THE FAILURE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH GOES WAY BEYOND PEDOPHILIA
The God of the Mass still demands blood offerings of innocent victims. So then who dreamed up this cosmos of quantum mechanics, black holes and big bangs?
“If it wasn’t God, it was someone even more clever than God.”
~ Tom Mahon ~
Some years ago, as my family and I were leaving Sunday Mass, our oldest son, about ten at the time, asked me which Earth we lived on.
- What?
“Do we live on the Earth we talk about in church, with heaven above us and hell below us, or the one on TV where they never show heaven and hell.”
- The one on TV, and never doubt it.
That may have settled it for him, at least for a while, but it hit me like a slap. I realized that I had been saying the prayers of the Mass since I was two or three, and over the decades the words had lost all meaning and become a rote recitation. What other non-sequiturs was I missing?
Prompted by that exchange I sat down soon after to read the text of the Mass, not as liturgy but as a work of literature.
And then I gradually stopped going to Mass. Three points still confound me, and prevent me from going back: the Nicene Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Offertory prayer at the heart of the Mass.
I should not have to affirm by my soul that I believe the earth is flat to follow the commandment to be compassionate to all others.
So why does this matter?
Because over the next 10–20 years we will probably see more changes in every facet of life than have occurred over the past 5,000 years. Ancient parchment texts that imagine God as an elderly, bearded man presiding over a flat earth suspended between heaven and hell is simply not up to the challenge.
And if the dogmas — the belief statements — are so antiquated and out of touch with what we now know, there’s little chance the accompanying moral code will have much effect.
The Nicene Creed
Halfway through the Mass, the congregation stands up to recite The Nicene Creed. It was written in 325 CE by the bishops, the leaders, of the formerly outlawed early Christian Church, by order of the Roman Emperor Constantine. Having decided to become Christian himself, Constantine mandated that every subject of Rome should be baptized, and that there should be a universally agreed upon statement of what that meant.
The Creed describes Jesus’ travels in a three-tiered universe where earth hangs suspended between the dome of heaven above, and the bowl of earth below.
It tracks Jesus as he comes down to earth from heaven; dies and descends into hell; rises back to earth; and then ascends up into heaven; from which he promises to come again.
Incredibly, there is no mention of anything Jesus taught or said or did. No reference to the teachings, the healings, the commandment to Love One Another. No reference to blessing the meek, the peacemakers, the humble.
Instead, Jesus of Nazareth is presented as the central figure in the ultimate frequent flyer program. And however phantasmagorical the story is, one must believe it literally to be a Catholic in good standing.
I had recited the prayer for 50 years and never thought about it. Once I realized what I was affirming — a collection of archaic cosmologies that have long since been discarded — I found it hard to attend Mass. Professing what you know not to be true is not appropriate in a religious service.
And this gets to the heart of the issue. When the geography of our belief system bears no resemblance to the geography of world we live and work in, then we have a crisis: personal, communal and global. And this is where we are now.
And that may partly explain the current trauma in all three Abrahamic faiths, leading to extreme acts of violence by some Zionist settlers, Christian fundamentalists and Islamic jihadists.
Global civilization today uses 21st Century technology to redefine life and mind. And what little moral guidance there is for the effort comes from two or three thousand year old documents. That’s the functional equivalent of buying a new Maserati and being given the User Manual for a 1921 Ford Model T.
The Lord’s Prayer
Scholars are almost certain that rabbi Jesus composed this, although apparently he never set it down in writing. It’s a remarkable text. In fewer than 60 English words, it does everything a prayer should: petition and thanksgiving; forgiveness and repentance; awe and reverence; and praise and glory.
It famously begins, “Our Father who art in Heaven…” But presenting the notion of “God” as an elderly man who reigns outside the Universe is not helpful to most people today. And those who insist it should, are often the ones who confuse faith with gullibility and superstition.
The preface to the prayer is going to have to be updated, to speak to modern believers, especially women. But it is so ingrained in Christian liturgy that modifying it might well cause (yet another) schism in Christianity.
The Offertory prayer
Four thousand years ago, Abraham understood God to be a desert patriarch who demands blood offerings of unblemished victims, to appease God’s ego so He will send rain to the fields and keep the locusts away.
The Roman Catholic Church, the largest religion in the developed world, still maintains Abraham’s notion of God as a desert patriarch. The One to whom the faithful must make blood sacrifice.
Very loosely translated, the Offertory prayer at the center of the Mass goes: “And so Heavenly Father we offer you this cup of innocent blood — the blood of your own son, in fact — and trust you will be pleased to therefore send us rain for our fields.”
Since it’s no longer legal to sacrifice children, in some branches of Christianity the offertory presents the bread and wine as symbolic of the body and blood of Jesus.
But in Catholic theology, the bread and wine are not simply symbols. They are ‘transubstantiated’ so that while they still look and taste like bread and wine, they have become in fact actually, physically, really, the body and blood of Jesus.
The more I have studied science and technology over the decades, the harder it is to imagine that static old patriarch on the marble throne having the imagination to conjure up a dynamic, expanding universe.
And set against the Church’s insistence that it’s infallible in matters of the supernatural, we now understand that nature is best described by words like uncertainty, indeterminacy and relativity.
That is not to say there’s not something — some organizing principle, or ultimate source, or ground of being, or That Art Thou. Something accounts for the existence of existence. And beyond that, the universe is engineered to such tight specifications that is constantly evolving and changing at every moment, yet fully complete at every moment.
Alternately, the Old Man on the Marble Throne can even be reverenced as one expression among many. But at best it is a, not the only, reflection, among many possible images, of something beyond our ken. To insist it is the only image is a disservice not just to seekers, but also to that which is sought as well.
But who can blame seekers. Today, where a human-made veneer of digitization — artificial, augmented, virtual — is imposing itself between us and the organic, the natural, the real, who can blame people for seeking some stability, some reason for their existence beyond blind randomness?
Shortly after I began studying the Mass more closely, three priests approached me, at different times and places, to go to Confession.
That’s not supposed to happen in the Catholic Church. The people confess to a priest, not the other way around. These men were not confessing to pedophilia, or to having a mistress, or embezzling parish funds. Theirs was a much deeper issue.
They wanted to confess that they no longer believe the story they preach. They still wanted to proclaim the ‘good news’: there is a way to stay sane in a mad world. They wanted to focus on John’s Gospel account of the Last Supper when Jesus summed up the two fundamentals of his teachings: Peace be with You, and then in that composed frame of mind, Love One Another. That’s it; everything else is commentary or distraction.
It was the rest of it that so deeply bothered these three individuals: the flat earth; the prohibitions against homosexuality and divorce; the exclusion of non-Catholics. And the really bad PR the church is getting.
And in an age that is increasingly interfaith and ecumenical, they are confounded by the paradox behind the term Roman Catholic. Rome is a city in Italy. Catholic means universal, or global, or all encompassing. The term is the equivalent of square circle. Which is it?
But for all these issues, this is their life, for the rest of their life. Can men like these abandon the people who look to them for spiritual guidance? As a practical matter, where’s a middle aged former priest going to find a job in the secular world?
How two such sweet, simple messages — Peace be with you; Love one another — became this convoluted miasma of Greco-Roman gobbledygook (hypostatic union, and transubstantiation, and Trinitarian dogma) is hard to understand. In the New Testament, Jesus is less focused on “Believe!” than on “Do!” Not on orthodoxy but orthopraxy; not straight thinking, but straight doing.
And that two-fold message is especially pertinent in a technology-centered world. Whenever you use any tool — a pencil or a superconductor — approach it in a calm state of mind, at peace with one’s self. And then use the leveraging power of the tool to manifest acts of kindness. The gospel message, condensed to a bumper sticker, would read: Be calm; be kind.
It’s time for the institutional church to get back to the basics found in the New Testament:
· “John baptized with water. Mine is a baptism of the Spirit.” (Acts 1:5)
· These were the original directions for the apostles, the first bishops, as they set out to walk the talk: “I send you out two by two. Take nothing for your journey except a staff, a robe and sandals — no bread, no bag, no money in your belt. When you come to a place, the good people there will provide for you.” (Mark 6:7–13)
· Jesus’ description of a life fully lived: “If you would be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give the proceeds to the poor. Then come, follow me” and live as a mendicant. (Matthew 19:21)
· And this describes the earliest Christian communities before the accumulation of real estate and political power replaced the law of love with an obsessive love of the law. “And they sold their possessions, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.” (Acts 2:45)
And this doesn’t begin to incorporate the Inquisitions, the Holocaust, the Index of Forbidden Books, the personal anxieties and depressions.
But maybe there is a way for the church to save itself. By going back to basics. On a global scale, sell all the holdings (art, real estate, equities) and pay off the debts of honest debtors.
And on the local level, sell or lease the parish churches that are shutting down for lack of attendance to the local community. And let the locals (churched or unchurched) to use the facilities as a base from which to start a new economy, as described in the Acts of the Apostles: “From each according to his abilities. To each according to his needs.”
Hyper-connectivity and unleashed capitalism prove more toxic and more fatal with every passing year. We have created a very fragile global community and if the Internet went down for even a day, the social disruption would be incalculable.
Would it not make sense then to begin creating new, alternative, local, barter economies, based on composure and compassion, and resurrected on the Third Millennium?
© 2018, Tom Mahon
The rights for the art remain with the respective copyright holders.
