Hi, I’m Wayne Jones, the host of re·Christian. Welcome to episode 3: “Remaining Catholic.”
Of all the Christian denominations, it’s difficult to decide which one has wreaked the most harm in the world: the Catholic Church or the evangelical Christians. Let’s call it a technical draw, but with the evangelicals’ narrow-minded ignorance being beaten out by the calculated evil of the Catholic Church.
I don’t actually consider it a church at all, and frankly it doesn’t consider itself one either. It has its own bank. It has—it is—its own city, located within Rome but administratively separate from Rome. The Vatican is essentially where all the senior hierarchy of the church live (current population: about 750). The Pope, some Cardinals, currently one retired Pope, a few people with low-content job descriptions (sinecures), some of whom are there in a kind protective exile after they have been shamed from their former “real” countries because of the sexual abuse scandal. The most famous of these is probably Cardinal Bernard Law, formerly of Boston, who died in 2017 and is now presumably in whatever section of heaven God assigns people to who have performed well on earth but can hardly be assimilated into the general population up there. He must be like a man in prison who is segregated in solitary confinement partly because of the danger he could still inflict (there are little boys in heaven) and partly for his own protection (there are the fathers of those little boys in heaven too).
The Catholic Church, or Vatican City, also in effect has some characteristics of a country as well. Remember, this is only the senior management of a church with a population of less than a thousand, but yet it is what is called the “Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations,” that is, not a permanent representative in the UN but with ongoing so-called “observer status.” This is still a lot. The Vatican representative can attend all the meetings and can vote in some of them, though it generally chooses not to. But it can make its Christian—ah, let’s call them “values”—known in debates. It's important to remember: this is a goddamn church. What’s it doing in the United Nations in the first place?
It's a big church, and a big organization in general, with nearly 1.4 billion (with a b) adherents. Well, I’m not sure about “adherents.” There are 1.4 billion who have been baptized as Catholics. Some of them have no doubt gone on to do good in the world, and some of them have been murderers. Still, this kind of heft of membership gives it power and influence that, say, your small Protestant denomination based mostly in eastern Canada does not wield. Sometimes the Catholic Church uses its power for evil, and sometimes it—well, let’s just leave it at that, because often when they’re doing what they might like to call good, they’re also trying to convert members to the faith—members who eventually will be called on to donate to the cause. It’s a fundamentally sick and corrupted institution.
I find it makes it easier for me to understand the church’s actions when I consider it an international corporation that is interested in protecting its financial bottom line. Forget the charity work and the self-praise about goodness. Think more: we already have a net worth of somewhere between $1 and $500 billion dollars (estimates are notoriously inaccurate), and we want to protect that for our shareholders. That will help explain a lot of their activity that might seem puzzling at first.
When you read a headline with Catholic in the title, or listen to the intro to a podcast that mentions priests, what is your first expectation of the content? Enormous generosity bestowed upon a world hungry for it? Dedicated men who selflessly sacrifice their time and their lives to protect the most vulnerable? Announcements about the pope affirming the dignity of women and gay people? If you are, then please direct me to those unicorn sources, because what I immediately think of is the raping of little boys. And, alas, I’m mostly right.
The Cardinal Law I mentioned earlier was one of the first to be exposed for his ingenious management of the problem of his employees having sex with children. Let’s move the offending priest to another parish and clean up a bit here in this one. Play it down in the media. Look abject during interviews. Perhaps pay out a little money if we have to. It was a good gig for him while it lasted, and frankly not a bad gig for him after he was caught. Cushy employment ensconced in the Vatican. No more Boston winters: just the warmth of Italy preparing him for still greater heat later, one hopes.
Many people listening to me now will not remember Cardinal Law (it all happened in the late 1990’s when I happened to be living in Boston), but the parade of sexual abuse has continued to roll down the gold-paved streets of society undeterred. It helps that the current, and the intervening, popes did exactly fuck all to solve the problem. They made sure that the local churches paid whatever money was needed to pretend that the priest or the bishop or someone in even a funnier hat and dress actually cared. Many churches had to be sold to pay for civil lawsuits. Back to the corporation not-really-a-metaphor again: liquidate some assets so that the core business can continue with more efficiency.
The Catholic Church is careful about apologizing for anything, too, and consistent in doing the least possible to even barely mitigate the legal and emotionally traumatic messes it leaves behind. Take the Indigenous people in Canada, many of whom claim to have been harmed by the residential school system during the last century, which was mostly run by the Canadian government and the Catholic and Anglican Churches. Whether or not you believe or support what the Indigenous claim, the Catholic Church has done a stellar job of not taking or admitting any responsibility. The Canadian government officially apologized in 2008. The Anglican Church, in 1993. The Catholic Church? Well, not quite nothing—the odd rogue Catholic official has apologized—but there has never been an official apology, that is, one from the Vatican. What they have done is issue what they call an “expression of sorrow,” which of course literally contains no hint of an apology. It simply states that they are sad it happened. By that standard, I hereby issue an expression of sorrow for 9/11, the sorry history of death in the Middle East, and whoever invented bacon-flavoured chewing gum.
It’s a fucking outrage.
The question I ask myself, and have occasionally asked a Catholic now and then, is: why do you persist in being a member of such a corrupt corporation? Why do you feed it with money? Why do you proudly proclaim (instead of shamefully admit) that you are a practising Catholic, going to Mass, eating a wafer of unleavened bread which has miraculously transubstantiated into the actual body of Jesus Christ, confess your sins to a priest on the other side of the divider who may have done much worse, and so on? Why don’t you abandon the Catholic Church for the blood-stained fuck hole that it is?
A nun whom I contacted in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, several years ago told me she prefers to “work from within” to try to change the church. Good luck with that. Even on a well-established scientific fact that the earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around, the Catholic Church held out in the face of some pretty compelling evidence. Poor Galileo was forced to recant his discovery in 1633, and it took the church over 350 years before it admitted he was right. So it’s going to be a long time before the Indigenous get any apology, before women can become priests, before gay people can be equally married, before—well, the list goes on.
If you remain a member of the Catholic Church and actually give the fucking place money every Saturday or Sunday, then you are complicit. You are supporting the cause. No organization is perfect of course, but the tally on the Catholic Church is numerous enough that your common sense or your sense of decency or even self-respect should have you renouncing the corporation before this coming weekend. There are a few things that the Catholic Church does that are good, but it’s a short one. Those unblessed hosts that are left over are good with a little peanut butter on them. And the church does help a few people while in the process of proselytizing during times of disaster. And the main thing they do is to keep people lobotomized with guilt and fear and pleasured with the promise of life after death, so that those people are less likely to kill anyone else or to be too anti-social. But there’s hypocrisy at the core of it. What a great formula the church has cooked up where they lie to Catholics about life after death and their former leader, Jesus, somehow being alive again after having been pretty categorically killed—lie to them about that so that they will continue to come to Mass every week, donate micropayments that add up to quite a fortune for the corporation, and discourage the hypocritical congregants from complaining too much about the boy-fucking and the misogyny and the homophobia and the—as before, the list goes on.
I despise and disdain this church more than I do very few other things in this imperfect world. And I wish people would defy and challenge it more, threaten its bottom line, and try to make it better. I despair of any action though and therefore of any change.