Sometimes I'm in a desert, and there is a huge airliner trying desperately to climb, like an insect in futility, scrambling up the slippery camber of an animal's water dish, only for the plane to ultimately lose its hard-fought battle against gravity, crashing into the Earth in a huge fireball, right in front of me, hundreds of passengers dead in an instant. Other times it's a mid-sized twin engine plane, propellers roaring, doing aerobatics, the pilot pushing the envelope, swooping ever and ever closer to the ground, and death-- only to one time push things too far, smashing the plane into smithereens onto the unyielding turf.
Last night I had five separate dreams of airplanes crashing, one after the other. I would wake up, startled. Drift back to sleep, there goes another plane, even closer to me this time. When dawn broke, I snapped awake for good, groggy and distraught, like Rolf in the opening to Phantasy Star II.
Every Thursday evening, I attend my wife's "RCIA" class. For those not in the know, "RCIA" stands for the "Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults". It's how adults become Catholic. Our local version of this class takes place in the huge Catholic church, in the nearest major town to our home. It's a modernistic looking facility, with a lobby of enormous walls of glass windows looking in on the Church proper-- with its sanctuary and altar bizarrely situated in the center of the room, like the pupil of a gigantic eyeball, surrounded by pews of various elevations, tabernacle nowhere in sight.
Attached to this facility is a Catholic school. Unlike the humble two-hallwayed, musty smelling building of my own Catholic elementary upbringing, this school is modern and high budget-- brick walls, concrete steps with rubberized coatings, those industrial wooden-style doors with little thatch-pattern windows in them. It looks more like a public school than what I associate with Catholic tradition. We meet for class in the school's library-- an anachronistic room with a multi-thousand dollar Macintosh computer on the desk, an abstract art set of metal rails and-- interestingly-- airplanes hanging overhead, right alongside a shelf of ancient bound Bibles and Christian children's books.
Rectangle tables pushed together, we sit. Among the usual suspects: a soft-spoken priest in his eighties, with a 1940's-style swept cut of silver hair; a sister with a delightfully goofy sense of humor, who has been a nun for seventy years; a thin, handsome, young bearded Parochial Vicar in his early thirties-- a personal friend of mine; and a mixture of candidates, some of them old and there to learn more than anything else, along with others-- barely adults, even-- just getting started in life and on their spiritual journeys. Then there are those such as myself who aren't candidates at all, but present to support loved ones who are working their way through the process.
The sister always talks about progress... progress. "The world never stands still, and we as the Church need to move along with it." She brings up women, always women, and how they should be given more authority in the Church. "I love being around all of you great women in this room! Well... and the men too, I guess" she adds, giggling. "Jesus was a... was a Socialist, really!" she remarked in one session, a few weeks ago. It's that kind of "socialism", where the invoker simply means what the word doesn't mean: egalitarianism and being friendly to one another. This versus men with rifles, lining up the "haves" in front of ditches, rifles at the ready, shooting the bodies into mass grave ditches.
Last night's class was unusual. The sister was there, but the two ordinary priests were not present. In their stead was a short, thin, bald man-- a retired priest from a nearby diocese, as he so introduced himself. His job for the night was to cover the week's printed and bound material: teaching the candidates about the hierarchy of the Church. The material explained that there is the Pope, the theological descendent of Jesus Himself, then the Bishops who had their authority delegated throughout the ages by the original Apostles. Of course there are Cardinals, who vote for new Popes, along with Deacons, religious orders, laity, and so on.
This strange new priest, after a big sigh and a settling into his chair, spoke at length. "You see, the Catholic Church has this 'hierarchy', but it's... it's very loose. There are other Catholic Churches, like in South America, that have none at all! But we are Roman Catholic. So they have this hierarchy... people are tribal and territorial, so they just want to protect what is 'theirs'. And they are hung up on 'we do things this way only because it has always been done this way.'" He went on and on, pouring cold water on the Church as he dryly intoned.
On and on he went. Eventually, even the progressive sister felt compelled to reel him back in. Gently, drawing his attention once again to the actual printed material: "Well, Father, you know, when people think of the Church's hierarchy, they are thinking of the Pope, and Bishops, and things like that. Right?"
"Yes, yes, I suppose that is true", he reflected. Then, cue immediately discarded as his mind wandered again, "Did you know", he continued in his meandering, soft-spoken rambling way, "there there is a synod going on right now? Why, they are discussing all sorts of important matters! Like letting priests get married, giving women major roles in authority, and even allowing in gays and lesbians... uhhh, whatever that series of letters is."
The sister couldn't resist. Material totally abandoned even by her now, she excitedly added: "And they are even asking women to be at the table! At the synod, instead of sitting facing authority, they are all at tables facing each other, eight or nine apiece, and everyone gets a say! Can you imagine it!"
Homosexuality, pedophilia, pornography, extreme representations of violence, hedonism, nihilism, "anything goes if it feels right". It's in the movies; it's in the video games; it's in the water cooler conversations at work; it's on the news; it's in the Protestant churches and their "rainbow creeds"; it's supported by every trillion and billion dollar corporation from Apple to Microsoft to Goldman Sachs; the rainbow flags are on the capitol buildings; they are in the military recruitment ads; they are supported by every newspaper, radio station, and institution.
In a world like that, why would someone enter candidacy into the "RCIA" program? Why would someone want to become Catholic? What is fundamentally different about the Catholic Church versus Protestant churches, or the rest of the present-day world, that would serve as a lure to these fish?
Face feeling flush, heat rising within me, I spoke up for the benefit of the candidates in the room. "I don't mean to sound like a contrarian...", I paused briefly to collect myself, shy as I am, "...but the Church needs to be careful. Everything within it should be based on scripture. While I appreciate that they would would want laypeople such as myself at the table, my opinion shouldn't count as much as a Priest's or a Bishop's."
As I spoke, I thought of the wisdom of the Founding Fathers: abstraction layers... people don't vote for laws, they vote for representatives who vote for laws... people don't vote for President, electors do... The sister rushed in to reassure me. "You wouldn't need to worry-- that's why there are eight other people at the table with you!"
It was around this point where one of the candidates-- a timid young lady, red in the cheeks-- bashfully raised her hand. "Why does the Church say that priests can't be married?", she asked with genuine innocence. The bald Father, smilingly: "You know, three quarters of priests would ask the same question. People just don't like change, and..."
Again, I felt compelled to provide balance to the discourse-- the hairs raising on the back of my neck, that all-too-familiar urge when I know, despite not wanting to draw attention to myself, that I need to say something:
"But there is wisdom to the idea. When I was in my twenties before I had kids, I could devote myself wholly to my profession. In my thirties after I had them, one of them would need a drive to the doctor, or there would be some school activity, or they would be home sick... I've seen the same pattern work both ways throughout my whole career." For good measure, I added: "For a priest, it should be himself, God, and his flock. A family is simply too distracting."
The priest's reply? "Well, you'd be surprised at even then how much creeps in. Besides, I once knew an ordained priest who had ten kids!"
There is a special kind of diseased thinking, where pluralism is seen as not just a most noble goal, but as the First Principle, held aloft, the end all, in and of itself. Anything goes... priests can be married? Sure. They can be women? Certainly. Maybe they can even be homosexual? Perhaps even convicted rapists? How about drag queen priests-- we wouldn't want to leave them out, naturally?
Yes, there is this verse in the Gospels, or that verse over there. But what does it matter-- it's malleable. The Church needs to move on with the times-- with what people want today. After all, Jesus was a fun-loving hippy, right? Love thy neighbor, isn't that what he said?
Amongst the infected, no thought is given to human nature; to power structures; to trojan horses; to economics; to psychology; to game theory. No careful review of history is performed; no consideration given to possible unintended outcomes. Not a brain cell devoted to, "something different is not necessarily something better."
That maybe God's Word is eternal-- and will as we might, as badly as the ever-changing whims of the laity sitting around their synodal tables of all women, eights and nines facing each other, with lots of lesbians and transgenders and queers there for good measure, want to alter the Church's teachings-- that maybe throughout the stormy seas engulfing the world, the rapture, the crests and the foam, the thunder and the clouds, the torrents of rain, maybe, just maybe, the Church should offer something different: a rock, solid atop the Word of God Himself, for those who seek the truth, to cling to so as to not get washed away into the infinite expanses?
That maybe the Church should leave the "Sodom and Gomorrah" stuff to the rest of the world-- which is doing it quite prolifically, mind you-- and offer an alternative?
This compulsion to constantly deconstruct from within-- to tear down the existing, to build something brand new, baby with the bathwater and all. To claim to "value inclusion", by taking away the space from the people who are already there, and who call it home. By making the "something" identical to all of the other "somethings", with no regard as to what makes that "something" noteworthy in the first place.
It's full-speed ahead. Where "ahead" might be back into the darkness from which we came-- like a train track in the shape of a Möbius strip. Around and around we go. With blinders on. Performing endless aerobatics, like an airplane grazing ever and ever closer to ground level, cutting the daisies before inevitably pushing them up...