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Is the Pope Catholic?
[NATIONALREVIEW] By JOHN O'SULLIVAN
In which the author makes a good case, without actually coming out and saying so in so many words, that the 2100 year old church is again riddled with the adherents of everything the institution's supposed to be against.

Could Archbishop Lefebvre have been right, despite how nice Pope John XXIII seemed?

Is the church in need of a mass exorcism? It'd be easy to make jokes about watching the current head of the church spin around thirteen times and vomit Linda Blair, but it isn't really funny. The whole idea of having a (catholic) church is to have people paid to ponder full time the nature of right and wrong. I could be wrong, not being infallible like some people I know of, but global warming doesn't seem to be the stuff of salvation. Yet Chicago's archbishop commented:

“The pope has a bigger agenda. He’s got to get on with other things, of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the church. We’re not going to go down a rabbit hole on this.”

That sort of talk makes your average Baptist or Free Methodist collapse in gales of laughter. The ghosts of Saint Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox are all audibly snickering.

I make no secret of being an Orthodox Agnostic. I have no idea whether there's an afterlife. I passed my allotted Threescore and Ten mark last year, so I'm getting kinda nervous about that. My expectation is that when The End does come my consciousness will simply go where it was before I was born, or maybe to where it was when I was two or three, wherever that was. If I reincarnate as someone (or something) else but don't remember my previous lives is it really me that's alive? Jews seem to get by okay without the promise of heaven or hell, so I guess I can. If God exists (the existence of everything is a good argument in favor), I still don't believe his ego is so small that he requires me to grovel on my knees and praise him like some Oriental potentate. God is not Erdogan.

Christians have different opinions about all that. The ideas of Heaven and Hell are outgrowths of the ideas of dualism, of Good versus Evil. If you're good your soul, which may or may not be the same as your animus, gets to go to heaven. If you're Actually Hitler or Himmler or Heydrich or one of those guys (not just Literally) then it's the hot place for you. Or cold. Dante said the innermost hell was colder than... ummm... hell.

That still leaves Roman Catholics with the problem of a polluted church, that's more concerned with Global Warming, what to wear for mass on Sunday, and how to raise bail for a few hundred rapacious priests here and there. If the guys who define Good and Evil are themselves evil, can you trust their definitions? If the Church has fallen on evil days and they hold an exorcism, who's going to be cast out? Beelzebub or Saint Michael? Can you be sure just because the College of Cardinals stops spinning around? Duality, see? The Zoroastrians put good and evil on the same level of strength. Lucifer thought they were right.

There are alternatives.

The actual Catholic Church consists of over twenty churches. The largest by population is the Roman Catholic, of course. The non-Roman Catholic Churches fit into one of six liturgical traditions: Alexandrian, Antiochene (or Syrian), Armenian, Byzantine, Maronite, and Chaldean. We have a Ukrainian Catholic Church right here in Baltimore. It follows the Byzantine tradition, which is similar to the Greek Orthodox. They acknowledge the Pope as primus inter pares, but they also maintain different liturgies, ignoring that infallibility thingy. I have no idea whether their priests and bishops like to diddle little boys and girls. I haven't heard of any cases, but I haven't been paying attention and their numbers are small enough that no one seems to have gone digging for dirt on them to destroy them as institutions.

If you're utterly sick of the Pope, and want more structure in your life than you'd get as an Episcopalian, a United Methodist, or some other National Council of Churches Sunday feel good club, there are the Orthodox churches -- Greek, Russian, Coptic and such. They don't consider the Bishop of Rome infallible and they treat with him as equals. No one is required to hop on the humanist slide. They all still retain the concepts of sin and redemption.


Posted by: Fred 2018-08-31
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=521857