June, 2009, will mark the 50^th anniversary of my graduation from Our Lady of Sorrows elementary school in St. Louis.  What a great Catholic name it had; so full of guilt and, well, sorrow.  As if the name wasn’t enough to do the job, there was a statue of Mary, sitting on the ground holding the lifeless body of Jesus in her lap, looking up to heaven her eyes welled with tears.  If I looked at it too long it made me cry.

Now, fifty years later when I think about the statue and the name that went with it, I wonder why it no longer has that power over me.  I saw through the propaganda the Catholic Church has so diligently deployed over the millennia keeping their followers in line like the timid sheep they will always be, content to remain in the back of the cave, all too willing to forgo any attempt to take a stand, question authority and make a choice or two while living their life here on earth. Instead, they are satisfied with believing, or more likely buying into, the official dogmas of a church that, like many churches, instills the greatest fear of all, that of losing your soul, into the mainstream members who, without question, trust and believe in their leaders who blatantly preach one thing then practice whatever makes the leadership content and living a life of wealth, pleasure and power.

Look at the big Honcho, the Pope.  The man is the absolute ruler of the church.  Over the years, precious little happens without his consent.  The average Catholic holds the Pope in the highest esteem, believing him to no longer be mortal but some how nearly an equal with God.  Look at the current Pope, Benny the 16^th I think it is.  He’s a squeaky little man who lives a life of opulence, ease and indulgence.  He heads his own country, lives in a palace with cooks, servants, tailors, chauffeurs, security guards; hell everything a man could want or hope for.  He is constantly looking for ways to increase his wealth and strengthen his portfolio.  Just the type of individual who you expect to be a leader of a church, a spiritual organization dedicated to saving souls.

I’m being sarcastic there, in case you missed it!  The real Christ, when he visited us two thousand years ago to grant us salvation and we nailed him to a cross for his trouble, was anything but similar to the present day Pope; or any previous Pope save the one who chose the name John Paul I and who, upon declaring that he intended to return the art treasures stolen from the wealthy Jewish families by the Nazis as part of the holocaust and that were in turn given to the Catholic Church by those same Nazis in return for safe passage to South America where the Church had sufficient power to protect them, suddenly and without warning suffered a major heart attack (probably caused by a knife to the heart) and died.  Wow, that was a close call; the Catholic Church could have lost some serious bread had John Paul I lived to carry out his plan.  But, not to worry because things are back as they have always been and the pope remains one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world, with Rush Limbaugh running a distant second.

 This being the 50^th anniversary of my graduating from Our Lady of Sorrows, I am helping some of my classmates, who I haven’t seen in 50 years, organize a class reunion. It is somewhat perplexing to see them still in the throws of the church’s dogmas that I have long ago rejected as ridiculous (e.g. the priests working a miracle at every mass, changing bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood, or my favorite nonsense the assumption of Mary, body and spirit, into heaven – I always prayed for her that she wouldn’t get hit by an airplane while hanging somewhere in heaven in the sky) and at best the imagination of a group of megalomaniacs gone horribly wrong!  But, after having met with my oldest if not current friends and seeing how happy they are, devoted to their church and its teachings, compared to my anger at the lies and misdeeds over the centuries by evil, selfish men, and always trying to uncover the truth behind their phony proclamations, seeking reasons for their invented dogmas and searching for justice for their ruining countless lives and destroying hope in those who dared to oppose them, I have to ask myself “who’s the idiot, here?  Them for blindly following juvenile, fabricated “truths” and allowing themselves to be duped by these soul-saving charlatans using religion to maintain the wealth and power of the leadership, or me, tilting against windmills with nothing more than words to combat their words and a desire to see these bastards remanded to a place where they can do no more harm to their fellow planetary travelers?  Yep, it’s me, the unhappy, angry one who has fought for gay rights and equality for the last 35 years or more, arguing against religion’s lies and misdeeds.  I may be the idiot in a rusty suit of armor riding a tired, old donkey, but in Part 2 of this blog, I want to tell you why I think it’s worth the effort and the risk. Please leave any question or comment you might have and I will be happy to answer them.