Ask A Catholic

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