. He must reject the ill-advised ideas of those German-bishop mentors who had publicly prayed for the success of the Führer and attempted a postwar whitewash of Germany.

    Finally, he ought to apologize and seek to make restitution for his violation of the human rights of those he judged guilty of theological error, without due process, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

    In brief, the only just and fair outcome for Ratzinger is to be stripped of all status and possessions, to recant and acknowledge his errors and wrongdoing publicly, then live the rest of his natural life in a small cell on bread and water. Perhaps with piped-in recordings of his recanting played in a loop.

    Friday, April 16, 2010

    Anti-Religionism vs. Agnosticism

    Lately I've cyberfallen in with a crowd that is all too suspiciously eager to proclaim what a crock religion is in order to fly the flag of atheism, which even Richard Dawkins notes can only really be agnosticism. While I am an agnostic, I see no reason for triumphalism or hatred of religion, merely to proclaim one's position.

    To be agnostic one need not replicate churches, crusades or -- Universe's Echo help us! -- an inquisition, with the variable "God" merely assigned a negative value. Nor need one feel too superior to religious people who, after all, put on their pants one leg at a time just like everyone else.

    Yet this is what I often find.

    In "real time," of course, plenty of agnostics go to Unitarian churches, Ethical societies and the like, which have bake sales and bazaars just like Our Lady of Mercedes or St. Elfric the Tasteful, only they don't have crosses anywhere. And they don't dare even whisper G-o-d.

    Online, life is more polemical -- this is mostly about words, after all -- and it takes the form of ye olde high schoole "hate" clubs. We Hate Unfair Criticism has evolved into We Don't Thank Deities for the Deeds of Humans.

    My suspicion is that these agnostics are just as religious (and illiterate about religion) as most religious people. They're just religious about their agnosticism. This is not to say that religion "wins" or religionists are better. Far from it.

    My only contention, as someone who knows a thing or three about the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition and its foundational books and thinkers, is that it is not necessarily unreasonable to believe, and most real believers should experience doubts every now and then, just as it is not unreasonable not to believe.

    Not believing is not a new thing to be, it's merely little more than simply not managing to wrap one's mind around notions such as a man-god, prayer, not to mention an invisible being of whom there is no direct evidence.

    When one doesn't believe, one still is left with doubt, inquiry, tentativeness and the uncertainties of real science. Trust me. I know about this.

    Sunday, April 04, 2010

    Death (and Resurrection?) of the Catholic Church

    The Vatican's Holy Week of spin notwithstanding, public regard for the Catholic clergy, from the pope on down, has never been lower in the lifespan of anyone alive today. Yet the child molestation debacle could yet be an opportunity to remake the Church into something more in consonance with the gospel.

    Once there remains no Catholic who attributes absurd powers to men who put on their pants one leg at a time like everyone else, it might be possible to suggest that the clergy is the least significant part of Catholicism or Christianity -- just as the "good story" of one Galilean woodworker says.

    Keep in mind that in the gospel, Jesus' main response to religion is frustration and outrage with the legalism and hypocrisy of the religious professionals of his time and his religion. There is no command from Jesus to go to church. Pray in secret, do good without claiming credit, Jesus advises.

    The one clear set of gospel commands that have unmistakable moral consequences are those concerning feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, visiting the sick and those in prison and so forth.

    While the gospel story includes delegation of moral authority to the apostles, there is no incontrovertible establishment of a human organization resembling any of today's churches. Indeed, even in Catholic Christian teaching, the society of forgiven sinners who believe in Jesus Christ is an invisible entity of those imbued with the life-changing gift of faith.

    In fact, there is already a vast army of people who do not bother paying attention to the latest papal utterance or Vatican decree. People who don't think they're smart enough to understand theology or interpret writings penned thousands of years ago. People who go about their prayers, their assistance to the needy and their struggles with faith quietly and without seeking the attention of others.

    Aren't they the real Church, according to the gospels? According to the gospel, the heavens rejoice more over the repentance of one miserable wrongdoer than over the everyday lives of  church-going popes, priests or deacons.

    Now granted, those who follow this blog know perfectly well that I, personally, don't even believe here was a historical Galilean woodworker named Yeshua bar Yosif who walked on water and was crucified. However, if there are people who believe not merely the historical facts, but the theological claims it would behoove them collectively to act and to be, as a group and as individuals, like a people who really believe.

    If the pope really believed, wouldn't he be mortified at the thought that, because of his own personal error or omission or whatever, hundreds of boys were raped, some in the confessional? Wouldn't he and his minions be ashamed? Perhaps even fearful of the judgment to come?

    Or do they really think that anyone wearing the priestly flea collar gets a Get Out of Hell Free card, valid no matter what they do, say or think? Or do they think that their God is intimidated by the harrumphs of the Vatican's cardinals, just as they assume ordinary mortals will be?

    If people in the pews really believed, wouldn't they cease supporting the rotting and scandalous structure built in their name and with their money to the greater glory of the clergy? Just ignore it?

    Perhaps, then the Catholic Church as we know it could die and rise in three days, as believers claim happened to someone long ago.

    Wednesday, March 31, 2010

    Nixon Time for Pope Nazinger

    The smoking gun from Munich has now been published in The New York Times and not even the Catholic League, which has bought a space ad to defend the pope in a different case, dares challenge the finding against "the holy father."

    What did Joseph Razinger (aka formerly a Hitler Youth, archbishop of Munich and chief inquisitor at the Vatican and currently pope) know and when did he know it?
    • Written evidence shows that Ratzinger led the Jan. 15, 1980, diocesan weekly council meeting that decided to transfer Rev. Peter Hullemann, a priest sent from Essen to Munich for therapy to overcome pedophilia, to pastoral duties, meaning regular parish work. Hullemann was later sent to prison for what he did after that transfer in duties.
    • Munich archdiocesan personnel chief Rev. Friedrich Fahr, reputedly "very close" to the then-archbishop Ratzinger, had received oral and written warning concerning the "danger" posed by Hullemann between Dec. 20, 1979, and Jan 3., 1980.
    • Ratzinger received written notification that the transfer of Hullemann had taken place on Jan. 20, 1980, showing that he was kept informed.
    As an ecclesiastical executive, Ratzinger has been neither a milquetoast nor a hands-off leader. Indeed, in 1981, Ratzinger punished a priest for celebrating Mass at a peace demonstration; the pressure drove the man to leave the priesthood.

    So here are the values Ratzinger enforced: child rape, yes; peace, no.

    How long before a John Dean rats him out on his other misdeeds? Stay tuned. Tempted as I am to picket the Vatican and chant "Ratzinger resign," it would be far better for him to hang on and take the whole circus down with him.

    Sunday, March 14, 2010

    Pedophilia Spatters the Pope

    They couldn't get Karol Wojtyla (aka John Paul II), but reporters of the Süddeutsche Zeitung have finally nailed Joseph Ratzinger (aka the sitting pope) with conspiring to hide sadistic child rape when he was in the Archdiocese of Munich.

    Everybody is guilty of something, Joseph Stalin was wont to say when the arrest of someone without evidence of a misdeed troubled the top dogs at the NKVD -- a rare event, to be sure.

    But how many people knowingly accept the transfer of a now-imprisoned priest from another diocese (Essen), where he had raped an 11-year-old boy? The priest in question was no misdirected man: he engaged in rank acts of sadism to compel the boy to perform sexual acts. This is proven as a matter of law.

    Then there is the question of the stormclouds gathering over the pope's brother, also a priest. The role of Msgr. Georg Ratzinger in allegations of abuse when he was master of the boys' choir at Regenburg, which ran from 1964 to 1994, is currently under investigation in Germany.

    But the Vatican already claims to know that nothing happened there under the sibling Ratzinger. How does the Vatican know for sure before the investigation has been completed?

    Perhaps this is a case similar to that of Wojtyla who, when similar allegations arose about his tenure as Archbishop of Krakow, dispatched a Rasputin-like figure who controlled all of Wojtyla's papers, to gather up whatever had been left behind in Krakow. A Polish reporter who had begun to ask questions on this matter was then roughed up, according to a Washington Post report in the late 1990s, and nothing more was ever heard on the subject.

    Sunday, May 31, 2009

    Faithful? Progressive?

    Blogs that wear religion on their sleeves tend to be, like churches, full of hypocrisy. I've already blogged on the Methodist preacher who, the nun who, and my latest find is Faithful Progressive, the title of which, after a little following, prompts the headline question.

    The answer is "neither."

    The blogger presents himself as theologically a liberal Protestant and politically as loosely left-of-center. The blogger claims to be "faithful" to Christianity and "progressive" aka "afraid to call myself socialist" but really willing to fly the flag of moral indignation.

    In roughly a month or so of following the blog, FP has managed to:

    -- pick the mote in the Catholic eye as regards the Nazis (without, of course, having anything new to say), while refusing to even look at the Protestant beam: the churches that allowed themselves to be merged by the Nazis into the Reich Church under Reich bishop Ludwig Muller;

    -- flagrantly repeat and proudly use the schoolyard bully term "Ditchkins" (a conflation of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens) as the moniker for atheists of whom the writer is obvious afraid an in awe of; and

    -- flaunt the blogger's vision of the language of Cervantes as a wetback language not deserving proper use by obviously translating "Congratulations Judge Sonia Sotomayor" through a computer translator, with the result "Congratulations have judged Sonia Sotomayor," which doesn't make sense in Spanish, any more than it does in English.

    When I pointed out the incredibly stupid error -- clearly the machine interpreted "judge" to be a verb ("juzgan"), not a noun ("juez") -- the blogger changed it and pretended to have intended a "pun."

    The blogger, who is apparently obviously angry at afraid of atheist critics, insists the originator of "Ditchkins" has written a "great read."

    On the Nazi point, he pretended not to even hear the criticism.

    And to my pointing that his blog, which has far too many quotes from other sources and exceedingly little original material, violated the Associated Press' copyright, he replies that "You[r] toady sucking up to the AP is also reflective of the tendency of the new atheists to be a reactionary cultural force."

    So, there it is: faithful to Christian charity? No. Progressive? Only in the weasel sense.
     The guy doesn't have a clue.

    Sunday, February 15, 2009

    Goodbye to Peter and Paul

    The German film Goodbye to Lenin, a sensitive and humorous look at an end of an era, recently summoned to mind not the end of Communism, but the end of Christianity as I once knew it.

    In the film, a committed East German Communist woman goes into a coma just as the Berlin Wall is falling in 1989. She wakes up during German reunification. Her doctor tells advises that she should be kept calm. The hitch: she thinks her beloved Honecker regime is still in power.

    In my life, there was once a boy who once experienced ecstasy upon having the eucharist placed on his tongue, a young man who -- absent celibacy -- might have become a priest, an adult catechist who told quibbling pre-teens they would be excused from the Sunday Mass obligation if they found themselves literally in the bind of the guy on the classroom crucifix.

    But, yes, that boy sinned, that young man doubted and that adult ultimately gave up a lifetime of pretending to be committed to what he wasn't. Committed Christians, like committed Communists, were always rare, indeed probably nonexistent.

    At this thought I stumble upon the always aged Br. O'Connor, whom we boys called "the mummy" in the Irish Christian Brothers school I attended. He was unchanged in the 1990s, last I saw him.

    If he lived through the recent years of shame and a Nazi pope, what did he think, after all those years of loyal service to his order, going from Ireland to Argentina to teach rich ranchers' sons? How did that life end up squaring with the man from Galilee? Was it a failure to watch a world turn its back on everything to which his life was devoted?

    Fare well, Simon Peter and Paul of Tarsus! It was all for naught.

    Friday, February 13, 2009

    Episcopal Symptoms

    Sunday, as a favor to a friend, I went to an Episcopal church I had attended in the 1980s, located about ten blocks north of the White House. To my great disappointment, its peculiarly Episcopal symptoms of the terminal illness affecting Christianity convinced me of the relative wisdom of my current apostasy and agnosticism.

    First, of course, the church was near empty at the mid-morning second service of the day, typically the best attended. They'd disguised it with the oldest church trick in the book: removal of pews. But the church still looked empty.

    Second, the black female homilist was a walking, talking Republican advertisement against affirmative action. It wasn't bad enough that she read her flat, uninspiring and derivative sermon. She simply could not read! I'm not kidding. The words and their pronunciation were entirely foreign to her, although she spoke with an accent as American as apple pie.

    Third, there were a slew of announcements by church committee heads. All expressed that false American Protestant cheer ("ha, ha") to signal the good, clean fun of a book and CD sale or the fulfillment of hearing teens' "profound" questions to the church's seminarian about his trip to the Military Republic of Kumbaya, where distressing things are happening. They all made a pitch for more volunteers since, from the look of things, they were the only members of their activities -- and no wonder.

    The rector (not the homilist) was the parish's second female in that position, not the elegant former actress I had had a hand in selecting, but one who made an earnest Episcopal try to sound horsey and look dowdy, all reinforced by robust bursts of entirely forced laughter.

    Let's not leave out the after-service coffee and its swarm of men with bejewelled ears and tones borrowed from their mothers.

    No wonder the Episcopal Church is falling apart.