The John Paul II Catholic Church

Ever wonder why the church is where it is today, both here and abroad, at the crossroads of insignificance and lost identity, struggling for relevance in a culture it once defined with its churches, excluding those not sold to pay for sex abuse settlements and judgments, in danger if not destined to become museums of Christianity, more likely to be visited by tourists with guidebooks than parishioners with prayer books?

The answer is because the church is run by conservative ignorant men whose intellectual thought processes gravitate to preserving the status quo of values which are more concerned with form than substance and which are deeply rooted in tradition, and whose leaders are motivated by an unwillingness to question past practices to determine if they comport with Christian concepts on the one hand or represent comfortable familiarity with the ignorance they represent and innate human reluctance to change on the other.

I know of NO successful INSTIUTION in the world where the leader is permitted to lead into one’s eighties or hangs on to leadership while evidence of dementia and failing health impede that leadership except dictators and goofy Popes......even the Church has a m andatory retiremenrt age of 75 for its Bishops and cardinals....

Why not the guy at the top who is incapabale of leadership physically or mentally....

Is he somehow immune from ischemia, Parkinsons, senility, fraility, dimentia, memory loss, the effects of old age....tiredness leading to inattention spans, poor decision making, confusion, and loss of concerted decision making ability such that ALL older person are known to be more susceptible to being taken advantage of....thus the protections being introduced world wide to avert elder abuse.

Those of us who are content to continue to “bow our heads and pray for God’s blessing” are deservedly relegated to the “lemming routine” of Catholic theology where one stands, sits, kneels and bows, blessing oneself mindlessly with the thumb on the forehead, lips and heart, while dutifully listening to mind numbing words of antiquity in the Scriptures to lead our 21st century lives without EVER questioning these priests, Monsignors, Bishops, Cardinals and Pope, these nitwit men!

Ever wonder how a Church claiming infallibility could have embraced tenets like:

1. Purgatory a place premised upon of all things Scripture, finding therein support for the need to be purged and for a need for purification.

2. Original Sin premised again on Scripture, “we have all sinned”… Rom. 3:23 or “My spirit rejoices in my Savior”…Luke 1:47 because if you need to be saved…well it is because you have sinned through your forbearers if not through you.

3. Immaculate Conception because …well can you imagine a guy that would have his own mother stained? with you know what. Besides didn’t the angel Gabriel say, “Hail Mary full of Grace”. How could she be full of Grace before he was born and before he redeemed mankind “ through salvation” on the cross except that she didn’t need what the rest of us did…salvation from someone’s original sin?....well, only because she was without sin! Da…da!

4. Assumption because well, who would allow his mother to be put into the ground awaiting final judgment when she was without sin…not in need of purgatory…and when by periodic updating of her celestial/earthly passport, she could be the ambassador from the beyond appearing from time to time to members of the ‘faithful’.

5. Illicitness of Contraception completely negating a central tenet of catholic theology that intent is the gravamen, of the offense….ie: one need not do the evil, only intend the evil and the sin was extant…but to intend not to conceive whilst practicing rhythm or abstinence….well that is not sinful because, by dispensation of sorts, this Church approved practice is considered as being open to life “Humanae Vitae”…Oh, yah, let me tell you the one about…..

6. Transubstantiation a doctrine of questionable value, disputed even today by theologians of considerable reputation, only declared in the year 1215 by Pope Innocent III after the fourth Lateran Council previous to which the words and intermediaries, bread and wine, were only symbolic of the request, “Do this in memory of me.”

7. Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, only woman can be ordained - the foundation of which owes its existence more to the reality of the Human experience well into the 20th century than it does to any intellectual substance feebly mustered by dim witted theologians past or PRESENT. The whole of Human history bespeaks a world controlled by Men. Indeed, Christ could have hung it up had he chosen any women as a disciple in a society which did not recognize a woman other than as a child bearer, a child raiser, an amphora carrier, or a dancer with seven veils before some king….unless of course he was prepared to hand out some Prozac with the seven loaves and fishes when introducing the concept of equality to the sexes assembled.

Heck, men controlled everything from antiquity to the present.....thus men and only men were the prophets and disciples of old, women only gaining the vote in this country in 1920, and not by inalienable right, as one might philosophically think as equal human beings on this planet….but unbelievably by the passage of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution! Men actually voted to give women an innate right!

8. Limbo, a place for the blameless, which fortunately the Church’s most esteemed and learned theologians have now agreed to do away with as a doctrine and have in a manner of speaking consigned this belief to hell where it should have been all along…and perhaps also should a number of the other questionable Church inaugurated tenets outlined above but are accorded infallible status.

A Church mired in dubious theological precedents noted above which are routinely followed without re-examination and dialogue is a Church consigned to marginalization in an increasingly skeptical world by a better educated populace of God fearing people who have come to realize that salvation’s destiny is in their hands, not in the traditional drivel marketed by Pope clones walking down the aisle in their mitre hats and carrying crosiers whilst blessing the faithful in their pews…..sprinkling them with the use of a scepter dripping with holy water…..without ever taking responsibility for what has occurred….in other words, business as usual, “bow your heads and….”

Truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it and ignorance may deride it. But, in the end, there it is.

From a Catholic lawyer

I received this email today and I'm posting it in honor of St. John Brebeuf and Companions whose feast is October 19.