THE REALLY OLD GUY IN THE FUNNY HAT

Here comes another pope to America to say mass in Yankee Stadium. Or as I like to refer to papal visits, here comes another really old guy in a funny hat. Like the last pope, the very popular John Paul the 2nd, this guy is the enemy of his own people. If I was still a Catholic that statement would be considered heresy, as if heresy is some sort of serious crime. Well, for centuries heresy was a very serious crime, punishable by all sorts of cruel and unusual punishments. The Catholic Church for much of its history has been a repressive and bloodthirsty tool for controlling the masses, a political organization that stood in the way of human progress and promoted bigotry and slaughter against non-believers and enforced complete tyrannical control over its followers.

That's pretty much what I got out of 12 years of Catholic school. Even as a little kid I had a lot to wonder about when I noticed the glaring differences between the message of Christ that the church supposedly stood for and the actual practices of the Roman Catholic church. Of course as a little kid I knew better than to question my teachers since that sort of thing only invited a severe beating. I got enough of those as it was for the crime of being a typical restless and high spirited little boy. Many a Catholic school teacher in their bid to emulate the church they so loved made it their mission in life to beat and bully the spirit out of children. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. I was lucky enough to escape with a mind of my own.

I don't hate the nuns for it since they knew no better. They were, like priests, part of that very deluded segment of people who think they are God's representatives. To my mind their only mistake was to try to reinforce that opinion of themselves at the expense of others. Let people think what they want of themselves, it's no skin off anybody's nose until they try to force you to recognize their superiority and moral authority. And they got it backwards anyway, attributing to God their own cruelty, mean-spiritedness, control-freak tendencies and narrow minds, rather than trying to emulate the loving and tolerant God of their own Scriptures. No wonder they didn't want us reading the Bible, that would have exposed them immediately. Indeed, in earlier centuries, the church guarded education as its own provence, content to control the lives of the great majority of people who lived in illiterate ignorance and superstition.

When literacy spread, the church was threatened. When the Bible was translated into the various modern languages and spread to the common man through the invention of the Gutenberg printing press the Catholic church went to extraordinary lengths to prevent its distribution, claiming the sole right to be the interpreter of Holy Scripture. And no wonder, since even a cursory glance at the content of the message of Jesus Christ exposes the church as the biggest fraud in history. Before you could say A-B-C, the spread of literacy and the widespread distribution of bibles led to the Reformation, which was not really a reformation so much as a mass exit of people from Catholicism into other Christian faiths. The Roman Catholic faith never really reformed but instead remained for further centuries the corrupt, repressive and bloodthirsty organization it had always been.

As a response to the Reformation no soul-seaching went on in Rome, instead a series of wars were instigated to attempt to reseal the can of worms that literacy and self-thought opened up. That didn't work, but that can be no comfort to the millions who died horribly in the ensuing wars and the diabolical Inquisition that was Rome's response to the challenges to its authority. Boiling people in oil, burning them at the stake and earnestly torturing them did little to endear the church to the hearts and minds of those so afflicted. Not that a lot of the new so-called Christian sects were any better, having no other role model in the religion business than the Roman Catholic Church. It wasn't long before they started repressing people too, starting their own religious wars and torture programs. You've got to hand it "men of God," they are if nothing else consistent. My-way-or-the-highway people, almost every one of them. Even the gentler sects who eschew physical violence teach their believers that people of other faiths are lesser human beings, a direct contradiction of Scripture.

Which is a shame if you actually study the message of Jesus Christ. The guy never tortured anybody, never bullied a soul and never once advocated the use of armed forces to spread his message. He was adamantly against all of those things. After his death he was probably even more against them, considering what happened to him. His take on man's relationship to God was that it was to be a joyful and liberating experience drenched with love of one's fellow human beings and characterized by peace, tolerance and understanding. Pretty much the direct opposite of any organized religion. The more you study his life, methods and message, the more you wonder why the Catholic Church picked this guy of all people to be their poster boy. They couldn't have been any more his opposite if they tried. And they sure tried. Did they think the whole world would remain ignorant and illiterate forever?

If they had their way, that would be the case and they'd still be calling the shots in this world. As it stands now, Rome still holds a lot of power but its hands are tied in the warfare and torture business, forcing them to concentrate on their twisted ideology which still claims well over a billion believers. So they content themselves with stifling human progress wherever and whenever possible, refusing to allow birth control in poverty stricken nations, not allowing their priests to marry or letting women become priests, thus promulagating the pedophile aristocracy of their priesthood even in the face of huge public scandals. They have such a twisted perception of human sexuality they make it sound as if God made a huge mistake when he designed men and women to desire one another sexually.

One of the most beautiful experiences of humanity has been rendered somehow dirty and sinful, a human need almost as palpable as the need for air to breathe, water to drink and food to eat. Sexual relations should be an elevation of one's humanity and self-worth, a celebration of our respective femininity and masculinity, not the degrading and base act the church would have you believe it is. Their view that sexual relations are a necessary evil to be used only for procreation is as warped a take on humanity as exists. Equating sex with shame is a singularly repulsive proposition, far more bizarre than any variety of sexual practice could ever be.

When you mess with peoples' sex drive you mess with their heads. All those poor young idealistic fools who join their priesthood and swear the near-impossible vow of celibacy have no idea the kind of twisted existence that vow entails. You might as well swear not to use your lungs and kidneys for all the good it will do you. Your organs are all there for a purpose and they will function one way or another. There was a reason that some societies throughout history castrated certain people. Only a eunuch will not use his penis, simply because he doesn't have one anymore. But that doesn't mean that even eunuchs won't have sex. After all, there's always the receiving end of the deal. So what has happened to a priesthood that has sworn off women? Ask the altar boys, for centuries considered the next best thing.

So a church that preaches that the 5% of humanity who happen to be born homosexual are sinners destined to burn in eternal hell fire builds a cult of homosexual pedophiles as their representatives. Does this make any sense to anybody? This current pope while he was a top aide to the last pope even wrote a letter to cardinals throughout the world instructing them to keep secret the charges of pedophilia against priests until the statutes of limitations run out. Now this is not a stupid man, rather a cold and calculating one, so he had to know that keeping such secrets pretty much guarantees that such behavior will continue. And this is the guy the church elected to be pope, dashing all hope that will reform themselves anytime soon. And this Pope Benedict (Arnold?) is the last guy who to expect to attempt to bring the Church of Rome into any semblance of Christian practices.

So go to his mass if you like, line up to receive his blessing. Do the mental gymnastics being a Roman Catholic requires if that's what you need to be happy. Just don't ask yourself too many questions about the church's teachings and the deluge of contradictions that will flow from those questions. It's much easier to go with the flow, even if in your heart of hearts the behavior of the church disgusts you on many levels. There are some good things about the church, their effective charities, their teaching of moral lessons (even if they themselves ignore them), the sense of community inherent in mass worship. There is also a comforting reassurance in the familiar rituals, the incense burning, the pomp and circumstance, celebration of communion and the message of a thoughtful sermon. And if you ignore the man-made distractions and concentrate on the simple and beautiful message of Jesus Christ that many of these sermons stress, there are many spiritual rewards to be gained.

But living the message of Christ need not be a part of any organized cult. Humans have a tendency to screw up any religion they try to organize, not just Christianity. The Word is in the book, not in men. Read it for yourself and draw your own conclusions. The organ called our brain is meant to be used too. We all learned to read at a young age and much is made of our ability to comprehend what we read. Most Scripture is pretty straightforward stuff, while a lot of it is pretty convoluted and esoteric and difficult reading. But there's nothing in there that is beyond the average person's comprehension, and certainly nothing that can be explained better by a pedophile who is part of a devious organization. Sometimes it's quite obviously the work of men, while other passages seem to be imbued with profound revelations of a higher order. Read it and don't let anybody tell you that what you've just read means something other than what it plainly states and what it says to you as a person with a brain. This is not poetry or encrypted code, it's plain prose. You don't need a so-called expert to tell you what you've just read. You're smarter than that.