Carlo Acutis & Catholic Nonsense

No more JPII saints. I am nauseated by them. As should you be. 

This isn’t just about Carlo Acutis. I have nothing against a boy who was obsessed with the consecrated species. But thank God for Garry Wills. I don’t know if I am willing to go as far as Wills does in his book “WHY PRIESTS: A FAILED TRADITION,” but I am getting there. Quickly.

Thank you, Carlo. Thank you, ridiculous canonization process. 

Things have to change. Thankfully, it’s a guarantee they will. To see what I mean, watch the video:

Beyond Carlo

Speaking for changes, I’m voting Biden. Bishops and priests that say otherwise and threaten me with hell? They are a disgrace and a laughing stock. But I have to tell you that they really rev me up. Keep yapping, bishops. You make me want to RUN out to the polls.

But don’t worry. I’ll stay safe due to COVID-19 (which is very much still a thing, monstrously cruel bishops and school principals who are right now endangering teachers and students). So I’ll be mailing it soon.

Carlo and the Miracle of Seeing Christ

Let’s talk about miracles. You want to be in the Real Presence of Jesus, fellow Catholics? Then go to your parish and skip the Adoration Chamber. Find the maintenance-people and venerate them for a change. I don’t mean silliness. I mean, maybe offer them a nice lunch or bring them something to drink.

And don’t throw money on them at a distance, Americans. Spend time with them productively. If you can take orders from them and lend a hand competently, then offer to do so, and accept their “no” should they give it. Be respectful, as you would before the Blessed Sacrament. And while you do this, please keep in mind the laughable Church position “preferential option for the poor.”

Preferential Option to Laugh

Why do I call that laughable? Not because of the deadly seriousness of poverty. Actually, it’s for many reasons. The first reason is the de facto slave class of Church employees that we, fellow Catholics, are hunky-dory with. You don’t have to go out looking for the poor, U.S. Catholics. They are working at your parish. Therefore skip fawning and sucking up to Father so-and-so and spend real time with another in persona Christi. 

I also laugh at “preferential option for the poor” because of many arrogant liberal Catholic academics. Don’t get me wrong. I know outstanding and truly heroic Catholic academics who are honestly in solidarity with the poor, but there are far more talkers. But numerous others are cowards who talk big but poke around their egos and see what happens. Many times—not always!—their circles are the intellectual and ego equivalent of a grotesque comparison of a specific body part. I’ll let you guess which.   

Cheerleading for Carlo, Trump, or Biden is Dangerous!

So like I said, I’m voting Biden. Excommunicate me, and still, I vote for Biden. Better to die in ex-communication than to sin against my conscience, an angelic Dumb Ox once opined. It’s the move in 2020 where I can go in the promising direction of life.

Nevertheless, there is a terrifying phenomenon that has me very concerned. There are so many Biden voters that I interact with that aren’t satisfied with my vote. They want more. They demand I become a cheerleader like them. I am to be carried away in their delusion that Uncle Joe is the most remarkable political figure since Thomas More (an elite who burned people alive). One diehard liberal Catholic informed me recently that Biden is the most moral and upstanding politician in D.C., and that even Senator Lindsey Graham said so. Hey! It must be true then?

Sorry, I don’t drink Kool-Aid from the right or left. Biden has my vote, but as Cornel West says, it’s a choice between a catastrophe and a disaster. And if you are pissed off because I said that about your dear old white Joe Biden, good. You have a chance to learn something unpleasant about yourself and maybe grow from it. See, that furious reaction you’re feeling is typical of how brainwashed folks act when they get challenged.

Medicine for the Brainwashed

Take care! There’s a big emotional development problem when you are either 100 or zero emotionally on matters all the time. This predisposition to get behind something or someone in a bipolar way looks like a national scale failure. Sorry. I am not jumping on the sentimental crazy-train for Biden. Maybe you can be thrilled over drone warfare’s imperial cruelty and the human slave trade in Libya. Not me. I vote against the monster Trump. That’s enough!

By the way, to any guilty white American Catholics offended that I am not thrilled about Biden, here’s something for you. Go to YouTube and search “IT’S A BLACK PRESIDENT, HUEY FREEMAN” from Aaron McGruder’s prophetic “BOONDOCKS.” Pray and watch your emotional states. Then go watch some “SOUTH PARK.” Maybe follow that up with “BOOK OF MORMON.” You’ll get a feel for the prophetic. It’ll benefit you.

Every one of us should spend some time in adoration of Christ-the-parish-maintenance-worker. Here is a way to really touch our New Testament roots. Jesus and Mary, Galilean peasants, were deemed to be nothing-people, but cook them 2K years with theological and devotional freight, and we forget all about that uncomfortable truth.

Time to remember the essential truths and drop every distraction that keeps us unaware of their bone-crushing poverty. No metanoia with idolatries, including sentimental lies about Jesus.

Saint Carlo & a God Worse than ISIS

Anyway, yeah, Saint Carlo Acutis. Hooray for another saint who keeps us complacent while the JPII Reverse Vatican II program churns on. I’m sure that Carlo Acutis is in heaven, ok? He’s right there with Judas, Walt Disney, Mother Teresa, that homeless person who died yesterday in your city, the greatest woman who ever lived, and everyone else to kick the bucket with or without the wax-treatment Bernadette Soubirous got. You know why? Because the real God isn’t worse than ISIS.

Think about that terrorist group, ISIS. Wow. If they get ahold of you, you are goners. But not before days of agonizing and grotesque tortures. But it will eventually end.

In contrast, the sadistic God people dream up is infinitely worse than ISIS. He has many worshippers, that false god, many of them Trump voters and fear-mongering priests. Oh yeah, he’s worse than ISIS. Because his tortures never cease.

Can you believe that there are Catholics who worship that imaginary hellish demon of a god? I know there are. To these insidious people with their ostentatious obsessions for the liturgy, doctrine, and the prestige of the Church, their mental idol is somewhat like a degenerate sexual fixation. They have a thing for theological torture porn, and they eternalize it. There are so many sick people! Enough to fill up a civil war.  

Carlo & the Predilection for Irrelevance

But back to harmless Carlo and obsessions with Hosts. Switching the focus from Communion and the Body of Christ that is Eucharist onto magical ideas about what goes on when priests say certain words sure serves the interests of the hierarchy. However, this sort of lunacy affects not only imbeciles.

I enjoy witty Stephen Colbert, but you can see this kind of brainwashing even in him after his interview with Garry Wills. He told Wills, out of character, that “he was no better than a Protestant!” Wills may not be correct about his opinions on the Eucharist or priesthood, but he was on target in his response: Catholics are not better than anyone else, Colbert. Eucharist isn’t magic.

And not every Catholic is the brilliant and (almost always) kind, Stephen Colbert. I’ve met too many cruel, racist, homophobic daily communicants in my 21 years working in ministry to pander to this evil in magical thinking. I know far too many who sit before the Bread with a pathological lust for power over others. Our country burns with big problems. I’m talking about Trump-sized problems.

Stop sucking up to the pastors and bishops! We have work to do. The hungry go empty, the oppressed are robbed, and the poor’s weeping is choked out beneath the knee of imperial cruelty. But God hears!

Carlo & the Saints I Wish To See

Show me someone with a Eucharistic devotion and who stands up to abusive priests and the bishops who shield them. That’s a saint I can admire.

Show me Catholics who live the Eucharist in fighting systemic racism in our parishes. As scholar Robert P. Jones argues, our white Catholic parishes are culpable of building up thriving racism in the United States. Without our deliberate consent, White American Catholics, there would be no white supremacy in America. Jones speaks the truth. I’ve seen this building and maintenance of racism first hand in Dade, Broward, and Monroe County parishes in Thomas Wenski’s Archdiocese of Miami. I have seen it cultivated in the powerful and the wealthy, and they turned the Gospel around 180◦. Show me saints who take a stand against that!  

Show me a diocesan employee who has a spinal column and fights structural sin, who strikes down sinister fundamentalist clericalism and its cruelty. Now we are talking sainthood, and maybe martyrdom!

Show me someone who sits before the Blessed Sacrament and includes divorced and remarried people, homosexual people, and Catholic transpersons. That’s the saint I want to talk about!

We Need Saints

We need Vatican II saints. No more JPII saints. Let’s grow out of this saccharine, mawkish, mushy devotion. It enables the worst things going on today in the Church. Holiness becomes bizarre magic for a comfortable, easy, cheap grace Christianity—really a useless Christianity, the spiritual inferior to atheism.

Or worse, spiritual worldliness, masquerading as piety and even love for the Church, but complacent with evil traded for human glory and personal well-being.