Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Catholicism

What Catholic Confession Is Meant To Do And How It Goes Wrong

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On May 9, 2024

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It has been observed that Catholics have a tendency towards excessive guilt, in the same way that Hindu practice devolves towards something close to OCD.

Like a lot of religious practices, the eye of someone familiar with actual spiritual cultivation practices can see what they were intended to do. Rosary practice and bajans, for example, are obvious forms of meditations (Hindus haven’t forgotten that, Catholics often do.)

If you’re riven with guilt or shame, you can’t pass beyond certain points in spiritual practice. A mind which doesn’t “let go” and move freely is an absolute barrier to progress, and as the Buddha noted, spirituality is about freedom. Being hounded by negative emotions is not spiritual.

This is one reason (though not the only reason) why almost all paths emphasize moral development at the start of the journey. If you don’t do wrong things, you don’t feel bad about them. It’s easier to avoid problems of guilt and shame than to fix them.

That said, I’ve never met anyone who never did anything which might be considered wrong, and other than psychopaths and certain types of enlightened people, everyone feels shame and guilt occasionally, and often without any or much justification.

If people are to be happy, forget enlightened or spiritually advanced, they need to be able to put guilt and shame aside.

Confession: where you tell your sins to someone, they tell you what to do to expiate your sins, and then they say God has forgiven you, is a pretty bright idea and it works for a lot of people.

But often it goes wrong. People start looking for things to be ashamed and guilty. Emphasis on examining oneself for bad actions, thoughts and feelings leads to excessive feelings of guilt and a treadmill. Instead of getting over it, people wallow in it. I suspect that for many the lows followed by the highs of relief after confession are like a merry-go-round of feeling, and rather addictive and the Church often makes it worse by its emphasis on perfectly understandable feelings and thoughts as bad.

This isn’t a total diss: studies generally find that Evangelicals, Buddhists and Catholics are the happiest faith followers and happier than secular folks. But every religion has modes of failure. (Evangelicals, with their idea of salvation by Faith Alone have a failure mode of being horribly evil people.)

If we aren’t aware of the failure mode of a faith and of its specific practices then we can easily fall into them. Confession is good, if done with a mind to its benefits, but not if it is treated as an idol: it’s done for a reason, and if it is causing harm to someone rather than relieving them, it has failed.

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The Lessons Of Jesus (Or “Why Conservatives Hate Francis”)

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On March 28, 2024

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As Easter approaches, let us consider Pope Francis.

https://twitter.com/Pontifex/status/1771152349698142589

The difference between Francis and his critics isn’t as wide as some people make out, and he’s far less unorthodox than his enemies claim, but this is the difference: Francis wants to welcome people, and believes in a God whose primary trait is love, while Church conservatives want to exclude people.

The greatest controversy of Francis’s pontificate has been his allowing blessings for same sex couples. He doesn’t allow marriage, and no priest has to bless a homoxexual couple, but they are now allowed to. In Africa, most of which is virulently and culturally anti-gray, this has gone down badly even with those on the left of the Church, but outside African, it’s been a theological issue. The Church teaches homosexuality is a sin and no grace can be given to homosexual couples.

Anyone who knows the church finds this ironic and funny, given that the priesthood and the bureaucracy couldn’t run without closeted gays.

The larger issue, though, is that just as Jesus spent time with tax collectors, prostitutes and other low-lifes, and believed it was almost impossible for the rich to enter heaven, Francis believes the Church should reach out to sinners, treat them kindly and even love them, as Jesus loved humanity, despite our sins.

The example of Jesus, as displayed in the Gospels, is that of love for the unworthy. His contempt is for the empty ritualists, the Pharisees, and the greedy, but even they are invited to join Jesus on the path to God. But, of all the sins he took time to condemn, Jesus himself never spoke of homosexuality.

I’m not, overall, a fan of Christianity. I’m with Gore Vidal, who said that monotheism was the worst thing to befall the West. Christianity and Islam’s records are of vast violence and coercion and horrific crimes.

But there is a good side to Christianity, a tendency to love and acceptance and care for the poor and the weak which comes directly from the Gospels, and that care tends to be show much more in the better offshoots of Catholicism than in most Protestant denominations, tainted as they are by ideas of predestination and/or salvation by faith alone. When Henry the Eighth forcibly shut the monasteries one claim was that they didn’t help the poor enough, but the new Anglican church did even less.

Francis is the only Pope of my life who I regard as Christian: as following the the example of Jesus, even if very imperfectly. The others were orthodox inquisitors, feeling that rules were more important than love and charity.

I rather doubt that either Benedict or John Paul II will like their reception, should Jesus and Heaven exist:

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

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It’s Almost as if the Pope Is Catholic

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On September 25, 2015

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Yea, verily.

40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:

42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:

43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

So. The Pope told Congress to welcome immigrants, house the homeless, feed the poor, and stop selling weapons to murderous regimes.

It is almost as if he is Catholic.

Now I’m not Catholic, or even Christian, but I had the standard Sunday school upbringing and I’ve read both the the New and Old Testament.

Reading both is a good way to leave yourself with a lot of sympathy for the Gnostic types who believed there was no way the God of the Old Testament (bash out their brains) could be the same guy that Jesus was talking about.

Because I don’t believe that God made sure the Bible is inerrant (I know just a little too much about early church politics), I tend to concentrate on the parts that seem closest to what Jesus actually said.

Perhaps, like many, I read in what I want to see. But I think it’s minimal, because I got imprinted young. It’s more likely that reading about Jesus as a child formed my opinions of right conduct than the other way around.

It seems to me that what Jesus was most concerned with, in terms of the way to treat other people, is summed up pretty well by the Sermon on the Mount, the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would they do unto you), and the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

It’s always seemed to me that it’s better to be a good Samaritan (a non-believer who is kind to those in need), than to be a Pharisee, obsessed with the rules, but not kind in action.

Francis isn’t a radical Pope. He hasn’t said abortion is ok, or even birth control, or homosexuality. He’s pretty doctrinaire.  What he has done is shift emphasis to the issues Jesus spent more time talking about, and extended those issues to modern concerns like climate change.

A good person, according to the Sermon of the Mount, can’t be a climate denialist, let alone be funding climate denialism.  The people who are going to suffer the most from the climate crisis are “the least of these.”

To put it crudely, if you make climate refugees homeless, you’re making Jesus homeless. Those who die, well, you just killed a lot of Jesus.

When you lock people up in solitary confinement, you are locking Jesus up in solitary confinement.

When you torture someone, you’re torturing Jesus.

When you rape someone, yup, Jesus.

But when you feed someone who would have gone hungry, yes, you’re feeding Jesus.

When you give a refugee a home, you’re giving Jesus a home.

This is a powerful, and simple message. Everyone was made in the image of God. Everyone is God’s child. What you do to them, you do to Jesus, God’s only begotten son.

The holy, sacralized life, is one where you see God in other people, in the environment, and so on. Everything you see is God’s work. To mistreat it is to disrespect God. To mistreat God’s children is to mistreat Jesus.

We have had a number of Popes who a harsh, judgmental man might consider virtual Pharisees themselves. Picking no bones with church doctrine (though I might another day), emphasis matters.

Benedict, as Ratzinger, oversaw the destruction of liberation theology. This is how he made his bones, taking hope away from those who needed it most in the Latin American world. Depriving them of much of the powerful ideological, theological, and practical support of the church.

As you do unto these, the least of my children…

I suspect a result of the dismantling of liberation theology and its practitioners has paved the way for Evangelicals to make vast inroads into parts of Latin America, while the church can’t fill its ranks.

Young idealistic men, the sort of people you want as priests, don’t seem to want to be in the church.

My approval is unimportant, but I do approve of this Pope, despite the fact that I certainly disagree with him on many issues. Kindness is always admirable. Forgiveness is at the heart of the Church, and Francis has moved towards that. Yes, the Church disapproves of abortion, divorce, and so on, but Francis, step-by-step, is turning those back into sins which are much more easily forgivable.

We all sin. We all do wrong. What sins the Church, as God’s voice on earth considers more serious, as cause for being cut off from the sacraments, tells you what the Church thinks is most important.

It is here that I suggest one watch Francis’s efforts most closely, because it is here that will tell you what he most believes.  He probably won’t change Church doctrine (some deny he can, that’s not an argument I care to get into today, especially as I’m hardly an expert on the Catholic church), but he can change its emphasis significantly.

Is abortion more important than war, homelessness, or the murder of the already born?

These issues, and how they are handled, will be the truest guide to Francis’s own soul, and for those who believe in the Catholic church and its version of God, they will matter greatly.

So, I pray for Francis. Under his care, may Catholicism come to treat Jesus far better than it often has in the past. And in so doing, may many lives be blessed with the kindness and love that should be at the heart of any religion’s teaching.

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