Beware. Here comes the theology bit. Click here if it ain’t your thing.
The Ferns Report was published while I was in the land of cheese and wine and I came back to a country where Christianity ought to be convulsing in disgust at the sins it has committed and the mistakes it has made. For those of you who can’t read and who are deaf and who live in isolation wards but get Zoomtard piped into your blood stream through i-mode, the report details the sexual abuse by Catholic priests in the Ferns diocese which is in the south-East. Per person, this area suffered an appalling rate of abuse and it was enabled by official bodies of the state, ignored by the general populace and most importantly, unchallenged (largely) by the Catholic hierarchy.
I am part of a clever little Presbyterian church but I regard myself a Christian and not a denominationalist. I knick the glory, therefore when a Christian in a different tradition does something brilliant but I share in their darkness when the clouds of their sins cover them. And so while no one in Ireland was surprised by the content of the Ferns report, seeing the details laid out so clearly on a table like that did take the wind out of my lungs. The major problem with my faith continues to be the apparent lack of Christ in many Christians and the sense of guilt I feel when I internally condemn people based on my flawed judgements. The likes of Sean Fortune do far more to unsettle my faith than any of the more general questions often asked by my peers. It isn’t so much “Why does a good God let bad things happen to good people?” but “Why does a follower of a good God seem incapable of being more good?”
Still, the point of all this public navel gazing is to explain why I am not a Catholic. My dad’s friend has written a very articulate and lovely book called “What makes us Catholic“. This post, inspired by Ferns and study I did in France, in one short illustration, hopes to explain “What makes Zoomtard not a Catholic (Anymore. Although he still wants to call himself Catholic when it suits (mostly to annoy uptight Evangelicals (which isn’t a very nice thing to do)))”.
If punning is a sin, Jesus is a sinner
In Matthew 16 we can read a famous passage that forms a cornerstone of Roman Catholic theology. Jesus has taken the apostles to the city of Caesarea Philippi, 25 miles north of Jerusalem. This is not the kind of place nice Jewish boys like the apostles ought to feel at home in. It was a city famous for its worship of the pagan god Pan and in previous generations had the name Panion.
The people of the city would gather to worship Pan with orgiastic group sex by one of the sources of the River Jordan high in the feet of Mount Heron at a cave called the Gates of Hell. Jesus and the apostles have gotten to know each other pretty well at this point and a conversation arises, as you would expect it to, on just why Jesus is able to do all these food appearing, sick healing, blind seeing, 1450 keep-me-ups blindfolded miracles. Simon Peter makes the startling conclusion that Jesus is in fact the promised Messiah prophesied throughout the history of Judaism by the Hebrew Scriptures. He says, “You are the Christ, Son of the Living God”. The record is ambiguous on whether he says “You are the best centre forward Nazareth has ever seen.” Jesus congratulates him on this insight and actually renames him. If you have ever been to mass and heard this Gospel portion read out or been in Sunday school you might recall this line from Jesus:
Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter…
Simon is a pun on sand. Peter means rock. This realisation has not come from book learning but from God and it changes the course of Peter’s life forever. Jesus continues:
…and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hell will not overcome it.
The Roman Catholic Church interpret this to mean that Peter, who has been redefined as a rock, is the rock that Jesus speaks of. That is true. It takes some warping of history to make Peter and not Jesus’ brother James the first Bishop of Rome (or Pope) but then again, redefining James as cousin to permit Mary to remain always a virgin to substantiate Papal infallibility…. argh! It all gets a little convoluted and you see why I don’t go to Catholic mass every week. But my point here is that the Roman Catholic Church use this as the basis for papal infallibility. If you look closely at the text though you see that as ever, Jesus is saying much more than you could have conceived in Sunday school or at mass as a teenager.
We could parahrase these words as:
What I build on this rock, the Gates of Hell will not be able to defeat.
This rock, in the city they were in, Caesarea Philippi, would be instantly understood by his hearers to refer to the mountain upon which the pagan festivals took place at the cave known as the Gates of Hell. Jesus is actually saying two things here:
1. Peter, you are a rock who will form the foundation of my church which will never be overcome.
2. This church will have its origins in the very crimes it stands against, but those crimes will never defeat it.
Point 2 is far more interesting for me when you take the passage in context. Jesus is declared as the Christ and then he talks about his imminent death and how, somehow, this death will defeat death. See the real rock upon which Jesus’s church is founded is his cross. But in his cross he is put to death. This assasination was the definition of an evil act. But in the evil, Jesus plants roots that will ultimately defeat evil. On the site of human-degrading orgies in honour of gods that don’t exist, God will establish communities of human-elevating worship to Him.
What does all this mean?
This deeper meaning to the text reveals two key things of relevance. The first is that Jesus has a sense of humour. This is no small observation but he is constantly punning and making subversive allusions. He stirred the pot with relish. He’d be a great guy to have a pint with. The second thing is relevant to the state of a church that can give rise to the Ferns Report. This mission statement issued by Jesus at the base of Mount Heron is fundamentally subversive. It stands in opposition to the culture of the day and the way the structures of the world work. But the Ferns Report shows us that the church bought into the value systems of the world. They sought to protect themselves instead of having the moral courage to let the light in. They sought to hold onto power instead of relinquishing it gleefully. They put them their own comfort ahead of the safety of others, even exposed children.
I can’t help but think that more time spent dwelling on the deeper significance hidden inside the words of Matthew 16 instead of protecting their position as the representatives of God would have left the Catholic hierarchy a lot better prepared for the inevitable failures that any group will give rise to. Because of who God is and what we know of him through Jesus, the church should not be frightened when it fails to match the scope of its mission, which is to help in the redemption of the whole of creation. Why? Because our God won his final victory by letting the enemy kill him. He has achieved the victory for us by going through the Gates of Hell and coming back again. Out of our despair, the Spirit of God gives us hope.
And this is where the hope for the battered, beaten and self-mutilated Irish Catholic church is. In God. In the Scriptures. In justice, kindness and righteousness. In following this carpenter to the feet of Mount Heron and declaring that there we will stand and fight.
But they’ve missed the Zoomtard train. I want to follow the God who puns right now and I can’t hang around waiting for a church as it decides wether or not to reform when there is a church out there who has as its slogan, “Reformed and ever reforming.” That is why I am not a Catholic. I hope that in the history of the church written in centuries to come, the Ferns Report is cited as the end of the rot that began with the Ultra-Montane Cardinal Cullen in the 1850s and the beginning of a new focus.
Don’t laugh. Hope is a virtue after all.
Your Correspondent, Left 3 days ago and no one has noticed he is gone