Going Down the Sinéad Road

[talktooloose]

Without apology:

FUCK YOU, CATHOLIC CHURCH.

As a Jew I hereby do not forgive you for the Spanish Inquisition or for turning a blind eye to the Holocaust.

As a gay man, I hereby do not forgive you for your continued attacks on my basic rights and freedoms. I do not forgive you for the 1986 Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons. In this document you justified gay bashing by saying "...when homosexual activity is...condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase."

I do not forgive you for the constant harrassment of governments in their attempts to extend to queer people rights equal to those actually or apparently living a heterosexual lifestyle.

I do not forgive you for your latest interference to social progress as regards gay marriage in Canada. And, boy! am I not looking forward to the Vatican's paper tomorrow outlining how the faithful world-wide should help build pressure against extending marriage rights to non-heterosexuals.

If you are a reader who is offended by this, if you are a queer person or a person of conscience who finds comfort or direction from this church, I ask you to think about these issues the next time you are fed a wafer by a hypocritical representative of a sexist, insanely wealthy bureaucracy which has fed misery, threats of damnation and shunning to pregnant women, gay youth, battered wives and indigenous peoples. Perhaps it's time to ask what moral authority these protectors of child abusers have and why you are comforted by their words.

Ask yourself what stink is being hidden by the incense.

Comments

Adding Insult to Grave Injury

[walterwz.livejournal.com]

Actually the total silence of the Church while they had ring side seats for the whole Nazi holocost says all that needs to be said about their total moral bankruptcy.

[rfmcdpei.livejournal.com]

The thing with ideological hegemonies is that sooner or later they self-destruct when people begin questioning. See Québec, before and after the Quiet Revolution.

!

[notahilbilly.livejournal.com]

WORD.

Seriously, I'll be damned if you didn't just hit it spot-on especially in that last paragraph. I actually gave a *snap* without even thinking about it.

Q: Why should I be comforted by Catholic Church?

[snowmit.livejournal.com]

A: Central America.

Painting all Catholics with the same brush is no more appropriate than painting all gay people as pedophiles (bonus points for painting all gay people as pedophiles if you are a child-abusing priest). The current Pope sucks, sure, but so does the current President of the United States.

Apparently, time was that gay people could get maried in churches. The Catholic kind.

Re: Q: Why should I be comforted by Catholic Church?

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

And I know a wonderful man who worked for Catholic Social Services here in Toronto who helped young girls get abortions when appropriate. A moral man and a devout Catholic. Good thing his church didn't find out.

I hold to the belief that religious expression and opaque power structures are anathema. The possibility (inevitability) that top positions will be occupied by the power hungry is too great. The Catholic Church has been involved in too much abuse of power for me to consider it a viable means of increasing good in the world, not that anyone's giving me a vote.

Yes, there are countries, especially in Central America where the Jesuits, priests and nuns are moral barometer. Good on them and I mean that. The outrage and pain that lead to my post are as genuine and the suffering caused to tens of thousands as real.

And it's not just Catholicism that makes me doubt institutions of profit or power as the appropriate vehicle for spirituality. My interest in Judaism mostly ends when I have to enter a synagogue, especially a large institutional one.

Anyway, the power of the church isn't what it was. The coverage of the SARS concert in Toronto yesterday was virtually indistinguishable from last years Pope-alooza on the same site. The traffic co-ordinator, responsible for seamlessly moving 450,000 in and out of Downsview Park called the Pope Mick Jagger's warm-up act.

Re: Q: Why should I be comforted by Catholic Church?

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

If this message comes up first, read it second.

And furthermore...

It seems to me that the institution of President of the United States has become so mired in corporate donation and backroom control that it is impossible to have a clean president anymore. Ditto the Vatican.

And... Am I mistaken in thinking that when there were same-sex unions in churches, it was before the protestant reformation? There really wasn't a Catholic Church in the way there is now. I mean, it's not the same institution so the comparison doesn't hold. Of course, what does that say for my line about the Spanish Inquisition? Is there a statue of limitation on abuses of holy power?

[painglass.livejournal.com]

Wow. *continues in awe struck silence*

[rcornelius.livejournal.com]

For more reasons than my brain can process at the moment, you have my agreement on much of what you have said.

I think for me actually, a defining moment in my religious life (it isn't much of a life according to conventional standards) was in watching the movie "Stigmata" when one of the characters states (and I am paraphrasing):

"The kingdom of god is all around you, not in building of wood or stone"

I know that there is debate on whether Jesus, speaking in Aramiac, actually said this or not. But the sentence itself is powerful to me and changed my direction.

It cemented in my head that I do not need a church to believe in God. Or a celestrial force. That perhaps God is something even more powerful than a being of some sort. That he is an idea.

So many atrocities in history have been done in the name of God. We attack countries under the "blessing" of God. Holy wars today are incited, apparaently with the express consent of God. Yet I cannot believe that a God would be so violent, so cruel, favouring one class of sinners over another.

To me, what the church as found is enterprise, is marketing, is politics, and has become a institution so disingenous that it trys to open it's revolving doors to everyone but only includes those who fits it's mold and type.

I can accept that the church might be doing good things in Central America. I can accept that there are places on earth where the church is indeed caretaker and friend, the moral conscious to a immoral nation-state or territory. But that doesn't make things ok. The church may not do a few good things so that the core of badness is somehow forgiven.

I believe that when those in the highest positions within the church are finally standing outside the gates, within their book of life, they will have a lot to account for.

[a-trick-mind.livejournal.com]

As a Jew I agree. There can be no excuse and no forgiveness for the Catholic Church turning a blind eye to the Holocaust and indeed for their complicity in aspects of it.

For the Catholic Church or any religious or social entity - when the hand that should be extended to help people seeks to control them and gain power over them, then we have the moral duty to oppose them. Much of religion is about power and greed. The Church and orthodoxy in most religions feel threatened by gay people and the idea of gay marriage, and that is a failure of religion and morality. It is a continuation of the need to dominate the minds of mankind, not a desire to lead and serve them.

I believe in God. Who I have trouble with are the people who purport to speak for him.

I have added you to my friends list.

Tim

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

Okay, hi. I don't usually hit this level of high dudgeon, but I hope you'll be generally entertained.