For the Greater Glory of God
We were required to write that at the top of every homework assignment, the Church Militant’s Jesuit battle cry, A. M. D. G. — Ad Majoram Dei Gloriam. There is no sarcasm writing that as the English title of this piece because if God is real, I think a lot of religions have got her dead wrong and do little toward her glory, if she even needs or wants it.
Not for a second do I believe that God, if she, he or it exists, would want us to ignore our guts and listen blindly to dogma. A conscious creator of all existence would be obvious in our deepest most instinctual selves, and some say She is. This being would surely be secure and confident enough not to need interpretation, explanation, a priestly class in special garb, or all the defending, contextualizing and philosophizing these often oddly dressed charlatans tell you She does. And She certainly wouldn’t need our obedience, worship and adoration — even in a Celtic creation myth, the gods are described as “lonely for they had none to command or worship them.” To me, that’s narcissistic and frankly all too human. Why would I want to chase after a god like that, lonely, needy and prone to rages? THAT is not perfection. Why on earth would an all-powerful, all-knowing all-loving prime mover need company and to be praised and feared and adored? And WHY all the cryptic waiting about for signs do be deciphered and the impatient longing for saviors to return in glory and finally deal harshly with our enemies?
In her article, Jesus is Not Coming Back, Author Beverly Garside noted of evangelicals,
They find the vision of divine vengeance against us inspiring. Jesus will indeed come back, and boy will he be pissed. They will be proven right, we will all be proven wrong, and boy will we be sorry.
They will often vehemently deny such thoughts but gosh that line took me back. I very much remember this attitude in the traditionalist Catholic nonsense I was exposed to as a child. We were right, everyone else was wrong and they would, alas, pay for it — EVERYONE. These people saw themselves as deeply compassionate and full of humility but they knew they had it absolutely right and all those fools who expressed a little too much alacrity for the Vatican II reforms, all the Protestants spawned of heresy, the Buddhists, Muslims, pagans, Hindus, new-agers, agnostics, apostates and atheists were all, sadly, going straight to hell if they didn’t convert and admire the pope’s red slippers. They told us all this (not really the slipper part but it was implied) with a sort of zealous, forthright knowing and pity, their faces drawn down into a vaguely suppressed yet knowing smile, eyebrows raised and heads slightly moving from side to side as if to say, ‘tut-tut’ — it was just a sort of sad matter of factness that those who weren’t in with us were pretty much screwed. But not to worry, we would pray for them!
Until I finally stopped asking, tired of being told “just have faith and do not question God’s will,” I’d often ask my teachers to square why a loving God would send a soul into the world knowing that person would never become a Roman Catholic and therefore spend an eternity suffering. They never had a good answer and I could tell that question really annoyed them.
And let us not be under the illusion that we, in our righteous traditionalism, had forgotten ‘the Jews.’ My would be edifiers had a bit of restraint there because, Jesus being essentially Jewish and Jews, being the “chosen people” and all meant they would mostly convert to Christianity (i.e., traditionalist Roman Catholicism) in the end days. We needed to be on the alert for that happening. For now, sure they were ‘God’s chosen people,’ He had a covenant with them, but nevertheless, Jews were still pretty silly for not believing in Jesus — they’d be wiping egg from their faces before too long. All their difficulties during the last 2,000 years of history, ever since the Romans destroyed the temple and scattered them from Jerusalem, happened because they didn’t accept Christ as the Messiah and had demanded his death. “It’s so unfortunate but we must forgive and pray for their conversion,” they said. I liked to query WHY, if Yahweh is a personal god, a whole culture was indiscriminately punnished for the bad behavior of a few. As you likely already guessed, they taught that the difficulties of the Jewish people, brought on by their attitude toward Christ, included the Nazi Holocaust but, after all, that was a mechanism by which God returned them to the Holy Land! I don’t believe that, I thought it was bullshit at the time but you dig deep enough into some Christian-identified minds and you’ll often encounter some rather ugly stuff. There is a certain self aggrandizing, self-congratulatory and self-assured joy one finds when you are certain you know the truth, some call it arrogance but to them, it looks a lot like humility.
One of the founders of my school and his 10 children would make a show of ignoring people during the peace offering at mass. This took the form of not acknowledging people who offered them their hands in a sign of peace because it happened smack in middle of the consecration of the Eucharist. They did it at every mass I ever saw them but I remember one time particularly well. Many of my group, including a couple of teachers commented on it and laughed as we got back into our vans.
We attended First Friday mass as a school every month. One by one, an enthusiastic elderly woman extended her hand, and said «Peace be with you!» the rest of the family begrudgingly took her peace offering but not him:
“Sir? Peace be with you, sir…Peace be with you sir….Sir? Peace be with you! Sir?…Sir?…Sir?”
That went on for a good 30 seconds. She was developmentally disabled. What was it the Gospels said about “whatsoever you do unto the least of my brethren?” This man had told us before that he felt not looking at the altar to shake someone’s hand and look them in the eye would take his focus away from the most sacred part of the mass. One of my teachers, a woman who we all thought was a nun but turned out not to be, had also told us his reasoning and was quite impressed with it. He was oh so pious and full of love for his brethren, or so he sometimes intimated during his lectures. In his example, as with the rest of the administrators and many of the teachers, it usually struck me that it was the Church first, brethren second — or if they were stubbornly Protestant, third. After all, if the Church is the mystical body of Christ, you can guess which body part this guy was. The show of hardheaded effort it took him to ignore this woman was the most distracted I’ve ever been in a mass and I’d wager he was more so. Everyone around us was staring as this man gazed ahead and steadfast at the altar. I just cannot imagine Jesus would approve and frankly, it was weird and rather self-absorbed. I thought the last supper, which the Eucharist commemorates, was a sacred social gathering to celebrate Passover, a communal sharing of bread and wine…and roast lamb…and some matzo and a few barukh Atas between friends. I mean, Leonardo da Vinci made it look quite a lively event.
Jesus, party of 13, your table is ready!
But I suppose the original meaning of celebrate did refer to the Mass as a solemn event. I recall in that school that we talked about Jesus probably having a sense of humor and joy and loving his communion with humanity but any depictions we saw of him were usually quite solemn. I’ve always been a fan of The Buddy Christ because he reminds me of The Dude.
Roman Catholicism, the way we saw it, was a S E R I O U S thing for which to be overjoyed, as long as our joy didn’t involve waving our hands and speaking in tongues…or guitars on the altar. I recall the seething disdain and judgement for those who didn’t understand as we understood, who weren’t party to the ‘True’ traditionalist faith. Boy did we have the goods and they went all the way back to about 34 AD when Jesús changed Simon’s name to Peter and built a church on him — you suckers! They’d talk about it openly and with seething sadness and condemning concern; it was impossible to mask such intensely zealous and self righteous smugness. It came out often when they’d make fun of gay people. Picture it, two adults stood in front of a class of children wearing cozy shoes and sweater vests. They’d begin by telling us about their recent weekend visit to San Francisco, smirk and affect a swish of the hips, a lisp and a limp wrist — it wasn’t out of any kind of admiration. Other pedagogues there would comment on Asian drivers, African Americans and the Baptist Church… oh, and Mexicans — at least they were all Catholic. They appreciated Spain for its contribution of the Inquisition, supporting Columbus and the Conquistadores, and San Ignacio de Loyola but they really didn’t like Mexicans all that much. It meant more Spanish masses. Anyway, those two swishing men are now revered priests in Dakota del Norte, you can see photos of them smiling and full of the Spirit, The Rev. Testacalva and Monsignor Arschloch on their diocese webpage. I remember hearing a recording of Testacalva on his radio program defending this nice pedo priest and confessor to Mother Theresa, Donald J. McGuire. Looking at their photos, it’s difficult not to want to smack them… but maybe they’ve changed, I doubt it. By the way, I changed Testacalva and Arschloch’s names here to protect their vanity.
Looking back, they all spoke of charity but the only real love they seemed to have was for dogma. Traditions like parading rose-festooned statues of the Blessed Virgin about and other such oddities were also big on their list. Generally speaking, they expressed feeling really special about themselves for being in the traditionalist Catholic in crowd. We found the beliefs of Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses really, really weird… which they are. But still, there we were with our scapulars and rosaries believing the Virgin Mary squeezed her boob and projectile lactated into St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s mouth — yes, every morning after a Latin decade of the Rosary, that is the sort of story we’d read in the Lives of the Saints. There was often some bodily fluid dripping from a statue.
Oh, I remember it all so much more than I’d like, I can practically smell the incense and paraffin candles and hoping the hell a statue wouldn’t blink or come to life, bleed from the ears and call you to be a martyr. Then there was walking in line through the streets of our town, in uniform, praying our rosaries loud and proud… and in Latin… as we marched to go to First Friday mass or to harass women as they entered Planned Parenthood.
After one horrible fiasco in the early 1980s, my parents finally woke up and pulled me from that school. There we all were, full of faith, hope, love, and purpose, the Church Militant walking down the sidewalk droning in Latin and me thinking, ‘this isn’t humble at all, it’s ostentatious and horribly embarrassing. J. C. said to keep your piety on the D. L.’ One day, as we arrived at the steps of Planed Parenthood, I uncomfortably wondered why the woman who came out the building was crying and beseeching us to have compassion and not judge the hardest choice she’d ever made. Before long, as one of the adults told her we would pray for her and her dead baby, she was screaming and cussing at us. I think some of the adults thought she was possessed. Still, we just stood there stone-faced and pious because we were in with the Messiah, we had the goods and unless she seriously repented, she was going to hell. Jesus would come back soon and smite her, this building and every one in it. They don’t even do abortions at that location but that didn’t matter, we needed a building at which to glare forlornly and, magic rosaries in hand, direct our piety.
And then the righteous shall affect pity and charity and say, we tried to save her, we tried to save them all, oh we are so blessed.
I began to count the days until I was 18 and could leave it all behind.
