A Pope In Search of Image

The Church can't have it all: a full bottle, a drunken wife, and also the grape on the vine.

Daniele Capezzone

In the course of Pope Benedict´s U.S. visit, he will be using the latest technology and a highly armed and costly security service to shuttle him around the country while playing shell-games to hide him from a possible shooter. Maybe this will help obscure the fact there is always an agenda, sometimes not so transparent, behind the actions of world leaders when they make visits. This is no exception.

Although about a quarter of the U.S. Christian population are Catholics and 39% of those Hispanic, Pope Benedict probably couldn´t have come to more fertile soil to renew what he, irritatingly for many, considers the only true faith on the planet. It is a preaching and image-building mission which is too little and too late in a world slowly but surely slouching toward the light of rationality and reason.

For the non-Catholics of the America, the Roman Catholic Church holds no particular power over them and for many Christians it is difficult to sympathize with the leader of a religion who comes to America apparently to wag a finger at his American flock (as well as possibly influencing the Obama-Hillary outcome in Pennsylvania). It is also not a conciliatory mission between the Protestant and Catholic faiths.

Primarily it is, once again, about what the Roman Catholic Church has to offer the world. What good it has produced from its luxurious 109-acre headquarters over the centuries is debatable. But the continuing dogma, the medieval exercises in defining sin, collaborations with the Third Reich during WWII, interferences in Third World modern birth control programs, and pedophile priests whose many victims continue to lead ruined lives are what are still remembered and justifiably so. However, the Pope´s well-crafted words on this visit will, hopefully, make short-term memories shorter.

In Italy, the RCC continues to exert a powerful influence over the state. Six centuries after being constituted, the popes of the Church became the de facto political rulers of Rome, and, many still believe, of the Italian state today. It is a business that gets out of paying 90% of what it should owe to the Italian government tax offices for its commercial activities thus laying the tax burden on its faithful while its priests live in comparative luxury and security.

There is even a mandatory church tax today for all Italian citizens although they can get out of it by "tithing" a secular organization instead. Separation of church and state does not exist in Italy. When the Pope visits America, this is a part of the baggage he brings with him, of what he has to offer U.S. Catholics.

Knowing that the Bible is not enough, the RCC has contrived over centuries many clever, tortuous, intellectual explanations for the purpose of their existence as a religious organization. The good life the high priests have depend on this as well as their tax-free status and hold on prime real estate.

Besides listing the newest sins, another recent intellectual exercise by Pope Benedict was his declaration that the RCC is a nonconformist organization in today´s secular world, "If it is true (my emphasis) that a Christian faith taken seriously means nonconformity with a not inconsiderable number of contemporary social standards, then a more-or-less negative image is unavoidable". He qualifies the statement as any philosopher would with an ´if" of course.

Pope Benedict answers the secular hostility towards himself and the RCC by redefining the Church as a nonconformist organization, heroes in a world gone "evil" because of secularism. As if only the Church has a monopoly on the goodness in humanity. Reason and rationality, and even caring for their fellow man by secularists are, according to the Pope, conformist. This coming from a leader of an institution that requires conformity and blind obedience. Reframing issues works well in politics as we all know. Yet, at the same time, the Church has had to recently redefine their doctrine and conform to the realities of science, particularly on the origins and evolution of man.

The Church knows it must evolve to survive in a world where the most penetrating ideas of our civilization, or any civilization, are the ideas of science and mathematics. The Church will continue to attempt to merge religion and science as God´s plan and it will work for a while thanks to slight of hand devices by the Church and because of fervent followers who chose to let others do their thinking for them. The RCC will put up a pretty good fight, but ultimately they will be fatally hemmed in by their inability to come to terms with science and its implications for religion.

The essence of Christianity has a very fine message no one can deny, which is to love your neighbor but the rest is white noise. Attacking secularism, as the Roman Catholic Church does, is dishonest when it uses it as a reason for evil in the world.

Beyond the basic message of love that Christianity imparts, the organizing of religions by zealots and shake-down artists who simply cannot mind their own business, has been a well documented failure. They´ve had 2000 years to get it right. Now it´s time for them to move aside.