After having done some writing here and done some research, I begin to realize how Roman Catholicism is not so much a fascist religion but a religion in search of a fascist patron. The Patronage of course goes back to the founder of Catholicism which was Saint General Constantine the Great.
Patronage has gone on for centuries from one Holy Roman Emperor to another or for competing parties vying for the patronage of the RC church to temporarily wed itself to the church for legitimacy. This is the proven historical model. Marriages of patrons on that scale are of course to my point of view usually made in hell.
The reason the RC church has shrunk in the forty years since Vatican II is in my opinion because it has factored people out of its basic equations and corporate bottom line. They publish those billion numbers in membership but how many mere millions actually have gone to church in the past year.
The laity, women, gays, unwed mothers etc. are not what is important in the Church. Only the abstract of the church is important. Like the fundamentalists that have a relationship with a book - the bible - The RCs or at least the hierarchy only have a relationship with itself - somewhat incestuous if you take a look at it.
The fundies and the vatican boys might use the word love but they do not know how to embrace humanity. They can shout all day at humanity about hell hoping to invoke fear in people but the bottom line is that they do not know what people are really about.
In a way of blessing from God, the secular world has been invented by people and they the secular world are the inheritors of God's and Jesus' message to humanity - to love oneself and to love one's neighbor equally - that is the ideal - that is the mission statement or should be of this brave new secular world that takes up where the death of organized religion in the western world has left off.
The first encyclical of Benedict XVI in one chapter will define God as love over and over again. In the next chapter, the word "Church" is substituted for the word "God" - reminds me of the kind of word filler I used to use in a high school history paper - before word processors. In the RC Church God and Love seem to be just words.
The clerks, the purple dresses, of the Vatican are good on theory and schoolboy essay rhetoric but in the final analysis they are glad that people are disappearing from their ranks. Their lack of people skills speak louder than words.
If you want Jesus you won't find him there on the altar in the abstract of bread. Jesus -God- is in the hearts of the truly faithful and not in any stone temple or gold tabernacle.
There is no room for dissent in the RC church. I do think that maybe Pius XII begged the German Corporal Shickelgruber for official church recognition in Germany over the Lutheran church. The German Corporal didn't need any more acts in his historic circus sideshow or the useless obsolete title of Holy Roman Emperor.
It is a pity that that Pope did not have the guts of the martyrs to shout his moral disgust at Hitler. Hitler may have arrested him and tortured him. But the world's outrage might have toppled that great evil and saved millions of people, Jews and gentiles alike.
I recently saw or read how the Vatican is about to declassify documents to prove that Pius XII did in fact save thousands of Jews in WWII. Impressive. He is on a fast track to official sainthood. If I was Devil's Advocate on that case, I would ask the Vatican to declassify all its documents on the tens of thousands of Nazis and SS Officers who escaped to South America using Vatican passports. There's a truth there somewhere. That Pius XII was more concerned about the nick knacks in the Vatican Museum than he was concerned with the collateral damage of a world war which would be those people thingies?
In a way of the failure of all Christians to prevent the Holocaust, there was also a moral holocaust. Morality sacrificed for the sake of papal politics caused a moral vacuum for the lack of great moral deeds that should have come first from such a large expensive operation such as the RC church. That moral vacuum of all the churches, existing in the west after WWII, has progressed in the west into a secular world where dissent and the number of children in your famity is decided by you and not some men in a black robes with a twisted sexual view of the world. Thank God for that!
Martin Luther, after he translated the bible into German, started being more vehemently anti-Semitic. Luther could not understand how the Jews with a wonderful translation of the bible into German would still not embrace the one true faith.
After Vatican II, they put the mass into the vernacular. They were catching up in time, some four and a half centuries, after the priest Luther had asked for an open and honest discussion of abuse in the ranks of the clergy. Luther found out then that the only word that could come from the lips of good Catholic was "yes". Dissent has not, nor will it ever be tolerated in the ranks of the Army of Constantine - the RC church.
As they sell off churches, schools and hospitals, they put their future business hopes of productivity, profits and membership numbers into Africa and other parts of the emerging world.
The fascist patron is not so easy to come by these days unless you become a cabal partner with the GOP in the USA etc. Since Pius IX and the disappearance of the Papel States with the unification of Italy in the nineteenth century, the Patron of the RC church has become itself. The boys in the Vatican, fighting not for souls but a promotion from purple robes to red robes to the white robes are the failed corporate execs existing on the cash raised from the sale of churches that my immigrant ancestors helped built with pennies, dimes and quarters over a century ago.
The Peter Principal whereby a bureaucrat or corporate executive rises to his ultimate level of incompetence is proven under the current regime in Rome.
Since Vatican II, when the main stream Protestant church members did not stream into the RC vernacular common service mass, the Catholics began to move back into their old medieval ways.
There are many closed doors in the Vatican these days. The most important doors to the heart, mind and soul have perhaps never been opened or have never even been sought out.
So it goes and continues. May the force be with you.
