Ask A Catholic

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!