Ask A Catholic

I left the Church years ago (tried to go back a few years ago in the midst of a personal crisis and almost made it but I believe in a woman's right to choose, that is final, the Church and I will never see eye to eye on this) but used to teach the Catechism. I know there are plenty of Religious Education/CCD survivors here, too, happy to answer questions, because once you're Catholic, you love Catholicism forever in some way or another: it doesn't wash off. What do you want to know about our super-occult image-rich original-colonialist tradition? Ask away!

Oh oh I have a question!

Can you explain the Immaculate Conception a bit more? Like, how is that possible? How is it connected to St Anne being a saint?

The Catholicism Thread

schism!

was to be expected, really

lapsed catholic here, have no interest in going back.

girlfriend's at this point pretty much firmly outside the church (this was a gradual process) because of lots of things but mostly that same issue. but yeah it's never really gonna leave her. she tried briefly to be a unitarian (like p.j. funnybunny, the bunny who did not want to be a bunny) but that didn't work.

itt Alfred, Lord Sotosyn is Henry VIII...

have no interest in any organized religion. fucking daycare provider took my son to ash wednesday and had ashes put on him....NOT HAPPY.

Catholicism is for lyfe in a way that other denominations aren't. I am not a "lapsed Evangelical", for instance.

aerosmith,

Something I've always wondered about: Why do Catholics revere the symbol of the crucifix when a) it was just the most common Roman instrument used for putting people to death, and b) it was the method used to kill Jesus.

Dear AAC:

I was raised Anglican, mostly High Church style, was even an acolyte, let active belief fall away from me gradually and have been a fairly content agnostic since I was twenty or so. I've always wondered if my joke that being raised Anglican means you get all of the ceremonies of Catholicism but none of the Catholic guilt is true and from the sound of it it is (thus your opening words), I certainly don't remember any particular focus on the idea of guilt as intrinsic in my religious upbringing as such, and might explain why I found it so easy to let go. Is it something that is ingrained from the start in any/all Catholic religious instruction?

Yours,
The Guy Whose Dad is the Only Active Anglican In My Family Anymore

fuck that chris! "how about a separation, not so much between church and state but between my child's forehead and your ashy finger"

itt Alfred, Lord Sotosyn is Henry VIII...

I'd love to have been pope during this period.

apparently when my mom was little her dad would very occasionally bust out some wine for dinner and his line was always "tonight i thought we could be episcopalian"

I find the dis "cafeteria Catholic" hilarious, ie one can't pick & choose which dogma to embrace. Pretty much every Catholic does this, being human.

xpost -- Hero.

Something I've always wondered about: Why do Catholics revere the symbol of the crucifix when a) it was just the most common Roman instrument used for putting people to death, and b) it was the method used to kill Jesus.

You just answered your own questions! Seriously – we revel in masochism. The veneration (not worship) of the crucifix is a reminder of what Our Lord endured for our sakes.

repurposing of the crucifix is actually like in my top five favorite things about christianity

xpost -- Then Alfred why don't you do what they do in Orthodox ceremonies and stand up straight through three hour services?

yeah she was all "i washed them off". lady it ain't your right to do that.

I certainly don't remember any particular focus on the idea of guilt as intrinsic in my religious upbringing as such,

Maybe I was privileged in this regard, but as a Catholic school attendee for 12 years I never got the guilt. Maybe it was a post Vatican II phenomenon? My mom, however, got nothing but guilt.

Why do/did Christians hate Jews for killing Christ when He* had to die for our sins so that we can go to Heaven?

(*still a believer, so all pronouns capitalized...)

Then Alfred why don't you do what they do in Orthodox ceremonies and stand up straight through three hour services?

Because Fr. Frank forces us to say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys for masturbating in the bathroom.

I know that's not meant as a non-sequitur, and yet.

the whole ecce homo bit and he died for your sins is the main thing i took from going to church between the age of 3 or 4 and 15 or 16. crucifix probably the least inexplicable thing about the whole shennanigans.

catholics no longer believe that jews killed christ. apart from weird ones like mel gibo who go against the contemporary teaching of the church.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexually_active_popes#Suspected_to_have_had_male_lovers_during_pontificate

Lenny Bruce said Catholics would wear electric chairs around their necks if Jesus had been a 20th-century martyr.

xxxxp (*as if the switch from third- to first-person ("us") didn't already tip you off...)

Doesn't Mel Gibson follow an anti-pope?

i'm lapsed, but still feel like a catholic. I never got the political drubbing about abortion etc at my catholic school (which wasn't associated with a diocese and had very few people from the church involved in it). as a result I don't have that kind of grudge against the church. but knowing that is there makes me resist going back to it (even though I live in a really liberal area where I'm sure 75% of the catholics at the churches near me probably are not in line with traditional church thinking on this topic).

if i was going to let something temporal about the church bother me it would more be the endemic child fucking and covering-up there of than the backwards views on abortion that would piss me off.

but it's just the whole kit and kaboodle that i'm put off by so i needn't worry.

Christianity in general makes me so angry, Catholicism only even more so, I try not to be baited too often. But I also have a weird history of being a very serious-minded kid in a super Evangelical community with no outside influences to level me out, so it's not really the usual thing.

as a catholic school person for 12 i never got the guilt. again, prolly cuz i was thrown out of CCD in 8th grade for farting.

well here's what has always confused me about the crucifixion narrative. on one hand (and this obv varies by what gospel you're reading too) it's a negative account where Jesus either has to forgive the ppl killing him (they know not what they have done) or is in crisis (why have you forsaken me), etc. but in other accounts or maybe other hermeneutical traditions it is a very positive event and he died for humanity's sins, or his death was a gift to us (in its atonement), etc. so re the second interpretation it makes sense that you'd wear a crucifix (maybe. it was still a very common event to be crucified so it doesn't seem like a great grower as a symbol of a new religion -- tho i imagine without any historical background in this area that probably the icon emerged long enough after the Roman empire that this didn't appear to be so bizarre). has the first account (despite being canonized primarily in Mark) mostly been ignored in the main Catholic narrative or what?

Also I tried to find things to carry with me, maybe just from the "spiritual practice" side of what I was taught, but I feel more and more certain as time passes that there's absolutely nothing salvageable there.

"forgiveness" a pretty good one i thought but w/ever

(i have the kinda-luxury of having been brought up Nothing so everything looks way better to me than it does to people who were brought up Something)

Mordy, one of the motives behind adopting the crucifix WAS its commonness and lowliness. It was the death of thieves and murders and rapists, the lowest thing that Our Lord could be subjected to. This is common across all Christianity, I think -- not specific to Catholics, although the rest of us don't portray the human form on the cross in our iconography.

xxxp I think it's the being rose again after three days that turns the crucifixion into a victory:

on one hand (and this obv varies by what gospel you're reading too) it's a negative account where Jesus either has to forgive the ppl killing him (they know not what they have done) or is in crisis (why have you forsaken me), etc. but in other accounts or maybe other hermeneutical traditions it is a very positive event and he died for humanity's sins, or his death was a gift to us (in its atonement), etc

these all go together and are not contradictory:

he forgives the people killing him -his followers, the crowd who choose barabas etc.- because he is the ever forgiving christ-god who dies for us in order to wash away our original sin even though we've gone against him and aren't worthy of such a sacrific.

he is in crisis because, although divine, he is human and wrestles with his predicament and torture until reaching acceptance and understanding of it.

xxp yeah iirc (and maybe i do not rc) the crucifix was in use as a symbol from the religion's earliest beginnings as a roman cult. it is a really neat defiant thing, i think! and what laurel says about connecting the holiness of the godhead to the lowliness of the lowest is also def true.

yeah and also don't underestimate the attraction of sheer maudlin morbidity

oh man I got onto other stuff and now there's a lot of questions

Something I've always wondered about: Why do Catholics revere the symbol of the crucifix when a) it was just the most common Roman instrument used for putting people to death, and b) it was the method used to kill Jesus.

well, it's not just Catholics - that's all Christians. Crosses everywhere. It's a paradox, kind of your classic Jesus paradox: Jesus came to save you. You love him for that, right? Assuming you accept that you were damned & were likely going to Hell, this Dude came to take your place, because He loved you exactly as you were, warts and all. You on your worst day, He still loves that person enough to die in his place. Presumably you love Him back for that, but He has to die to accomplish the work of grace. So the cross on which He dies in transformed into an instrument of triumph; the instrument of His demise becomes the sign by which those redeemed by Him recognize one another and gain comfort and fellowship.

this is not a specifically Catholic teaching but it's the cross as I understand it.

NB I do not still actually believe much of this but I'm willing to offer defences as long as people don't talk like "oh ua believes all this stuff," I don't, I'm just intimate with it

The English theologian John Bale attributed to Pope Sixtus "the authorisation to practice sodomy during periods of warm weather."

i'm hazy on this but i think the cross took a while to really take off as The Symbol of the church. the fish was the 'sign' among believers for a good long time

xp Didn't you know? Anal keeps you cool.

I actually see more people with fish pendants and fish symbols on cars than crosses and crucifixes.

evangelicals love all the 'early church' stuff

btw sodomy /= anal

i mean, i'd rather sit on a pillar in the syrian desert than live in a dallas exurb myself

xp

I was raised Anglican, mostly High Church style, was even an acolyte, let active belief fall away from me gradually and have been a fairly content agnostic since I was twenty or so. I've always wondered if my joke that being raised Anglican means you get all of the ceremonies of Catholicism but none of the Catholic guilt is true and from the sound of it it is (thus your opening words), I certainly don't remember any particular focus on the idea of guilt as intrinsic in my religious upbringing as such, and might explain why I found it so easy to let go. Is it something that is ingrained from the start in any/all Catholic religious instruction?

Catholic guilt is tradition. It does make intuitive sense to my indwelling Catholic: the Holy Family suffered as they did for me, but how grateful am I really, in my daily life? Not very. I'm more interested in myself. That's my nature, and I don't do much to overcome it or transcend it. But the saints show me that I could, if I really cared. Hence, guilt!

Lots of straights don't understand that though. Fortunately in Catholic school I learned what constituted sodomy since it was all non-procreative sex anyway.

xxxp can include anal sex

I actually see more people with fish pendants and fish symbols on cars than crosses and crucifixes.

that may be, but in hoc signi vincis iirc

Alfred, if you were Philip K. Dick & saw those fish symbols, you would be transported back to the first century, and a pink light would tell you about your son's birth defects

goole right, wiki sez, but the cross was still around early:

During the first two centuries of Christianity, the cross may have been rare in Christian iconography, as it depicts a purposely painful and gruesome method of public execution. The Ichthys, or fish symbol, was used by early Christians. The Chi-Rho monogram, which was adopted by Constantine I in the 4th century as his banner (see labarum), was another Early Christian symbol of wide use.

However, the cross symbol was already associated with Christians in the 2nd century, as is indicated in the anti-Christian arguments cited in the Octavius of Minucius Felix, chapters IX and XXIX, written at the end of that century or the beginning of the next,[2] and by the fact that by the early 3rd century the cross had become so closely associated with Christ that Clement of Alexandria, who died between 211 and 216, could without fear of ambiguity use the phrase τὸ κυριακὸν σημεῖον (the Lord's sign) to mean the cross

If my sister's experiences in the mid nineties are any indication, Catholic schools are feebler institutions than they were in the fifties and sixties.

no more nuns to run them

oh that's for sure. it's the one thing that i kind of mourn about the slow death of the catholic hierarchy.

Why do/did Christians hate Jews for killing Christ when He* had to die for our sins so that we can go to Heaven?

The Sanhedrin, "an assembly of twenty-three judges appointed in every city in the Biblical Land of Israel" as Wikipedia handily puts it, handed Christ over to Pilate to be crucified. The race stuff in all this is way too dense for me to really parse without making an utter ass of myself, but, speaking from a how-it-seems-to-me position rather than a doctrinal position here, it seems like Christians (including Catholics over the ages) think of Christ as a Jew-who-passes. He's not really a Jew, because the Jews persecuted Him. Yes I know this is profoundly fucked up, but I do think that's how anti-semitic Xians think of the matter.

"lay teachers"

Who'd'a thunk it? That Catholicism would be the Hot Topic of the Day on ILE? Next thing you know it will be declared DaVinci Code Day on I Love Books.

Can you explain the Immaculate Conception a bit more? Like, how is that possible? How is it connected to St Anne being a saint?

It's possible because of grace. Pius IX institutes the doctrine in 1854: "In the first instance of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin." From newadvent.org, further explanation:

The term conception does not mean the active or generative conception by her parents. Her body was formed in the womb of the mother, and the father had the usual share in its formation. The question does not concern the immaculateness of the generative activity of her parents. Neither does it concern the passive conception absolutely and simply (conceptio seminis carnis, inchoata), which, according to the order of nature, precedes the infusion of the rational soul. The person is truly conceived when the soul is created and infused into the body. Mary was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin at the first moment of her animation, and sanctifying grace was given to her before sin could have taken effect in her soul.

Not only did the Sanhedrin hand him over, but Pilate also gave the crowd a chance to save one of the convicted, and they chose to have Barabbus, a "bandit", freed instead.

VERY INTERESTINGLY, wiki has just told me that "bandit" is one translation, but that "insurrectionary" or "revolutionary" is another one. So perhaps the interpretation is that the Jews who voted for Barabbus betrayed Christ by picking the WRONG revolutionary/the wrong version of their future??

Meanwhile, leave it to the Onion for timing (unless this is what prompted the threads):

http://www.theonion.com/articles/pope-to-ease-up-on-jesus-talk,19727/

xp it's cos of paddy's day tomorrow

Yeah, it was Mary who was a virgin at the time of Jesus' conceptions. Anne and Joachim definitely porked.

the wiki summary sort of implies the doctrine of the IC was a little bit political:

From early on in the history of the Catholic Church, in numerous places in the writings of the Church Fathers, the belief is implicitly stated.[citation needed] In various places the feast of the Immaculate Conception had been celebrated for centuries on 8 December when, on 28 February 1476, Pope Sixtus IV[6] extended it to the entire Latin Church. He did not define the doctrine as a dogma, thus leaving Roman Catholics free to believe in it or not without being accused of heresy; this freedom was reiterated by the Council of Trent. However, the feast was a strong indication of the Church's traditional belief in the Immaculate Conception.[7][8] On 6 December 1708 Pope Clement XI decreed that the feast of the Immaculate Conception be a Holy Day of Obligation.[9] throughout the entire Catholic Church.

The Immaculate Conception was solemnly defined as a dogma by Pope Pius IX in his constitution Ineffabilis Deus on 8 December 1854.[10] The Catholic Church teaches that the dogma is supported by Scripture (e.g., Mary's being greeted by the Angel Gabriel as "full of grace") as well as either directly or indirectly by the writings of Church Fathers such as Irenaeus of Lyons and Ambrose of Milan.[11][12] Catholic theology maintains that since Jesus became incarnate of the Virgin Mary, it was fitting that she be completely free of sin for expressing her fiat.[13] In 1904 Pope Saint Pius X also addressed the issue in his Marian encyclical Ad Diem Illum on the Immaculate Conception.[14]

check them dates!

"expressing her fiat"

oh well if ambrose had her checked out first then i guess i believe

any takers on the alternate view of virgin as a mistranslation from the hebrew? i always found that interesting.

oh and i am like a catholic once removed or something - raised atheist but oh man never to be mentioned around my irish catholic grandmother. who was awesome btw, so i figure catholicism is aok. also radical nuns are the coolest shit ever. ok then.

I find it interesting too. It's was supposedly maiden or something and not virgin, right?

maiden is a virgin?

by definition I think it just means unmarried

The whole virgin vs maiden vs maid thing is v confusing. Really it used to just be a young unmarried woman. I think for a very long time there wasn't necessarily a connotation that she was also sexually pure!

p sure 'maiden' suggests virgin but that the mistranslation suggested only 'young woman' or somesuch

"Several distressed correspondents have queried the mistranslation of 'young woman' into 'virgin' in the biblical prophecy, and have demanded a reply from me. Hurting religious sensibilities is a perilous business these days so I had better oblige. Actually, it is a pleasure, for scientists can't often get satisfyingly dusty in the library indulging in a real academic foot-note. The point is in fact well known to biblical scholars, and not disputed by them. The Hebrew word in Isaiah is (almah), which undisputedly means 'young woman', with no implication of virginity. If 'virgin' had been intended (bethulah) could have been used instead (the ambiguous English word 'maiden' illustrates how easy it can be to slide between the two meanings). The 'mutation' occurred when the pre-Christian Greek translation known as the Septuagint rendered almah into ... (parthenos), which really does usually mean virgin. Matthew (not, of course, the Apostle and contemporary of Jesus, but the gospel-maker writing long afterwards), quoted Isaiah in what seems to be a derivative of the Septuagint version (all but two of the fifteen Greek words are identical) when he said Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, 'Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel' (Authorised English translation). It is widely accepted among Christian scholars that the story of the virgin birth of Jesus was a late interpolation, put in presumably by Greek-speaking disciples in order that the (mistranslated) prophecy should be seen to be fulfilled. Modern versions such as the New English Bible correctly give 'young woman' in Isaiah. They equally correctly leave 'virgin' in Matthew, since there they are translating from the Greek."

Yeah - it was young woman - my b.

i forgive u

VERY INTERESTINGLY, wiki has just told me that "bandit" is one translation, but that "insurrectionary" or "revolutionary" is another one. So perhaps the interpretation is that the Jews who voted for Barabbus betrayed Christ by picking the WRONG revolutionary/the wrong version of their future??

Use this site or this one to cross-reference any claims made on wikipedia regarding this sort of thing imo. Wikipedia tends to slant a bit on any given day. Number of different translations of Mark 15:7.

btw in case the Holy Father is reading this thread I apologize for reading the Bible

again btw in re: virgin vs. maiden the Church very conveniently regards tradition as one of the ways that God speaks to us. So if an early translator happened to say παρθένος for עלמה that was God's hand telling us more about the story

Yeah dude everyone knows Catholics don't read the the Bible. What are you doing? x-post

I'm not sure what your point is, aero, because pretty much all of those translations confirm that Barabbas was an "insurrectionary" and had been involved in an uprising in which some murders were committed, although they differ on whether he was a murderer or just involved with a gang or rebel group who were accused jointly.

Which is still interesting to me because I was only taught that he was a robber and murderer when in fact neither is proven and one isn't even suggested.

@ ENBB when I was getting my training to teach Catechism I had a Bible question and I asked this young priest whose weekly homilies were pretty heavily Get Back To Tradition stuff and his answer, hand to God, was: "Why do you need to know?"

hahaha

well Laurel take this one:

English Standard Version (©2001)
And among the rebels in prison, who had committed murder in the insurrection, there was a man called Barabbas.

vs this one:

New Living Translation (©2007)
One of the prisoners at that time was Barabbas, a revolutionary who had committed murder in an uprising.

To "rebel," in the tradition, is to be against God. To be a revolutionary, that's another matter.

What is this, pick the examples we like day?

Bible in Basic English
And there was one named Barabbas, in prison with those who had gone against the government and in the fight had taken life.

American Standard Version
And there was one called Barabbas, lying bound with them that had made insurrection, men who in the insurrection had committed murder.

I'm reading this as, he was a rebel against the Roman system and was in jail primarily as a political prisoner. Which is why I posited that he might have represented a more earthly kind of victory for the Jews under Roman rule.

But I mean you are reading that based on your reading of various translations. That's in the nature of Biblical exegesis: you have the text, and you have the translation, and you have your own beliefs, and you make your interpretation based on a confluence of those three. If you're Catholic, you add in the fourth & overriding matter of tradition.

I just set up those two to show that there are several readings. And even if we all spoke Esperanto, there would be many ways of "reading"/interpreting. Absent the author here to tell us what he meant, and absent a completle documentary view of the circumstances, we're going to be interpreting and bringing our own biases to the table. That is why we need the Church to guide us.

Dude I'm not saying the Catholic Church ever needed more excuses to be anti-Semitic. Just noting a gloss that was never presented to me before.

I was raised Roman Catholic, which let me tell you, is somewhat of an exotic religion in The South. In my rural small town, my whole class was WASP except for me, the other Catholic and the Jewish guy. (And we all still qualified for the WAS part, at any rate.)

Once, my family was in Memphis and Mom found a Catholic church in the Yellow Pages that we could hit for Mass. We drove around looking for the place and finally saw a parking lot with filled with people in their Sunday best. Mom rolled down the window and asked one of them, "Is this a Catholic church?" The fellow looked up and down the street, shrugged his shoulders and replied, "I don't think you're going to find any others!"

my ex-boss is a Catholic from Mississippi. he's also gay. he had a very fun childhood.

I was raised Roman Catholic, which let me tell you, is somewhat of an exotic religion in The South.

The church I occasionally attend here is Catholic but few of the trappings of Catholicism are readily apparent. It also makes reference to the middle passage in the hymnal, which gave me pause to reflect how far I am now from where I grew up

how soon do we get to "Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute"?

"The middle passage" as in the slave trade?

how soon do we get to "Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute"?

"Now Barabbas was a robber."

Can't understand Protestantism. If you wanna believe in God, you might as well go whole hog and accept rituals: beautiful robes, saints, stained glass windows, feast days, and pedophile priests.

― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, March 16, 2011 12:08 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

Lots of things in the Church comes to us through Legend and Tradition though – that's precisely what upset Protestants.

― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, March 16, 2011 12:18 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

not to pick on Alfred or anything, because these sentiments seem pretty common among ex-catholics, but, ok i'm going to play capt save-a-prot itt for a second.

what upset protestants (and remember, being "upset with the church" was a state of being that preceded Protestantism) wasn't the weight placed on Legend but on authority. the money pissed people off, not the mysticism, but they issued from the same space -- the authority the church had arrogated to itself to determine what 'tradition' meant, and then grounding that authority in that very tradition. pretty convenient in worldly affairs, but kind of a bitch to deal with if you're the type to really care about the course of your own soul and the livelihood of your community.

what's funny is how Protestantism didn't really have to exist! it might not, had the church of Luther's day (which was also Michaelangelo and Leonardo's day, i always forget) wasn't truly rotten. they could have been another academic clique.

what's amazing and hilarious about about Protestantism (and all theology really) to me is how obviously it stems from the daily life (read: economics) of its community. Protestant thinking is intensely economical. it is about doing what is necessary to achieve what is asked of you and not acceding to any demands to do more. "i will get into heaven and no you aren't getting a fucking cent from me for it." this doesn't mean it's easy. i remember stuff in confirmation classes about conscience and the truth thereof that was almost confucian in its severity.

once you have decided that that jesus, himself, is sufficient for salvation, then "the rest" ie. the whole church hierarchy, the robes, praying to saints, even the idea of "acting" on your own behalf, becomes not only pointless but basically evil. and the church was evil at the time they cooked this up so it seemed to make sense...

"The middle passage" as in the slave trade?

as in vagina

xpost: goole, you knew I was partly kidding, right? I wasn't calling for nailing Martin Luther himself on the door of Wittenberg.

but I love robes

"The middle passage" as in the slave trade?

yes, and I think making jokes about this term is completely over the line. few things in history that give evidence of man's capacity for ignoring his fellow man's suffering as the middle passage

Wallace Stevens said it best re the romance of ritual:

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

this is my favorite catholic thingy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod

if yer going to go whole hog on ceremony, robes, incense, mad religious paintings and stuff ... the Eastern Orthodox have every other branch of Christianity beat on that count.

of course, you have to stand for like a zillion hours during an Eastern Orthodox liturgy service ...

100 years from now I'm going to start "taking sides: Wallace Stevens vs. Jean Valentine" & if yr honest Alfred the choice will cause you genuine existential angst

lol alfred i know it was a joke, you just happened to say the things i felt like arguing against :)

Let's discuss this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marozia

uh woah cadaver trial!

man the dark ages were wild and awesome. i think they get a bad rap, too.

i think you're prob right

"Pornocracy"!

is there another institution currently in existence that can date itself back 2000 years basically continuously?

man the dark ages were wild and awesome. i think they get a bad rap, too.

― goole, Wednesday, March 16, 2011 4:11 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah for real. there needs to be more movies about this era, or hbo series or something.

The Friars Club

xp

would kill for a GOOD miniseries about pre-renaissance rome, or the crusades, or the black death, or something

YES

http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2010/02/fall-of-west-death-of-roman-superpower.html

cool bloggy book review of a recent history of the dark ages

i want to get some plague doktors on my tv

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Stephen_VI

YESSSSS

err x-post

theres something pretty amazing about maintaining a 2000-year contiguity, mostly that you end up with amazing shit like the cadaver synod

My god this is great:

Sergius III was a pope of the Roman Catholic Church 29 January 904 and 14 April 911. Because Sergius III was possibly the only pope known to have ordered the murder of another pope and the only pope to have fathered an illegitimate son who later became pope (John XI), his pontificate has been described as "dismal and disgraceful."[1]
Sergius was the son of Benedictus and came from a noble Roman family. His tenure was part of a period of feudal violence and disorder in central Italy, when the Papacy was a pawn of warring aristocratic factions, often led by prominent women.

The pontificate of Sergius III, according to Liutprand of Cremona, was remarkable for the rise of what papal historians saw as a "pornocracy", or "rule of the harlots", a reversal of the natural order as they saw it, according to Liber pontificalis and a later chronicler who was also biased against Sergius III. This "pornocracy" was an age with women in power: Theodora, whom Liutprand characterized as a "shameless whore... [who] exercised power on the Roman citizenry like a man" and her daughter Marozia, the mother of Pope John XI (931–935) and reputed to be the mistress of Sergius III, largely upon a remark by Liutprand

i think the crusades are already pretty 'late' to be talking about the dark ages

xtianisation of rome, battle of milvian bridge: 312
fall of rome: 476, traditionally
arrival of islam: 600s
great schism: 1054
first crusade: 1096

anything that happened between like 500 and 1000 is this weird blur

basically anything between the fall of rome and giotto i find pretty fascinating, on both sides of the schism. the byzantines/ottomans were pretty raw too!

you know what could use a sick multi-part HBO/BBC/canal+ miniseries is the history of venice

does "Pippin" count as a story about the early/mid Dark Ages?

in From Dawn to Decadence Jacques Barzun tried to rewrite our understanding of the Dark Ages – says the nomenclature is based on clichés. A fabulous book, by the way, if sketchy in places.

also, some of the pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon kings seem pretty neat -- esp. Alfred the Great. Venerable Bede is also a favorite. as long as there's no King Arthur/Camelot shit tied in, i think that some sort of miniseries about British kings of that era could be well done.

yeah for real. there needs to be more movies about this era, or hbo series or something

saw this movie, it kicks ASS:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1181791/

Seconding Alfred on the Barzun recommendation -- read most of it one long agonizing day stuck waiting in jury duty and it was one hell of the way to pass the time.

i really wanted to like Black Death - bean, warner, plague, how can u go wrong - but it failed to grip me tbh

one of the great things about the inferno is the volume of popes down there

this might be my favorite thing from the period

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazars#Conversion_of_the_royalty_and_aristocracy_to_Judaism_and_relations_with_world_Jewry

http://www.khazaria.com/kuzari/excerpts.html

basic story is that a powerful king asks the philosophers, rabbis, priests and imams to pitch him on upgrading their shamanic tradition and he goes with turning his whole kingdom jewish

i really wanted to like Black Death - bean, warner, plague, how can u go wrong - but it failed to grip me tbh

man I loved it - the pacing, and the village, the righteousness of the speeches, the whole predictable-but-killer moral-equivalency stuff - adore that flick

note that hunting around for 'khazars' and judaism online can get you into some creepy nazi shit :/

xp did you guys like valhalla rising? i was really into it but haven't finished it

I really, really love the story of the Khazars, it's something else. Michael Chabon did a pretty good serialized story with that as the setting.

That kazars thing is REAL?? I thought it was made up as part of that stupid book with a women's version and a men's version?!?

+h, sorry.

just read Pope Joan which was a riff off the 'female pope' fable that was mentioned in the Marozia wiki entry: it was a decent read, though nothing mindblowing...

basically i am looking to watch fantasy TV series but set in irl

basically I want a Marozia biopic in the style of Caligula, and written by Gore Vidal, of course.

high hopes for this jeremy irons thing about the borgias, though obviously thats later than im talking

I think there is a character in Pope Joan called Marozia who is a courtesan for elite clients...

...but there's nothing as crazy as the pornocracy in that book!

i want a huge biopic on this guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_the_apostate

Gore Vidal's novel is terrific, as is the Gibbon chapter devoted to him.

dear aero,
Could electroconvulsive therapy possibly help people get over religious upbringing, even if it's only temporary relief? And if so, can I buy a taser, write it off as a medical expense, and set up a mobile ECT/deprogramming practice?
thanks,

WmC, I can't speak to religious upbringing outside of the Catholic tradition. I would say just as a guy who's had a lot of therapy is that "getting over" is a concept best worth tabling. The way forward in my experience is seldom over or around but through. #wouldhavemadeagreatnewageguru

hmph, still wanna tase me some xtians

dear catholics

am I cool to love this awesome book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melmoth_the_Wanderer and still kiw you guys

sincerely

if it helps I am a notable Gerard Manley Hopkins stan

this isn't really a catholic question, but since we're here . . .

four days can be a long time, i guess, but i've never grasped the transition from jc's heralded and popular entry into jerusalem on palm sunday followed by jeering crowds calling for his death on good friday. is this a compression of a longer stretch of time that i missed? were friday's crowds hired goons rounded up by the pharisees?

on palm sunday night they went home tired and a bit sunburned and they laid down with their ugly spouses in front of their ugly children and looked at their loser lives and then they looked at jc and they said "I can't process it".

^^^

Lol and OTM

lotm

Opinion's about Andres Serrano's work notwithstanding, is there something funny about the destruction of Piss Christ by a sect whose whole graven images policy is a little bit off in the first place?

I'm watching a marathon of Jesus/Church-themed stuff on the History Channel, and it's really incredible to me how the Da Vinci Code so thoroughly altered the tone of broader public discussion about the church to a de facto stance of 'what are they hiding??'

Has anybody else noticed this?? NB never read da vinci code

there was some other stuff that happened in the last decade besides the da vinci code that might make some people think the church is hiding things

hahahah fair enough

And it's maybe worth noting that I'm watching the History Channel which mainly seems to focus on giving face time to JFK truthers.

"Pope Pious sent a stone to Washington to be used in the Washington Monument--on its arrival in the District of Columbia, an anti-Catholic mob defaced the stone and hurled it into the Potomac River."

O_O

Opinion's about Andres Serrano's work notwithstanding, is there something funny about the destruction of Piss Christ by a sect whose whole graven images policy is a little bit off in the first place?

To be honest I think Piss Christ is a symbol of the Church's failure to engage the late 20th century adequately, because I consider it a pious work: the point of Piss Christ is not "lol Jesus in piss." It's actually imo a realization of one of the paradoxes at the core of the teachings, one of the most profound mysteries: God not "in human form" but in this body, the exact same one you walk & talk & breathe & piss & shit & spit & ejaculate with every day, the one that feels pain and feels pleasure and feels relief when it rests and strain when it's burdened. Because no amount of "no, he took on human form" is really the same as confronting the waste products of the body. Christ does not shit in the gospels. He eats once or twice, but the gospels sort of leave it to the reader to grasp the totality of what's being claimed by their authors: not "God in a man's body." Not "God having condescended to occupy a human frame." God and man.

Piss Christ is a Catholic work; a sad enduring irony of the age is that the very people who ought to be celebrating it hate it because their Augustinian heritage commands them thus.

john have you ever seen sister wendy talk about piss christ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9pAKdkJh-Y

(she reads it differently than you do, but even so)

I'm watching a marathon of Jesus/Church-themed stuff on the History Channel, and it's really incredible to me how the Da Vinci Code so thoroughly altered the tone of broader public discussion about the church to a de facto stance of 'what are they hiding??'

this kinda doesn't matter - the Church plays the long game & has endured much more organized efforts than a bunch of pop-lit readers goin OMIGOD CONSPIRACY!, these people will be distracted by Sarah Palin soon enough

xp @max no I hadn't heard that until now - she is incredible, it is hard for me to listen to her because I'm estranged from the Church and she makes me remember what I loved about it - her take isn't mine in re: Piss Christ, but it's a good one I think, and her bit on the body, her counter-Augustine riff, is unbelievable - Franciscan to my way of thinking

John, the post up here with your take on Piss Christ should seriously be framed and go on a wall, thanks for sharing that beautiful insight.

On Monday, the Vatican will release a document on the reform of the international financial system which will be to the left of every politician in the United States. It will be closer to views of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement than anyone in the U.S. Congress. It will call for the redistribution of wealth and the regulation of the world economy by international agencies....

In his 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth), Pope Benedict calls for a radical rethinking of economics so that it is guided not simply by profits but by “an ethics which is people-centered.”

Profit is not an end in itself but a means toward the common good. “Once profit becomes the exclusive goal,” he writes, “if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.”

...While Benedict acknowledges the role of the market, he emphasizes that “the social doctrine of the Church has unceasingly highlighted the importance of distributive justice and social justice for the market economy.” He unflinchingly supports the “redistribution of wealth” when he talks about the role of government. “Grave imbalances are produced,” he writes, “when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution.”

http://www.ourdailythread.org//content/vatican-issue-radical-document-economy-thomas-j-reese-sj

wau

nice. I was actually thinking recently that the left need to get more of the religious on their side this time around. probably can't win without 'em

haha sister mary k-lo @ nro/the corner will have to twist herself into a pretzel trying to square this w/republican ideology

Yeah, can't wait for that.

This is probably a dangerous view in America, it's not popular. Even Catholic churches in America cater to their demographic.

This is actually not new re what popes have been saying for decades, it's just generally ignored in favor of sex-and-reprod issues.

tbf, what popes have been saying vs what popes have been doing, on either issue

are you saying the Pope is on the board of Goldman Sachs?

I go to church and they say vote about abortion, never about justice issues the Pope speaks to. I have to wonder if this is simply because some affluent Catholic church members spout a lot of conservative bull and this just makes them uncomfortable.

yes

he can't get most of his co-religionists to listen to him except when they want to.

ah, democracy

Yes, distributism has actually been Catholic orthodoxy for nearly a century, and there've been papal encyclicals and agitation by the faith's intellectual leaders (Chesterton was an eloquent advocate).* But I think the degree to which it emerges in American (or indeed Irish) Catholic sermonising is very much hostage to the fact that American (and Irish) Catholicism are both currently facing unprecedentedly mobilised demands for democratic accountability to their actual-factual local congregations, so that anti-war or anti-capitalist pronouncement are maybe getting undermined by all the sex stuff especially. (Garry Wills used to write a lot about this, but I haven't seen anything much recently.)

*It's the root source of the Blairite "Third Way", also, I think...

the left has this facepalm habit of openly being like lol religion ha ha ha we can do without those fusty antiquities! magic snakes amirite! zombies! without realizing that the right does exactly the same thing (in that they pragmatically jettison all the commie love-and-charity stuff and just leave in the key bits about killing gays) without actually making the boneheaded move of telling everybody. the left should be the party of religion and the right should have spent the last forty years in the outer darkness trying to justify its psychopathic new faith where compassion is the primary sin; instead they've been allowed to invert the central moral assumptions of thousands of years of religion and thought while still being able to straightfacedly call themselves "conservative" because at least they don't think women should be allowed to make decisions.

(and yeah part of why they've been able to do this is the weird calvinist nature of american religion in the first place, but maybe right-wing christianity wouldn't seem like the only option if the left hadn't arrogantly decided that it was totally unnecessary to appeal to the religious, i guess under the leninist impression that in the enlightened future they won't be around?)

so then you get something like the above papal announcement, which is really cool and everything but which the left is in no position to gain from because they've already alienated all the people who would listen.

i think theyve alienated those people a lot more by supporting same-sex marriage and lesbian soldiers and forced gay adoption than they have by being sort of snide about religion. but i dont know which left were talking about--there arent a lot of atheists holding higher office!

american politicians are required to profess faith the way they're required to wear ties, but even the Democrats (who yeah are not what i mean by the left -- i mean the left that's been cast out entirely from american politics and just mopes around university departments now) don't put religion to the political use that their opponents do; they've given up on it. and yes, all those social policies alienated the people to whom christianity mostly meant "gays and abortion are bad", but there was no alternative model on offer -- partly, no doubt, because it was the rightist interpretation of the faith that had the backing of business and of the making-a-comeback politicians subservient to business, but i think also because there was no resistance to it at all; the social democrats seemed to assume there was just no reaching these people.

if theres no alternative model on offer--which i dont think is strictly true but--why is that the fault of the left? not sure i buy the idea that 'the left' and 'the right' and 'business' drive religious belief...

maybe im misunderstanding you but it seems weird to say that the reason there isnt a strong christian left is the left's habit of dismissing religion--seems to me that there is a lot, like a LOT more going on--

like enough other stuff going on that college professors dismissive attitudes toward religion dont really enter into it

how big is this christian left demographic that supports samesex marriage and evolution

(I know a few but I'm genuinely curious)

a few weeks ago several of us discussed in another thread the church's role in the abortion wars and why the congregation seems to be more in lockstep with the clergy on this issue than, say, the death penalty or war. here's an very interesting and readable (and lengthy) excerpt from a book (which, on the title alone and from what i've read of this excerpt so far, i should probably buy) published this past january on the social mission of the church that deals with a lot of that:

http://ncronline.org/news/politics/us-catholic-bishops-and-abortion-legislation

difficult listening hour - yeah totally otm, perfectly put. I actually grew up around mostly left-of-center and moderate Christians, and there are a lot more of them than people realize. Right Wingers just do a very successful job of creating the sense that most christians actually buy into their totally un-Christ-like, Calvinist-y prosperity gospel bullshit, which has a lot more to do with this weird American perversion of post-Enlightenment values than actual Christianity

difficult listening hour - yeah totally otm, perfectly put. I actually grew up around mostly left-of-center and moderate Christians, and there are a lot more of them than people realize. Right Wingers just do a very successful job of creating the sense that most christians actually buy into their totally un-Christ-like, Calvinist-y prosperity gospel bullshit, which has a lot more to do with this weird American perversion of post-Enlightenment values than actual Christianity

otm - the Church isn't Bill Donohue either

there were a bunch of guys at OWS handing out info on distributionism, about which the more i learn the more i dig

which the left is in no position to gain from because they've already alienated all the people who would listen.

― occupy the A train (difficult listening hour), Sunday, October 23, 2011 3:26 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

i don't think this is completely true

it's largely true tho Hoos I think

guys

this proclamation is useless
the jews have all the money
and they don't listen to il papa iirc

well they should b/c god talks to him

did anybody read my link it was very enlightening

i'm mid-wormhole at this point but this is also a pretty awesome read, who is this hillary hammel person she seems really smart

http://catholicmoraltheology.com/the-princeton-abortion-conference-one-year-later-guest-post-by-reproductive-justice-activist-hilary-hammell/

sorry i went out and it kept getting to be a longer trip!

yeah max of course you're right the conflict between the whole tradition of social liberty and the habitual repression of organized religion is a forever-old thing and did not start in 1970. and i was being glib about "liberal" snobbery towards religion (which tbf is not just restricted to the college professors, depending on where you live), but the complaint stands: i wish that the social left in this country, meaning the ones who don't subscribe to the nihilistic individualist cult we've invented, felt comfortable with? were willing to invoke? the pretty central and saleable tenants of christianity (and pretty much every other religion) re: compassion/class equity/escape from bondage to anything like the same degree that the cultists are willing to invoke its tenants re: repression and prejudice.

but then of course you could say that the repressive and prejudicial aspects of religion are always easier to organize around politically because they're the more reliable qualities of people, and that they're in the religions because of who we are whereas the compassion stuff is more aspirational. but you can get people whipped up about it still! i guess i wish that there were more religious demagogues on the left. at least trying. like tolstoy! instead we just have michael moore, who talks about his religious "upbringing" like he's brandishing an ID; christopher hitchens, who's suddenly decided at the end of his life that anti-god is the battle that most needs fighting; and a bunch of politicians who dutifully confirm that they go to church and then change the subject. maybe there's no Market for the other kind.

oh i do think business drives religious belief though, just like religious belief drives business; calvinism+its descendants and western european free enterprise are really intertwined and they pushed each other in the 1600s and they're still pushing each other now. but there's a whole other tradition we could have that i wish the left would try to develop.

HOWEVER i should own up to knowing this: in russia in the 1870s/80s there was this whole movement where urban student radicals got devoutly christian and went out into the country in a whole "To The People Movement" where they tried to convince the peasants (the barely-better-off post-serfs, whom americans are natch way better educated than and way more rich than in terms of stuff owned but whom they are coming within striking distance of on the misery front) that they were being abused and exploited and that their oppressors were violating the teachings of jesus, and the response they tended to get was that it was indeed hard to be a peasant and life was full of unnecessary suffering but at least they could be thankful for the tsar. so this stuff is difficult i guess.

First word from the Corner: ignore this pope fella, he's out of touch.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/281099/catholics-finance-and-perils-conventional-wisdom-samuel-gregg#more

waiting for William F Buckley to chime in from Hell.

ha

raising taxes? Even Bill Clinton thinks that’s not a great idea

btw, this "rebel nun" from L.A. who died a couple weeks ago, Anita Caspary, was a fascinating figure:

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/16/local/la-me-anita-caspary-20111016

god did i really say "tenants" twice up there when i meant tenets

These guys have been popping up at occupy camps:

http://protestchaplains.blogspot.com/

I did run into one lady in her clerical robes on Sunday last week, walking about the Portland camp offering communion to anyone who'd receive it.

yeah we've got a methodist dude who comes and leads interfaith services every day which is awesome

This belongs in two threads but I thought this bit here from an article about the group deserved mention:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2011/10/10/occupy-wall-street-protest-chaplains_n_1004112.html

On Sunday (Oct. 9), a diverse group of New York religious leaders marched to Zuccotti Square carrying a handmade golden calf fashioned to resemble the iconic bull statue near the New York Stock Exchange.

do any of y'all say "happy good friday"? is that a thing?

also raise your hand if you observed meatless fridays all throughout lent!

*does not raise hand not even a little bit*

I say "Have a Good Friday," and then I wink really hard.

I'm just glad I don't have to try to bargain with Mum anymore about what exactly constitutes 'no meat'

we tried to convince her to let us to have Dim Sims with our fish & chips but she wouldn't budge. we used to get SO mad at her, lol.

for my dad it means 'just plain cheese pizza'

our family didn't really eat much fish anyway so it always meant something horrible like fish sticks or tuna mornay

My brother in law was telling me how virulently anti-Catholic his grandfather was, and speculated that he may have been a KKK sympathizer in the 1920s, when the klan was quite strong in Oregon. But a little while later I was trying to explain to him the concept of Limbo, the Pagan Good, and the Harrowing of Hell, and his only comment was "Superstition!"

Is there any way to talk about the more esoteric parts of Catholic belief without eventually walking into a lamppost?

What is "the PAgan Good" and the "harrowing of hell"?

Aren't the Church going softly-softly on limbo now because the whole thing about unbaptised babies really upsets people? I know my school (not an explicitly Catholic one btw) was pretty dismissive of the idea.

Good grief! Are they teaching kids nothing in schools these days? (/facetious)

The harrowing of Hell was when Jesus descended into Hell after his crucifixion, for some reason or another. I've been a Catholic my whole life and have never heard the term "The Pagan Good" before.

It's my understanding that Limbo is not current Catholic doctrine any more. I think the church abandoned it several years ago.

I think it might depend on culture too? I know I was surprised to find that a Mexican-American friend & her family all ate fish every Friday - definitely not done in my part of Ireland.

I knew the harrowing of hell, but had to google the pagan good.

I googled the pagan good and didn't get anything. Hence why I asked.

Yeah, just double-checked and even adding "catholic" I don't get anything.

do any of y'all say "happy good friday"? is that a thing?

everyone is just saying 'happy easter' in the office today

To the best of my understanding (nb: I am not aero), there are different levels of accepted belief, ranging from traditions (which are respected, but not required) up through doctines and dogmas.

The concept of the Pagan Good was never doctrinal, but a tradition, which tried to account for the afterlife of pagans who lived blamelessly before the redemption of humankind by Christ's crucifiction. Dante, in the Inferno spared these Pagan Good from the torments of eternal punishment, because they had not sinned apart from their share in Original Sin. Dante consigned them to hell, because church doctrine required this, so their essential punishment was removal from God's eternal grace. But they got to sit around in a pleasant place and chat. iirc, that place was Limbo, right along with all those unbaptised babies.

The doctrine of the Harrowing of Hell (again, to my best understanding) concerns the "rescue" of the souls of some important biblical patriarchs and prophets from hell. Before the Resurrection, they couldn't be redeemed, but we know God SPOKE to them and used them as instruments of His Will, so God can't just leave them festering in hell, even though they were jews, so right after Christ was ressurected He went to hell and redeemed them, too, quick as He could get around to it. I mean, we're talkin' MOSES and ABRAHAM, fer chrissakes! They got preferential treatment.

Oh, ok. I've heard of that. But there must be some other word for it than "Pagan Good"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuous_pagan

The harrowing of Hell was when Jesus descended into Hell after his crucifixion, for some reason or another.

Used to have this church book with a drawing of Jesus in Hell. Really threw me off as an 8-year-old.

I think it might depend on culture too? I know I was surprised to find that a Mexican-American friend & her family all ate fish every Friday - definitely not done in my part of Ireland.

It would have been the case back in the day, though. My parents still have fish most Fridays though I think they are flexible about it.

The church shrugs and says "I dunno" about babies going to limbo:

On April 22, 2007, the advisory body known as the International Theological Commission released a document, originally commissioned by Pope John Paul II, entitled "The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die without Being Baptized."[25]

After tracing the history of the various opinions that have been and are held on the eternal fate of unbaptized infants, including that connected with the theory of the Limbo of Infants, and after examining the theological arguments, the document stated its conclusion as follows:

Our conclusion is that the many factors that we have considered above give serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptized infants who die will be saved and enjoy the beatific vision. We emphasize that these are reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge. There is much that simply has not been revealed to us.[26] We live by faith and hope in the God of mercy and love who has been revealed to us in Christ, and the Spirit moves us to pray in constant thankfulness and joy.[27]

What has been revealed to us is that the ordinary way of salvation is by the sacrament of baptism. None of the above considerations should be taken as qualifying the necessity of baptism or justifying delay in administering the sacrament. Rather, as we want to reaffirm in conclusion, they provide strong grounds for hope that God will save infants when we have not been able to do for them what we would have wished to do, namely, to baptize them into the faith and life of the Church.

Until recently at least, unbaptised infants could not be buried in a consecrated graveyard and would often end up in an unmarked field.

^^ Applying this sort of theological methodology consistently would lead to St. Aquinas being relegated to a mere pile of opinions and most of the doctrines of the church being opened to reasonable doubt... and I say, "more, please."

'sure knowledge'

!

sorry to derail, but will someone tell me about this Sister Wendy person in the video upthread?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/02/us/nuns-speak-about-vatican-criticism.html?ref=us

The Vatican ordered a “doctrinal assessment” of the women’s leadership conference in 2008 after years of concerns about its direction. The conference was formed in 1956 to provide communication and coordination among communities of sisters, and is a canonical organization, which means it answers to the Vatican. The assessment concluded that the leadership conference had hosted speakers who “often contradict or ignore” church teaching; had never revoked a statement from 1977 that questioned the male-only priesthood, and focused their efforts on serving the poor and disenfranchised, while remaining virtually silent on issues the church considers great societal evils: abortion and same-sex marriage.

yeah you don't say. as usual the nuns are fuckin awesome

truth bomb

The Catholic church is as big as any company in America. Bankruptcy cases have shed some light on its finances and their mismanagement

http://www.economist.com/node/21560536

That reminds me, I saw a sign for bingo starting next month. I wonder if I can get anyone to go with me.

The Catholic church is as big as any company in America. Bankruptcy cases have shed some light on its finances and their mismanagement

http://www.economist.com/node/21560536

The parishioners were unimpressed. Some heckled the bishop when he visited their parish to celebrate mass. One of the Boston parishes, St Frances Cabrini in Scituate, Massachusetts, has been occupied for the past eight years by parishioners who have refused to accept its closure. They have a roster chart to ensure at least one person is at the church at any time, so that the archdiocese can’t change the locks.

sweeet

The principle of separation between church and state in America means that religious groups are not required to file tax returns, list their assets or disclose basic facts about their finances

erm that is not what i thought separation of church and state was about

'entails that'

Non-taxation of religious organizations is purely a political decision by Congress which could be reversed at any point, if Congress decided differently. Not a constitutional issue whatsoever.

It's true that tax-exempt status for religious orgs is statutory, but the laws conferring that status - and those making them audit-resistant and exempt from filing annual financial reports - are based in principles, including that of separation of church and state. Also, some case law supports the idea of tax-exemptions for churches as being in line with the establishment clause and the ideal of separation of church and state (though OTOH, some decisions have held that tax-exempt status is a means of govt. support of religious orgs).

This article has an interesting section about the history of tax-exemptions for religious orgs and charities http://lawandreligion.com/sites/lawandreligion.com/files/livingston.pdf.

late cardinal, a progressive Italian Jesuit, in last interview:

"The church is 200 years out of date. Why don't we rouse ourselves? Are we afraid?"

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48876172/ns/world_news-europe

No Catholic conservative would cop to being afraid of change or to being out of date, for that matter. To them, religion and morality are static reflections of an omnipotent, omniscient (and therefore unchanging) god. Consequently, change is not frightening so much as simply wrongheaded.

Once you get yourself deeply into this sort of a mental trap, you become a voluntary prisoner. Every door to change is wide open, but using one's freedom looks like a sin.

I don't know if this has been discussed anywhere else on ilx:

http://www.ontopmag.com/article.aspx?id=12865&MediaType=1&Category=26

79 year old celibate monk makes profoundly ignorant pronouncement about sex. This is sad and stupid, but not terribly surprising.

i acted as godfather at my nephew's christening on saturday, was v weird being back doing the vows etc. i didn't want to repeat them but i was at the altar and conscious of my sort of religious sister thinking i wasn't taking it seriously etc.

one thing tho, in one of the vow questions, the priest said something about rejecting "THE GLAMOUR OF EVIL". this phrase has been stuck in my head sense. THE GLAMOUR OF EVIL.

that's that good good Catholic stuff right there

the priest arrived late, and he said to me, and i can quote it cos he repeated it later "sorry about my lateness, i've never done a cremation that fast, believe me!"

A friend FB-posted: "Pope Francis washed women's feet on Holy Thursday, breaking canon law. The conservatives are going crazy."

http://canonlawblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/popes-like-dads-dont-have-a-choice-in-the-matter/

the pastor mentioned this -- approvingly, i should add -- during the homily at Holy Thursday Mass today.

how could the prohibition on washing women's feet possibly have a scriptural justification? unless jesus just happens never to be mentioned as washing any women's feet (and does wash e.g. disciples' feet, and have his washed?)?

i wasn't aware that there was any sort of canon-law based prohibition on this (if indeed there is), either.

tbf jesus did a lot of stuff with his disciples that he supposedly never did with women

heh heh heh

catholicism is mostly "these guys who started our church, supposedly, who knew guys who were with jesus a day or two, supposedly, are the direct voice of God via Jesus/God, exactly, so do whatever we say because even though we elect our leadership it's whoever speaking through us"

see, direct line to the word of God

Petrine Succession, boyos.

is this a big departure?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/pope-francis-good-atheists_n_3320757.html

as I understand it it's not a big departure historically but in the present age of fundamentalist revival, yes

seems pretty awesome.

Catholic guilt is tradition. It does make intuitive sense to my indwelling Catholic: the Holy Family suffered as they did for me, but how grateful am I really, in my daily life? Not very. I'm more interested in myself. That's my nature, and I don't do much to overcome it or transcend it. But the saints show me that I could, if I really cared. Hence, guilt!

I just realized that I'm a Catholic about practising music

huge props to francis for that

as I understand it it's not a big departure historically but in the present age of fundamentalist revival, yes

Oh, that's interesting. I've pretty much always understood that it was belief in Christianity, not goodness of deeds or character, that was the determinant. So this seemed pretty radical to me.

dude!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism

Ah.

you know, those ppl who think they're Christians.

Adopting for a moment the xtian worldview, it seems apparent to me from the bible that the xtian god is allowed to do whatever he wants to do, whenever he wants, and this includes redeeming whoever he wants to redeem, without having to follow the rules he has previously announced, because he makes the rules as he goes along and is not required to post prior notice before making a rule change; that would be purely optional for him, as he is bound neither by precedent, nor by any purely human standard of fairness or justice. This seems pretty self-evident to me.

In our daily lives, god usually acts through she-bears

23 Then [Elisha] went up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up by the way, young lads came out from the city and mocked him and said to him, “Go up, you baldhead; go up, you baldhead!” 24 When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up forty-two lads of their number. 25 And he went from there to Mount Carmel, and from there he returned to Samaria.

I only know that story because of Weeds.

I kinda think the Curia is getting ready to kill the pope (again).

The Vatican issued an “explanatory note on the meaning of “salvation,” on Thursday, May 23, after media reports circulated indicating that Pope Francis” promised heaven for everyone engaged in good works, including atheists.

In response to the media attention, the Rev. Thomas Rosica, a Vatican spokesman, said that people who know about the Catholic church “cannot be saved” if they “refuse to enter her or remain in her.”

(Translation: Atheists are going to Hell if they don’t accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.)

http://www.examiner.com/article/vatican-corrects-pope-atheists-are-still-going-to-hell

Does the Church still believe in the existence of Hell, or does it define Hell ambiguously, as "total separation from God." If the former that seems pretty gauche.

Sorry i see now that my question has been dealt with earlier. Anyway, i'm not a fan of this Vatican retraction.

heh heh heh enter her or remain in her heh heh etc

when to withdraw is a p big deal for us

Saints Sergius and Bacchus were Roman soldiers, Christian martyrs and gay men who loved each other. They were killed around 303 in present-day Syria. Their feast day is observed on Oct. 7. The couple was openly gay, but secretly Christian — the opposite of today’s closeted Christians.

The close bond between the two men has been emphasized since the earliest accounts, and recent scholarship has revealed their homosexuality. The oldest record of their martyrdom describes them as erastai (Greek for “lovers”). Scholars believe that they may have been united in the rite of adelphopoiesis (brother-making), a kind of early Christian same-sex marriage.

http://blog.gaycatholicpriests.org/2011/10/gay-saints-and-lovers-sergius-and-bacchus/

Still no HBO miniseries on pornocracy :(

My priest relative-by-marriage concelebrated a Vatican Mass with Francis a few weeks ago. I guess he might be a bishop someday if he wants that.

Junipero Serra as a saint, si o no?

I leave such matters to my lawyers.

it was bound to happen despite most evidence being that he's a shit. disappointed that Francis did that but if I agreed with absolutely everything Francis said and did it would be wrong.

https://twitter.com/mcmoynihan/status/646686363732066304

The Rev. John McNeill, an openly gay Roman Catholic priest who, from the 1970s onward, publicly pressed the church to welcome gay men and lesbians — and who was expelled from his order as a result — died on Tuesday in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 90.

His death was announced by DignityUSA, an organization that supports gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Catholics. Father McNeill had helped found its New York chapter in 1972.

A Jesuit who was ordained in 1959, Father McNeill was known in the decades that followed as an author, activist and psychotherapist specializing in the needs of gay clients. He first came to wide, explosive attention in 1976 with the publication of his book “The Church and the Homosexual.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/26/nyregion/john-mcneill-priest-who-pushed-catholic-church-to-welcome-gays-dies-at-90.html

RIP

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/08/us/pope-francis-archbishop-joseph-tobin-newark-archdiocese.html

this seems like a positive development

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd54HzNI_Rk

As always, the main cultural signifier here isn't religion so much as nationality, class and coming from a family that shoves you in front of a set that resembles a tidied up Rosemary's baby in order to answer questions about your sexual lack of history

haven't seen rosemary's baby

but yes, catholicism is definitely tied to local culture (i'm not sure i'd say nationality)

Family first, then social circle then community then school then nationality

Church can fit in p much anywhere there depending on the severity of the infectiom

true

was talking catholicism with an acquaintance the other night. we were remarking how we were still pretty earnest and believing, if with plenty of doubts, when we made our confirmations and had chosen confirmation names accordingly. i chose san martin de porres (mixed-race peruvian saint a sort of patron saint on anti-racism and the poor), and he chose st anthony - because his mother was always telling him to pray to st anthony as he was always losing things. he had a friend who chose zeno, because it was the funniest name of a saint other than homobonus that he could find and he knew he'd get in trouble if he said he was choosing homobonus

haha

man having two confirmation saints is hard work lemme tell u

to answer questions about your sexual lack of history

I thought we were talking about Catholic girls?

Saint Dorkus is another classic

what was it like backing frank black?

please help me understand the de Auxiliis controversy. the question is that god grants grace to man without man having to do anything but this doesn't sit right with jesuits bc man should participate in his own redemption or am i completely misunderstanding the point of contention?

From a quick read in Wikipedia, it appears to be more of a question of how the doctrine of free will affects a person's ability to accept or reject grace and hinges upon the intricacies of how god's omnipotence and omniscience would work in a system where god is trying to bestow grace, knowing ahead of time it will be rejected. It is the usual tying oneself in knots to overcome inherent flaws in the logic of church dogma and doctrine.

and determinism

kind of thing which i find too boring to get into too much - no disrespect to theology in general but this particular dispute has me yawning. seems like both sides kind of viewed causation as a zero sum game. the more god does the less the individual does and vice cersa. bañez and the dominicans believed in physical premotion, the influence of god on the will of the person who acts on that will, jesuits found this overly deterministic, though they did believe in god knowing everything that could happen including counterfactuals, and creating the world as it is while knowing all the options so that always seemed kind of deterministic to me also

determinism vs free will obviously a very old question and lots of great apologetics out there reconciling omniscience and free will etc but this seems to be specifically be about the efficaciousness of grace specifically, and aiui specifically as relates to its conveyance automatically iow without the actual participation of the sinner but maybe w/ some level of his participation acc to jesuits? this is precisely the point i am trying to understand.

a quick google tells me this is "one of theologies most exciting debates"

theology's. fuck.

i feel like this is something that you can't just make a pithy summation of that will explain too much. although if it were i would not be in such a position to do so

especially because earlier debates in the church precede and inform it (the dominicans are augustinian thomists)

i thought augustinianism and thomism were different?

where are some underrated aerosmith bootlegs to enlighten me

Xp.Yeah they are. Thomas Aquinas both draws from and disagrees with Augustine, I guess I should've said that Dominican theological position on grace and predestination draws from aquinas and thomas

i mean, no catholic believes in predestination

right?

Well the Jansenists did and they claimed to just be disciples of Augustine

no catholic believes in predestination...right?

After you've been catechized, the church cares little about the private little heresies of its communicants, so long as they don't make a big issue out of them. If you are a priest or some other official of the church it's trickier, and you'd better be able to couch your determinism in the kind of theologically acceptable obscurantist terminology that won't get you in trouble with the church hierarchy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrowing_of_Hell

^Because I was wondering went on during those three days.

metal as fuck

Martin Luther: [looks directly at the camera, Office-style] https://t.co/s9EFy1IZPe

— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) March 22, 2020

capitalism: this fuckin thing has exposed most of our activities as painfully blatant scams

catholicism: hold my bier

lol x 2

What a world

https://www.aod.org/sacramentsupdate

peter at the pearly gates: i'm sorry, we can't let you in. looks like there was some sort of administrative error down there on earth. it's gonna take a while to clean up. don't worry, there's a waiting room *nods toward purgatory*

“Look it’s not a big deal, minor administrative snafu, well get it figured out, but in the meantime don’t die because of you do youre going to hell”

so...if the priest wasn't technically baptized all that time, does that mean that the people he baptized are also at risk of eternal hell due to administrative error?

so...if the priest wasn't technically baptized all that time, does that mean that the people he baptized are also at risk of eternal hell due to administrative error?

The church (shrugs): Hey, God makes the rules, we don't.

administrative assistant to god: god dammit, we've got another memo from earth. it's another policy clarification request.
god: let me guess, fucking b-
admin assistant to god: baptism, yep, it's baptism again.
god: it's whatever they want. it's whatever they want. we've told them this. i don't care. this is the least important planet on my plate. this planet shouldn't even BE on my plate

okay I have a dumb question:

When you put ash on your forehead for Ash Wednesday... where does the ash come from? Is it special, sanctified ash, or just some regular old ash from the bottom of the BBQ?

thanks in advance from an ignorant protestant

Who even knows where the hosts come from? probably some warehouse in Skipton!

They are supposedly from the previous Palm Sunday’s palm leaves? I never knew this though tbh I never paid attention in either Mass or religion class.

so does a priest have to daub the ash on your forehead? Or is it DIY

At primary school I was told it was previous years Palm Sunday's Palms.

Priest
xp to me

At school the teachers used to give us a row if anybody wiped them off our foreheads.

Who even knows where the hosts come from? probably some warehouse in Skipton!

My mum as a lifetime on/off lapsed catholic buys wafers as a substitute because she fell in love with communion hosts at an early age ... I'm not making this up! Had no idea they were widely available online. At least now I have a good birthday pressie option for her.

in my presbyterian youth, we used sourdough bread (very NorCal) and welch's grape juice.. everybody got their own shot glass, we didn't share a cup

also there was no transfiguration or whatever you call it, the bread was just bread and not the actual flesh of christ

i don't understand the catholic sense of forgiveness. some of the most of unforgiving ppl i know are catholics. is this just my limited experience or is the concept somehow perverted as a type of punishment?

I forgive you.

catholics do love history -- the old churches, holy relics, that thing you did

Bless, alfred

Lol sufjan

guilt and forgiveness are the pendulum that swings butts into seats on Sunday. there's a sacrament requiring the CEO's signature on forgiveness with middle management present.

The simple answer: it's easier to condemn than to accept. The latter puts you in a position of weakness.

Seems like a lot weight to carry but you know

Jesus carried his own cross, man -- it's the least we can do.

a new priest has Young Pope'd my home town's church. women wear veils. men wear suits. One (drunk) lady started speaking in tongues in a webcast mass. Turned it into his fascist terrarium. most people left, but a new crowd showed up. there's a spectrum of "catholics", so it can be important to know which we're talking about.

Most Catholics in my acquaintance only speak in tongues when I offer them Negronis.

mel gibsons and negroni fiends

i don't understand the catholic sense of forgiveness. some of the most of unforgiving ppl i know are catholics. is this just my limited experience or is the concept somehow perverted as a type of punishment?

i don't understand the catholic sense of forgiveness. some of the most of unforgiving ppl i know are catholics. is this just my limited experience or is the concept somehow perverted as a type of punishment?

― Comfortably numbnuts (Heez)

there are lots of different sorts of catholics but those sort of catholics you're talking about...

i mean look what you really wanna watch out for are _british catholics_. british catholics are just fuckin' bad news all around.

anyway, those kind of catholics, and you have a lot of the same in america too but they're not oxbridge educated, they'll forgive you, but only for the stuff _they_ did.

then you also have the catholics who are basically pipelining evangelicals, the evangelicals decided they loved catholics when roe v. wade came down and ever since then they've been, like. evangelicalizing a lot of catholics, to where american catholicism is in a lot of ways another evangelical church, but with the robust tradition of highly organized institutional child abuse american roman catholicism is renowned for. i mean when evangelicals do child abuse, it's usually more grass-roots, more of a DIY thing. catholics... well, they don't have it set up as well structurally _now_, because they lost a lot of their funds once they were held legally responsible for institutionally supporting CSA. but for a while there, i mean, it was them and the mormons and _no_ competition from anybody else. i don't really know shit about the mormons, we grew up on the east coast, not really a lot of mormons out there. i just know that they're very organized and very patriarchal.

the ones you really wanna watch out for is the jesuits. they'll take the most fucked up wrong shit imaginable and make it sound reasonable. whenever i say fucked up shit and somehow manage to make it sound reasonable, that's part of my heritage, my grandfather got his law degree from a jesuit law school. i've been working really hard for a long time to try and unlearn that behavior.

the tenets of Christ are followed less than even the Tenet of Chris

Kate, I've just got back from the funeral of my uncle, my extended family of Liverpool Catholics were there as well as many from the Catholic school he was deputy headteacher of (in London) - he was a lifelong socialist and many of the others there are too. Think it doesn't need to be stressed that I don't agree that any of these people are "fuckin' bad news all round", and that includes my uncle's cousin, who is a bishop.

You know I have many problems with the church and hated my Catholic high school (which uses the same motto as the jesuits) and am absolutely an unbeliever now, but the actual people are generally fine.

no that's fair, "all around" is an overstatement. _intellectual converts to catholicism_. your tony blairs.

to be clear, i apologize unambiguously for that statement. i got _lots_ of issues with certain aspects of catholicism. but the actual catholics themselves, no, any problems i have are _very very limited_ and have more to do with the institutional culture fostered by certain people in positions of authority. like. they're not like _cops_ or anything.

I am totally going from a small. Sample size and should have worded it as a question. I am genuinely curious whether there’s something inherent in Catholicism that makes forgiveness, or the lack thereof, a powerful tool.

xp Well I am also very suspicious of Anglican converts to Catholicism, they take it all way too seriously, they don't get that having so many rules means that you can safely ignore all of them.

i mean look what you really wanna watch out for are _british catholics_. british catholics are just fuckin' bad news all around.

English Catholics I think you mean.

xp But I guess they usually convert because they object to female/gay vicars or something.

Some of the loudest leftists I know are Catholics, all of whom have liberation theology sects in their blood.

I am totally going from a small. Sample size and should have worded it as a question. I am genuinely curious whether there’s something inherent in Catholicism that makes forgiveness, or the lack thereof, a powerful tool.

― Comfortably numbnuts (Heez)

oh sure, it's the biblical passage that they say is the scriptural basis for the papacy, from Matthew 16:

17 Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. 18 And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” 20 Then he ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

forgiveness, or the lack thereof, is an _integral_ part of catholic tradition, on an _ongoing basis_. out of the seven sacraments, the only ones that are _regular acts_ are communion and confession. it's part of why "catholic guilt" is such a thing, the expectation is that you are regularly going to confess your sins to a priest and do penance (i personally was never asked to do more than symbolic penance - a couple hail marys, a couple our fathers, not even close to a full rosary's worth, just a couple). it's kind of similar to the concept of "self-criticism" in marxist-leninism, except done in private rather than in public.

Some of the loudest leftists I know are Catholics, all of whom have liberation theology sects in their blood.

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

the thing that gives me the most pause about this is that among white leftist catholics at least, the one they all seem to praise most is Dorothy Day. and in a lot of ways, in a lot of things, i think what she did was good. but it's the anti-abortion thing. to me, you know, i don't feel like that's someone i can be in _communion_, as they say, with. because what happens is time goes on and what gets lost is all the radical stuff she advocated for, and what _stays_ is the anti-abortion bit. an institution like the catholic church, particularly one founded by patriarchy, it wears down and erodes any opposition to it.

the same way, this is my understanding you have... francis of assisi. and this is a guy who was a radical opponent of the church, a radical reformer. martin luther wasn't the first. you had people, _often_ from the clergy, looking at what the church was doing and saying "hey, this, uh, this doesn't really seem to be in line with, like, what jesus actually taught, he wasn't all 'hey you want to live a good life start a rich, powerful, and oppressive institution in My name'"

and the church was like "ok two options. one, you quit talking about _political_ issues and stick to telling people to be good people, and you know, we'll encourage that. we're on the same page here, we want people to be good people too. but if you keep going around telling people about how what we're doing isn't in line with what jesus said, you know, we'll declare you heretic and kill you and all your followers. your choice, friendo." and he chose the first path, and that's why pope francis has the name he does, and catholics can all go like "lord make me an instrument of your peace" or whatever, and there are all these pictures of him being a friend to animals. and that's it, that's kinda all you get out of him, a name and some inoffensive pretty-sounding words.

i mean i guess being put to death as a heretic wouldn't exactly have done him any more good. like, what, he could be remembered the way the cathars are? yeah that doesn't seem like an improvement. idk. i guess i drank the kool-aid a little much as a kid when they kept telling me what saints the martyrs were.

i was at the funeral of an elderly rural catholic today, service was weird as they all seem to me now that im long enough outside of the cant and the concepts but the piece about the departed spelled out a life well lived and cherished and celebrated all the same regardless of noting his fondness for a pint

merchant seaman, mechanic, antiques dealer and father of ten. doubt he was a saint, dont doubt he was a catholic, doubt he was observant for what the purposes of this thread would seem to be

in other words typical enough of my experience of the irish roman catholic

little enough time was spent on the school-rules fanaticism which seems to dominate american commentator experience of catholicism. if i were to guess id say theres about ten of those people in the world and seven of them only started after reading dan brown.

is it possible ye read the rules and rarely observe the people at all, i ask

Eh there's a lot of American Catholics who identify culturally but don't practice any observance or church attendance except weddings and funerals, and they CERTAINLY don't have a personal religious practice or any interest in a moral code or spiritual pursuits. Unfortunately they still vote for Republicans and against abortion despite enjoying the benefits of birth control, family planning, mixed fibers, and doing whatever they want on the sabbath.

is it possible ye read the rules and rarely observe the people at all, i ask

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac)

the rules, and the powerful people who decide what the rules mean, they have more influence on my life than the people. it's just... it's the hardest thing for me, to talk about things on an _institutional_ level, and i do it poorly sometimes and it comes out as looking like i have something against the individual people. which i don't. i mean i don't have anything more against catholics than i do against, say, harry potter fans. the harry potter books, i haven't read them, but i'm sure they're fine books. they're important to a lot of people. it's just that, you know, supporting harry potter, it hurts people who don't deserve to be hurt, whether one _wants_ to hurt them or not. (and yes, i am drawing a direct equivalence between harry potter fandom and the roman catholic church. fuck it.)

feeling emotional and heartfelt at darragh’s post. last line a real killer.

hey my dad loathed religion all his life but still got a priest in at his deathbed. and i don’t think it was a pascal’s wager thing. not in the sense it’s commonly meant. and his mum was a lovely kind irish catholic married to a nasty disciplinarian by all accounts. both devout far as it goes. only one of them good.

community and communion probably meant something to them both but as darragh says, not sure the rules meant as much as all that.

❤️ fizzles

otm

hey my dad loathed religion all his life but still got a priest in at his deathbed. and i don’t think it was a pascal’s wager thing. not in the sense it’s commonly meant. and his mum was a lovely kind irish catholic married to a nasty disciplinarian by all accounts. both devout far as it goes. only one of them good.

community and communion probably meant something to them both but as darragh says, not sure the rules meant as much as all that.

― Fizzles

mmmm. i do feel differently about it.

my dad has a cross on his gravestone. i don't think it was catholic. he loathed religion all his life, and at the end, when he was alone, there was a lady who was there for him, to be his friend, and she converted him. that's what she _does_ with her life. and, i mean, i'm glad she was there for him. i'm glad she could get through to him when i couldn't. he buried himself in shame about abandoning us, about being a shitty dad, and poured it all out to her at the end. and it would have been nice. it would have been nice if he could have told me when he was alive. if i didn't have to get it secondhand. and for all that i'm grateful it seems... it feels _transactional_. to me, the cross, it corrupts, it debases, what i truly believe was this woman's genuine love, her genuine compassion.

that's the other thing about being a catholic, my grandfather's favorite movie was _a man for all seasons_, and it's a great film. it's one of those films where catholicism and leftism converge, i think, the film is a leftist film but it's a leftist take on catholic belief. and one of the things that i was taught about it, growing up - i didn't see it for a long time, but i was _taught_ about it - was that it wasn't enough to do the right thing, that there was a question of _why_, _why_ a person did something. that thomas more struggled with that. and no matter how good my dad's friend was, no matter how much it was _right_, the fact that on some level she was doing it to "win souls for christ"... i don't think that reflects badly on her. i think that reflects badly on _christ_. he has no _right_. no right to my dad's soul. that cross on my dad's grave marker is a lie. and a god, a church, a religion, that is willing to _accept_ that lie...

well, it's like Robert Wyatt sang on "Alliance" (_Old Rottenhat_, 1984):

It's hard to talk to enemies. We are enemies. What we had in common makes it even worse...

In truth, my values are as Catholic as anyone's. I believe in the power of forgiveness, truly believe in it. Not just for the sake others. For for my own sake, for my own _soul_. Forgiveness, for me, it's putting down a burden, letting go of that compulsion to distance, to wariness. The need for _vigilance_. I've had to be vigilant so often, about so many things. I have to be vigilant far too often now. I hate all of the things I have to see, I have to know.

Because I can't forgive. Not like, refuse, I believe, believe in my heart, that it's not possible. Not possible for me to forgive someone for something they don't believe was _wrong_. All I can do in that case is make excuses. All I can do is cape.

The thing about having 1.35billion adherents, is you're going to be able to find whatever you're looking for within that communion, good and bad.

I grew up in a fairly strict American Catholic setting. After my mom died, The Young Pope denied my dad's 2nd wife an annulment on her first marriage, so my dad stopped going to mass entirely.

On one hand, I respect it. On the other hand, hey what now?

That sucks. Most of the Catholics I know are either priests or seminarians or lay people with Bachelors in Theology. They are all, of the ones I know well, lovely, caring, sacrificial, forgiving people. I think seriosly studying the tenets of Christ and the Church sifts the grain from the chaff (for the most part)

Last I heard there were about 1 billion Catholics in the world. That number has certainly been inflated to include anyone raised Catholic or otherwise claimable by the church, but it suggests to me that anecdotal evidence about the nature of Catholic individuals is likely to run the full gamut from truly unrecognized saints to the worst people ion earth.

Was raised Catholic growing up and was probably one of the model examples - taught Sunday school, Catholic summer camps, altar boy, etc. Maybe it was just the church groups we attended, but none of the more detestable aspects of the church were apparent or just leaned into through it all. I stopped attending as soon as I hit college because I think there were people involved that were more representative of Christianity as a whole that turned me off. That idea that "I can behave terribly but I'll be fine because I go to church and God always forgives" started becoming more noticeable in my later teen years when it seemed like the more reasonable option was to JUST BE NICE to people.

Was raised Catholic growing up and was probably one of the model examples - taught Sunday school, Catholic summer camps, altar boy, etc. Maybe it was just the church groups we attended, but none of the more detestable aspects of the church were apparent or just leaned into through it all. I stopped attending as soon as I hit college because I think there were people involved that were more representative of Christianity as a whole that turned me off. That idea that "I can behave terribly but I'll be fine because I go to church and God always forgives" started becoming more noticeable in my later teen years when it seemed like the more reasonable option was to JUST BE NICE to people.

A lot of this is my story too. I was an altar boy, I went to CYO, I went on Catholic youth retreats, I went to an all-boys' Catholic high school for two years. I never had any bad experiences through any of it; I guess I just wasn't any of my local priests' type, because at least two of them were defrocked or quit the church later. One moved to Las Vegas and got murdered one morning by a guy he'd molested years earlier. Anyway, I stopped going to church when I moved out of my mom's house at 18 — I'd long since drifted away from any kind of Christian belief and into reading about other stuff (Zen, Taoism, the usual shit). These days my "beliefs," such as they are, are a kind of personal amalgam of Zen, Taoism, Stoicism, and Norse/Asatru values — blood, honor, manliness, but without all the stuff about the gods.

My mom is still very much Catholic; she does the readings at her church just about every week, and does a lot of charity work — drives meals to the elderly, does people's taxes for free, maybe some other stuff too. She acknowledges all the shitty things the Church and her alma mater, Penn State, have done, but it neither invalidates her engineering degree nor impacts her faith.

similar for my dad, who was born and raised Catholic. He joined the Knights of Columbus after he retired and all the kids left the house. I don't ask too much about it but as far as I know that's mainly been a social thing for him.

I know he has some old-school thoughts about women that aren't as severe as other people, and he's been called out by my sister, so I've never felt like piling on to what's probably an in-grained lost cause. But he was never a Jesus-first parent - which I really appreciate looking back.

perhaps Heez hasn't finished Home Alone. Marley and his son forgive each other at the end.

well, my Methodist-turned-Catholic mom took me to see Home Alone when it was originally out in theaters, and I'll cherish that time and parenting decision forever.

Bob marleys in home alone?!? Ok I’ll finish it.

I grew up Lutheran in the south. It was extremely chill. Church camps all that stuff. Not much guilt or anything like that. My mother and father are still Christian but they do not go to the same church nor do they vote for the same party. My mom prefers the activist, community oriented side of the church while my dad prefers the traditional side. The south is mostly are up of baptist and evangelicals who believe in the gospel of prosperity and rarely do community outreach.

I now live near DC in a neighborhood filled with federalist society lawyers who rarely engage with their non-Catholic neighbors. I also know a lot more of the New England Catholics, well former Catholics, who are some of the best ppl I know, but seem extremely damaged by the church and their strictly religious parents.

Anyway Catholicism has come to represent this very corrupted version of religion that you either walk lockstep with or fight against. And yes, I understand my small neighborhood doesn’t represent the entirety of Catholicism, so I’m mainly just asking questions, be it from a very skewed place

The thing about having 1.35billion adherents, is you're going to be able to find whatever you're looking for within that communion, good and bad.

― H.P

sure. 1.35 billion adherents is a lot. i don't need to play diogenes looking for a Good Catholic. they're all over the place.

one pope, though. one college of cardinals. all men, all celibate, or pretending to be. one Young archbishop of Portland, denouncing "gender ideology", issuing edicts forbidding teachers in Catholic schools from referring to trans kids by their _names_, from gendering them correctly.

one man. how many children? how many fucking kids is this one man abusing, and nobody says anything, nobody _does_ anything, it's _fine_ because he does it in the name of _Christ_, he does it in the name of the Roman Catholic Church?

-

I can't... I can't talk about what it was like for me, growing up Catholic. How it affected me. I try, but I can't. It hurts too much. Sorry. Y'all... I think y'all talking, I really would _like_ for y'all to know. But I can't tell you. Maybe someday. The most I can do is jump off Heez here:

I also know a lot more of the New England Catholics, well former Catholics, who ... seem extremely damaged by the church and their strictly religious parents.

My Catholic roots are Midwestern. Brahmin-y, but Midwestern. My parents, my mom's parents... I don't think of them as "strictly religious" either. I went to Catholic school, Catholic college, church every Sunday, but I don't think of my upbringing as "strictly religious" in the "women with exposed ankles are immodest" sense. Have I been extremely damaged by the Church and my parents? Absolutely.

I can't say more than that right now. I wish I could. I don't believe in... I don't believe in the culture of _silence_ I was raised in. I really want to speak up. I just can't right now. I'm sorry.