Week 8, September 14, is the feast of the exaltation of the cross.  The feast celebrates the restoration of the stolen pieces of the cross to Jerusalem in the 7th century.  This seems to be a completely unverifiable event, although no one would try to verify it because it’s part of official lore.  Non-Catholics may be interested in knowing that the priest wears red vestments instead of the regular seasonal colors for feast-related masses. 

The homily was of the sort that I could get behind, for the most part.  Father talked at length about claiming the cross to relieve pain and suffering, and I believe this is a great idea.  From a physical standpoint, it’s good to have something external to concentrate on when you’re in great distress.  It lets you keep your wits rather than completely breaking down.  While I don’t endorse the cross as an object of adoration any more than I would endorse your teddy bear, the effect is the same.

When I think on these things during the week, I’ve been thinking about ways to interpolate the features I like into my life, and leave behind the chaff of vindictiveness and intolerance.   It won’t work, I imagine, but it’s worth the effort.

I knew it was coming, obviously.  I’m not blind to how big an issue this is in the church.  And I was all ready to launch into a balanced discussion of whether or not life begins at conception, and the rights of a human being to control what happens to its own body, and so forth.

Luckily, I don’t have to worry about any of that, because it turns out that the Catholic Church couldn’t care less.

You heard me right: The Church doesn’t give a damn whether a pregnancy is the same as a child.  It doesn’t enter into the equation.

If you read my last missive, you’ll see that I accepted (at least in principle) that the church had to pick a side and stick to it.  Well, here we have the ugly spectacle of the rubber hitting the road on such a policy.

You see, it makes no difference to the Church, in any factual sense, whether a zygote or a fetus is a viable human being.  What matters is that in someone’s ancient and uninformed opinion, any pregnancy is interchangable with any baby.  This, to me, is like trying to make wood pulp out of acorns instead of actual trees, or putting a frame around a pile of paint without making a painting first, or making appleseed pie.  It is self-evident to me that one is not the other, no matter what they will eventually become.

But the Church has picked a side.  The homily today was an outrage piece worthy of National Review’s op-ed page.  It seems that “a certain political figure who is Catholic”* said this week that she thought the Church was wrong on abortion.  Obviously the Church is not wrong on abortion because the Church says it is right on abortion.  Ipse dixit.  End of story.

A number of problems arise from this smug and self-righteous stance, and none of them have to do with whether or not an acorn actually is a tree.

1) Just because the Church says it doesn’t mean that Catholics believe it.  Many Catholics, not just politicians, are pro-choice.  These people are convicted enough about both their faith and the abortion issue that they’re willing to be denied communion over their opinions.  That is, in its own weird and stunted way, very inspiring.  It speaks to how important the Church is to these people, as well as to how wrong they think the Church is on this issue.

2) There are even disagreements within the Church hierarchy.  Bishops and priests fight all the time to change this or not change that.  It doesn’t make them bad Catholics, it just shows how much the institution means to them.  I don’t pretend to grasp all the issues surrounding the revival of the Latin Tridentine Mass, but you can start learning about it here. Likewise, this link will drop you into the deep end of an argument about female clergy that’s worth taking a look at. I don’t need to understand the deeper issues to see that these are both instances of people fighting for what they think is right to make the church better than they see it now.

3) What’s more, there are some things the Church has finally and conclusively been defeated on.  The church changed a great many things after 1965, and will continue to change a great many more.  Things that seemed like airtight dogma a few years ago are now openly being changed.

The Church occasionally faces a simple choice:  either it dials down the rhetoric and allows people to decide for themselves on an issue, or it sentences itself to irrelevancy.  This threat has been avoided dozens of times over the centuries, and yet to the faithful the institution of the Church is no weaker for it.

4) Finally, removing any nuance is bad for everyone, Catholic or not.  Obviously abortion is a complex issue, but the Church refuses to treat it as such.  This is largely because the more complex they allow the discussion to get, the more they lose ground on the details.  For the sake of simplicity, the tyranny of simple arguments that I elaborated on last week, they have to say that it is categorically bad and just pretend the obvious gray areas don’t exist.  This functions mostly to make the people forced into this position look like well-intentioned idiots.  In order to make such arguments appear valid in our mass this week, for instance, Father had to essentially condemn the last 500 years of progress in human rights, free expression, and learning.  Such an emphasis on “individual rights,”  Father insisted, were just anomalies that keep us from seeing the true design of Christ.  He failed to mention, of course, that such heretical and useless ideas are the reason he can drive a car, vote for his leaders, get medical treatment, and eat a balanced diet.  But hey, if it’ll prop up a colossally bad argument, why not just throw it all out the window?

Overall, this episode gives me the impression that saving souls is secondary to maintaining control in the mind of the Church leadership.  This doesn’t exactly shock me, of course, but I was a little taken aback at just how vigorous the assertion of control was.  An otherwise very nice elderly gentleman offering the mass threatened me rather boldly with eternal damnation for failing to accept the decree of the Church.  I suppose people who grew up with this sort of crap are used to it, but it rankles me.  Christ’s abiding love, my ass.

*Oh, by the way: it was Nancy Pelosi who said it, but nobody can mention that in public for fear that we might think Catholics are being told how to vote.  This ridiculous loophole may be the subject of future posts, but we’ll see how it plays out.

The gospel reading was from Matthew 16, and presented the story of Jesus building his church on the rock of Peter as the beginning of Papal authority.

Father used the occasion to lay out the best case I have ever heard for why the Church matters.  It’s a bit cynical and a bit frightening to grasp the full depth of the argument, but it’s one that can’t be written off easily.

The Church, he said, stands not just on the scripture, but also on the guidance and authority of the Pope and his priesthood.  Let’s leave aside for a moment that this is exactly the sort of thing a priest of the Pope would tell you, because that’s not really where his argument was going.

He talked about the stability of the church for 2000 years, due to its code of faith.  He pointed out that parishioners were not about to stand up and say “we sort of feel like we agree with God, the Father Almighty…”  The creed they’re about to say emphatically says “We believe in God, the Father Almighty.”

Does dissent and doubt get crushed under in the advance of such a monolithic system?  Absolutely.  And Father was gracious enough not to drive the point home, but the implication is simple: If you want a system that lasts, you can’t build it to accommodate every nuance and quirk of human will.  You pick a side, you decree that it’s doctrine, and you defend it against attack.  It is not a perfect system, but it is one that has been able to stand more or less unchanged even with an incredible amount of change taking place around it.

Father contrasted this steadfastness to evangelical Christianity, which is based largely on personal conversion experiences.  He didn’t deny its appeal, but he pointed out (I’m paraphrasing here) that such faith ultimately leads to a complete lack of objectivity.  If no one but you is the judge of your relationship with God,  Then how can you possibly know if you’re doing the right thing?  It would be possible to justify all manner of untoward behavior, believing all the while that you’re right even though so many others agree with you.  This is, he claimed, why there are more than 40,000 denominations of non-Catholic Christian churches, but still one and only one Catholic Church (well, except for the Eastern Orthodox and Anglican faiths, and a few others, but he was on a roll, so I let him off the hook on this point).

When I was growing up, I experienced this fractiousness first-hand.  We went from a church in the Baptist General Conference to a church in the North American Baptist Conference to a Mennonite Brethren church.  Same hymns, same Bible, same essential message.  What was the difference?  I couldn’t exactly tell you, but I’m sure if I dug down deep enough (or asked my Mom, who has always been exceedingly detailed in her awareness of such esoteric differences) it would come out to be some tiny dogmatic wrinkle that someone disagreed with once upon a time and now makes seemingly identical churches ideologically incompatible with one another.  I’m reminded of the story I’d heard of the church that split due to an argument over whether or not Adam had a belly button.  While it might just be an anecdote, I wouldn’t be overly suprised if it had actually happened.  The self-righteous tend to check their brains at the door in these matters.

So compared to that silly mess, the Catholic Church offers a much more stable option.  You might not find exactly what you’re looking for, but the appeal is that what you’re looking for won’t change on the whims of the deacons or when a new pastor is hired.

So is this an attractive offer?  Not really for me, I guess.  For me, signing up would be buying something I don’t really want so just to claim the company of millions of others who have it.  I’m about as cynical as they come, but that’s too cynical even for me.  But at least I know now that there’s a sound argument for the Church.  How reasonable it might be is still up in the air, but it’s a good start.

————————-

A few points I didn’t see as much value in:
He briefly scoffed at those who said that when Benedict was chosen, there was a political process at work.  He said that Benedict wouldn’t be able to change things even if he wanted to, since he was bound by the edicts of his faith.  Such a claim is simply laughable.  Of course it’s a political process.  When there’s a vote, there’s politics, no matter how holy the electors in question may be.  Of course he can control the direction of the church.  Benedict has no choice but to pick certain concepts and rules he wants to champion.  He can say he’s directed by God if he likes, but it’s still his worldly influences that decide which ideas he dedicates his pontificate to.

I also took issue with the tenuous connection to Old Testament prophecy that was said to take place in the gospel reading.  Jesus is supposed to have said that what Peter binds on Earth is bound in Heaven, and what he looses on Earth is loosed in Heaven.  This, according to the priest, is the same “rabbinical language” used in the first reading, from Isaiah.  It is supposed to indicate that this is some sort of procedural maneuver on Jesus’ part, to set Peter up in a recognizable position of authority.  I don’t doubt that this is all true, if it’s actually what Jesus said.  Knowing what we know of the way the Bible was put together, though, it’s overwhelmingly likely that Jesus said no such thing.  These are pretty obviously words put in his voice years after the fact to justify the authority of Rome, whose bishop claimed authority over other church elders through this very passage of scripture.  From what we can tell in most other places, it seems to me that Jesus wasn’t much of a bureaucrat, so the whole things rings hollow in my ears.

(Father also mentioned that one person in Solomon’s time was made administrator of the realm, able to rule in the king’s absence, and I couldn’t help but conjure images of Eddard Stark or Tywin Lannister acting as the Hand of the King in Westeros)

My avid readers (both of you) will have to wait til next weekend.

The homily saturday evening was about the Eucharist. If you’re unfamiliar, that’s the communion or sacrament or what have you, the wafer and wine (or just the wafer, it turns out. the wine is sort of optional). Father Anderson laid out in no uncertain terms what you needed to believe in order to participate.

I understand that you’re supposed to be a card-carrying Catholic to take communion, and I have no problem with that. I wouldn’t presume to take part in a ritual I don’t qualify for. But as the priest said, when Catholics take communion, they “believe” that they are actually partaking of the body and blood of Christ. Not a symbol, but flesh and blood. I’m informed that “by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood” (paragraph 1376, if you’re keeping score at home).

Now I’ve said that I’m not going to make fun, so I won’t compare and contrast this (as my hero Robert Anton Wilson did) to cannibalistic rituals that have been carried out throughout history. And we’ll set aside the logistics of that much flesh and blood being miraculously recreated on demand five times a weekend in parishes all across the country and around the world, by priests who apparently have all received the necromantic training necessary to accomplish such a feat.

What I want to know is what is meant by the word “believe” in this context. Does the average Catholic actually accept that they are placing human flesh in their mouths, and they’re okay with that? Or is it the sort of “believe” like we practice elsewhere in our lives? We all have ideals and goals and hopes that we would say we “believe” in, but in practice, we understand that our reality comes up short of our aspirations. Charity is a great concept, but most people don’t give change to every panhandler they pass by. In the same way, I wouldn’t blame a Catholic practitioner if she answered “yes” when asked if she believes in transubstantiation, but admits privately that this is a convenient fiction, a way of participating in the infinite.

And if the Church were okay with that, even implicitly, I think it would make their position easier to accept. The problem is that no such allowance is made for the fact that this fundamental aspect of the faith is (and you’ll have to pardon me saying so) bat-shit crazy. I can be thrown out of the Church and barred from communion for saying that the wafer is not the body of Christ. Just ask John Frith what happens when you speak out against this particular crazy idea. The upshot of this problem is that most (non-bat-shit-crazy) Catholic practitioners are already heretics in some sense, if only silent ones.

So I don’t really know what to say about it, at the end of the day. It’s not going to stop me from fulfilling my obligation, but I may have to dial down my optimism a bit at integrating Catholic belief with my life.

“Because when we were afraid Papa was going to die, we promised him that we’d do this.” (this is our pre-arranged cover story to give ourselves a little credibility with kids and other relatives).

“How long?”

“A year.”

“If Papa dies before the year is over, do we still have to do it?”

I would have been horrified, except that the very same question had occurred to my wife and I separately when we first discussed the matter. I figured it was a valid point.

“Yes.”

————

So that was the beginning of our experiment. All three of my kids are vastly different in temprament and personality, so I figured it would be sort of interesting to see how they handled our first flirtation with organized religion.

Oldest Boy (age 11) is a trooper.  He’s progressed by leaps and bounds this last year or so in handling responsibility and becoming more stoic about the things he doesn’t like.  He adjusted his attitude accordingly and didn’t complain.  The Wife counted 64 questions in the 55 minutes of mass, which is typical for him.  I find myself taking him for granted sometimes, but I find lately that he’s often displaying the kind of behavior I want from him.  He accepts what’s thrown at him as best he can, and does his best.  If my other kids learn the same behaviors OB shows us lately, I think they’ll be just fine.

Baby Girl (age 4) is practically already Catholic.  She’s been going to preschool at my parents’ Evangelical Lutheran church, where she’s been loving all the Bible lessons. Her other Grandma got her into Catholic Bible School this summer, and got her a CD with the music from Bible School as well as long-winded explanations of Catholic ritual and belief.  She went to sleep with that CD playing on repeat for weeks after she got it.  So to say that she’s open to the idea is an understatment.  She turned to me during mass and said “Church is fun.”  To be fair, I might think church was more fun if I also got to color pictures all the way through, but it seems unbecoming a man of my years.

Then there’s Middle Boy (age 6).  At age 4, while enrolled in the same Lutheran preschool and receiving the same lessons that would resonate so much with BG, MB informed us quite matter-of-factly that Jesus and God weren’t real, just stories that people made up like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.  This is not isolated behavior.  He is a total rational empiricist almost to an extreme.  I alternate between being terribly proud of his clear-headedness, and being afraid that I’m raising some sort of amoral monster.  Of course, he’s still a sweet kid at heart, and just about the time I get too worried, he does something so incredibly sweet and thoughtful that my heart melts and it all goes away.  MB did not take the adjustment easily.  He spent the first 15 minutes fidgeting and fussing.  Then he spent another 15 minutes sullenly sitting, mugging for the mirrored glass of the nursery area a few rows behind us, and sighing loudly when he could find nothing else to do.  He rushed out into the hall for a bathroom break, then came back and proceeded to complain about it taking too long for the rest of the service.  Patience is a virtue that MB hasn’t developed yet.  My hope is that this will help instill that in him a bit.

In an unrelated jarring note, I found myself telling another parent from school that I couldn’t call her back in a few minutes because we were “going to church.”  This might not seem odd to you, or to the person I said it to, but it’s mind-bogglingly weird to me.

Not when I married into a Catholic family.  I did that some time ago.  And my in-laws have always been nothing but civil and pleasant, despite being disappointed that none of their sons-in-law are Catholic.

Recently, my in-laws helped us out of some financial difficulty.  It’s a very hard thing for me to ask for money, but we had little choice.  They are not vindictive, I-told-you-so sorts of people, but my Father-in-law had one string he attached to the money:  we had to attend mass with them every week for a year.

I was raised Christian (Baptist, if you’re keeping score), but I haven’t had much use for any of it since i was a teenager.  My wife (Catholic by birth but no longer practicing) and I have made a point of not involving our three kids in religious life of any kind, because we just don’t recognize it as having importance in our lives, and it seems hypocritical of us to insist the kids participate when we don’t want to.  But now we’re going to more or less be Catholic for a year.

My own parents, while probably wishing they’d thought of this idea years ago to get us into their church, were supportive of the idea.  They probably figured a different church is better than no church.  Mom said it was important that I approach it with an “open mind” or it wouldn’t have any effect.  Now, when Mom says the words “an open mind,”  what she means is “a mind that’s in agreement with what I think.”  This has always been a sticking point in arguing faith with my mother, and I’ll probably talk about it again.  But she has a good point.  There’s little value in this experience if I go and read a book all through the service.  An effort needs to be made, even if that effort isn’t exactly sincere.

For my part, I am not starting this blog to make fun of the Catholic church or its rites.  I am not one of those sneering, snickering atheists who insist that you’re stupid simply because you choose to go to church.  It’s fair to say that I think it’s a bit silly, but I plan to keep that to myself unless there’s some compelling reason not to. No, I’m writing this because I want to document the experience.  I can’t guarantee the open mind that I promised my mother, but I can at least try to see the other side of the argument.

I want to write about my experiences because I want to end up with a sense of what it means to be religious.  Is it good simply to attend church, even if you don’t believe in it?  Can you be Catholic even if you don’t believe?  And will it have any impact on my life?

We start this saturday.