Let’s be honest. Accusing Republican bishops of politicizing the Eucharist is like accusing John Kerry of politicizing the war in Iraq. Both issues are already political and have ever been political. The history of the Eucharist is the history of an elite minority flexing its dominance over a vast majority with the legerdemain claim that it holds in its hand the flesh of Jesus Christ–himself a Church-made image of God designed over centuries to secure worldly dominion. If that isn’t political, what on earth is? It’s only that the Church hasn’t reared its ugly authoritarian head so prominently in recent years that’s causing all the fuss. So why is it rearing it now?

 

Indeed, why are Church leaders so blatantly revealing their partisanship, supporting anti-choice politicians while ignoring pro-war, pro-capital punishment politicians? Why remind the world not so much that Catholics can’t think for themselves, but that they aren’t suppose to think for themselves? Why alienate potentially millions of Catholic Democrats? Why divide the Church? Then again, why not when the rest of the country is so polarized?

 

Before answering, it’s fair to say that staunch Catholics do have one point. Denying Catholic politicians the Eucharist is certainly a political ploy, and one likely given the blessings of the Bush White House. Deal Hudson, the publisher of Crisis, a conservative Catholic magazine, and consultant to the Republican Party and Bush White House on Catholic affairs, has advised exposing the “scandal” of Catholic politicians voting against Church dogma. However, if politicians truly identify themselves as Catholic, honestly believing that the Catholic Church is the God-inspired, universal door to eternal salvation, then God isn’t asking too much to run on platforms that reflect Church doctrines, including anti-abortion. If that political stance undermines an election campaign, then those are the breaks. That’s the small price you pay for eternal beatitude.

 

I admire Catholic politicians for standing up to the Church, but I’d admire them a lot more if they just came out and said that they don’t actually buy into the whole authoritarian business of religion. Walt Whitman, in a letter to Emerson, wrote, “The churches are one vast lie; the people do not believe them, and they do not believe themselves; the priests are continually telling what they know well enough is not so, and keeping back what they know is so. The spectacle is a pitiful one.” Whoa! What ever happened to that kind of fiery honesty? Why can’t pro-choice “Catholic” politicians just come out and say they don’t necessarily agree, publicly or privately, with every Church doctrine? And again, why is this all happening now?

 

Obviously, a watershed presidential election is around the bend. But it’s more than that. I have a story to tell that will explain what I mean. It’s a bit crude, but it perfectly illustrates what’s going on with the Church. While an engineering undergraduate at the University of Michigan, I had to take a grueling 8 am class in creative writing. One particular student, sitting in the corner of the class, didn’t speak a word the entire semester. On the last day of class, as he was dozing off, he loudly passed wind, waking himself up along with the rest of the class. For the rest of the class period, he was an incessant chatterbox.

 

That’s the Catholic Church. Asleep in its old age and nearly dead, it’s passing through the winds of a scandal of decades (centuries?) of sexually molested boys publicly exposed, waking itself and others to its own vanity, obsoleteness, and loss of power. Now in its death throws, it vainly attempts to presume a moral high ground, making much commotion over issues that the currents in human history have long since decided upon.

 

Yes, history has already spoken: Let there be abortion. Let there be gay marriage. And humanity saw that they were good. But the Church is asleep at the wheel of time. The American cardinal James Gibbons wrote, “The Church is not susceptible to being reformed in her doctrines. The Church is the work of an incarnate God. Like all God’s works, it is perfect. It is, therefore, incapable of reform.” If any one hubristic attitude has undone humanity in the last twenty centuries, it is this one. Someone needs to remind today’s living bishops that a religion that does not reform is history.

 

My bet is the Church already knows that it’s history; it just wants to go out with a bang. A movie like Gibson’s Passion doesn’t prove that the Middle-Ages are in, but that they are on the way out. It reeks of desperation. Robert Ingersoll, a great American thinker who for some reason we don’t hear much about anymore, wrote, “Give the Church a place in the Constitution, let her touch once more the sword of power, and the priceless fruit of all the ages will turn to ashes.” Today, the Church is like an old fart who woke up to realize he’s weaponless. We would do well to heed the words of Ingersoll and not allow the Church to once again seize power through disciplining elected officials who did not run on authoritarian Church platforms.

 

Of course, some politicians do run on divisive religious platforms, but I think we’ve had enough of a president who represents less than half of America. Hudson stated that Kerry earned excommunication for supporting women’s rights. He spoke volumes. You heard him John, you’ve earned it.

 

 

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Sankara Saranam is the founder of The Pranayama Institute, an educational public charity that reaches over 70 countries, a commentator on religious affairs, and the author of God Without Religion, available in August 2004.

 

The Pranayama Institute, PO Box 1103, Peralta, NM 87042 505-238-7183 www.pranayama.org

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