The religion of my childhood, the one my parents still practice faithfully. Truth is, I am repulsed by it. Yes, repelled. The Inquisition, the Malleus Maleficarum, the genocides of North and South America and other colonial zones, the Holocaust, child abuse across generations of American youth, etc, etc. Modern-day denials of healthcare in the developing world, in Middle America, and anywhere the Vatican's tentacles can slither and pry. Ugly and unasked-for opinions about the dignity and humanity of family, friends and neighbors who practice lifestyles not in accordance with a codex of laws that reek of incense, of beeswax, of blood and wine, of rotten corpses strewn across battlefields.
A twenty-century-old mob of vicious, life-despising geezers who consistently side with ancient and oppressive values when given a choice. Women haters. Unrepentant child abusers, and the supervisors who aid and abet. The current godfather was a frigging National Socialist, marched with the Third Reich.
Not that this is a moden twist, no. When European society briefly relaxed during the centuries leading up to the Renaissance and priests and friars began owning land and raising families, Rome HQ came down hard and instantly declared all such marriages void, sentencing thousands of children and spouses to lives of indigence and meanness. Over a thousand years earlier, the brilliant Augustine of Hippo decided that an important Catholic belief must be the inherent awfulness of humanity, shaping so very many lives with his swooping, cruel pen.
Against this, how can I compare the beauty of stained glass, the Latin mass, and some childhood memories that could easily have happened in a synagogue, a secular chapel, even a museum of a certain sort? How can I say that the beauty and nobility of the best of the reflective and knowledge-seeking subgroups within the Roman Catholic Church somehow outweighs the gross monstrosities of the past two millennia, and the pervasive attitudes that exist to this very day?
I must say that I respect the right of an individual to believe whatever she or he wishes to believe, yet I cannot endorse the continued existence of the RCC. When a true world government becomes viable (sometime later this century, I do hope) I will petition them to dismantle it with all possible speed and throroughness, and to share the money with the needy and impoverished masses- those starving nations and hopeless millions that always get mentioned on the pulpit, yet only receive missionaries from Rome. This would be a different planet if we could truly decentralize religion, and the inestimable wealth of centuries in the coffers of Vatican City would go a long way towards fixing world poverty.
