Do all the American Krap Kristians share Pope Cardinal Ratguts's bedrock immorality?

Sure, he always looks like he's dressed to party, in outfits like his pretty white dresses and chic little hats, but make no mistake, Pope Cardinal Ratguts is a ruthless enforcer of his primitive authoritarian ideology. Worse, he establishes himself by his own words and deeds as a profoundly and institutionally immoral savage.

"In August, 1984 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger stated that liberation theology has a major flaw in that it attempts to apply Christ's teaching on the sermon on the mount regarding the poor to present social situations. Ratzinger believes that Christ's teaching on the poor means that we will be judged when we die, and at the final judgment, with particular attention to how we personally have treated the poor."

-- from the Wikipedia article on liberation theology

by Ken

A listserv colleague, one of the smartest people I know, was providing suggestions for countering the inevitable right-wing appeal to "morality" as a reason for allowing the wealthy elites to stomp the "undeserving" poor into the dust. Right-wingers not only believe that people who find themselves in need of life help are in that situation because of their own failing, but are apt to couch that belief in religious terms -- that it's God's will and doing, so that stomping on the poor is really doing the Lord's work.

No amount of reasoning, my colleague argued, will touch people who think they have God on their side, which is why she gathered a list of citations from that proto-socialist Jesus. I think we're all familiar with the desperate right-wing efforts of late to concoct a "macho Jesus" who magically believes all the anti-human proposition of the Crackpot Right, but as all those people who brandish their bibles like weapons would know if they ever actually read what's inside, Jesus would have been shocked and horrified by everything, all the predation, hatred, and bigotry they fetishize in his name. Jesus, of course, was a people kind of guy, and the god he fronted for was a people kind of god.

And then she wrote something that really warmed my heart:

"There's a reason liberation theology got squashed down so very, very hard. It was both a coherent and popular argument against the characterization of deity, the ultimate implied moral authority, as a bitter sadist."

The liberation theology movement was the last time the Catholic Church found itself on the side of ordinary people, and even that was an accident, a product of the new spirit of humanity breathed into it by the accidental pope, John XXIII, who was expected to twiddle his thumbs in the short time he had left to live, at which point the cardinals hoped they might be better able to reach agreement on a "serious" candidate. Instead that amazing man -- probably the last truly decent person to rise into the uppermost ranks of the Church -- aligned the institution with the needs and hopes of all its faithful.

Oh, old Pope Paul VI tried to get the toothpaste of liberation theology back in the tube, but he was way too wishy-woshy to do the job that the "sainted" John Paul II would roll up his sleeves and take on with such fanatical zeal. And he would no doubt have been thrilled to know that his tiara would be passed on to a man of whose ruthlessness and savagery and worship of the powerful he had made such generous use in his own papacy.

And Pope Cardinal Ratguts has done nothing to disappoint. Even with the forced diversion of having to deal with the monumental mess of the Church's wretched history of institutionally coddling and even encouraging the pedophile priests (an effort that Ratguts had largely overseen while still a cardinal, in his role as John Paul's designated keeper of the faith), he has been a resolute force for the subjugation of normal human aspirations with the yoke of uncompromising doctrinal orthodoxy, ensuring that there's a Rich Folks' Catholic Church and an Everyone Else's.

And so a surprising amount of common ground has been found between the Church and the non-Catholic Krap Kristian sects that have spread like cancer in this country.

"Pro-life" they call themselves, based solely on the difficult question of abortion, being themselves way too whacked-out to appreciate the difficulty of the question, while remaining resolutely pro-death on all manner of issues that aren't difficult. Even savage old Pope John Paul, after all, took his opposition to the death penalty as seriously as his opposition to abortion -- at least rhetorically. (The hierarchy over which he maintained such tight control seemed always to be on 24/7 guard when it came to standing up to blasphemy on abortion and creepily silent on . . . that other matter.)

And where Jesus seems to have had nothing at all to say on the subject of homosexuality, at least nothing preserved among his teachings or anywhere else in the New Testament, the self-appointed guardians of "morality" of both the Mother Church and the United Krap Kristians ride that famous single citation in Leviticus -- buried among a host of other (sensibly unenforced and indeed unmentioned) prohibitions, of which they appear to be utterly ignorant -- as an excuse to throw the full weight of their orthodoxy at it, pretending as usual to do so in the name of Jesus.

They don't know anything important about Jesus's life, work, beliefs, or teachings, and they're defiantly, militantly proud of their ignorance. They hate Jesus with every fiber of their malignant -- or merely plug-ignorant -- carcasses.

I've mentioned a number of times that, for all the evil that has been done, and all the important work in need of doing that has been left undone, by these Jesus-hating "Christians," there are also a lot of people I've known or known about who have been inspired by their faith to attempt to do those good works. The single most important example in the Catholic realm was the liberation theology movement, spearheaded by all those humane activist priests who believed their calling required them to devote their energies to improving the conditions of the downtrodden among their worshippers. Their actions made, as my colleague put it, "a coherent and popular argument against the characterization of deity, the ultimate implied moral authority, as a bitter sadist." And it was only natural that liberation theology "got squashed down so very, very hard." (I love that phrase!)

And then I stumbled across the pre-papal Cardinal Ratguts's principled position on the subject, that -- as the Wikipedia writer puts it -- "Christ's teaching on the poor means that we will be judged when we die, and at the final judgment, with particular attention to how we personally have treated the poor," and has no bearing on how people lead their lives in the here-and-now? It's just a hurdle to overcome at judgment time!

It occurred to me suddenly that I hadn't felt it necessary to spell out the connection, in my Sunday Classics piece ("Verdi blows the lid off the whole Krap Kristian hypocrisy") focusing on the agonizing unawareness of sinful unworthiness expressed by the mezzo-soprano in the "Liber scriptus" and by the tenor in the "Ingemisco" of the Day of Wrath depicted in Verdi's Requiem. It seemed grotesquely obvious, too much so to even warrant mention, that the only point of such depictions is as a cautionary lesson to influence real-world, real-life behavior.

I hadn't counted, though, on the depth of the ruthless savagery and total immorality of the man who considers himself personally charged with enforcing the morality of his subjects -- who not only doesn't see the connection but insists that there isn't one. In a reasonable, principled world, an argument like this would have caused Cardinal Ratguts to be carted off to the nearest loony bin, or at least voted off the island. Instead his career as a pitiless enforcer of primitive orthodoxy continued to flourish until his fellow cardinals seized the opportunity to promote him to the top job.

What a bunch!

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