And how, In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, can so many leaders of the American Catholic Church promote the re-election of this man whose debauchery and decadence knows no bottom? And who wish to stack our courts with men and women obsessed with their love of the law, and so often blind to the law of love?
Worshipping a god who exists outside of nature, even outside the universe, and who has no women in his divine presence - no mother, wife, sister or daughter - leaves churchmen free to fixate on women's sins, and one in particular: abortion. One that is not even mentioned in the Gospels.
Certainly abortion is a complicated issue. The basic premise of all legal and ethical systems is respect for life. But the churchmen limit the focus exclusively to life in utero, and are mute to the ravages of economic and political systems that make life wretched for millions after they are born.
Yet so often manly sins against the common good (war, poverty and environmental waste), or against the future (not attending to catastrophic climate change), get little more than a tsk-tsk. Women's sins like abortion and birth control remain the focus of so much clerical wrath. How much longer will a group of men who refer to themselves collectively in the feminine - Holy Mother Church - consider Eve and her daughters to be the sole locus of temptation in the world?
And who ever said celibates should be the authorities on human sexuality? We don't let the blind teach drivers' ed.
As you know, Holy Father, midway through the Mass the congregation stands to recite the fundamental dogma of the Church. Credo; I believe that: long ago, Jesus came down from the sky, by himself, to earth to teach the people how to live a righteous life. When the religious leaders of the day, men with stiff necks and stone hearts, put him to death for his radical teaching of composure and compassion he went down to the underworld for three days, before coming back up to earth. Then, soon after, he went up again to heaven, the astral realm, from which he promises that one day he will return to judge the living and the dead.
Have you ever seen the television show, Ancient Aliens? Does it run in Italy? Each episode describes the myths and creation stories from various ancient civilizations. When a story comes from ancient Egypt or Babylon or Central America, it is presented as just that, an entertaining story. But when the same story is told in church at every Mass, it is not presented as a fable, but literally the core Truth of our Western faith tradition.
I doubt the producers of Ancient Aliens would ever compare the Christ story to the other fables. The public outcry would be too great. Those others are all mere fables; but the Nicene Creed is an unassailable Truth for billions of people. Men have killed and died for these Truths.
Even more unfortunately, the Creed, composed in 325 CE, describes the earth as a flat surface suspended beneath the dome of heaven, and above the bowl of hell. It is the ultimate alien adventure story: to travel from heaven down to earth, then to the underworld, then back to earth, then to heaven to await a return.
This takes cognitive dissonance to new heights. And holding two very different thoughts with equal conviction, about the nature and meaning of our very lives, presents us now with a series of crises: personal, communal and global.
Unfortunately, I got off to a bad start with the Church. When I was a child every room in our house had a picture of then-Pope Pius XII staring at us. It terrified me. I wish now it had been your congenial and welcoming face, or that of John XXIII. In time, like St Paul I traveled far and wide to try to sort things out: why can't I be happy in the Church I was baptized into, and that everyone I knew and loved seemed to be a happy in? Only after sussing on this for many years did I finally see the Church does not want us to be happy. If we were happy, we wouldn't need the Church.
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