Perspectives on Pope and church.

For folks like William Bennett and Pat Buchanan, the slightest criticism of Catholics or Catholicism is to be instantly, furiously denounced as religious bigotry or "Catholic bashing," an expression of irrational prejudice. But there's a distinction to be made between irratinal prejudice and rational objection.

Catholics should never be "bashed" or discriminated against purely because of their faith. (Nor should anybody else.) They have the same right as other believers to worship according to their own rules--but only voluntarily, never by government fiat. By the same token, just as no non-Catholic has the right to ram non-Catholic creeds down the throats of Catholics, the reverse is true. In America, where religious liberty is under unremitting attack but still prevails, all Catholics--pope and cardinals and bishops and priests and lay-people--have the right to preach, persuade, pray, and proselytize as individuals and church representatives. No Catholics have the right to use the secular government of all Americans, of whatever religion or none, to impose their sectarian ideas on non-Catholics.

The pope has the right to condemn birth control and abortion. He has the right to pray for America's soul (offensive though it was), and did so. But when he admonished the president and vice-president of the United States on his last visit, he was way out of bounds. So also was his graceless and stupid buckpassing when he blamed America's sexual sleaziness for priestly molestation, ignoring the real cause: the warped teachings of his own church against women and sex.

When the pope and the Catholic hierarchy attempt to obtrude their archaic and misogynistic positions on laws which affect millions of non-Catholics (and Catholics, most of whom ignore the pronouncements of elderly celibates with no conception of life and love in the real world), they are trespassing where they don't belong. It is not Catholic-bashing to fight back. It is justified.

The pope himself evidently represents something deeply meaningful to the faithful, despite their indifference to his fifth-century outlook. While respecting that Catholic reverence, we must bear in mind that other millions hold just as strongly to other belief systems. That's why government must remain neutral to all.

We can consider the church from three perspectives. First, from the cosmic: we live on one small planet in one obscure galaxy at the outer edge of an inconceivably vast universe which has existed for about 20 billion years. If the unifying principle we earthlings call God is in charge, it has presided over this universe for that long and (who knows?) perhpas other universes. This reduces our tiny globe and johnny-come-lately species to a blob of matter which somehow gave birth to creatures who think they are intelligent. It rarely occurs to them that, if there is a trend toward intelligence in the cosmos, other beings on other planets must surely have evolved far above the state we wretched, quarrelsome, destructive, teeming humans have arrived at.

Turn up the magnification and focus on our little orb. From this second perspective, the Roman Catholic church is only one sect--albeit the largest and much the wealthiest--of an enormous family of Christian sects. Christianity itself is a late entrant in a long procession of religion--perhaps, suggests anthropologist Anthony Wallace, 100,000 or so. Christianity arose centuries after Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Taoism, a millennium and a half after Judaism, and three millennia after Hinduism, which religions in their turn grew from prehistoric origins.

Clearly, religion is something we humans are programmed for. Our Cro-Magnon forbears were religious 30,000 years ago; our Neadertal cousins, 60,000. Fossils in the Chou-kou-tien caves indicate that the Homo erectus who inhabited them practiced ritual cannibalism 400,000 years ago.

Whether religion is an epiphenomenon of the human mind or a response to dimensions we so far glimpse as through a glass darkly is moot. It is not at all moot that we can sense moral, spiritual, aesthetic, and transcendent dimensions. Religion has many uses. One is to respond to this mysterious otherness.

Religions have emerged and flourished and died or been absorbed into succeeding religions. Christianity, as a case in point, drew on Greek and Persian and Indian and Egyptian cults for, among other concepts, its dying and resurrected savior god, Satan, heaven and hell, ritual cannibalism, winter solstice birth attended by miracles, and spring resurrection. The Blessed Virgin is simply the Christian avatar of the ancient mother goddess, who lives on in Buddhism as Kwan Yin and in Hinduism as Parvati, Lakshmi, and Kali. Christianity split into two a thousand years ago and began to splinter almost 500 years ago. It will continue to change and, in due time, be superseded.

From yet a third perspective, think about the pope. He belongs to the same human race as the rest of us. He puts his pants on one leg at a time (or would, if he wore pants). This is the dispassionate, pragmatic view. He himself, however, honestly believes that his sect is the only true repository of religious truth and the only true instrument of salvation; he further believes that his personal opinions, which are those of a Polish Catholic indoctrinated to accept church dogma without question, are funneled through him straight from the Holy Ghost--one-third of the Holy Trinity, which equals God. He also believes that the Blessed Virgin not only lives and breathes in heaven and can be communicated with there, but that she personally intervened to bring about recent political events in eastern Europe (not entirely to her credit).

The pope is just as firmly persuaded that his archaic fulminations against birth control and reproduction come from the same authority. This conviction makes him oblivious to the anguish imposed on suffering millions worldwide and the horrifying threat overpopulation holds for the planet's future. He is a textbook example of what Gibbon meant when he wrote that "to a philosophic eye, the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than their virtues." With the best intentions in the world, the pope's intransigent meddling in reproductive programs is responsible for the displacement, starvation, violence, and death of millions of people around the world.

It is not Catholic-bashing to fight back when this Polish citizen who heads a Roman church swings his weight in the White House, as he did during the Reagan and Bush administrations; or when he and the American hierarchy grab public tax money and demand more for religious schools; or when they back legislation which imposes purely Catholic standards on all. These are outrageous assaults on the First Amendment's proviso for church-state separation, America's cornerstone and greatest adornment. Pope and church are not the only offenders, of course. Fundamentalist Protestants are just as belligerent and determined to undermine the Constitution. But Catholics have been the worst and most effective for the longest time.

To object to that is to defend our secular government and the way of life which has permitted all religions to flourish here, as they have nowhere else. This is not Catholic-bashing. Actually, it's patriotism.