From the Greek hagios, meaning “saint” and phagos, meaning “eating, feeding, consuming.”
Author’s note: In between finishing this week’s piece and sending it out, the pope was outed as having used a variation of the Italian equivalent of the word “faggot” in a supposedly closed-door meeting with bishops about allowing gay men into the priesthood. That just about makes my entire argument for me, but please do read on.
A piece of chewing gum conceals a spring-loaded trap intended to snap down painfully on an unwitting finger. A flower pinned to a lapel camouflages a nozzle that is secretly attached to a squeezable bulb filled with water. A small electrical contact tucks neatly into the palm of a hand and delivers a harmless (but still shocking) jolt. A whoopie cushion hides in plain sight. Practical jokes rely on two things to succeed: 1) a disparity in knowledge between the clown and the clowned-on and 2) the belief that unexpected suffering is, in itself, righteous. Without either of these two axioms in place, practical jokes become at best annoying and at worst intolerably sad.
So what to make of a Catholic Church that has so blatantly telegraphed to the rest of the world that it intends to both throw the whipped cream pie and move quickly enough into position to be walloped in the face by it?
Last week Pope Francis formally recognized the second of two required miracles for canonization in the case of Carlo Acutis, an Italian born in 1991 and died in 2006 of leukemia. The headlines all emphasize that this will be the Church’s first ever “millennial” saint.
A few questions immediately come to mind: what is a miracle anyway? Why two miracles and not three or four? What kind of 15-year-old has had enough time on the planet to accomplish anything, much less establish a pattern of behavior that could be described as “saintly?” According to the article linked above, Acutis used his “computer skills” to design webpages for the local parish and his Jesuit high school. I suppose an adeptness with “getting around on the internet”—to quote the pope—must indeed look like a mystical form of sorcery to an institution that has only ever looked backwards, squinting past opulent domes and spires to try and recognize its long-dead Christ; or looked down, shuffling alongside anti-human political movements ; or simply just looked away from true suffering (viz. rampant pedophilic sexual abuse).
In spite of a laundry list of bad behavior since the arrival of Christianity 2,000 years ago, I actually find it incredibly difficult to criticize the Church meaningfully. This is partly because Christianity is a cult, and if you’re able to escape from a cult early on and mostly unscathed, as I did, you can’t help but regard it with a sense of complete and total irrelevance.
Of course I could go on at length about the Evangelical cancer in American politics, the abhorrent sexual violence against innocent adults and children, and centuries of colonial erasure of indigenous people and culture, and we could all agree solemnly. Hypocrisy, am I right?
But when it comes to a personal criticism of the Church, why bother? Last year the famously open-minded United Methodist Church split clean in two over disagreements about LGBTQ+ involvement. The current pope has made bold declarations about the validity of same-sex “unions”
(still can’t
call them marriages, after all marry two faggots—to use the pope’s preferred nomenclature). No denomination to date has ever been able to sufficiently explain the caesura between one’s supposedly personal relationship with God and the role of the institution in ritualizing, mediating, and policing that relationship. The 2nd-Century Gnostics did a better job in that arena. Meanwhile, none of what they’re wringing their hands over even closely resembles a problem for people outside of the Church (except where churchly opinions spill over into so-called secular forums, e.g. every branch of the U.S. government).
In Douglas Hofstadter’s brilliant and still-relevant book on computer consciousness, Gödel, Escher, Bach , he supposes that the most important thing that separates a human brain from a computer brain is the human’s ability to step outside of a system and observe that system in toto: in other words, to meta-analyze. Ask a computer to do an impossible task and it will try to do it over and over again, as many times as you ask it to. Ask a human to do the same thing, and at some point the human will decline to even attempt it, having stepped outside of the system (even subconsciously) and recognized the impossibility of the task. It’s just something that we can do naturally.
My heart breaks for gay and trans people whose personal relationship to God is plagued by systems that give and take, say one thing and do another, or look the other way in the face of injustice. I want to grab these people by the collar and shake them out of it—it’s a cult! Drop it all! Free your mind and your ass will follow! Indoctrination is a powerful thing.
And the alternative to God is terrifying; just ask the existentialists! I don’t judge or begrudge anyone for their own curiosity or belief in a higher, unknowable consciousness, and I also don’t identify myself as an atheist for some of the same reasons I mentioned in my first essay on Substack: “Swimming with the Fishes” . But I think the most frequent and incorrect assumption about atheism is that it is necessarily arrived at under conditions of cold, unfeeling rationality. That science is uncaring and unsparing, and that godlessness = amorality. One of the most elementary questions that religious people have is, “but if there’s no God, who’s to say what is ‘good’ or ‘bad?’”
This question, revealing as it does all of the asker’s political, social, and cultural biases in a single instant, pre-occupied Nietzsche greatly. In his On the Genealogy of Morals, he draws etymologically-sound arguments for a morality that has its origin in class divisions, not extraterrestrial commandments. It is not a coincidence, he writes, that the German schlecht (“bad”) is nearly identical to schlicht (“simple,” “plain,” that is, not nobility). By all accounts, the pre-Christian Greeks drew their moral boundaries in this way as well. The point here is that morality is absolutely detachable from religiosity, and any atheist who has never been compelled to murder can attest to that easily.
And so all it usually takes is a little bit of digging to provide compelling answers to God-fearing Christians who, in any other circumstance, might actually be relieved to find that there’s nothing under the bed, or that the closet is empty (once you come out of it). Meanwhile, ecumenical laborers throw cash and bodies at churches, schools, seminaries, conferences, books, Substacks, etc., and are still unable to reconcile a simple paradox like, “if God loves and forgives all people unconditionally, why is homosexuality a sin?” What even is “sin” under that assumption?
The Catholic Church has one suggestion, and it’s bread and circuses all the way down. It’s hard to see the Church’s millennial saint as anything other than a desperate grasp at the straws of cultural relevance (it’s also hard not to laugh at that saintly portrait of a teenager wearing a backpack). And anyway, we don’t have to reckon with these questions at the moment because we’ve just heard of a fabulous new miracle, and we need to see to it that its progenitor is properly recognized. So what is that miracle? Let’s return to the article and find out:
The miracle… involved a young woman who was born in Costa Rica in 2001 and moved to Florence in 2018 to study.
The woman fell from her bicycle at 4 a.m. July 2, 2022, and suffered a serious head injury… Even after emergency surgery removing part of her skull to reduce severe intracranial pressure, doctors warned her family she could die at any moment.
An associate of the young woman’s mother began praying to Blessed [Carlo] Acutis the same day, and the mother went to Assisi and prayed at the blessed’s tomb July 8—the same day the young woman began to breathe on her own again. She slowly recovered basic mobility and a CT scan showed the hemorrhage was gone. After a period of rehabilitation therapy and a complete recovery, she and her mother visited his tomb Sept. 2.
Wow. Powerful stuff. You mean to tell me that this young woman could have died, and then she didn’t? I don’t suppose it could have had anything to do with the operation that reduced the “severe intracranial pressure.” Couldn’t have been the team of doctors, nurses, and hospital staff (that is, mere mortals) whose literal job it is to work on cases like this. But wait a second, you’re also telling me that they went and prayed to the kid who did all the church website stuff and he intervened? Why not pray to St. Luke the physician ? Or the brother saints Cosmas and Damian
? Or just to God? What did the 15-year-old computer whiz do from up in heaven, reboot her lungs? Unplug and plug her brain back in?
Another “miracle” that set the stage for the canonization of Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu (alias “Mother”) involved an Indian woman who recovered from a tumor after a locket containing Mother Teresa’s picture was applied to her body. Even the woman’s husband and doctors refused to certify the miraculousness of this event, explaining that it was not a tumor but a cyst caused by tuberculosis, and that the woman had already been on medication for nine months because of it.
None of this cold, hard rationality held any sway over the Catholic Church, who I have to imagine were delighted at having any reason to host another Mass on a day other than Sunday, light some incense, and crow loudly enough to drown out the sound of the pain and lawsuits from the children that their staff had raped that year.
Instead of answering hard questions, the Church would prefer to feign a bulletproof theology with such logical gymnastics as Both/And (PDF) , patting themselves on the back for being able to hold two contradicting ideas “in tension,” as if your average Sudoku solver doesn’t do the same thing (while also sitting on the toilet and texting their boss). Yes, you are both hand-crafted by God in his own flawless image and a complete disappointment to God for a sexual preference over which you have no control. Picture God as the guy in the bowling alley who lets the ball go and then immediately starts dancing around and trying to gesture it over to the other side of the lane. “No no no, don’t swing that way!” Failing that, there’s always old-fashioned faith; just believe it, you know? Here’s another old-fashioned one: you can’t both have your cake and eat it too.
Why do we take these people seriously? Why do we accept some things about Christian institutions as “normal” and disregard, ignore, or even bury others? These and other questions are purely rhetorical for those of us who have stepped outside of the system. To the Catholics, I suggest you follow your Christ and do what he might have done: eat the saints.
What Am I Watching?
I hope you got to take advantage of the Memorial Day holiday this past weekend. Long Weekend (1978) is considered one of the canonical (no pun intended) “Ozploitation” flicks that started popping up as part of the larger Australian New Wave in the late ‘70s.
Peter and Marcia, barely hanging on to the frayed ends of their relationship, drive out to the coast for a long weekend camping on the beach. The trip is doomed from the start as neither of them can keep from sniping at the other, and Marcia would much rather stay at a hotel than camp anyway. On the drive out, in the dark, Peter hits a kangaroo with the truck, and they get lost in the woods looking for his secret beach spot. The kangaroo turns out to be the least of their problems as the entirety of the natural world seems to turn against them during the course of the weekend.
Exploitation films are generally low-budget, schlocky movies with lots of blood or lots of boobs—or lots of both—made to turn a quick buck. The thing that sets this film apart is its extensive nature photography. About thirty minutes into the film I had lost count of how many different beautiful animals had appeared onscreen. I guess the conceptual premise of the film is that nature has decided to punish Peter and Marcia and seal their fates in light of some transgression, but what exactly they did to deserve it gets more than a little lost in all the fighting they do between themselves. I was enjoying the birds, reptiles, insects, spiders, crabs, wombats, possums, Tasmanian devils, koalas, and even a zombified dugong too much to care.