I was born a Catholic. I was baptized a Catholic. I went to Catholic school my entire life through high school. When I went to college,I dusted off the old altar boy training and helped out in the basement of a church where a Mass was said on an altar made of two sawhorses and a two by four surrounded by folding chairs I helped set up. Upstairs, in the main church, they were going through the whole megilla with the incense and the chanting and the music and the somber guilt. I'd had it with that nonsense. The basement was where it was at. Real. Like the old days.
Then one day, I retired. If there was a place you could resign, I would have. But how do you resign from a place you never really belonged anyway?
All through grade school, and the first year of high school, Catholicism was just the way it was. I didn't question the nuns in grade school teaching us anti-Semitism. I didn't question the racism, or the sexism, or the contradiction of being driven to Catholic school in a Cadillac. I didn't question any of it. The elitism, the arrogance, the sucking up to the parish priests by the rich parishioners. I didn't question the hitting, the verbal abuse, the installation of the catholic guilt I carry to this day. None of it. It was just the way it was. I was Catholic and I was a member of the chosen religion.
The came 1973. Catholic High School. The times they were a changin. The Catholics couldn't handle it. Abortion became legal and the Catholic hierarchy went ape shit. They abandoned their social justice, the concern for the poor, and no meat on Fridays for a sudden obsession with blastocysts and fetuses and stem cells. Ob-freaking-sessed. That's all that mattered. A goddamned cell was more important than any of the poor, the old, the retarded, the homeless, the abused kids. I didn't get it.
So I asked questions. Beginning that year, when math teachers began spending half the geometry class ranting about abortion, I got pissed. I was sick of it. So I began speaking up. Why is a fetus more important than the poor and the starving? I don't understand half this Bible thing. Why do we have to listen to abortion yapping in English class? Why do you throw some kids out of school for being mouthy while letting thieves and in one case, a murderer, stay in school? Could it be because of social class? Did Daddy take you to Cancun last winter? These are legitimate questions, right?
Max's Dad became Public Enemy #1 to some of the priests for his curiosity. He barely survived the last couple of years of high school. It was rough. How little I really knew of how corrupt this organization was. But I quit, like I said.
Now we find out that the infallible Pope, chosen by God (sorry I just spit up in my mouth a bit) is nothing but a co-conspirator in a world-wide child molesting scandal. Despite the Vatican turning into the Bush Administration and slandering anyone who questions their criminality, we all know what you are. A corrupt criminal organization who needs a good house cleaning. Unfortunately, there's no term limits on Pope Rat(zenberger). So he will stay until he croaks. The scandals will go on. The faithful will continue to dwindle in numbers and only the morally blind will stay and give standing ovations to the indefensible.
It's sad. Oh not that my birth religion is so utterly corrupt, they all are, but that so many people are unwilling to retire from it. You know what, folks. God doesn't give a shit what you do as long as you're nice to others. That's it. That's the only thing in the Bible or the Torah or the Koran worth remembering. You don't need some ridiculous zombie like chanting of words you can't ever forget to get to Catholic heaven. Just be nice to others. If that started happening, this earth would already be heaven.
