BANANACUE
REPUBLIC
Vol II, No. 14
Apr 06, 2005

 
 
 social criticism by
 Vicente-Ignacio de Veyra III

CONTENTS

Literary website:
War Photos Museum 

A Roman Orgy

THE POPE is dead, long live the Pope.

And that’s because religiosity will always be a part of humanity. This is a widely understood fact that – as an accepted normality – sustains the richest religious organizations of the world. These institutions understand that their survival rely on man’s general incapacity to veer away from the conventional wisdoms of their respective tribes. But, looking on the bright side, many agree that religion is good; at the least it puts people’s minds at peace and keeps them together as a mob for Moses. This, in consequence, makes religion justified in exploiting peoples’ ignorance and lack of imagination.

But this is not to articulate a rift between the faithful and the agnostic. After all, the Catholic Church itself is not free of inner contentions, even as the recently deceased Pope rallied in his job for a revolutionary intra-religious global togetherness. For instance, this late Pope – whose body presently lies in state at the Vatican to be mourned by the Catholic faithful – was himself subjected to dissent among many cardinals. These cardinals were eager to go against the Papal edict by positioning themselves as in favor of artificial contraception even among the sexually active unmarried, if only to prevent the spread of certain special infections the viral mutations from which could produce global catastrophes.

But religiosity is religiosity, and arguments against its dogmas are usually reserved for those in authority and within the confines of that authority. Religion, after all, is neither science nor philosophy, being founded on faith instead of questions. So conflicts between religions almost always result in holy (sic) wars, and intra-sect textual conflicts (like the continuing exchange of potshots between the Ang Bagong Daan and the Erap loyalists of the Iglesia ni Cristo) result in nothing more than addenda to the murky political power play of our hypocritical Christian islands’ messianic greedy and righteous.

BUT, AS in the case of John Paul II, certain subtle deviations from conventional behavior can actually be found in some religious authorities. I say subtle, for otherwise those deviations would come out as either akin to the liberation theology swerves of the late assassinated and now legendary Fr. Kangleon or, in fact, akin to the harsh vocal rebellions of Jesus of Nazareth himself against the proclivity of his time’s church for sheer ceremony and child-sacrificing blind faith.

But let’s focus on John Paul II. As regards him, I refer of course to what even the so-called corporate faithless of, say, CNN would appreciate as the certain contributions of this late Pope to the world, contributions which – unfortunately, regardless whether these were truly John Paul II-subtle or Jesus-harsh – the Catholic flock will certainly forget even as we speak.

That contribution of course is in the articulation and then physical manifestations of certain virtues, as in the Pope’s apologies to the Greek Orthodox Church for old Catholic abuses (modesty and humility and un-prideful magnificence) coupled with his physical visit (sincerity, unselfish valor) to the center and authority of this other Church.

Now, the reason why I say the flock or following will certainly forget this contribution is this. As is always clear on religious TV and in Sunday church, what Che Guevara called Jesus Christ, Inc. would never really allow teachings of virtue to supersede teachings of faith. Whereas Pope John Paul II demonstrated that even religious figures can qualify for the deeds-emphatic Nobel Prize for Peace without going to the extremes of a Mother Teresa (which extremes would even suffer questions from the saint-making committees), the everyday Churches that we know will always submit questions of morality to fundamentalist textual linguistic analysis by earthly gods who enjoy putting additional words into God’s mouth through human readings of divine books God supposedly wrote in toto in the mountains. These readings will always be superiorly articulate about the academic merits of the scholiastic intellect, but – almost always – dumb to the scholarly pumping of the humanist heart.

THUS we have billions of Christians on Earth who can’t even tell you what Christ is really all about other than the abstract “son of God”. One of the great contradictions of the New Testament is that while Christ’s rebellion seems to be represented by a veering away from and against the directions of pure ceremony and blind faith of the day’s religious mores, all towards positions of virtue and love and caring and sacrifice and forgiveness, many seemingly inserted passages insist on coming up with Christ’s own ceremonies and faith teachings. The result? Today’s billions of Christians and Christian priests resemble the figures of Anno Domini, making one suspect that the reason why Christ ought to have that Second Coming is decidedly due to a First Failure. And we wish the next bible would really be written by a non-sexist God and not by a bunch of intra-generational history scribes with political and corporate and sex-shame interests in mind.

Consider the big difference between today’s Pope worshipper and the worshipped Pope. While many political leaders and Christian followers make speeches national or household regarding their dead Pope, yet many of these admirers would rather talk about other things than Father Wojtyla’s fight against abuse and injustice in German and Post-German Poland. They might prefer to talk about how one could buy stocks of the Vatican Hotel or could bring his franchised coffeeshop outlet into the quasi-state, or otherwise where one could have better developing of his Vatican digital shots.

NOT THAT there’s anything un-Christian about business and consumer culture per se. I might even conjecture that Jesus of Nazareth’s tantrum at the temple against the businessmen there was made up, a mere allegation that aimed to 1) manufacture a capital crime against him, and 2) contradict his recurring position that the real Church is not in Church but in the hearts of men and upon modest rocks. Sure, maybe he entered the town on a donkey to demonstrate that priests need not have polluting and fossil-fuel gobbling SUVs. Sure, maybe he got irritated with the temple as having turned not merely into a temple for Mammon but a literal temple for overpricing and the sale of Church-endorsed and Church-tolerated carcinogenous and corrupting products. But I doubt that he got into a sort of wine-induced violent dance because he found the temple to be more valuable than his improvised nomad's altars. Otherwise, he would already have gathered contributions from his rich followers for the building of alt temples. Nah, I believe Christ thought everywhere to be his Church. And he didn’t rage against the buckets of fish vendors there.

No, I don’t think Christ hated business, even as he made pronouncements that may have been a prototype for what Alexander Solzhenitsyn referred to as Christian Socialism. But I believe Christ was on an ambitious and appropriately poorly-funded mission. It was a mission to promote virtue, not establish another (or grab the old) divine aristocracy. It was an architectural mission to build a church out of the environment, not an interior environment out of some expensive tithing church with a record-burning choir.

It is sad that the Christian majority will never see this church-of-virtues side of Pope John Paul II. Most of us will mourn the Pope as the icon in the mythological hierarchy of ceremonial prayers that includes the saints and the Virgin Mary, mostly there to service our selfish daily bread and good health and freedom from temptations and salvation and success pleas. All the while that we curse the stinking old man beside us with the bad breath and cheap and unfashionable shirt.

I ALWAYS imagine Jesus of Nazareth as the kind of man who would sacrifice his own soul just so his sinner friend’s could be saved. That’s my understanding of Christianity’s lofty ideals.

But obviously now, there are two sides to the late Pope. And some of us would rather focus on the one rather than the other. Christian environmentalists, for instance, might focus on John Paul II the humanist if not humanitarian. The Catholic mining concessionaires, on the other hand, might focus on John Paul II as the great mass-giver with the divinely Kodak-friendly costume. But that’s understandable. After all, Jesus Christ himself had two sides. The violent man of faith who called priests “vermins of the earth” and a “brood of vipers” will always be relegated to the shelf in favor of a painting of the Christ as a divine young fellow with the corporate good looks. The latter adorn our Churches.

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". . . obviously now, there are two sides to the late Pope. And some of us would rather focus on the one rather than the other."