One of my favorite classical pieces is Berlioz’ Roman Carnival Overture.  If you have it, you can play it in the background to accompany this post.  I’m writing about what’s going on in Rome–more specifically, the Vatican.  It’s a carnival atmosphere—well, as much a carnival as you can expect from that strange Christian sect, the Roman Catholic Church.  You will find that the light tone of the Berlioz piece is perfect accompaniment to this heathen’s sermon as I mount my rock in Hell to preach secular logic and lore.

The Pope’s retirement party creates several interesting questions, with many subquestions, including:  What do you call him?  Is he still the Pope, or Pope Emeritus, or his ex-Holiness?  Apparently that’s settled.  He’ll still Benedict and will be called Pope Emeritus.  I’d just call him Cardinal Ratzinger and use Pope Emeritus only at formal functions, like we do with old campus deadwood.  His function will be similar—Universal Church instead of University X.

What will he do?  He’s too old for golf, although that Popemobile would make one bad-ass golf cart.  Maybe they’ll rehire him as a consultant, reducing his benefits (does the Vatican have something like Medicare?).  Is he still infallible?  If not, how can you go from being infallible to fallible?  Is there some kind of demotion carried down from God by one of those sexless archangels?  (Apparently, when angel Lucifer fell, he acquired sex—if you believe Rosemary’s Baby.)

I suppose the real worry for the new Pope will be how much the old Pope will meddle in Church affairs.  Let’s face it:  This is all new stuff.  Here this stodgy, traditional, and conservative gang of old men haven’t seen this kind of situation in almost six hundred years.  The College of Cardinals is an old boys club that’s not used to having more than one leader.  Talk about moving out of their comfort zone!  These guys aren’t used to new ideas, don’t like them, and almost always avoid them, and here comes old Ratzinger throwing his monkey wrench into the ancient machinery called the Vatican.

The Church moves as fast as a snail in hibernation.  Conservatives have an easy time there.  If some Pope shakes things up a bit (a few steps forward), the next guy that comes along moves back (even more steps backward).  Look how long it took them to apologize to Galileo.  I’m surprised they didn’t return to saying the Mass in Latin.  It’s all mumbo-jumbo anyway.  Sprinkling the holy water and adding to global warming with all that incense—oh, my allergies!—just reminds me of the shaman shaking his rattles.  Latin or English—what’s the difference?

And yet people find comfort in this symbolism.  It’s pretty gruesome when you stop to think about it.  In each Mass, you practice symbolic cannibalism by eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood.  Ugh!  CSI Vatican.  And they don’t even get the symbolism right.  Those nails weren’t through His palms.  No way He’s going to hang there on the cross suspended by nails in his palms.  Of course, it would be revolutionary if the Church possessed any historical accuracy at all.  Most people don’t care and most people don’t need it.

Revolutionary?  Nah.  The word doesn’t fit.  “Revolutionary Church” is an oxymoron.  It became an old boys club by banning the Gnostic gospels centuries ago, declaring the Magdalene a prostitute, and banning women from the priesthood.  Like Judaism and Islam, Christianity, as defined by the Catholic Church, is anti-feminist.  There’s a common tradition that treats women as property.  Just make more babies for the Church, old girl!

To climb in the Church’s hierarchy, you have to be a team player, of course.  Those radical priests who actually take care of their parishioners or work with the homeless, poor, and needy, they need not apply.  Cardinals are princes, and true royalty doesn’t get its hands dirty, no matter how many times they symbolically wash the feet of someone.  Through the ages, Church royalty has been a parallel career for those seeking power and riches.  It remains that way.  Let’s face it—the Vatican is a palace and the Pope is King over all Catholics.  It’s as simple as that.  Well, it’s more an oligarchy, I guess—the old boys club always elects one of their own.

Throughout the world and especially in the U.S., the Catholic Church is becoming irrelevant.  Surprisingly, many people still believe in God or, at least, some deity that puts sense and order into an otherwise chaotic Universe.  Even most churchgoers just go through the motions, knowing that the Church’s positions are retrograde tom-foolery.  Its positions on birth control, same-sex marriage, LGBT relationships, abortion, and many other things are largely ignored.  The priest spouts his fire and brimstone and the parishioner thinks, “Duly noted, and duly ignored.”  Maybe he lives with a bit of guilt, but he shouldn’t—no old man in the Vatican speaks for God, no matter what the Church says.  And you don’t become a Christian by kneeling in a cathedral any more than you would become a car by standing in a garage.

This is why the Pope’s retirement is so amusing.  Here’s a man, Cardinal Ratzinger, who has been elevated to Popehood, the most holy of holies in the Catholic Church, a superhuman, in some sense, being demoted back to being just a man.  It’s proof, as if we needed one, that he’s always just a man, and far from being infallible.  It is he who makes decisions, not God.  And he’s put in that position by a very political body full of self-important, arrogant people.

That reminds me of another reason the Church has become irrelevant—rampant perversion in the priesthood and its subsequent cover-ups.  It’s an ongoing scandal.  I smiled when ABC News was naming princes of the American Church who could be good candidates for the papacy.  Sean Patrick O’Malley, a Capuchin friar and Archbishop of Boston, was mentioned as a man who has sworn to poverty.  His predecessor was accused of covering up some of the afore-mentioned priestly shenanigans and received a posh job in Italy as a reward.  O’Malley then began the process of selling off Church property to pay for legal defenses.  That’s a nice way to achieve poverty, I guess, at the cost of the parishioners who donated great sums of money to build those churches the Boston Archdiocese took over.

It used to be that young priests would just fool around a bit with the nuns and leave it at that.  There didn’t seem to be so much pursuing altar boys.  The first could be solved by letting priests marry.  The second could be solved by allowing them to express their gayness, maybe (though, once a pedophile, always a pedophile?).  Of course, the Church will only achieve relevance the day it opens its doors to all people, even members of the LGBT community.  Another requirement for relevance is allowing women to become priests and members of the priesthood to marry.

Will reform come from the next Pope?  Not likely.  Will we  one day see a lesbian Pope?  I don’t think so.  Reform in the Church is so glacial that the Church will become extinct long before that happens.  The Magdalene might be smiling then.

And so it goes….

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 5th, 2013 at 4:00 am and is filed under Fundamentalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.