Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

Sam Paris sent me an image that's been bouncing around the Net for some time now, and I roared. It's funny on the face of it, whether you know anything about religion or not—but if you've struggled like I have with the difficulties of understanding the several competing concepts of God, salvation, and the life to come, it was, well, ineffably hilarious.

I understand that it's not real, and in fact was created with Church Sign Generator. I don't know where it came from so I can't credit it, but read it all the way down. Yee-hah!

Where the topic comes up for discussion, I've heard many people say that the descriptions fed to us in childhood of Hell were vivid and very detailed—but Heaven was always vague, colorless, and ultimately boring. I keep flashing on the classic Gahan Wilson cartoon of some guy with wings and a halo sitting alone on a cloud, thinking to himself: "I sure wish I'd brought a magazine."

Although the Catholic Powers go out of their way to deny it, buried deep in Catholic culture and tradition is a very radical kind of universalism. God did not create the physical universe as a temporary nuisance to be endured and then left with no regrets. The physical universe is in fact a crude, low-res reflection of higher realities that we simply cannot apprehend in this life. One metaphor might be Olaf Stapledon's cosmology from Star Maker, in which the Star Maker crafts a steady succession of increasingly mature creations, each creation "better" in a metaphysical sense than the one before. Another metaphor might be one I heard in college 35 years ago: That our physical creation is a faint echo of a higher world, which in turn is a slightly clearer and louder echo of an even higher world, and so on far beyond our ability to grasp. At each level there will be challenges, struggle, and probably suffering appropriate to our levels of spiritual development. Creation was in fact a far, far bigger Bang than we think.

So do dogs go to heaven? Hardly. They are already there. And when we leave this world and continue our long walk back toward the Creator, they will be right beside us.

It's been a low-energy and off-my-peak couple of days here for reasons I won't bore you (or gross you out) with. Had to take a run up to Denver, but mostly I've been sitting quietly and reading. I finished a book that I don't really recommend unless you're chained to the potty and need to kill time: Basilica by R. A. Scotti is a popular history of the construction of the second St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, the one that we all know and love, which supports the largest church dome in the world. The book is competently written, but it's a little thin on details of the construction itself. Ms. Scotti is much more interested in politics and personalities, and in truth I did learn a lot about Bramante, Michaelangelo, Raphael, and Bernini (and more than a few popes) that I didn't know before. But she has no good head for architecture, and does not define any terms. I kept flipping into a wonderful DK book called The Visual Dictionary of Buildings to clarify certain elements of church architecture. Now that book I recommend, especially if you're a writer trying to set a scene in a complicated building and aren't entirely sure what an oculus is. (Or—quick, now!—define a "spandrel".) There are some factual errors in Basilica, one of the worst of which suggests that poured concrete was used in some places in St. Peter's. Not so—poured concrete was an ancient technology that was lost after Imperial Rome came apart and was not recovered until the 19th Century, or pretty close to it. St. Peter's was built almost entirely of mortared masonry and sculpted stone.

If you're interested in the peculiarities of St. Peter's Basilica, a better book is The Bones of St. Peter by John Evangelist Walsh, which speaks of the excavations under the main altar just before WWII. The Basilica was built over a Roman graveyard, and there was a lot of fascinating stuff under the floors. More about the Shroud of Turin than about the Basilica is Holy Faces, Secret Places by Ian Wilson, of which I reread a considerable chunk. However, Wilson speaks of the countless weird little crannies in the Vatican complex, in which a lot of interesting things, and not only relics, may be hiding. Secrets are not good in religion for many reasons, but mostly because secrets are a power thing, and power corrupts spiritual organizations mortally. (See Encountering Mary by Sandra Zimdars-Swartz for a good discussion of this problem.) Wilson is a marvelously engaging writer, and potty reading doesn't get a whole lot better.

I also reread several sections in Peter Ochiogrosso's fascinating 1987 book Once a Catholic, in which a number of famous Catholics and (mostly) former Catholics explain what sorts of marks their Catholic upbringing left on them. The book is not explicitly about the gulf between Tridentine (i.e., Latin) Catholicism and Vatican II Catholicism, but the demographics of the people the author chose to interview almost guarantees it. Like them, I grew up Tridentine, and like them, I know what we lost, and why. (Not all that was lost was good; in fact, a good deal of what we lost was desperately in need of losing.) The book is secular in approach and intent, and does not preach, in either direction. It's a character study, of real characters. (One of them is George Carlin.) Highly recommended, and I think I've spoken of it here before.

All these books but Basilica are currently out of print, but cheap on the used market. Reading them was research for a current project of mine—Old Catholics. (Nothing makes you a better writer than simply reading, and reading a lot.)

Finally, I'll throw out an idea I had yesterday, for an invention I wish someone would get to work on. I want something I might charactize as a Miracle Voice Teacher. I want a program that will put a musical score on the PC screen and listen to me try to sing it. The program should average the frequencies that come in from the mic and put a line above or below a note in the score, telling me whether I'm high or low. It should have a metronome, and the ability to play the score as MIDI. It should be able to record what I sing and play it back for me, showing me on the screen where I botched the melody.

And if that's possible, then the program should be able to teach me how to harmonize, by isolating one of the melodic lines and allowing me to sing it, and then gradually adding in the other lines in the headphones while I try to stick with my own line and not get confused. Scarily, such a thing would allow me to sing four part harmony...with myself. The world may not be quite ready for that, but at this juncture I think I am. I went looking for the product and didn't find it, but if you know of something along those lines, I'd like to hear about it.

I'm old enough to remember when the Catholic Mass was in Latin. I'm old enough, in fact, to have been an altar boy and memorized all the Latin responses. The priests in our parish were pretty fierce about the Mass and brooked no mistakes, so when serving at Mass it all went like lightning, as we were always paying absolute attention to what was going on. The consequences of not doing so were unthinkable.

However, most of the time we were out there in the congregation, fidgeting with our peers. (At our school we began every single school day with Mass. Fidgeting was an art form.) The Mass itself was mostly incomprehensible, even if you were an altar boy. The translations in our St. Joseph Daily Missals didn't track the Latin with great precision, and in any event we were not taught Latin systematically.

So there was this 45 minute daily challenge (a full hour on Sundays) of what to do while God was at work up there at the altar, in a foreign language. Nuns (on schooldays) and parents (on Sundays) kept a tight lid on moving around and/or talking to our peers. About all we were left with was our imaginations...and our missals. The missal was a fat book full of prayers, but it had other things as well, including short bio clips of the saints who were significant enough to get their own feast days. We read them out of boredom, and some of my friends paid close attention to the juicy details of how some of the martyrs were offed, which came up now and then in playground conversation. The Romans, for example, cut poor St. Agatha's breasts off in the process of killing her. One of the other saints had her teeth yanked out, again by those ever-creative Romans. I skipped past such stuff; I got nightmares enough watching bad monster movies like The Crawling Eye on Channel 7 Thursday afternoons. Interestingly, the newer missals given to school kids in sixth grade (1962-ish) omitted such details, but the mid-1950s missals that our class had, well, it was all there.

I've picked up a number of other Tridentine-era missals at bookstores over the years, and some of them are packed full of things to browse through, not all of it prayers. The 1949 printing of Benziger Bros' Saint Mary Every Day Missal is an amazing thing. It had everything our St. Joseph missals had, plus a history of the Catholic Church, a history of the United States, and (for that matter) a history of the world. Most oddly, sprinkled in amidst the saints and the prayers like "easter eggs" in modern software were short histories of the Catholic Church as it evolved in each American state. Delaware, for example, was tucked right between St. Boniface and St. Norbert. My copy has no index (though the pages at the end are loose and it may have fallen out); if you wanted Illinois, I guess you simply had to hunt for it. (I haven't found it yet.) The type on this additional material was astonishingly small, smaller than anything I think I've ever seen on the pages of a book intended for the general public. The pages were 3 1/2" wide and 6" high—and there were 1,335 of them! To get an example of just how small the type was, keep that page size in mind and download this scan of a typical page spread. (2.8 MB jpg.)

I suspect that the Powers within the Church knew all about this problem (they had, after all, been kids once) and when the Second Vatican Council redid the Mass and translated it into English, the emphasis was on following along and participating. Not long after that, fat-book missals left the Catholic experience entirely for several reasons. Most importantly, the post-VCII propers (Scripture readings and associated prayers) were three times as long and difficult to fit into a single book, but I think the notion of missal-as-distraction was right up there somehow, heh.

Nonetheless, I think a lot of us learned about the saints out of sheer boredom, and I certainly picked up more Latin than some just by trying to correlate the mysterious Latin prayers with their (loose) English equivalents. Maybe those of us who still go to church could increase religious literacy among kids by bringing back missals and not requiring that they follow along with the grown-ups. It worked in 1961. I don't see why it wouldn't work today.

A very cogent post by Bishop Sam'l Bassett on one of the Old Catholic email lists I subscribe to forced me to think a little harder about the reasons for the Roman Catholic Church's devastating priest shortage. Everybody seems to think (and I confess to leaning in that direction) that celibacy is the key issue. I'm sure that requiring that priests be celibate thins out the pool of candidates considerably. On the other hand, I personally know a handful of people who are not married, nor even dating anyone. They are interesting people: extraordinarily self-contained, not hermits but quite social. They definitely need human friendship. What they do not seem to need is sex. There is even a term for it now (asexuality) and an organization: AVEN, the Asexual Visibility and Education Network.

So such people exist, and are probably commoner than we think. Why, then, wouldn't they want to become priests? A very serious reason occurred to me while I attended Mass with Carol's family the other day at a local Roman church: Being a Roman Catholic priest is probably the most unpleasant and least rewarding job in the entire Roman Catholic Church.

Why? Think for a second: Various sources tell me that 75-85 percent of Catholic women who have sex use birth control of a proscribed sort. Divorce among Catholic Americans has risen to par with non-Catholic Americans. An overwhelming majority of Catholics believe priests should be allowed to marry, and a clear majority support the ordination of women. All of these things are vehemently condemned by the pope and by RC bishops who want to stay on the Pope's good side. Well. Where does the laity meet the hierarchy? Right down the street in your neighborhood parish. And who's stuck in the middle between these two warring camps? Guess.

There was a time when Roman Catholics would "pray, pay, and obey" without argument. Those times are past. Back in the days of "The Terror" (which ended with Vatican II) priests were required to grill women in the confessional about their sex lives, and particularly as to whether they used contraception. No more. When the subject comes up at all these days, the laity push back, and it's the parish priest who has to listen to angry and increasingly educated parishioners who have read popular books on the controversial topics and frame questions that are difficult and painful to answer, especially when the answer is "Because the Pope says so."

Who'd want a job like that?

The real reason for the priest shortage may well be that the Roman Catholic Church has painted itself into a corner with paint that (as some wag said) takes forever to dry. Imagine being a parish priest trying to counsel a woman whose husband has turned vicious and begun beating her. "No, you can't have a divorce. If you get one, you are automatically excommunicated. I'm sorry."

Q.E.D.

Carol and I went to Mass today, and I was shocked to see that January 1 is no longer the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus Christ, but instead "The Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God." I'm a little surprised that I hadn't run across this before, since the change happened a long time ago, but I was a lapsed Roman Catholic for decades before returning to the faith through the Old Catholic Church back in the 90s, and I'm sure I've missed other things as well.

I've spent a little time trying to scout out a reason for the change in the feast, or even the precise year when the change occurred, and have come up empty. The cynic in me wonders if the Church would rather not admit that Jesus had a foreskin, or any sex organs at all. (If they weren't reluctant to admit it before, they probably are now, in the wake of umpty zillion copies of The Da Vinci Code in Catholic hands.)

Interestingly, circumcision is not an inherently Catholic or Christian procedure. Christians were relieved of the Jewish obligation to be circumcised within a few years of Jesus' death, at what we now call the First Council of Jerusalem, which is described in Chapter 15 of The Acts of the Apostles. The Council released gentile Christians from the bulk of Jewish ritual and dietary protocols, including circumcision. What gentile Christians were required to observe are what we call the Noahide Laws, which pre-date Moses and go back to Noah. The Noahide Laws are the precursors of the Ten Commandments, and are supposedly those laws that God holds binding on all human beings, not simply the Jews. They include abstention from idolatry and blasphemy, dishonesty, murder, fornication, and the consumption of meat cut from a living animal or from an animal that had been strangled. (The text in Acts is pretty terse and there is some argument about the details—for example, dishonesty is not explicitly mentioned—but that's the gist of it.)

Jesus really was a Jew, and thus was required to be circumcised. The near-universality of circumcision among American Christians is something of an anomaly, and doesn't hold true in the rest of the world. I haven't found a good historical treatment of circumcision as an American medical and cultural obsession, but I suspect that the elimination of the Feast of the Circumcision simply reflects a lot of general Church squeamishness over matters sexual. Mary has all kinds of feast days, and I would think a feast that put the lie to the heresy of Docetism (which denies that Jesus was truly human as well as divine) would be a good thing to retain. Alas, it is not to be, and it's one of a number of things I do miss about Tridentine Catholicism.

Just a quick postscript to yesterday's entry, after which I will let the whole God thing rest for awhile.

A reader wrote last night to ask me if I believed in Purgatory. Well, yeah—just not the Medieval concept of temporary divine punishment that you could buy your way out of with prayers or money. Simply because the concept was abused—and abused horribly—doesn't mean that it has no merit.

If I have a personal theology of Purgatory, it cooks down to this: Purgatory isn't about punishment, and especially pointless, Dante-esque torture-style punishment. It's about Learning Better. It's about making mistakes and paying for them in their natural consequences so that we don't make those mistakes again. We enter Purgatory at birth, and we do not leave it until we attain the ineffable state of the Beatific Vision, having worked on our flaws across unknown realms where time, space, thought, and feeling may not be precisely what they are here on Earth. In the process, what we will ultimately learn is what it means to have been created in the Image and Likeness of God; that is, to be truly and completely human.

The story was everywhere on Monday that today (Thursday) Pope Benedict XVI will be holding a meeting with the Curia to discuss the future of the thousand-year-old Roman Catholic tradition of mandatory celibacy for priests and bishops. The immediate trigger was another outburst from one of Rome's most embarrassing nutcases, the defrocked Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, who (after a several years' dalliance with the Moonies) has taken the celibacy issue on as his Really Big Thing. (Just because I agree with him on this issue doesn't mean he isn't a nutcase. You should read about his exorcism masses, among other things.)

I will hand it to Archbishop Milingo: He hit Rome where it hurts. Earlier this year, he consecrated four married men as bishops. At least two of them have a long history with the Old Catholic Church, and one of them (Peter Paul Brennan) I've spoken with. (Some information on Bp. Brennan is here. Scroll down a little; he's #3 on the page.)

The Vatican is in a bit of a spot here, because of the longstanding Roman Catholic theology regarding apostolic succession: The mental and spiritual state of the consecrator does not affect the validity of the consecration. In other words, even if Milingo is a few drills short of an index, if he follows the accepted form for the ceremony of consecration, and if the bishops he consecrates have the desire to become bishops, well, then they're bishops. They may not be licit—legal in the eyes of the Vatican—but they are nonetheless valid. And because a bishop is the highest ordained office recognized in Catholic tradition, one representing "the fullness of the priesthood," a bishop can consecrate other bishops, and preside over an independent Catholic jurisdiction. If this sort of thing happens too many times, you end up with splinter churches all over the place.

Just as the late Pope John Paul II was an idealist, Good Pope Benny is a pragmatist, and I've grown to like him. (Popes should not be idealists. They have a Church to run.) He understands the weakness of the celibacy tradition (it was enacted to keep children of priests and bishops from claiming inheritance of Church property under the emerging secular law of the Middle Ages) and its unpopularity with the laity. He also knows that he's running out of priests. So while it may not happen this year or next year, I think that the celibacy requirement is going to go away fairly soon. (We will see the end of the ban on women priests eventually, but it won't be within my lifetime.) The Eastern Orthodox have never entirely banned married priests, and Rome has quietly accepted a number of Anglican priests with wives and families into its fold.

His big problem, of course, is how to pay for the upkeep of tens of thousands of wives and kids, and the big question that Roman Catholics have to ask themselves is this: Am I willing to cough up a lot more to the Church to support clerical families? Protestants and Anglicans do it as a matter of course. We'll see what the laity says when their parishes ask for donations of thousands of dollars each year—not merely the odd 20 that most people toss in the basket on Sundays.

Every time I criticize the Roman Catholic Church's teachings on sex, women, and the body, I get a few notes from people who indicate that these same teachings have strengthened their marriages and allowed them to be "free." Free from what is never clearly stated, and I'm not callous enough to demand that my correspondents explain themselves in detail over what is a very personal matter and none of my (or anyone else's) business.

But I will stick to my condemnations of what I call the "Cruel Magisterium," and from time to time I will explain why in this space.

Let's start with the story of a friend of mine, whom I'll call Mark. He was small, studious, and geeky like the rest of us, with a quick grin and a passion (like me) for electronics and astronomy. When we were 13, Mark was a few months into puberty and hit the corner of a chain link fence with his bike. He went down hard and got tangled up in the mechanism in a bizarre way that included a nasty groin injury that literally ripped the skin of his scrotum. He bounced back pretty well, but a year later, while several of us were camped out in a tent in my backyard, he told us the rest of the story.

Six weeks or so after the stitches were removed and he was pretty much healed, Mark had to go back to the local Catholic hospital for a lookover that included a sperm count. The attending physician performed a procedure on him called a "scrotal massage" to get a sperm sample. As Mark put it, "He squeezed my balls until the stuff came out." The procedure, which took a fair amount of time, was so hideously painful (think about it!) that Mark screamed, to which the doctor simply replied, "Be quiet."

Now, there is an absolutely painless way to get a sperm sample from a 13-year-old boy:

1. You tell him what you want.
2. You give him something to put it in.
3. You close the door.

Alas, the Cruel Magisterium allows no exceptions whatsoever to its prohibition on masturbation, which is always a mortal sin. The Roman Catholic Church, however, considered it perfectly acceptable to cause intense pain to a scared little boy, even though that pain was completely unnecessary in a medical context.

That was 1967. I've often wondered what Catholic hospitals do today when they need a sperm sample from a boy or an unmarried man. (Married couples with fertility problems gather sperm samples using perforated condoms.) I doubt they could get away with such a barbarous procedure anymore, and were I Mark's father I would have sued the physician and the hospital for child abuse. I suspect they now send such cases to secular clinics and just look the other way.

There are only two possible responses to this incident:

• You can condemn the teaching that required a Catholic hospital to needlessly hurt a small boy until he screamed. Or,
• You can endorse the teaching and the cruelty that it demands.

Sorry, folks, but there really isn't any other way out. When a church demands that cruelty be done, especially to children, it surrenders its moral authority completely. If you doubt it, reflect periodically on what poor Mark went through, then imagine that it was your own child.

I chose the door.

At the closing of our 40th grade school reunion, reunion chair Terry Jerusis Dullmaier presented me with a slightly bizarre token of her appreciation: A bobble-head figure of Pope Benedict XVI. (This was due to my sometimes inexplicable interest in the Popes and all things Catholic.) Where she got it I shudder to think, but it's actually kind of cool in its way, and I gave Good Pope Benny a place of honor on my theology shelf.

He's not alone. Also resident on my theology shelf is Louie the Giggling Squirrel. This was a gift from my sister some years ago, and both an inside joke and a quiet bit of homage to our Uncle Louie, my mother's black-sheep brother who broke almost all the rules in his life. The one he kept was perhaps the one that matters most: Love and stand by your family. Although unmarried, Uncle Louie took care of my mom's house after my dad died, and he was very good to his nieces and nephews, sometimes (as with me, who received his gifts of broken TVs with astonished gratitude) without fully appreciating the impact of his kindness.

But then again, who ever really appreciates the impact of his or her kindness?

When he was twelve or so, Uncle Louie raised an orphaned baby squirrel to adulthood, and trained it to hide in his shirt pocket and jump out on command for a treat—thoroughly disquieting (but sometimes delighting) any unsuspecting onlookers. So when Gretchen gave me a stuffed squirrel that giggled when you squeezed his tummy, well, the name was a foregone conclusion.

Uncle Louie did not get on well with the Roman Catholic Church, and was generally assumed by his very devout family to be a lost soul. So when I placed the Pope on the shelf next to Louie, Carol remarked that Louie looked a little apprehensive. Perhaps. Or maybe Louie the Giggling Squirrel is looking for a shirt pocket to jump into, knowing that popes can be surprising people.

Maybe it's a sign that Pope Benedict XVI already has a squirrel in his shirt pocket, and is waiting for just the right moment to surprise us all. The best popes always do that somehow. Cross your fingers.