A Rabbi asks a priest a question... part 19

Continued from last week…

“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” Charles Darwin, the Descent of Man.”

In 1517, the Reformation killed Christendom. In 1618, the Thirty Years’ War killed Europe. In 1789, the French Revolution killed God, and in 1859 with the publication of The Origin of Species, Darwin pointed out that we had never really needed God anyway. We weren’t God’s creatures. Evolution had created us by means of sexual selection. To be fair to Darwin, he wrote in The Descent of Man, quoted above, that we really can’t kill inferior and savage peoples, we should simply not encourage them to breed and hope that they would just be absorbed by superior races – like the English I imagine.

Later readers of Darwin, like Hitler and Hitler’s friend Margaret Sanger of Planned Parenthood took Darwin’s ideas to their more logical conclusions. The inferior should not be allowed to breed. In the Thirty Years’ War and the French Revolution, the nation state had replaced God and Christendom as the object of worship. We, Us, Our Nation was superior and all others inferior. Our way was better, our music more beautiful, our laws more perfect and our genetic material more special. Darwin had discovered that the purpose of natural life was not love nor was it virtue. The most insistent purpose of life is the struggle for resources and the survival of the fittest. There was no room for a loving God in a cruel world.

The readers of Darwin applied these ideas to the new age of 19^th century nationalist imperialism. The nations of Europe scrambled for control of resources among the inferior nations of Asia, Africa and the land still held by indigenous Americans and Australians. These chosen superior Nations, each more chosen than the other, needed resources. By this, they meant territory. A nation, according to these Imperial Darwinists was an organism. Its purpose was survival and thus, the control of resources. The inferior would just have to take their lumps and part with their possessions, and if need be by their lives.

There were however two special nations, two nations that didn’t have any land at all, and didn’t seem to want any, first the Roma people, the “Gypsies,” but far more significantly, the Jews. The Jews may have been chosen by God, but now that there was no God, they were nothing more than parasites. The Gypsies lived off the land and what they could take with them when they left for greener pastures. The Jews were far more insidious, according to some of the Imperial Darwinists. The Jews didn’t move on. They settled in like an infection, loaning money and controlling factory production and art and theater. They controlled the press, the manufacture of weapons, public opinion, etc., etc. They had to be rooted out like any infection. Europe was about to meet just the physician to perform the operation: Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist Party was not a madman. He was evil, not insane. He coolly, reasonably convinced a whole nation, famous for its art and science, that the Jews were nothing more than a parasite nation living off the wealth of others since they had no resources that is no land, of their own. Hitler could dispassionately decide that an entire ethnicity should be extinguished, because there was no God who loved and had chosen Israel as His Firstborn. The German People were the true chosen, and Hitler in effect was the god who had chosen them.

In ten years six million Jews would be rounded up and killed. They were among the 80-million-person butcher’s bill that the glorification of the nation and Imperial Darwinism had demanded.  (I have no stomach for holocaust deniers. In my grandfather’s town in Germany there were 300 Jews as there had been since the Middle Ages. In 1945 only 3 remained alive. Most of the 80 million dead were the direct or collateral casualties of war. The Jews, the Gypsies and many Poles were butchered not as the result of war, but for the sake of genocide.) A parallel horror continued in Russia, China, Eastern Europe, and much of the rest of the world until 1991. It continues to this day in Cuba and to a lesser degree in China and Vietnam. 

Karl Marx, an atheist of German-Jewish background, created a social philosophy that promised an earthly paradise, since there was no heavenly one. In the chaos following Hitler’s death and the end of the Second World War Marxist Socialism took over a third of the world and cost the world even more lives than had the world wars. The death of God in Europe and America and the worship of nation, the race and the State had spawned Darwin, Margaret Sanger, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Marx and the litany of sorrow that was the 20^th century.

The result of all this is that Christianity is no longer the required state religion of any country that I can think of and, more often than not, Christianity in any form is discouraged – if not persecuted. Christianity is no longer a state. It has the opportunity to become a religion once again.

Curiously the madness of the 20^th century has witnessed the birth of a Jewish state after 19 centuries of statelessness. In a sense, we are back to the years of the birth of Christianity. Christianity claims to be a spiritual Israel, and Judaism has become a very concrete state in this world as well a religion. This amazes me.

Next Week: I am now ready to answer the Rabbi’s questions.

Shouldn't my brother go to this family wedding?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

Can you knock some sense into my brother? He is one of these “traditional” Catholics who look down their noses at the rest of us real Catholics who know that catholic really means open minded and welcoming. He is refusing to go to our nephew’s wedding. Our nephew Nigel is a splendid young man, we are all so proud of him. He is a great outdoorsman and has a wonderful destination wedding planned in Minnesota in the early autumn, in a grove of sacred oak trees. The ceremony will be performed by a local druid, or shaman and it is just a perfect fit for the young couple. In addition we five siblings are getting up in years, and this will quite possibly be the last time we are together. We are heartbroken that our youngest brother will not be there. To top it all off he is Nigel’s godfather! What would Jesus say to my Neanderthal brother? Can you say something that will change his mind?

Yours,  

Frieda Doolittle

Dear Frieda,

No, I cannot say something to knock sense, as you describe it, into your brother’s head. Neither can I say anything that will knock sense into your head, because “…the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will pile up for themselves teachers according to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.” (2Tim 4:3)  Why would you want to rub his face in the fact that, as the lad’s godfather, your brother has failed to share his faith with his godson something he solemnly swore to do, by having a wedding in the woods in a made up pseudo-religious ritual. The family is repudiating him and the faith he believes in. I assume young Nigel was raised in the faith to some degree and by this action rejects it.

I imagine that for your brother this is a decision of conscience. I will give Nigel and his intended the benefit of the doubt, that their decision to have the wedding in some mosquito-infested wilderness is likewise a decision of conscience and not some fantasy from bridal magazines about the garden wedding in a meaningful place instead of a stuffy, old, boring Catholic church in some boring outdated ritual. I remember something attributed to St. Thomas More, martyred by Henry VIII, a very popular saint when we were all still young and still part of a universal faith. When questioned, Thomas More explained that he could not assent to the wedding of Henry and his mistress Ann Boleyn because of his conscience. His friends asked if he thought his conscience was superior to those of the king, the courtiers and all but one of the bishops of England. The brave Bishops of England had all signed the Act of Supremacy that made Henry the head of the Church in England, thus allowing him to give himself an annulment and marry his current girlfriend.

St. Thomas responded, “No, I assumed the king and bishops and court have done the right thing and are all obeying their consciences, but my conscience forbids me to sign the Act.”

“Then,” they asked. “Will you not come along for fellowship’s sake?”

Thomas replied, “When you and the king and the court and the bishops all enter heaven having obeyed your consciences and I am dammed for having disobeyed mine, will you accompany me to hell for fellowship’s sake?”                                            

Let us assume that Nigel has a well formed conscience which he is obeying, just as you are obeying your conscience. Does your brother not have a conscience? Why do want him to obey your conscience and not his own? I doubt that he would ever ask that sacrifice of you. Think about what your brother is giving up. He is risking rejection by the people that mean the most to him – his own family. I imagine that he wishes he could go and be at this important moment with the people whom he has known and loved all his life. Do you think that this does not hurt him? Do you think that the loss of favor that is bound to result from his glaring absence at a family event makes him happy? I imagine that he wishes he could celebrate the event, but cannot celebrate their rejection of the faith he holds most dear by the people he holds most dear. Perhaps he is taking the Gospel a little too seriously. He cannot seem to forget the words of Jesus,”Anyone who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matt 10:37)

You are going to a wedding. He would be going to a funeral, a funeral of the faith of your parents and grandparents for a thousand years. It is, in effect, the celebration of the death his world. You want him to violate his conscience for this? 

“But it is the last time the family will be together!” 

Do you think your mother and father, who are long dead, would be happy about this? Would they rejoice to see you reject that faith and those customs they tried so hard to share with you? If what we believe as Catholics, that all the saints in heaven attend every Mass, is true, it is sad to think that Nigel has failed to invite his grandparents and their ancestors for a thousand years to attend their marriage. You may think that it is narrow-minded of your brother and his outdated Church to have such legalistic demands in this modern era, but it is the Church that has created your family and your culture.

A pseudo-pagan forest wedding may seem harmless to you, but it is a return to paganism. If they want to be free of the shackles of Catholicism and tradition, so be it! If they want paganism, paganism they will get, with its slavery, human sacrifice and cannibalism. I can see you rolling your eyes! Cannibalism!?! Impossible in this enlightened age.

Didn’t you see the video of a Planned Parenthood executive in L.A. lunching and munching in a chichi restaurant while discussing the sale of fetal body parts for human medical purposes? I think at one point she humorously coos that she someday hoped to buy a Lamborghini. (For the drivers of used cars a Lamborghini is a wildly expensive luxury car, the price of which starts at $200,000)

“She was just joking, and they were just talking about the medical use of fetal tissue? What’s wrong with that?”

 It’s human tissue they are selling, taken from a live human being, for God’s sake!!! Have you allowed your conscience to become that dull?  What are the rules for? The rules keep us from returning to paganism and devouring ourselves. It’s just a wedding? No, for your brother it’s a violation of conscience and each violation of conscience make the next violation of conscience just a little bit easier, until we have killed our own individual consciences and then the conscience of society as a whole. We become Nazis.

I knew Nazis in Germany. They had very easy consciences. They were happy to go along to get along.

“Why fight it? Everybody is doing it. Everybody agrees with the current political wisdom.”

Do not forget that Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, a collaborator with Hitler and his program of eugenics. The Nazi Mengele was happy to do experiments with the tissue of children – aborted or not. Hitler returned Germany to its pagan roots and encouraged the worship of Germanic nature spirits. Germany is now a dying pagan country, and the Catholic Church in America is not far behind.  Let your brother keep his conscience, it is a rare and precious thing these days.

One more good reason for your brother not to attend the Druid wedding in the woods: it is lousy symbolism. I imagine that Nigel and his true love are doing this because it has so much meaning for them. A Catholic ceremony, with all its silly requirements and paperwork and its ridiculous refusal to allow an outdoor weddings would just have no meaning for them.

You want to know why we Catholics generally don’t allow outdoor weddings? There is an altar in a church. Altars are where one makes sacrifice and marriage is a sacrifice.  Marriage is a gift given not just by bride and groom to each other, but to their children, to the third and fourth generation and beyond. It is a sacrifice made for humanity and for history, but we have reduced it to a narcissistic fantasy from bridal magazines the size of telephone books. The basic building block of Christendom has become a plaything for wedding planners and for aging children, to the third and fourth marriage.

Cardinal Francis George quoted someone; I don’t remember whom, saying that when one invents one’s own religion, he generally ends up worshipping himself. I prefer to worship at the living temple built by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and by their descendant, Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God and Son of Mary. I will not bow down with you at the shrine of Nigel’s invented religion.

Has it occurred to you that perhaps you are the one looking down your nose at him? Why do you want to force your brother to worship at your Temple of the Easy Conscience? At least leave him his religion. He doesn’t seem to have much else.

The Reverend Know-it-all

Letter to Lee Turjiste -- part 4

Letter to Lee Turjiste, continued. 

Baptisms and Funerals! Here I am really torn. On the one hand, if you say “No” to someone who wants to have a child baptized, they will probably be angry enough to never darken the door of your church again. If you say “Yes” to someone who rarely comes to church and is in no sense a member of the parish, or even a practicing Catholic, they will probably never darken the door of your church again either. That is until it’s time for the kid’s first communion. You will see them again for weddings, confirmations and other photo events.

If you say “No”, it’s goodbye. So most priests want to be pastoral and say “Okay, but you’ve got to start coming to church.” “Okay, Father we will.” And they do come: three times — 7, 13 and about 25 years after the baptism. Here is a typical phone call:

(Bridezilla) “Hello, Are you the priest?” 

(Pastor) “Yes I am.”

(B) “I want to rent your church for my wedding.”

(P) “Are you a parishioner? “  

(B) “...... (long pause)...yes I am.”

(P) “What’s your name?”

(B) “I’m Diadora Shickelgruber. Certainly you remember me, Father.” 

(P) “I can’t say that I do.”

(B) “Well I probably go to the service you don’t celebrate.” 

(P)”I say most of the Masses and am always in the vestibule after Mass. Why do you want to be married here at St. Dymphna’s? 

(B) “I went to school there and got all my sacraments there. When I was little I always dreamed of walking down that aisle on my wedding day.” 

(P) “Are you currently attending another church?”

(B) “Oh yes, Father. When we’re not at your church we go to a church closer to our house.”

(P) What is the name of the church?”

(B) “I can’t remember it right now.”

(P) “Because you live twenty miles away, don’t attend regularly, and are not registered here, I am going to need a letter of permission from the pastor of the church you normally attend.”

(B) “....long silence....How do I get that?”

(P) Introduce yourself to your pastor after Mass and he will tell you how to make an appointment.”

(B) “Oh.” Click. Phone goes dead.

They are either going to have a wedding in the park with the local shaman, or they are going to pester the nearest Catholic priest who has also never met them for a letter of permission until weakened by hunger and fatigue he gives it to them. If not they will write a long letter to the bishop pointing out that their grandfather gave a lot of money to the parish and the priest treated them terribly. Some diocesan functionary will call and Father will give in.

The bride invariably shows up dressed like a frigate in full sail at which point I am tempted to wax eloquent on the beauties of virginity symbolized by the reams of white lace and taffeta in which she is festooned, but that would just evoke another letter to the bishop about how un-pastoral I am and so I preach a few platitudes that will sound inoffensive on the video. And so the cycle starts all over again.

We will see them again a few years later when they want a baptism or something like it; or someone they love, or at least fell guilty about, needs burial. We, the clergy, refer to this sort of religion as “hatch, match and dispatch.”  However, this is becoming much less common. Very few, except homosexuals, wedding co-coordinators and divorce lawyers think that it’s important to get married anymore; and most Catholics think birth control is just fine. This abandonment of the sacramental life eases up the pressure for baptisms, weddings and, oddly enough, even for funerals.

Ever since, at the urging of Margaret Sanger (Foundress of Planned Parenthood), Drs. Pincus and Rock invented the birth control pill in the early 1950's, things have been changing. Puerto Rico was selected as a trial site in 1955. I suppose Puerto Rico was chosen because the US government was already trying to reduce the number of Puerto Ricans in the world with a string of birth control clinics on the island. Perhaps Ms. Sanger, former friend of and collaborator with Adolph Hitler, figured there were more Puerto Ricans than anyone wanted or needed. Perhaps she figured if it worked on Catholic Puerto Ricans, it would work on Catholic Mexicans, of whom Ms. Sanger also thought there were way too many, even back then.

Guess what? Puerto Ricans went for it despite their Catholicism and now most Puerto Ricans aren’t Catholic. They are an aging population that has lost much of its beautiful art and culture. Ms. Sanger couldn’t give a fig for their wonderful food, delightful music, beautiful painting and wood carving. They were the wrong color and the wrong religion as far as she was concerned, so let’s test the pill on them. Those who renounced their faith in order to have a more relaxed reproductive morality and a higher standard of living soon also renounced their culture, and eventually renounced their progeny.

Having devastated the Puerto Rican family, Planned Parenthood went on to devastate the families of the USA proper. Catholic faith had not stood in the way of modern narcissism in Puerto Rico and it would not stand in the way of the reduction of the European American population of the United States, even though the birth control pill had been designed by Sanger to get rid of all those brown and black people cluttering up our lily white shores.

How, you may ask does this take the pressure off for funerals in Catholic churches? We just had an example here at St. Dymphna’s in Frostbite Falls. An elderly woman died who had been active here as long as her health held out. After that, the family put her in a very nice home. The woman had only one daughter. The daughter didn’t seem very interested in having a large family and so there were only two resultant grandchildren. Like their mother, they had little use for grandma. I don’t think she got a lot of visits.

When I heard that she had died, I was curious that no one had requested a funeral. It turns out that she had died a while ago and no one had told us.  The daughter said that they thought it foolish to go to the bother and expense of a funeral. They cremated grandma and went their merry ways. They all had lives to live.  So it is, that there are fewer and fewer funerals because there are fewer and fewer left to grieve and even fewer to pray for the dead.

Our small families have relieved us of the economic and financial burden of former times. The one or two children we thought optimal were given everything except faith. Why should the little narcissists mourn the dead? We gave them everything but never mentioned that they in turn should be generous. The death of a grandparent is cause for rejoicing. The few descendants are freed from the guilt of never visiting Grandma and now they get all her money. Having not wasted her money on a brood of demanding little rug rats, Grandma had amassed a tidy sum, which her one or two heirs, or their lawyers will divide. Why waste any of it on a funeral that no one wants? No one but Grandma, that is.

Remember that scene in Dickens’ Christmas Carol? Having used his finances very prudently, old Scrooge is un-mourned by anyone. The ghost of Christmas future shows him his own overgrown grave. That poor dear woman I mentioned above does not even have an overgrown grave. I imagine her ashes were scattered, or maybe they are somewhere in the basement to be thrown out with the rest of her stuff.

When there are still enough people who remember religion in some form, they schedule a funeral in a church where the deceased may have more or less gone. They want the choir, the eulogy, the sermon, the wake, the grave side, the whole nine yards and a video of the proceedings... The most crazy-making thing that I get asked at funerals is about scheduling. I have actually had people request a funeral months in advance. When I looked confused and asked isn’t that a long time to wait?  They responded, “Oh no Father, she’s not dead yet, but she will be by then. We have to get everybody on the same page as to the best date of the funeral. We have to check our calendars and we won’t take her off life support until we have a tentative date picked.” I thought I was dealing with a family of vampires.

It is now very common to put grandma on ice, or if it’s going to be a really long time before the calendars open up, Grandma will be burned and there will be a “Memorial Service” whatever that may be. The modern mourners haven’t a clue what Mass is about especially if they are born in the USA. They want the whole enchilada and they darn well better get it. After all, they are paying for it! And these are people who know the value of a dollar! They certainly haven’t wasted any of it on having large families.

Of fifty Americans at many funerals, perhaps two of them will be under the age of 30. Do you really think those two remnants of once Catholic large families will bother to have funeral masses for the childless multitude around them? When I offer a funeral Mass, my grief is very real. I don’t however grieve for the departed whom I have probably never met; I grieve for a way of life, a culture and a community of faith that has died.

The Church is growing: Africa, China, the Philippines, South America, Korea and so many emerging cultures are on fire with faith. There has never been a time when so many Muslims converted to Christianity. The faith is made glorious by those made martyrs by their Muslim neighbors.

The faith is not dying, the culture is. We have chosen ourselves over the God who made us and loves us. We are now 60 years, give or take, after the invention of the little golden pill, (as the singing nun called it). We have been born into the birth-controlled, baby boomer consumerist revolution and are reaping the reward of our own narcissism: extinction.

Next week: So what do we do?