See Me Squeegee

Dear Pope Francis,

Congratulations on the new job!  I tried Tweeting you at @Pontifficator but you may not yet be as hip as the ol’ Benedictator when it comes to social media.  Soon enough, though…hope you get this email.

A little about me:  I’m Irish-Catholic by upbringing and tradition (psyched for St. Patrick’s Day this weekend), was an altar boy from about 3rd grade through middle school, was baptized, confirmed, and became a godfather at another baptism, have visited Jerusalem and Vatican City on some soul searching…but honestly my church attendance has been pretty lax the last six years or so.  My policy:  In any calendar year I need to go to church more often than I go to Vegas (instituted in 2008, when Vegas won 5 to 4).  For 2013 Vegas is up one-zip, but I’ll be at Mass on Easter to even the score.

And I guess that’s where you come in.  I had a pretty good track record under John Paul II and I’m not really blaming Benedict for my recent slew of absences.  There are a ton of factors – most modern countries are getting less religious, I live in an ironically sinful and nonreligious area where every city is named after a saint and/or a Spanish Catholic mission, I have I think everyone’s doubts about whether there’s really a God and how accurate and literal the Bible really is.  But, shoot, man – your institution hasn’t helped matters much recently and I’m hoping you can at least give us some more reasons to believe.

Have you ever seen the movie Dogma?  You should – Jay and Silent Bob, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, Salma Hayak as a stripper and Chris Rock as a prophet and George Carlin being George Carlin.  It’s actually a pretty good litmus test for American religious realness, I’d say.  If you can laugh at it even while it’s being pretty sacreligious at times, I think you kind of get the modern world in way that just having a Twitter account doesn’t really suffice.  It’s supposed to be satirical but some of the most religious, pious, just truly great people I know really like it because they get the real message – that there is and absolutely needs to be a break between the tenets of spirituality and religious tradition and what has become the institutional religious dogma that quite frankly turns a lot of us Good Samaritans and would-be-disciples off.

If you’ve read this blog before you can probably tell that I’m a man who’s worn a Lance Armstrong Livestrong bracelet.  But maybe the most meaningful bracelet out there is the good old WWJD bracelet.  And I’m hoping you’ll direct the institution you now control – the church I grew up in, the institution that means so much to my grandparents and less but still something to my parents and my generation – back toward that message and away from politics and dogma.  A little less Roman, a little more Catholic.  A little less Old Testament fire and brimstone and a little more New Testament “what you do the least among you you do unto me”.  Crank up a little of Don Henley’s “Heart of the Matter” in the Popemobile and you may hear a little Christ in there…”I think it’s about forgiveness”.

Because, shoot, I’m several paragraphs in now and I haven’t addressed the elephant in the room – at least a ventricle of the heart of the matter here.  Your institution – Jesus’s institution that he passed down to pope after pope and that now rests in your hands – molested kids and covered it up.  I say my Hail Marys to two entities – Our Mother (but not Notre Dame) and the University of Michigan on fall Saturdays. But had my parents not moved from Wilkes-Barre to Ypsilanti, had I grown up in Pennsylvania and attended the football-loving main state school where I grew up, I think I’d say the same thing:  Penn State football should be finished.  One sicko molests a kid and you deal with him; you follow WWJD and you forgive him but you don’t do so cavalierly.  You work like crazy to make it up to the kid and you make sure it never happens again.  Penn State football screwed up royally and institutionally and sickeningly and I hate seeing their highlights on SportsCenter and the articles about the poor players and poor fans who have to live with the aftermath and especially the poor Paterno family and how they have to somehow soldier on on the backs of millions of dollars while the legacy of their patriarch has been (rightfully) tarnished forever.  Penn State football should be excommunicated from the public consciousness, unless it’s brought up again in remembrance of the victims and the cause.  But, shoot – to err is human and to forgive is divine…and Penn State is human and secular and slavish to the almighty dollar.  But you’re supposed to be divine.

So how is a Doubting Thomas like me supposed to adhere to the teachings of the church when the church is worse than Penn State?  And how can the church hold so rigidly to its almost 2,000 year old dogma – women can’t be priests, priests can’t marry, birth control and homosexuality are sins – when it can’t honor the Golden Rule and the most central of principles that God sent Jesus to preach and exemplify?

So please, please be progressive.  My requests:

1) Make the child molestation thing right.  No harboring, no aiding and abetting.  Forgiveness, sure but eventually.  Clean it up (more on how in a second) and make amends to the victims.  I’ve visited your fancy new digs – you’re selling advertising on the side of the Vatican while all the while you have thousands of Michaelangelos and DaVincis in storage because you can’t possibly display it all.  Money’s not an issue.  Become a leader in child abuse awareness education, set up scholarship funds for affected kids, whatever you need to do.  WWJD, and the answer isn’t “hope it goes away or goes unnoticed”.

2) Let priests marry.  You know how you clean up the child abuse situation? Don’t create an atmosphere where it’s bound to happen.  As a former altar boy – who had no involvement or knowledge of anything like that at my church, but spent some time with priests is why I’m saying this – I won’t say I wasn’t initially shocked by the scandal, but then again after a few minutes of thinking about it I wasn’t really *that* surprised.  As a ten year old I could tell priests were different from the other grown men I knew, and I didn’t blame them.  They were lonely, they were isolated.  Comparing Father Joe or Father Perfetto to my dad…my dad had a job during the day but his real life was at home with us, with my mom. Coaching soccer, pitching wiffle ball in the neighborhood, going out for beers with his running buddies.  Priests were priests all the time.  They lived with the other priests in a house next to the church.  Most adults work at least a few miles away from where they live, and many live a few towns away.  They’re not always their work selves.  Priests had this weird singularity to their lives – everything they did centered on being a priest and everyone they knew was part of the parish and saw them as the priest.

Think about Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Exceptional men, good leaders…mistresses of convenience.  Lewinsky, the maid.  As Chris Rock says “a man is only as faithful as his options”.  Those guys were good-looking, powerful, etc. and even *they* stooped to a weird level when that itch needed scratching.  Now look at a priest – no real experience dealing with women, all the women they know are parishoners who see them in this celibate light…what are their options?  Have you ever seen the HBO show “Taxicab Confessions”?  It’s a bunch of tawdry admissions that people make to cabbies and it’s risque enough that it’s a whole series on a popular cable network.  These priests hear those kinds of confessions for a living – they’re facing some kind of sexual temptation regularly but through the constraints of their chosen profession they don’t have any real outlets.  What do you expect?

So that’s half of it, but here’s the other half – who goes into the priesthood if it means giving up any chance of having a family or a “normal” life?  Which teenage/twentysomething boys, having recently discovered and been discovered by girls, is willing to make that lifetime sacrifice?  It cuts down your pool of potential priests considerably.  You’re losing out on great candidates *and* by the same token you’re increasing the likelihood that the men you employ will be…let’s just say strange.  If you’re a ladies man – does Don Juan have the same connotation in Argentina? – or feel you might blossom into one any day now, you’re that much less likely to make that permanent celibacy decision.  But if you don’t fit in in that world, there has to be an increased probability that that’s not what you’d value as highly so you’re probably more willing to make that decision, right?  It’s a sample size of one, but I know one guy from high school who became a priest and he’s top ten strangest humans I’ve ever met.  Watched a lot of those Faces of Death movies and would tell you all about them if you were stuck on a work shift together; would walk around the pool club we worked at in a Speedo like it was no big thing.  Weird dude.  Priest.  Me, my brother, our dozens of other buddies who grew up in the same church?  Never really considered it.

WWJD?  Lot of evidence out there in the Gnostic gospels that Jesus said things like “My wife” a few times.  The Bible goes way out of its way to include Mary Magdalene – a prostitute…sex can’t be that bad, right? – as a central figure and a favorite friend of Jesus’s.  Jesus was brought into human form to humanize God, to be one of us.  Why shouldn’t priests have that opportunity to live like their congregation, to celebrate and interact with women?

3) Let women be priests.  There’s the fairness thing, equal opportunity and all that.  But more than that there’s the pragmatic thing.  Women are over half the population.  They’re dynamic speakers, they’re innovators, they’re great at organization and fundraising and leadership.  They have all the qualities you would want in a priest in at least as high of amounts as men do, and so by leaving them out of the mix you cut your labor pool in half.  So, again, you end up with a lot of B-teamers leading your masses.

Then there’s WWJD again.  Again, JC adored Mary Magdalene.  And depending on whether dogma classifies Jesus as a human or not, Mary (mother Mary) is either the greatest or second greatest human being of all-time in the church’s eyes.  Why not women?

4) Lay off the birth control thing.  I’ve only read a little about you but it sounds like you’re going to make poverty a big focus in your papacy. I applaud and admire you for that.  So let’s get real…middle class Catholics – us buffet Catholics who pick and choose the pieces of doctrine we like (and even if we screw that up a little, we all embrace the heck out of that forgiveness clause so I think we’re okay in the end) – don’t listen to the Vatican on birth control.  But poor Catholics – and, disproportionately, poor Catholics from your neck of the woods south of the border – do.  And it’s killing their chances of getting out of poverty.  You know that saying “The Lord helps those who help themselves”?  (Of course you do…is the Pope Catholic?)  He’s giving poor Catholics a chance.  Condoms, pills, Elaine Benes’s sponge…man, I can respect your take on abortion coming from the church itself, but these other methods?  Any time you can prevent a curious teenager from dooming both herself and her child from a life of poverty, I have to think Jesus wants you to do that.  The New Testament is all about forgiveness and inclusion; Jesus understood that people were sinners and he embraced us for it.  Leviticus may disagree but Jesus gets the final say, right?  Leviticus didn’t even make the Trinity…podium finishers only, man.  Jesus forgives, Jesus understands.  Jesus would understand the stats and the temptations and the modern world we live in where “be fertile and multiply” should probably take a backseat to “how are we going to feed all 8 billion of us” and the sympathy for young single mothers.

5) Maybe most importantly, be inclusive.  Do you know why Christianity spread like wildfire?  In large part because it wasn’t exclusive.  You didn’t have to be born into it.  You didn’t have to be circumsized.  The Jesus message is ridiculously universal and welcoming.  God loves you.  God knows you’re not perfect but he loves you anyway.  God loves you so much and wants you to know that so deeply that he sent Jesus in human form to become one of you, to understand your lives better, to fraternize with the sick, the lame, the poor, the elderly, the prostitutes.  God doesn’t hate anyone, but if he did he’d hate the “God Hates Fags” sign carriers a lot more than he’d hate the fags themselves.  Half the New Testament is about Jesus befriending the undesirables.  The Beatitudes are all about “blessed are the poor, the sick, the meek”.

So let’s get inclusive. Let’s go back to the way St. Paul spread this thing like he was Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all rolled up in one.  #jesuslovesjesusforgives #lethewhoiswithoutsincastthefirststone #allarewelcome  The church’s greatest asset is its core message, that only God can judge us and that he’s willing to forgive. Let’s not lose sight of that.

I don’t think I’m all that different from a lot of arm’s-length Catholics. We’re going to question the heck of out of religion because that’s the world we live in, one of science and reason, one of pragmatism and skepticism, one in which we’ve been disappointed too many times by leaders and promises and in which we’ve been distracted by false idols and American Idols.  But I think a lot of us still want to believe in Jesus’s message and in the church’s mission.   They teach in philosophy that Jesus was either “Lord, Liar, or Lunatic” but I’m willing to give him a dimension in between – a great man whose vision and message is important whether he’s the son of God and the son of a virgin or whether he’s just the incredibly admirable son of an incredibly admirable mortal named Mary.  Forgiveness, tolerance, do unto others as you would like done unto you – like many prodigal Catholic sons I’m going to continue to have my doubts about divinity but either way that’s a message I can get behind.  I hope the church can focus on it, too and I’m particularly hopeful that you’re the man for the job.

Amen,

Brian