Ladders

More than once I have sat down to write an essay about religion, and usually end up aborting the piece.  Never have I false-started a blog entry as frequently as with this one, and indeed one of my gaps between entries was due in large part to how I could salvage the idea, or write it in a way that would be middle of the road, yet satisfying.  It’s one of those topics—well, so far the only one to present me such a quandary—that can offend people to the point they don’t want to continue reading my blog, and maybe not even stay in contact with me if I cross the line.  I’m not even sure where the line is half the time. 

I’ve written about religion before, sort of.  I have quite comfortably expressed my views concerning my own faith, where, when and why I turned away from church, and even how I feel religion has strayed from its original purpose.  As a result, I’ve seen my friend count drop by more than a few whenever I write something like that.  I’d like to say it doesn’t bother me, but it does, I guess.  There isn’t one friend of mine, whether online or not, that I don’t respect regardless of their own views—and many of them have views with which I am in complete disagreement.  That doesn’t mean they’re not good people; we just agree to disagree.

This weekend, the Catholic College of Cardinals will convene to vote for the successor to Benedict XVI.  I wonder if we can go back to calling him Cardinal Ratzinger now?  Indeed, a Pope hasn’t resigned in over six hundred years, so we have a lot of questions that need to be answered.  Regardless of who they elect to succeed him, whether it’s the Canadian candidate, that guy from Ghana who’s supporters have put up campaign billboards on his behalf, or some upstart from Latin America where almost half the Catholics of the world reside (in various degrees of poverty, one might point out), the winner will not only inherit the title and responsibilities of the head of the Catholic Church, they will also instantly become a head of state, since Vatican City is a sovereign nation.  Just think, a priest from Quebec could soon be the head of another country, while he’s still a Canadian citizen.  I’m sure they’ll let him keep dual citizenship, or diplomatic privilege at the very least.  Conrad Black, put your hand down.  After all, it’s the Pope.  You can’t insult him, can you? 

Sinead O’Connor did.  The brash, young singer, and devout Catholic herself once declared the Pope—at that time John Paul II, a long-serving and very popular Pope, no less—was the ‘real enemy’, and proceeded to tear up his picture on live television.  The Saturday Night Live audience was stunned, shocked to silence as the image lingered in the air while they cut to commercial, seamlessly as though the whole thing was planned by the network.  It wasn’t.  Sinead committed commercial suicide that night.  She has since had a respectably successful career, scoring a few hits and selling records, mostly to her core fan base, but the breakthrough she enjoyed as a result of her smash hit ‘Nothing Compares 2U’ evaporated.  Why?  Because she insulted the Pope.  How could someone rip up John Paul II’s picture?  He never hurt anyone.  For Christ’s sake, he was the head of the whole Church!  Millions of faithful followers kept his image in their homes.  My grandmother, a life-long Catholic, had several photos of him around her house, probably more than Jesus and Mary combined.  As a child, I briefly thought he was a great uncle of ours, or something.  And he always seemed to look so nice in his photographs.  How could this man ever be considered anything less than a saint?

The story goes that Sinead had read an article about—wait for it—altar boys being sexually abused by church officials, including priests.  She wrote to her diocese, and after receiving no satisfactory response, wrote to the Vatican.  When it became apparent that no one was going to step up and admit to wrong-doing in the church hierarchy, and when it appeared that none up the chain of command was prepared to accept culpability, she felt it was necessary to use her own celebrity to speak out on behalf of the victims.  She realized that she had maybe the biggest platform to shed some light on so grievous a scandal.  Where she erred is that her message, blunt and visceral as it was, fell on deaf ears.  All the world saw was an emotionally-charged singer rip up the Pope on TV.  No one got the message, and Sinead drastically underestimated the response, or lack thereof, of the audience.  They crucified her.

I proudly own several Sinead O’Connor albums.  It moves me to tears to watch footage of people burning her albums in the street, because that is what actually happened.  Radio stations sponsored mass-burnings, and one even brought in a steamroller to crush her albums, tapes, and CDs.  This wasn’t Nazi Germany in the 1930s.  This was the United States in the early 1990s.  Suddenly, her talent was irrelevant.  The sexual abuse was ignored, as it had been all along.  People were more concerned that this freakish Irish singer, who willingly shaved her head to thumb her nose at the stereotyping of what a female singer/songwriter should look like, was an agent of evil, negatively influencing the youth of the nation.  Just like all those nasty heavy metal stars of the 80s—you know, the ones that put Satanic messages on their albums.  Surely those metal singers were worse.  What self-respecting man would grow his hair and wear make-up?  Boy George, put your hand down.  Funny, no one had a problem with him.  Nor should they have.

Sinead’s problems didn’t end there.  At a concert a few years later, the venue at which she was about to perform insisted on playing the Star Spangled Banner before her set.  She asked them not to do so, because she didn’t feel it was appropriate to play any country’s national anthem before a rock concert.  She also pointed out that national anthems promote nationalism, and in many cases hostility between countries rather than unity.  Fair comment, considering the fact that I have attended dozens of concerts, and not once have I heard a national anthem played.  She got lambasted for that opinion as well.  How un-American, to spurn the national anthem, and on US soil no less.  I never understood the furor over that.  Who sings the anthem before a concert?  It just seems unnecessary.  A hockey game?  Sure, but a rock show…?   The fact is people were just looking for reasons to cast her in as negative light as possible.  In the 90s, she couldn’t pour a glass of water without someone criticizing her.  All the while, children continued to be abused.  The collection plates were still full to the brim every Sunday, and the Vatican continued to stuff its coffers.  It still does.

Now, it is important to remember that children are abused all over the world, in every race, religion, creed, and culture.  There are bad people everywhere.  More and more abusers, within or without the church are exposed every year.  As the world slowly wakes up to these and other horrible crimes that have persistently been ignored, avoided, or denied, we are slowly coming to realize what one person had the balls to address almost twenty years ago.  In the last twenty years, the Catholic Church has seen its numbers begin to shrink.  The next Pope will have to think really hard about how it will continue to serve its congregation, in the face of severe poverty, climate change, exploitation, abuse, and controversial rock signers.  I wonder how many of the over one billion faithful know exactly how much money the Vatican keeps in its central bank/vault?  Do they ever wonder if the Pope, who could have been anyone depending on how popular he was behind the secret, closed doors of St. Peter’s Basilica this week, ever lays awake at night trying to decide what his divine message, which will be accepted quite literally as gospel, will be?  If he wanted to, he could stand at the balcony and declare that Twinkies are infused with the Body of Christ, and everyone would have to accept it.  He could say “You know what, we’ve been wrong for almost two thousand years.  Women could make decent priests after all.”  Maybe he’ll totally mess around with us and say “Sinead, you were right.  There are an awful lot of perverts touching young boys inappropriately.  My predecessors did squat to help them.  Maybe we should try to stop it now.”  I’m not holding my breath.

The fact is, the vast majority of Catholics go to church for the right reasons.  They are good people who wish to be part of a community where people smile when they greet each other, worship together in a place where they feel at home, and help others in need, both at home and abroad.  Most of them probably wish priests could marry, that women could have equal rights, and that people wouldn’t have to feel guilty enough every day to have to spill their guts behind a flimsy screen in a makeshift broom closet.  Most don’t want to see children abused, and find child exploitation abhorrent.  Most wish the Vatican could take even half its national wealth and spread it around to people in need—like, half their adherents.  Today, Sinead O’Connor is still a practicing Catholic, but she has chosen to follow a splinter group which allows women equal rights.  As a matter of fact, she is an ordained priest.  This branch of Catholicism has been disavowed by the Vatican.  There isn’t a person alive or dead who can convince me that her motives are anything less than sincere.

I would never hold someone’s faith against them, so long as what they follow is sincere, and followed for the right reasons.  And it isn’t up to me to decide what is right for someone, especially in matters of belief.  I have a friend who is a psychic, and she makes a living providing spiritual guidance to people who seek it.  I see no difference between what she does and what religious leaders do.  Her message is one of love and empathy.  The difference is that her faith does not have two thousand years of bigotry, exploitation, misogyny, coercion, genocide, censorship, and forced conversion on its resume.  That’s a whole lot of crosses to bear.

Speaking of crosses, a few weeks ago, I took a picture of one adorning the gable end of a former church, now used as a community center.  I’m not sure if the building has been desanctified or not.  Beneath it was an aluminum ladder, with no one in sight, just propped up against the building as though someone was trying to climb up onto the cross. That, or climb off it.  I took a picture of it and posted it on my Facebook page (you may have seen it, and it’s still on my page if you want to go back and play along), jokingly asking people to post captions.  Mine was simply:  “Volunteers...?”  I can’t imagine being the guy that walks out onto the balcony after the white smoke over St. Peter’s starts to waft out of the world’s most famous smokestack.  That’s a ladder I wouldn’t want to climb.  Lately, The Artist Formerly Known As Benedict XVI has come to realize that ladders go two ways.  We all know that we climb ladders to reach for something; surely climbing down is for a reason as well.  There has been no shortage of suspicion as to why he changed his direction, and I’m not prepared to offer any speculation.  We all have ladders of our own, and perhaps he just got tired of hanging on the rungs.  Maybe it’s because he’s really old.  Maybe at the top he just didn’t find what he was looking for.