Catholics: What Century Are You Living In?

-I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful. –Pope John Paul II, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis 4

-Let no one deceive you with shallow arguments. –Ephesisans 5:6

Women can’t be priests? Really? Forgive me for beginning with such an obvious and tired old subject, but really?

Catholics are generally an educated bunch. So why do so many accept such an obviously discriminatory policy? I believe that no Catholic should accept the teachings of their church because it is officially a discriminatory organization. Only years of indoctrination can cause an educated person to overlook this outrageous fact.

I’ve heard some Catholic leaders explain why women can’t be priests. Their reasoning is wildly nonsensical. It should be offensive to anyone with a brain. In fact, I’ll refer to today’s passage from the scripture and encourage readers to take it to heart: “Let no one deceive you with shallow arguments…Learn to judge for yourselves what is pleasing to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:6-10). Each Catholic should judge for himself or herself whether they want to swallow the backwards teachings of a religious group mired in the past, blind to equality and reason. Just google “Why can’t women be priests” and read the insulting games of logic for yourself.

But none of this is actually what church this week was about. It’s just what I thought of as I sat in a crowded, downtown Catholic church waiting for the service to begin. I watched people genuflect before entering the pews. I watched them cross themselves. I listened to songs in Latin. And I began to wonder whether religious people place more value in things just because they have always been done than in their own ability to think.

The priest’s sermon had some really strong points that I agree with, but ultimately led me to ask the same question. What century are they in? He referenced a story from the Gospel of John, in which Jesus heals a blind man. The people asked what the blind man had done to deserve his blindness, and Jesus said nothing—he was blind so that God could reveal his glory by healing him.

OK, so that guy is pretty lucky. Jesus heals him, he can see, dances off down the street, whatever. Everyone’s amazed at God. Excuse me, but what about all the blind saps that Jesus didn’t heal? Why did God make them blind? Couldn’t he just show his power more effectively by miraculously making everyone able to see. No wait—why stop there. He could miraculously make everyone healthy. Oh, and make enough food for everyone to eat. Heck, he could throw in ice cream stands on every street corner in the deserts of Israel. Seems to me there are better ways for God to show his glory.

Ah, but I’m being unfair. The priest wasn’t interested in all these potentialities. He was merely trying to extract from this ancient and probably untrue story a reasonable lesson for today’s listeners. And it is here that I must admit he had some good things to say. He was addressing some real and serious issues that we all think about. Why is there suffering? Why is there illness? How are we to respond to pain? He told a story about a person with Downs Syndrome and how she brought much joy to the lives of people she touched. He suggested that all people have gifts to bring, that all people can make life better for others. He made the beautiful point that we should not measure quality of life by physical ability. The disabled, sick, and elderly are equally human, and we should not as a culture be afraid of physical diminishment. What does it mean to be fully alive?

I’m glad I went to this church and heard this lesson. Indeed, I am better off for hearing and pondering this message.

At the same time, I am deeply angry. He suggests that we should explain away suffering as something that God wants. Suffering as we think of it—well, that’s not actually suffering. If you think that blindness is bad, you’re just not getting it. If you think that a child dying of cancer is bad, well, you’re just missing the point. If you think that someone being born without legs and consequently being forced to beg for pennies next to a trash heap in Nepal is bad, then you’re not realizing God’s true purpose.

If it is for the glory of God that these people suffer, as Jesus suggests in John 9:3, nobody should worship that God. They should reject him.

Thankfully, it is not for the glory of any god that people suffer. If it were, that would be a cosmic cruelty without reason for hope. Rather, suffering has reasons that we can understand and do something about. We might not be able to cure blindness or cancer yet, but perhaps someday. We might not be able to give people legs, but perhaps someday. And until that day, we can organize human civilization in intelligent ways that respect the dignity of all and ease suffering everywhere. Pie in the sky? Unrealistic? Cheesy? Yes, all of the above, but certainly better than worshipping the imaginary being who caused the suffering for his own glorification. We should be beyond that in the 21^st century.

Jesus ends the story of the blind man with this observation: “It is for judgement that I have come into this world—to give sight to the sightless and to make blind those who see…If you were blind you would not be guilty, but because you claim to see, your guilt remains” (John 9:39-41). The Catholic Church would do well to heed Jesus’s words. They claim to see. Jesus himself says that those people who claim to have all the answers are the most ignorant. But wait, churchgoingatheist, wouldn’t that apply to arrogant bloggers like yourself? To anyone? Yes, I suppose it would. Jesus’s words create a paradox, by which nobody can ever speak to anything with authority. Another logical trap, causing people to remain in perpetual ignorance rather than thinking for themselves.

Week 5: Is the Catholic Church…

…capitalized? To write this blog entry, I begin to type this question into Google. Wanted to make sure I capitalized the right words. But Google tried to predict my question, based, I presume, on the most common phrases typed into Google that begin like that. So before I got to “capitalized,” Google’s options were:

1) Is that Catholic Church a cult?

2) Is the Catholic Church the True Church?

3) Is the Catholic Church evil?

4) Is the Catholic Church the antichrist?

Allow me to answer these questions for the benefit of the world, since apparently a lot of people are wondering these things.

1) Defining “cult” is very slippery. Where is the line between a “mainstream religion” and a “cult”? The word cult has a negative connotation that members of mainstream religions like to give to people they find weird. As an atheist, I don’t see much difference between believing that David Koresh is the reincarnation of Jesus or believing that a divine power sent his only son to be murdered so that we could somehow be forgiven for things that god doesn’t like. Really—is it stranger to believe aliens are hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet or that Jesus will return to earth to yield a judgment sword? Improbable though it is, I’m inclined to think the Hale-Bopp comet “cult” had a better chance of being right. So the bottom line is, yes, the Catholic Church is a cult, but no more or less so than any other religious system that requires belief in the supernatural.

2) The True Church? What does that even mean? There are apparently a lot of people wondering if the Catholic Church was the first church, i.e. the church that began in the first century right after Jesus’s death. Well, there’s no doubt that it grew out of that initial community of believers, but so did every other church. More to the point, though, the answer is No because the Catholic Church that exists today probably looks absolutely nothing like the churches did in the first years after Jesus. Read the book of Acts for a sense of that first church. That and Paul’s letters in the New Testament are as close as we can get to knowing what it was like, and the Catholic Church’s emphasis on ritual, music, priesthood, and liturgy are drastically different from the charismatic, impassioned, spontaneous, spirit-driven worship of the first Jesus-believers. I heard once that the evangelical churches today are probably much more similar in nature to the first churches than Catholic or protestant churches are.

3) Yes, because it knowingly lies and shamelessly acquires wealth by deceiving people into giving them money. In my humble opinion.

4) No, because there is no such thing as the antichrist.

Now that we’ve got those big questions answered, allow me to pose my own questions about the Catholic Church. Is the Catholic Church…

…alive and well? Most certainly. This week the Churchgoing Atheist project took me to a Catholic Church, a place unfamiliar to me, a lifelong-protestant-turned-atheist. Of course I’d seen Catholic services in movies (like The Godfather, when all the murders happen) and I’d been to Catholic churches for weddings and funerals, but never had I been to the average run-of-the-mill service. I was amazed to find so many people there. 200? 300? There were more people at this service than had been at all the services of the previous four churches combined. My impression of the Catholic Church is that of a church lots of people belong to in name only, begrudgingly remaining Catholic because of lingering childhood guilt, and that prejudgment had led me to expect an empty church. I thought of Catholic Churches as dreary and dark, full of stodgy old people. I couldn’t believe the number of young couples, children, even teenagers. Everyone looked happy, or at least content. People were kneeling, praying with their eyes closed before the service began, something one rarely sees in protestant churches. I just didn’t expect the enthusiasm for a church that most Catholics I know don’t attend or attend only out of a feeling of obligation. This church was legitimately vibrant, and I was witnessing only one of the three services they hold each Sunday morning.

…subject to such strange questions on Google for good reason? I can understand people asking if the Catholic Church is the true church, because many people (like myself) question what they are told. It is perfectly reasonable to observe that there are hundreds if not thousands of variations of Christianity and wonder how that could be. Is it not strange that such disparate rituals and belief systems claim the same origin? Should we not ask what our belief in one of those systems implies about the truth of the other 99%? I can also understand the question about evil. History shows that the members of Catholic Church—in the name of the Catholic Church—have perpetrated war, murder, rape, theft, and so on. I do not wish to dwell on the evils that churches have historically done, because that subject gets a lot of attention from atheists already. Suffice to say, though, it’s a fair question. Is that Catholic Church a cult or the antichrist are nonsensical questions that I suspect get typed into Google by people who are taught to be prejudiced against Catholics. Who that might be, I can only speculate. (Mike Huckabee, I'm looking in your direction...)

…mindless? I would like to explore my protestant/atheist bias here—I don’t claim total neutrality in this project. My impression of Catholics is that they value mindless ritual over serious engagement in critical thinking. This impression comes from history class, in which we learned about the Reformation, from Catholics that I know, and from things people in protestant churches would tell me about Catholics. I believe protestant denominations, in general, encourage individual thought more than Catholics. Today’s service certainly reinforced this belief. To begin, there were no Bibles to be seen. There were books of liturgy—that is, choral responses, prayers, songs, etc.—on each pew, but no Bibles. If someone wanted to read for himself the day’s scripture, he could not. Second, the service consisted primarily of stock sayings that would be sung or spoken aloud by the congregation with no text or prompting. This suggests that the service follows the same pattern each week, and rote memorization or mindless parroting of responses allows one to participate. The sermon consisted of 10 minutes of meaningless platitudes about how God is present in our lives and brings joy to us even when we are unhappy. It did not refer to any book (other than the Bible), current event, or personal story. It did not challenge the listeners to contemplate. It merely reassured them that God was everywhere and his presence should make us happy. It was completely devoid of intellectualism. I admit that ritual has psychological value, but it seems that the Catholic Church places emphasis on ritual at the expense of critical thought. But I am open to having this belief disproved over the course of the project.

…charitable? Tough one. I believe the answer to be yes, because the hundreds of people who came to this service today brought Christmas presents for the poor. There was a huge stack of them. During the offertory, nearly everyone donated, and a second offertory was immediately held to raise money for a specific individual. This church must have raked in the cash. On the other hand, this church had the most beautiful interior I’d ever seen in an American church (I have seen cathedrals in Europe). I was struck by how a fairly bland-looking church in an urban neighborhood could have such ornate beauty inside. The wood paneling, the stained glass, the golden ornamentation, all suggest enormous cost. I can understand why people during the reformation got angry when they saw their hard-earned money contributing not to charity, but to the beautification of a building, the sole purpose of which was to make people so struck with awe that they would be more likely to give money. Still, I am sure the Catholic Church in general and this one in particular give away huge amounts of money to people who need it. This is a topic I’m interested in pursuing further, but not today.

…purposefully using guilt to control people? I just have to comment on this, since the notion of “Catholic guilt” is so prevalent. To what extent does the Church knowingly employ guilt to control people? Probably a lot, but no more so than many other denominations. I still get the guilt call from my mother, in which she expresses “disappointment” that I’m not in church on Sundays. (Why? Why disappointed? Would you prefer falsehoods and piety to truth and thoughtfulness?) I went to the Catholic Church today hoping to get some good juicy guilt preaching, but I didn’t. There were only two moments when the priest played the guilt card: the people weren’t “joyous” enough during the first hymn, and since the topic of today’s service was joy, he wanted to see them really get joyous on the second hymn. (They did not.) The second instance of the guilt card was during the children’s sermon, when he asked the children if they had all gotten their Christmas trees from this church’s Christmas tree sale. When one said no, everyone laughed, and he said, “It’s OK, there are a lot of good trees out there, but the best ones are here.” It was a subtle and harmless plug for the church’s Christmas tree fundraiser, not to the children but to the parents. Still, guilt card.

My call to Catholics: do not feel guilty for not going to church. I have spent many Sunday mornings feeling guilty for not being in church. Even if you believe in God, the notion of a God who actual cares whether you are “worshipping” him enough should be offensive to you. I tend to waste a lot of time checking fantasy football stats and drinking beer, so I sometimes feel guilty that I’m wasting my time, but I don’t feel guilty for missing a morning of being indoctrinated.