Of democracy, faith, and bodily fluids.

Rick Santorum, a fervent Roman Catholic (I take issue with his stranglehold on what that designation means, but that's not the issue here), says that he felt like throwing up upon hearing John F. Kennedy's speech about the separation of church and state.

Rick Santorum, a fervent Roman Catholic, wouldn't even be a viable candidate today had it not been for that speech and the discourse of which it was a part (nor would Romney, but he's at least admitted as much).

So Rick Santorum, a fervent Roman Catholic and the primary beneficiary of John F. Kennedy's speech on the separation of church and state, is nauseated by that very same speech.

Rick Santorum is not just a fool. He's as close as one can get to embodying Proverbs 26:11 without literally being a vomit-eating dog.

"As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly." (KJV)

 *Image brazenly pilfered from one of the single most wonderful places on the internet, Hyperbole and a Half.

Beyond the laundry.

Just when I thought the church would stop and leave me to practice passive heresy in peace, the pope goes and opens his mouth. Condoms contribute to the spread of AIDS now. I, as a white middle class American male, never felt the urgency of the church's disdain for prophylactics. I knew it was frowned upon (having never been married and all), but we were never talked at about birth control, and especially not about condoms. Abortion, yes, but condoms and birth control pills were simply an accessory to sex. That is, sex is wrong, but if you're ok with that you should probably use a condom.

Now, I think it's safe to surmise that the pope doesn't actually oppose the policy I just stated: if you're not worried about eternal damnation he probably prefers that you at least have some consideration for others and try not to spread sexually transmitted diseases. The problem, of course, is that he did not say this. He said that the distribution of condoms actually hurts attempts to fight the spread of AIDS. Meanwhile the Vatican's talking heads gushed about recent increases in membership.

Hooray for increases in membership! It's like the old days, but without the galleons and heavy artillery.

illustration by AD McCormick, in The Land of the Golden Trade, by John Lang

So fresh and so clean.

As I've mentioned before, I have an ambivalent relationship with religion in general and Roman Catholicism in particular. Suffice it to say that I'm usually a heretic among the faithful and an apologist among non-believers. The latter position--never easy to maintain--has recently become even more difficult due to an impressive streak of three news stories in two days which have revealed that the biggest threat to Roman Catholicism is the abject cluelessness of its own leadership.

The incident most attractive to the international media took place in Brazil, where the life-saving abortion of twins from a pregnant nine-year-old rape victim resulted in the excommunication of her mother and doctors.

The story most immediately troubling for Americans consists of a Chicago bishop threatening to close Catholic hospitals should the Freedom of Choice Act be passed.

And finally, remarkable for sheer absurdity, the Vatican's official paper, L'Osservatore, celebrated International Women's Day by publishing an article (which I can't find in its entirety anywhere) declaring that the washing machine is the invention most responsible for liberating women.

So, in the interest of saving children's lives, the Brazilian bishop punishes a group of people for saving a child's life while the rapist (the girl's stepfather) escapes excommunication, which should not surprise anyone familiar with the Vatican's procedure for handling child molesters within its own ranks. Meanwhile, in Chicago, the church cleverly denies its clout and plays the victim, vowing to engage in civil disobedience to the great detriment of millions of real victims. Its many mouthpieces are quick to point out that these are private hospitals, but neglect to mention that they receive public funds and seem to have forgotten that this same qualification has historically been the argument for refusing care based on race, inability to pay, and other no-no's for the Holy See. Then of course there's the washing machine, which liberated women much in the same way that Eli Whitney's cotton gin lightened the workload of southern slaves, or that the guillotine helped create a climate averse to capital punishment, or that the atom bomb has succeeded in deterring war since 1945.

What bothers me is not that I disagree with the church's positions--that's nothing new--but the belligerence with which it has suddenly decided to express its views. In these instances the church has picked its battles for the express purpose of provoking confrontation. From the absolutely disgusting display in Brazil to the vindictiveness of the threat in Chicago to the downright idiocy of the washing machine article, the Catholic Church has decided that its best chance at survival in the twenty-first century is to emulate the Jerry Springer show. Continuing to employ such a strategy will not only destroy the church in the long run, it will take a whole lot of credulous sheep down with it.

photo credit: Samsung

Maybe God still speaks Portuguese.

The Portuguese community in Artesia has for many years circulated a statue of Our Lady of Fatima to homes of community members for increments of a week at a time. The idea is that during that week families are to pray the rosary together. Despite its nod to devotion, such an affirmation of faith seems to me an unintended yet rather obvious acknowledgment of the failure of the very thing it aims to safeguard. That is, if we really believe, why don't we pray the rosary more often? Putting a statue in one's living room (although voluntary) practically makes devotion obligatory. That is probably the point to many, but forced devotion can't be called faith anymore than forced obedience (playing with Machiavelli here) can be called love.

The fact that I can even still pray the rosary in Portuguese is something of a source of pride despite the fact that I haven't been a practicing Catholic or praying Christian in quite some time. I was raised Catholic and served as an altar boy when I was younger; even now I must admit that I've remained more than a little enamored with the pageantry and imagery of Catholicism. Furthermore, deaths in the community (and, in a tightly-knit community such as ours, one stays updated on plenty) are always observed with a rosary, resulting in frequent opportunities to practice over the years. For me the rosary, prayed in Portuguese, has always been more of a way of remaining connected with my culture and community. Sometimes I wonder if that's disingenuous, but I do not think it's particularly unique.

It has always seemed to me that the apparition at Fatima has more significance to Portuguese people as a national event than a religious one. The Catholic Church does not mandate belief in it, and I've known people whose avid faith results in unquestioning adherence to the story of the shepherd children as told by Lucia dos Santos even as they give rational explanations for their disbelief in the apparitions at Guadalupe or Lourdes. From any skeptic's perspective, the only substantive difference between the three stories is the nation in which each takes place. So we venerate Nossa Senhora de Fatima as a matter of Portuguese pride rather than Catholic faith and, in doing so, pray the same rosary that the French pray in honor of the Lourdes sighting and Mexicans pray in honor of the Guadalupe sighting.

If I'm right about this, I suppose in a way it matters more that you remember the words than that you believe in their efficacy. There's something tragic about that realization which is not blunted for someone like myself who--even as a faithful, credulous altar boy--had severe doubts about why the hell Mary would concern herself with Soviet politics.

Getting to the point, I'm visiting my parents this weekend and they have the statue. On my way to the shower, I hear my father ask, "You want to pray the rosary with us?" Now, he can tell I don't want to; I can tell he really wants me to. "It's only ten minutes," he says. And he's right. If anything, it isn't inconvenience that bugs me but rather the creeping sense of my own disingenuousness. I sit down with them in front of the statue and my dad, almost apologetically, remarks, "Might as well. It's been here all week and we haven't even been praying." Then he proceeds to lead the rosary, occasionally stumbling over certain parts and laughing at his own mistakes.

Having personally witnessed my father's crises of faith over the years, the first thing I noted at that moment was that when I was a kid there's no way he would have chuckled in this way. He would not have likely made the little mistakes in the first place. Here again, prayer as such seemed to take the backseat: if to me it's a way of staying Portuguese, to my parents it's a way of gathering the family peacefully in one place.

Oddly enough, realizing this was a bit scandalous to me. If my parents don't fully believe, where does that leave me and my polished Portuguese-ness? For an instant I found myself the returning tourist angered that the quaint village he'd once loved had moved on and, catching myself in that sentiment, I felt ashamed. How dare I exoticize my own parents in this way? And my own culture? Shame! Yet that is (again, assuming I'm right about what really matters here) precisely what we do to ourselves with this statue, with our traditions. Exoticize our past, our culture, our ethnicity, our little blip in space and time. We Portuguese-Americans go to visit our relatives in the old country and lament the fact that nobody goes to church anymore, but it has more to do with our romanticizing of a "quaint" past than with lamenting a loss of faith.

It's patronizing and embarrassing, and yet I genuinely love my culture and its traditions. Maybe I'm a hypocrite or an impostor, but if that's so then I'm not alone. Not within the Portuguese community or any other that I may be a part of. I don't suppose any overt affirmation of a movement or belief can help but serve as a marker for its eventual downfall. Nor do I think that any tradition can help being both bastardized and sentimentalized--otherwise it would fail as a tradition. It would simply die. Then what?

Well, then you wake up in the morning and see if you still agree with what you typed after midnight the night before without giving the thing much thought. That's what.