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.

Week 1: The Uncomfortable Start of a Project

"This is the day the lord hath made; let us rejoice and be glad in it."

-Common expression to open church services

"Little Darlin', it feels like years since we've been here."

-The Beatles

Waking up on Sunday mornings is pretty alien to me, at least recently. 8:30 seems ungodly early for a weekend. But I am intent upon suffering so for my first trip to church in two years. It would not be church if it didn’t feel like a chore, right? But as I wake up, I get this unusual feeling—I’m looking forward to church. Weird, I know. I begin the drive to church, and it’s a beautiful fall morning. The air is fresh. I see neighbors walking dogs, raking leaves, talking to one another, and they seem happy. The sunlight is coming from a strange direction, lighting the trees into a blaze of orange and yellow. I turn on the radio, and the Beatles are singing “Here Comes the Sun.” The world is conspiring to make me happy about church.

One cannot help being tempted to see God’s hand in this beautiful morning. It’s as though he is thanking me, welcoming me, approving of my decision to attend church again. Or perhaps he just made such a beautiful morning in an attempt to prove his existence to me, an unbeliever.

If there were a God, he would know that I’m attending to church in order to look at it with atheist eyes. He would be offended that I will sit and pretend, sing along, read the prayers, listen to the sermon, and not believe a word of it. But I’m not worried about an imaginary God being offended and striking me down for unbelief. I will pursue my project: I will attend a different church every Sunday and write about it from an atheist’s perspective. Simple as that.

But where to begin? I want to ease into this project—nothing too crazy yet. So I choose a mild and liberal Baptist church near my house, and a church that will probably be similar to the Presbyterian ones I spent so many Sundays at earlier in my life. It will be nice to start with something familiar.

Approaching the church, I begin to worry about the empty parking lot. And where is the front door, anyway? I end up circumnavigating the building looking for a front door, but there are only about 15 cars in the parking lot, and no obvious influx of people. My plan to blend in and observe inconspicuously will not be easy if there are only a few people here. Not finding the front door, and feeling pretty stupid about it, I make my way in through the church office, and find the sanctuary. I must be early.

I'm not early. It's 9:55, and there are still only 10 people in the congregation, and I’m feeling pretty conspicuous, but at this point I’m committed. Five people in the front row. Not wanting to be too rude sitting in the back row, and I take a seat a few rows behind the crowd at the front, thinking I can hide behind them. 9:59. The five in the front row get up and relocate to the choir’s bench, leaving me in the very front of the congregation, right as the music begins. Awesome.

As the service starts, though, I’m oddly relaxed. Who cares if there are 10 blue-hairs wondering about the random guy in the front row? I do a half-turn and get a quick glance at the crowd behind me as the service starts, and I realize I’m attending a dying church. There’s almost nobody here.

It’s a strange mix of emotions I feel. There’s something comfortable, familiar, and almost joyful about being here. I spent so many hours in church growing up that it’s like returning home, or seeing an old friend again after many years. The comfort to be found in church is real. But I’m conflicted because the premise on which it’s all founded is nonsense. I’m angry I spent so many hours praising something that was never there. The people sitting in the rows behind me draw inspiration and guidance from a system that is a lie. So why am I depressed to see so few people here?

But when the pastor speaks, I like him immediately. He’s wearing a bowtie. He begins, “So the hated Yankees have won the world series,” and proceeds into a discussion of sports. Interesting, but it doesn’t seem like a sermon. I look at the bulletin and realize this portion of the service is the children’s lesson, and then it really hits me—there are no children here.

What do I really believe about the church? If I believe there is no god, and I believe religion is an enormous delusion, then should I be happy that there are no children to hear this lesson? Certainly church is not going to disappear anytime soon, if ever, but this one is—that is a near certainty. A church without children is doomed.

Growing up, I never used to listen to the sermon. But this one is good. The pastor touches on one of the best aspects of religious belief: charity. I cannot deny that religion makes people more selfless and compassionate than we are naturally inclined to be. The pastor builds his sermon around the passage from Mark in which a woman pours expensive oil on Jesus, and the bystanders protest that it could have been sold to give money to the poor. The pastor attempts to make sense of this strange action and Jesus’s approval of it. It is a perplexing section, and the pastor weaves it together with stories of charity and transformation from the local Rochester community. He focuses on Foodlink, an organization that provides huge amounts of free food to hungry families all over western New York. He asks the questions: will there always be destitute people? Will it always rain in our lives? Will there always be suffering around us? He answers those questions by saying that there will always be suffering until the kingdom comes and everyone is called back to god again. In the meantime, though, in our lives, god will rain blessings upon us in unexpected ways, as Foodlink does for the Rochester hungry and the woman in the gospel does for Jesus. People can give of their deep passion as expressions of charity, and others can be transformed by that.

A beautiful message, and artfully delivered. I wholeheartedly approve of his message of charity, and I believe the congregation, small though it is, follows through on this message with their actions. But do we need the Bible to inspire this? No. In fact, I do not believe that the gospel passage he analyzes conveys this message of charity. Though it was a passionate sermon, it was based on an illogical interpretation of the passage. If Jesus really believed in charity, he would not have applauded the woman for her kind act of anointment. The bystanders were right; the woman’s action was foolishly wasteful. I’ve been to Foodlink to volunteer*, and they have pallets of food as far as the eye can see, and each day we’d move a different food item. One day I was there, it was bananas. The Foodlink analogy doesn’t work, because the modern day equivalent of the woman’s action would be a Foodlink worker taking a pallet of bananas, turning them into a giant banana milkshake for Jesus, and then pouring it down the drain after he tasted it. Those bananas might be given to Jesus out of her deep passion, it may be a beautiful gesture of appreciation, but it removes food from the destitute who need it. The bystanders were right to protest. As far as I can see, this Bible story doesn’t make any sense in a 21^st-century context, and maybe not in any context. Unfortunately, every Sunday religious leaders must attempt to explain and find relevance in Biblical texts that sometimes defy logic. Jesus was dead wrong here, if we read the story from the perspective of the hungry.

I believe human morality has its basis outside of God and religion. We do not need to play games of logic in order to find moral messages in a biblical text that may contradict what we know to be right. The church's minister, in his message of charity, was right, and Jesus was wrong. But the logical gymnastics are a sad necessity of religious belief, and one that most believers choose to ignore.

As I leave the church, I shake the pastor’s hand and thank him for having me as a guest. I genuinely liked the service, the sermon, and the people. Still, I feel like a liar and a snake, because I’m pretending to be a believer but I’m secretly there to dissect and criticize. Those few people in the congregation will stay to discuss their charity work, and I will go home to type up an arrogant critique and then watch football.

This church is dying, and it does sadden me. Though I am sure belief in god is wrong, I’m surprised that I find myself thinking the world will be slightly worse off if this congregation dissolves. I realize that I should approach this project with a spirit of intellectualism, but also with humility and an open mind. I have much to learn.

*Incidentally, I can’t claim to be a particularly charitable person. Saying I volunteered at Foodlink makes me sound much better than I am. The volunteer work at Foodlink was part of my college fraternity’s charitable work. We figure that a few days of volunteering balances out four years of reckless drunkenness.