Every once in a while I get drawn into a discussion about Catholicism and it always ends up leaving me wired and pissed because so damn few people even understand what the hell it is.

I am way off the reservation on this, and there are probably a hellish number of people who disagree with me but I have a feeling that I am closer to the truth on this than just about anybody.

First and foremost we must establish a simple truth that nobody can reasonably disagree with. We are human and the essence of our humanity is to be flawed. Some are flawed more greatly than others some have flaws that are barely detectable but we are by our nature flawed. The story of Adam and Eve is the biblical seed of this imperfection. Whether you ascribe to that or not is not important. No person can point to any other person and say that they are perfect. It may be that they appear perfect to everybody, and thankfully this is not uncommon- because we all need things to aspire to- but in the iron dark even the most perfect people of faith ask the Creator for forgiveness for sins that maybe the rest of us cannot even fathom. Because we are not gods we cannot see what is in other people’s hearts and minds.

Second, if you are a Christian and you have read the Bible in any of its forms you understand that only one perfect person existed and that was Jesus Christ, perfect because of his dual nature of being a human and the son of God. This is pretty much the core tenet of Christianity.

So two important and critical Concepts, the perfect nature of God and the flawed nature of humans.

Jesus understood this, obviously with Crystal clarity. In Matthew 16:16, addressing one of his most loved and loyal followers, he said Peter you are The Rock upon which I will build my church and the Gates of Hell shall not Prevail against it. No matter what you’ve been taught to think about this, Jesus said it. And then just a few verses later, in 16:23, Jesus says, again to one of his most loved and loyal followers, get thee behind me Satan. Why did he say this? He said it because Peter was being a dumbass. Because Peter is a human and thought from a wholly and completely human perspective. Flawed. Fallible. Fallible means capable of failure for those of you in the cheap seats. Remember this, there’s going to be a test.

Jesus was letting us all know at that moment that even the very best among us are capable of being dumbasses. And there’s probably nobody who has escaped being a dumbass at some point in their life. And the more powerful a human being is the more people you can affect with your dumbassery.

At the beginning Christianity was a handful of people spreading a message of love and Redemption and of accountability. In its most basic iteration it was a way of dealing with other people that stressed loving kindness. It expected everyone to understand that they were accountable for their own mistakes. And that by the selfless Acts of the savior Redemption was available.

The early church grew at least in part because of this message. It is perhaps an oversimplification to say that this religion offered a better return on investment than many others but for the sake of this discussion that will do.

Nothing can grow like the early church grew without structure. The structure was provided for by Jesus in the form of his disciples, and as they spread the word they also spread the structure.

Anybody who has ever played the kids game chinese telegraph will understand that as the word spread, it was very easy for it to become diluted and changed and devalued. It was simply quality control to establish a standardized dogma. The ecumenical councils were convened and established to get everybody on the same page and using the same Playbook so to speak. Remember what we said earlier about humans? Guess who wrote those playbooks? Is there any question that those ecumenical councils screwed things up? We probably don’t have any actual way of knowing, but I’m guessing being human they got some shit wrong. They were all humans no matter how well they were inspired. Remember, Jesus reminded us that everybody, even his closest friend- the man he left in charge!- could be a dumbass. And you can bet that in every ecumenical assembly there were a statistically significant number of dumbasses.

One of the things that Jesus did that spoke clearly about what he thought of those disciples was to wash other people’s feet. He intended for those he sent out to spread the word to be the servants of his word and not its masters. But anytime someone assumes the mantle of authority, even reluctantly, even inspired by the Creator himself, that mantle of authority becomes an object of desire for those who seek power. And so, inevitably, people take up that mantle who pay only the merest lip service to the greater calling and follow only the call to personal and political power.

In the early church as now, there are and were wonderful inspired and inspiring people, people who fought their own demons to bring Christianity to others and to help others to understand it. And the very best of them were flawed. And there were plenty that were nowhere near that inspired or dedicated to anything but their own advancement. Humans. Remember? Fallible humans.

We have been blessed with magnificent religious figures through the years. Some of the Catholic popes were downright amazing. Some of the ones in my lifetime- and there have been six so far- have been great men and some have been absolute dumbasses but everyone was a human being and therefore fallible.

To keep the word alive in people’s lives, parishes around the world are operated by envoys of those original disciples. Some of them are inspired, some of them are dumbasses some of them are Probably actually, evil.

So here’s the first sacred cow to go up on that altar. I have mentioned this before much to the dismay of many people I know. The clergy of the Catholic church is a monarchy. They are not chosen by parishioners, they are chosen by other clergy. They are expected to be educated at a specific level which is different for every discipline but clergy itself is an appointment. Certainly, lip service is paid to the concept of being Servants of the parish and undoubtedly there are clergy out there who are devoted Servants of their flock. But it is still a political appointment. I am reminded by people better than I, that at the parish level, priests are generally younger men who have worked hard and studied long to attain the position, and this is absolutely true and for this reason I feel that the least political/monarchical level is that of the Diocesan or ordered priest. But even they are appointed and approved by the monarchy. Unlike a lot of Protestants you can’t just go to Divinity School and hang up your own shingle to be a Roman Catholic priest. You must be approved and appointed by other Roman Catholic Clergy. The obvious reason for this is to make sure that the clergy toes the official line which makes very good sense. Otherwise everybody is off the reservation in a generation.

Because these clergy are the most visible it is an easy mistake to make to confuse them with the church. They are not the church. But anytime the clergy as fallible human beings do something fallible or stupid, that fallibility, that stupidity, is assigned to the church. Some tonsured Dominican idiot decides he can raise money to repair St Peter’s Basilica by selling bogus get out of hell free cards to his wealthy parishioners? The church is selling indulgences!

No. The church never sold indulgences; that’s not what the business of the church is. A flawed and fallible human, desirous of political power, sold indulgences. A member of that appointed monarchy.

I am reminded That the Sale of the indulgence was technically a donation which provided for people who prayed for you. It wasn’t actually a “get out of hell free” card, it was an opportunity of redemption based on the prayers of other people. This was not something you will hear very often. You also don’t hear very often that The Dominicans were allowed to sell indulgences whereas the Augustinians ( Luther’s order) were denied this cash cow

The church is not the pope. The church is not any bishop or any priest or any individual parishioner even. The church consists of the body of the faithful. Let’s be very clear on this: the people who have faith in the Living God and Jesus Christ his son are the Catholic Church. They are also human. They are also fallible. We as humans screw up. It’s one of the things we do; some of us are Masters at it.

When Luther trotted up to that door and nailed his stupid list up, he was pissing in the faces of the church, the faithful. Whether anybody will admit to it or not, he did this because he desired the political power, And he hated that he had been denied the opportunity to engage in the money making scheme of the Dominicans.
If this were not the case. he would have done so anonymously and nobody would ever have known of him. He would have worked within the church to plant the seeds of a reformation, which happened eventually anyway. The worm always turns. Instead Luther became exactly what he claimed to be railing against, a fallible human telling lies to the faithful so that he could acquire that political capital, and boy did he. So thousands and eventually millions abandoned the flawed human leaders of Catholicism not to become followers of Christ but to become followers of Luther, another flawed human being. And this evil spread, because the most powerful weapon Satan has against the faithful Is to divide them against one another, Satan moved on from Luther and brought us Calvin and Wesley and by now the fragmentation is practically fractal. The 56 tongue speaking left-handed snake handling Pentecostals in Pascagoula are absolutely convinced that the 83 tongue speaking right-handed snake handling Pentecostals in Moss Point are all going to hell.

People talk about the popes but we have had some dumbass popes. Hell we probably have a dumbass pope now, only time will tell what damage he can do, I still pray that he steps into the light and properly fills those fisherman’s shoes. But he might be a punishment that we must endure. No, there isn’t technically an unbroken line of popes back to Peter, ( Unless you discount all the anti popes.) although the office stands; it has been filled by idiots, criminals, and lord knows what else. One thing is certainly true. If you could use a time machine and talk to one person or another all the way back until the time of Christ, there are millions of unbroken lines from every modern day Catholic, their faith passed from parent to child from mentor to student from brother to brother from one person to another all the way back to Jesus Christ himself. Lutherans can only go back to Luther. Calvinists can only go back to Calvin. Sorry if this ruffles your feathers but that’s just the way it is. When you choose Schism you choose to separate yourself. And if your parents chose schism or your great great grandparents, they have chosen for you a path carved through Humanity by Satan. Because they abandoned what they saw as flawed teaching, or flawed Dogma, to cleave to a Dogma or teaching created by- you got it – another flawed human being.

But be not afraid. Much to the dismay of those who would set us at each other’s throats for our differences in Dogma, Christianity shines through. Christians – real Christians, of which sadly I think there are very few- distinguish themselves not by cleaving to one Dogma or another, but by their Christianity. I know an awful lot of non-catholic Christians and some of them are pretty damn good Christians. I hope that someday they will understand how this all happened, and separate themselves from the bizarre transplanted bush and reattach themselves to the rootstock of Jesus Christ which is and will always be the Catholic Church. Incidentally for reference sake I feel that the Orthodox churches are still attached to the original rootstock as well, you certainly can’t blame them from wanting to separate themselves from some of the early Catholic popes.

Anyway enough of this for now.