Catholic and Enjoying It!
The gospel tells us to sober and prudent and use our brains, formed by the mind of Christ. It cautions us to “no longer be children, tossed back and forth and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love.” (Eph 4:14–16).
Because Christianism is a diabolical parody of actual Christian faith, its moral formation comes, not from the gospel, but from the Right Wing Noise Machine, which absolutely thrives on Panics du Jour, because an easily stampeded people is a people you can easily bend to your will.
For years now, Christianists have been stampeded about zillions of things, panicking endlessly about everything from Obama’s Secret Plan to Confiscate our Guns, Conquer Texas, and Set up Shariah Breeder Camps for Good White Christian Wimminfolk to the War on Christmas. (Indeed, we are in the thick of the Obama Banned Christmas Lie Season, accompanied by the lie that Trump Saved Christmas).
Along with celebrations like these, the holidays also offer us a time for reflection and perspective. And over these next few weeks, as we celebrate the birth of our Savior, as we retell the story of weary travelers, a star, shepherds, Magi, I hope that we also focus ourselves on the message that this child brought to this Earth some 2,000 years ago — a message that says we have to be our brother’s keepers, our sister’s keepers; that we have to reach out to each other, to forgive each other. To let the light of our good deeds shine for all. To care for the sick, and the hungry, and the downtrodden. And of course, to love one another, even our enemies, and treat one another the way we would want to be treated ourselves.
It’s a message that grounds not just my family’s Christian faith but that of Jewish Americans, Muslim Americans, non-believers — Americans of all backgrounds. It’s a message of unity and a message of decency and a message of hope that never goes out of style. And it’s one that we all need very much today.
Of course, Christianists have a ready explanation for this: taqiyya. Evil Muslims like Obama believe that you can lie for a good cause. So he lied about believing in Jesus in order to make War on Christmas by cleverly proclaiming Jesus as Savior and celebrating his birth and calling us to live by his teachings.
Meanwhile, these same Christianists celebrate heroes like James O’Keefe who have, for years, told cunning lies to, for instance, the WaPo, trying to get them to print false stories about Roy Moore raping somebody so that they can nail the WaPo for running a false story.
In short, one of the marks of Christianism is its love of lies and its weird and creepy habit of using accusation as a form of confession. It constantly attributes to its enemies the things the Christianist himself thinks and does. Whether cheering for the impenitent sex predator Donald Trump gloating while Al Franken resigns, or charging people with election fraud while committing it, or pretending to care about Bill Clinton’s victims while spitting in the face of Roy Moore’s and Donald Trump’s, Christianists, because they follow a diabolical parody of the gospel, lie and accuse while doing that which they accuse others of doing–just as the diabolos does.
Not surprisingly, they therefore spend a lot of time therefore lying and accusing the Holy Father, who is a Christian and therefore the enemy of Christianism. And not surprisingly, they love Panics du Jour involving him. Indeed, he has been the constant subject of Christianist Panics du Jour since the day he was elected: He doesn’t care about abortion! Panic! He approves of gay marriage! Hysteria! Beach balls! Panic! He’s a Gaia worshipper! Hysteria! Amoris Laetitia! Panic!
The richness of the Francis hater’s panic over Amoris Laetitia is particularly hilarious given that the same people sweating over an obscure footnote in a document nobody but Francis-haters and a small percentage of the shepherds to whom it was addressed have read is that the same people having a cow over it “destroying marriage” are the ones who *adore* a thrice-married sex predator and a defend a child molester with appeals to the Holy Family as his role models.
Anyway, this week, the panic and hysteria the Christianists are indulging in their Francis-hatred involves the Holy Father’s remark that he wouldn’t mind a new rendering of the Lord’s Prayer as saying “do not let us fall into temptation” instead of “lead us not into temptation”.
All the usual suspects are out, having cows and declaring the pope a dangerous perverter of the Faith–while they labor to make war on the Faith at almost every turn.
Yeah. About that: turns out the Lord’s Prayer is already rendered this way in many Romance language cultures and has been for years (including in both Spanish, the Pope’s native language, and Portuguese, and more recently French). That constitutes HALF of the Catholics on planet earth.
Now Christianists, who are big on nativist American-speaking White Spite and who are quite ready to sneer at anything not American as dumb and Euroweenie and all the rest of it will have no problem simply writing off these renderings of the Our Father in other languages as stupid and inferior.
But believing Catholics, who respect the Holy Father and the catholic diversity of the Catholic Church will not simply blow off millions of fellow Catholics for a perfectly legitimate translation of the prayer. Instead they will consider the fact that the Pope has Scripture on his side when he says, “The French have changed the text and their translation says “don’t let me fall into temptation,” he said in an interview broadcast on the evening of Dec. 6. (here on YouTube in Italian). “It’s me who falls. It’s not Him who pushes me into temptation, as if I fell. A father doesn’t do that. A father helps you to get up right away. The one who leads into temptation is Satan.”
After all, St. James tells us:
Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted with evil and he himself tempts no one; but each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin; and sin when it is full-grown brings forth death. (Jas 1:13–15).
Now, “lead us not into temptation” is a reasonable translation, just so long as we read it in light of the tradition. The problem is, many Catholics do not and so become prey to the lie that God lays traps for us and wants us to fail and go to hell.
It is Calvinism (and its bastard stepchild Christianism) that conceives of God as wanting to tempt us–or more precisely, those weak faithless culture war enemies over there whom God wishes to destroy) to our doom. Christianism loves the idea of God as a destroying angel saving his Elect and using the massa damnata as tools, not loving them as persons. In the Christian tradition, Jesus tries his best to save even Judas Iscariot, showing him special friendship even in the moment he hardens his will against him. In Christianism, God loves his Elect (meaning the Christianist, who can be an impenitent child molester and still have the blessing of God) and those who seek to do God’s will with all their heart, mind, and strength are still rejected because they are “liberal” and therefore bear the taint of reprobation.
Francis bears just such a taint for the Christianist and so must be subjected to continual panics du jour lest people hear the “liberal” gospel that is, in fact, the teaching of the Church–that God loves and wills the salvation of all. Christianists hate and fear the possibility that God has given the Christian revelation, not as a reducing valve to keep as many people from heaven as possible, but as a gift to save, if possible, the whole world. Christianists labor to see as many people excluded from him by any means necessary–in this case, with a ridiculous jingoist hysteria that condemns half the Catholics on the planet for saying the Lord’s Prayer in a perfectly legitimate way.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In