What Will the Pope Do for an Encore?

by Tommi Avicolli-Mecca, 2007-07-10

Right on the heels of the Pope’s Ten Commandments for drivers comes another Papal pronouncement: Priests have the okay once again to say the Sunday Mass in Latin.

Which shouldn’t be big news except that it’s aroused the ire of Jewish leaders and Second Vatican Council Reformers who originally supported the change from Latin.

The reformers have been a minority voice in the church ever since the death of Pope John XXIII in 1963. Even Latin America’s Liberation Theology, which married liberal Catholic thinking to good old Marxism and Socialist land reform, has been all but outlawed. Any hope of bringing the church into the 20th, let alone the 21st, Century has long ago been tied to a stake and burnt to a cinder by a succession of conservative popes.

Some Jewish leaders are upset because the traditional Latin Mass for Good Friday contains a passage that calls for the conversion of the Jews. Guess Pope Benedict never attended diversity training.

According to the Italian press, Benedict's next release will declare Roman Catholicism the only true religion of Jesus Christ. No doubt Pope Benedict missed the time machine that was scheduled to take him back to the good old days of the Inquisition. He’s well-suited for it: He used to head up the modern-day version of the notorious Catholic institution that expelled the Jews from Spain and slaughtered countless “heretics.”

Jewish leaders needn’t worry about the Pope’s latest decree adding to anti-Semitism in the church. Anti-Semitism and the Catholic Church have always gone hand-in-hand. Even when Catholics were embracing their Jewish brothers and sisters in a huge Kumbaya hug, there was still the prevalent feeling that Jews were the “Christ killers.”

Catholicism, like its Protestant counterparts, is all about proselytizing. It’s not like Buddhism, which sits quietly and humbly waiting for the rest of us to become enlightened. Catholicism will use any means necessary to force Jesus and the rest of its mythology down our throats until we choke.

Pope Benedict is not an anachronism, despite the funny outfit he wears. He reflects the church that the world has known for almost 2,000 years. When I was growing up, most of the nuns and priests I encountered in 12 years of Catholic school were like Benedict: Doctrinaire, inflexible, all fire and brimstone. Those men and women of the cloth wanted to control everything we did and thought. They made us feel shame about our bodies, our sexualities, our “earthly” desires.

Saying the Mass in Latin is not such a horrible thing. It’s rather beautiful with all those vowel sounds. Except for the part about converting Jews. What’s really scary about the Pope’s action is that he’s obviously doing it to please the conservative element in the Church that wants to push it further back into the past.

What will Pope Benedict do for an encore? A witch burning or two? Perhaps a heresy trial for a stem cell researcher?

I vote for a declaration that the Earth is flat.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical, southern Italian, working-class, atheist, queer performer and writer with a godless website: www.avicollimecca.com