Thou shalt not kid thyself - The Vatican unveils fresh new sins

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Thou shalt not kid thyself

 

The Vatican unveils fresh new sins, as the world just rolls its eyes.

Is your name on the list?

 

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

 

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

 

 

This just in: If you're an obscenely wealthy drug-dealing pedophile

stem-cell researcher who drives a Hummer and doesn't recycle, you are

totally going to hell. Oh please, like you didn't already know.

 

Hey, the Catholic Church wouldn't lie, mister. The Big Book o' Deadly

Sins apparently has a whole new addendum and it looks like it ain't

just gluttony and lust and murder and hot porn and witchcraft and

coveting thy neighbor's way cool Flickr photo stream anymore. That

stuff is for wimps. Serfs. Lutherans.

 

The Vatican is trying to get serious. Modern. Hip, even. Indeed, Sins

2.0 now includes taking " mind-altering " drugs and polluting the

planet and creating poverty and hoarding excessive wealth and messing

around with genetics and did you not see the grim expression on the

face of that Vatican official when he announced the new aberrations?

Totally serious. Deadly. I mean, the scales were flaking right off

his face. And if you look closely, you can see God right there,

standing just behind the podium like a hulking Dick Cheney figure,

nodding gloomily in agreement. Mmm, the Vatican. It's like Disneyland

for arthritic masochists.

 

Hey, don't get mad at me. These are just the rules. I don't make them

up, I just report the facts. Like this one: Do you have a healthy

Adderall/Zoloft/Budweiser addiction that you couple with a severe

case of keepin' your uppity and sexually dangerous wife in her gul-

dang place? God loves you. And your fellow Republicans. Do you enjoy

a joint with your wine and a few hits of Ecstasy at Burning Man and

maybe some special mushrooms at SXSW as you play with a Pyrex dildo

with your joyful girlfriend just after yoga but before meditating?

Say hello to Satan for me, pervert.

 

Perhaps you are amused by it all. Or maybe frightened. Or a bit of

both. Perhaps you also note that what's remarkable about

Sinapalooza '08 is not that the Catholic Church has now finally

managed to recognize that drugs and pollution even exist. It's not

even remarkable that a priest actually had the gall to say to the

world that pedophilia is also horrible and wrong and God does not

approve, and no one actually walked up and slapped him across the

face, hard.

 

No, what's perhaps most amusing is that in this modern age, someone

still feigns to have the authority to invent new sins in the first

place, to perpetuate the inanity of the very concept, to torque and

mold and reshape divine will as he sees fit, just sort of making it

up as he goes along, expecting everyone to basically kneel and cower

and kiss the ring. Is that not fabulous, in a hey-look-we're-back-in-

1328 sort of way?

 

And yes, I also enjoyed the new sin of excessive wealth, given how

the Vatican is one of the most — if not the most — gluttonously

wealthy organizations on the planet, oozing with real estate and

massive stock portfolios, dripping with cash, billions of dollars in

hoarded treasure and unknown gems, icons, art, the solid gold vaginas

of 1,000 pagan goddesses locked up in its vaults. The hypocrisy is

positively comical. Epic. Makes Eliot Spitzer's trifle look like Mary

Ann smoking a roach in rural Idaho.

 

To be fair, the church does use some of that massive wealth, once

estimated at about $15 billion but likely far, far higher, to fund

its various charities and clinics and community centers. But it also

uses it to buy more land, to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars

in settlements in hundreds of pedophilia cases worldwide, to wield

frightening political power, buy favor with the Italian mafia, and to

refuse services it deems " sinful, " such as providing honest health

information and condoms in AIDS-ridden Africa.

 

Despite all of that, I don't particularly hate the Catholic Church,

per se. It just happens to be the finest extant example of a largely

hypocritical misogynistic authoritarian patriarchy that still wields

far too much power. When it comes to insulting religious silliness,

it is, of course, far from alone.

 

It's also fun to consider, in an inverse sort of way, the great

Joseph Smith, founder and creator and master editor of his entire

religion, who, much like the Catholic Church, actually adjusted and

erased and rewrote entire hunks of Mormonism's bylaws on the fly,

just so he could, say, marry multiple women or perhaps prevent one of

them from claiming certain property ownership and perhaps so he could

slouch on the couch and not do the damn dishes and watch back-to-back

episodes of " Weeds " on DVD without the incessant nagging from the

wives.

 

Is that not fantastic? Is that not every male's dream? I do believe

we should all try this.

 

" Honey, it says right here in the Good Book that thou shalt not take

my Mercedes and go for a joy ride to Vegas with your girlfriends for

the spa weekend and leave me with the kids. " " What? Where the hell

does it say that? " " Why, right here! " " You just wrote that with an

orange Sharpie, just now! " " So? It's my religion! And by the way,

thou shalt now go make me a tuna sandwich. Naked. "

 

You have to ask: Do religious convulsions such as these make any

difference? Mormonism's silliness aside, is there really anyone left

who takes Vatican decrees at all seriously, someone who might've been

hell-bent on becoming, say, a rich child-molesting cokehead with a

giant carbon footprint who suddenly saw the new sins and was

like, " Oh crap! Guess I'll become a social worker after all. "

 

It's like that old joke: You're driving along just happy as can be

and you glance over and there's Exhausted Urban Mom piloting the

Caravan to the Gymboree, and just when you're about to ram her off

the road and hopefully down that steep embankment to her fiery death

as you laugh maniacally, you see it: " Baby on Board. " Damn! Thwarted

again.

 

Speaking of babies, here's a terrific new statistic: 25-40 percent of

American teenage girls have a sexually transmitted disease. Isn't

that wonderful? Abstinence education has been a blessing and a joy.

 

What does that have to do with Vatican impudence? Easy. This same

Catholic Church has been lying to young women for upwards of 2,000

years, telling them to loathe and mistrust their bodies and fear sex

and restrain their natural urges and not to touch any naughty body

parts until they marry a pasty middle manager who looks disturbingly

like their father, and only he can touch their naughty bits and make

them feel lousy about their bodies because he has no clue what he's

doing. Praise!

 

And hence, awash in misinformation and lies and the ignorance of

their elders, teens follow their natural urges anyway and have

uninformed, unprotected, deeply lousy sex, getting STDs and learning

all sorts of damaging habits that require years and decades and far

too much wine and therapy to correct.

 

Note to the Vatican: You want true sin? Here you go: Lying to women

is a sin. Pathological hypocrisy is a sin. Half a billion dollars in

pedophilia lawsuit payouts is a sin. Homophobia is a sin. Hiding

those golden vaginas is a sin. And creating new sins in a strange

attempt to stay relevant as your church withers and struggles and

falters in the new and spiritually hungry but religiously mistrustful

world, that's surely a sin.

 

No, wait. Check that. That's not a sin at all. It's actually just a

sad, inexcusable joke.

 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?

f=/g/a/2008/03/19/notes031908.DTL