Scribblings

On another note…

So let’s not talk about the POS in the White House who screwed government workers for three weeks for a vanity project while his Cabinet members showed they have no understanding whatsoever of the plight of the average American.

And let’s not talk about Nancy Pelosi having more balls than all the men in Congress put together. As always, it took a good woman to clean up the mess made by incompetent men.

No, let’s talk about the Catholic Church. As someone who was raised in this medieval throwback, I feel I know the organization inside and out. After all, I collected pennies to save pagan babies, was May queen, spent 16 years in Catholic school and lived next door to the convent and church we attended during my childhood. Yep, I know about the Catholic Church.

So as the pope and his minions blather and bleat about child sexual abuse and decide on more empty words they call policy which will actually change nothing, let me add my two cents.

Until the Catholic Church makes deep and systemic changes in the medieval structure it insists on retaining, nothing will truly change.

A ministry that excludes women is a ministry that denies half the population of the world. It’s a ministry that also denies its own history. Jesus had his ministry funded in large part by the woman we have come to know as Mary Magdalene. Yep, that woman we’ve been taught was a prostitute was rich and powerful and the only reason Jesus had the resources to continue to preach.

And when he died, it wasn’t men who had the balls to go to his tomb. No, they were too busy trembling and hiding. It was three women who had the guts to go to the tomb and it was three women to whom the angel appeared. Not a man in sight.

All this is just part of the story of women’s tremendous influence in the early church. That is, the influence they had until that woman hater Paul came along. A great deal of effort went into the early church’s effort to wipe the slate clean of any reference to the amount of influence women had in the early church. Their contributions were obscured and their full participation in the ministry gradually stripped away until it seemed as though the church had been only men from the beginning.

So there’s that. The church continuing to insist that only men can be priests is a construct from its early history when women’s contributions and equality in ministry were suppressed to promote male dominance.

Now let’s move on to the issue of married priests. Up until about the year 1000 CE, priests married. The church stepped in when it feared its assets would be lost to inheritance by the offspring of the priests. So obviously, the way to handle that was to deny priests the right to marry. When they died, everything stayed with the church.

Now understand that this only held true if you were on the lower end of the spectrum. On the higher end – bishops, cardinals and popes – you actually got away with making your bastard offspring cardinals and bishops in their own right, often before they were of age to even be confirmed.

So this no marriage thing had less to do with the priests devoting themselves to the ministry than it did with the church wanting to hoard all its wealth.

And that means that today there is absolutely no logical reason to not allow priests to marry. To say that it would take away their dedication to their calling is to insult and negate the work of every Christian minister with a family who is devoted to his flock.

Finally, if you are concerned about sexual abuse and predatory behavior, perhaps rather than putting out another piece of empty blather on a paper no one will really read or pay attention to, the church could admit women into the priesthood or allow priests to marry. This would go a long way towards discouraging pedophiles and rapists who see the church as a hidden protected world where they can do as they please.

The Catholic Church today is a medieval institution in which men parade around in shiny capes and embroidered hats while carrying bejeweled staffs. Pople bow as they pass as though this still was the Middle Ages and the king was riding by. It’s a spectacle that belongs in a movie, not real life. And god knows the church has long since stopped deserving respect given the decades long slog it has taken the rest of the world to drag its dirty secrets into the light.

The church was my parents’ lifeblood. It was their home, their comfort. I’m glad they both died before finding out just how truly empty and diseased that house was.