History
in part is a fragrant bouquet of florescence, but also, a matrix of organic
detritus in which roots side-by-side the beautiful and the ugly. History
enables the conscious recall of the quantum-good and the quantum-evil that
accord the creative stuff of resurrection and ascendancy; vitality’s trip to
religion and civility involves the bad experiences of irreligion and
incivility.
Church
in Denial
Nurtured
a cradle Catholic since 1933, I carried the conscious Catholic bias of
baptismal election in divine preference and in the historical culture of
self-righteous belief. Grounded in the holy apostolicism of the unbroken
succession of popes from St. Peter to Pope John Paul II, I believed in the
absolute and infallible morality and fidelity of popes. I had no inkling of the
crass secularism of the papacy from and before the middle
ages and through the Renaissance, nor of the political intrigues and
malicious suppressions of dissent prosecuted in witch-hunts, Crusades and
Inquisitions. The monumental failures of faith and morals on the part of
official Catholicism ... that actually occurred ... was not in my mind even a vague
influence. Any innuendo by Protestants of such bad occurrences was to me a
distortion of history and a calculated lie.
Today
I know better. Roman Catholicism I now understand was not above rewriting
history by way of suppressing facts and advancing a doctrinaire fideism that
cultures popular faith based on ignorance, mysticism, fear and guilt, and a
fanatical dependency on institutional self-assertiveness. While I staunchly
adhere to the personal religion of Jesus Christ, as exemplified and taught in
his lifetime, and advanced historically by the culture of personal,
conscionable Christianity, I no longer am blindly defensive of the claimed inerrancy
of Catholicism cultured by Roman institutionalism.
Catholicism’s
error is its radical fixation in absolutist political monarchy, as it has
evolved from the despotic politics of Caesarist
(czarist) Rome. Government by guilt and fear is the style of old Caesarist Rome. Dissent was stifled by the melding of
religious belief with state politics under an oligarchy-supported authority
that used military might to enforce public fidelity to its evangelism.
The
architectural norm that form follows function is true in life as it is
in politics. This norm precisely fits natural sacrament, for as energy
qualifies matter in cosmic evolution, so grace qualifies sign in vital
transformation. The architectonic energy of the open cosmos, in its deepest
(microcosmic) and most expansive (macrocosmic) qualifications, characterizes
the varied forms (material) that embody it. Thus, in the continuity of
cosmic evolution, the primacy of energy over matter is axiomatic. Einstein
equates matter with energy. In the same way, regarding the relationship of
spirituality to institution, primacy belongs to spirituality, not to
institution. This conclusion is affirmed in Jesus’ words, “My kingdom is
not of this world.” Consistently, Jesus called for personal and continuous
conversion and reform. In his explanation of the new wine-wineskin / old
wine-wineskin analogy he notes that old wine (consciousness) continues its
residence in old wineskins, while new wineskins accommodate new wine. Taste for
new wine is mostly lacking in skins accommodated to old wine; but consciousness
changes, that is, it is new and transformational from one generation to the
next. So old wine isn’t and shouldn’t be much found in new wineskins. In his
discourse with Nicodemus, Jesus commented on the transformational necessity of
rebirth in the consciousness
(“water”) of spirit and truth.