To build a better world, we should destroy the Catholic Church
Early in 2023 a Cardinal of the Catholic Church was buried in Sydney, Australia, amid tearful protest and weepy hagiography.
I leave the description of George Pell’s life to others. The key I wish to turn here is the context for the choices that determines conscience:
George Pell flew higher than any Australian priest, but he chose career over the safety of children
The career Pell chose was service within an ancient imperial government department, created to enforce the mores of the now long-dead empire. Service in an imperial house gone rogue millennia ago, if you will, in which the dead empire is risen again, zombie-like, in the form of celibate men working for an ever absent Emperor.
Now, see, I say all this because I had recently discovered that Fideism is a heresy. As many know, the word heresy comes from the Greek for choice, but in a bad way.
Fideism is when one believes in believing, or, has faith in faith.
At first it appeared to me utterly incoherent, how can one believe in anything if one does not believe in believing in things? How can that be a bad choice for believers?
How can you have a religion, which many assume uses belief as a primary practice of thought and pray, without belief in belief? Surely this is incomplete. This is a gap in consistency, or logic? Surely?
What are they doing?
Why is it that believing in believing, is a heresy in the Catholic and Orthodox churches?
Well, heresy is bad because choice itself is classed as a type of treason (I’ll explain why theologically in a separate post about St Augustine of Hippo at some stage), and it is that stepping away from the Church that is evil, not whatever heresy you believe in believing in.
Wrong beliefs are just evidence of your treason.
Choosing to not be obedient to the church/state/emperor, that is the real badness here, the evil, the lack of loyalty to your narcissistic betters, these celibate men of power. As if you ever had a choice!
As far as the Catholic and Orthodox churches can see, choice, simply by being available (regardless of truth or error or doubt, this is practical politics after all) turns one away from the authority of the Church. This is to be avoided because, in turn, this degrades the power of the Church.
Faith in God is not the aim of the these practices of power, but loyalty to the church/state/empire complex is. It’s about power, even if some of those political structures have disappeared. The collapse of the western Roman Empire created a vacuum the Catholic Church tried to step into, and eventually succeeded as the Papacy became Emperor-maker to the Holy Roman Empire, just before the Kingdom of France took over and wreck the dream.
This is why the Church forgives those who turn back to the authority of the church in any inquisition. You are often given a chance to obey, and undo the bad choices you made. All is forgiven if you obey.
Professed faith in the church’s dogma or patented creeds is but a shibboleth.
Back then in those more medieval times, choice was not considered part of economic life, only rulers and princes had ‘choice’, everything else was highly structured, down to the colours and styles one was allowed to wear because you were in such-and-such a class or occupation. Choice may have existed in the Roman Empire, but that was to be shut down. Dark ages anyone? Maybe Gibbon was right in broad measures but his details were wrong.
The badness here with choice and heresy, is not just because it is ‘wrong’.
For what is wrong is a bit random really, the articles of practice can be anything, and are inherited from various traditions (Greek thought, Zoroastrianism, Judaism but we’ll drop the pork thang). It is wrong because choice leads one away from obedience to the Church and its intercessory power which saves you.
It is soteriological, but only if you obey. Submit, in order to be saved, by being told what to choose. Then you are told to choose the church.
Orthodox and Catholic traditions are at one in this. Orthodox churches are much less rogue-like as they are more likely to be functionaries of the contemporary state they find themselves in (best current example of this is in Russia), rather than trying to function like a state, or meta-state like the Catholic Church.
From the Church’s point of view, when looking at someone who Cardinal Pell had to deal with, why would anyone choose children over obedient but lowly members of such an institution, They will always loyally choose parish priests who do what they are told. From the Church’s point of view Cardinal Pell was just doing afairly a dequate human resources job. Children might be baptised and countable as followers, but what do children know of obedience? Devils that they are. Are they ordained by God?
Choosing the children is not a possible choice if one knows that one's faith does not primarily refer to belief, moral or otherwise, but obedience. The key in the case of Cardinal Pell, is made of this loyalty, this trust… — and not belief, not morality, not goodness, not even God really. It is a bureaucracy of obedience.
Choose the church as there is no other choice, you’re baptized aren’t you? What do you mean you don’t remember? Your faith is faith in the church, and this means loyalty and obedience. And in the identity bind you.
This is also the why of the invert situation, where Catholicism in itself is seen as a treasonable offense, as in England after Henry the Eighth when he established English Orthodoxy with a Protestant ripple. Your loyalty is not to the King of England but to a foreign power when you are a Catholic. (Curiously this history trickles down into the constitutional law in Australia which prevents dual citizens from standing in the Commonwealth of Australia’s parliament.)
So how does this work in practice?
If a local parish priest is abusing children but the abusive sod is obedient to the church, the church will always choose a cover-up, a re-location or twenty, over the abused, and Cardinal Pell was at least one of these fixers, if not partaking in abuse himself.
This goes for any sin or misdemeanor by a priest. Are they still obedient? Then everything can be forgiven. We’ll fix it, don’t worry. So now then, how do we make the complainants shut up.
We’ll tell them to obey…
In this mechanism of loyalty and obedience, why would you choose the children? Why? It has worked for centuries, why jack up now?
Complaining about Cardinal Pell as an individual doing institutional saving human resources work misses the point that the Catholic Church must be destroyed.
I say destroyed rather than changed or restructured or meliorated in some way, because if one removes obedience to the Church, then, the Catholic Church is no more. Destruction is the only option, not because I argue for destruction as being a good thing, but because to fix the Catholic Church means to remove that which creates it in the first place. To repeat, the “faith” is based on Obedience, not belief/s, and if obedience is removed there is no church.
There is nothing in the authority and power of the church that has ever cared about children. The Catholic Faith means loyalty and obedience to the Church, and it is composed of celibate men across generations. Parishioners and their families, the laity, are second rate auxiliary members with no say in how things are run. The church feels no responsibility for the laity and their families, and never has. Its main game is dealing with those who have power, in order to parasitically maintain a supply of celibate men.
In Australia, I am told, the Catholic Church exists, legally, merely as a series of interlocked property trusts, in which archbishops and their lawyers go one trustee and one beneficiary, until the circle of no responsibility for the laity’s children is complete. I would suggest:
- the Catholic Church be broken up with an an anti-trust style programme,
- the property and assets be given to the local communities that built them.
Communities who in many cases have put in money and years of labour to build and maintain their local church. Indeed the Catholic Church in Australia has been receiving Government monies and grants since the mid-1800s.
Supporting celibate men to be in control of all this leads to those communities’ children being abused and nothing will be done to fix it. To stop the abuse the church must be changed, but removing obedience as its prime directive, destroys the church. Destroying the church is not an act in itself but an outcome of protecting children.
The church in Australia, or anywhere outside the Vatican, can thus be seen an agency of subversive obedience to a foreign power. And what I mean by “foreign power” here and now is that which protects its celibate men, choices and behaviour which is foreign to any community who raises children.
And all because Fideism is a heresy, or at least, because heresies allow individual choice, and this is liable to give rise to a lack of obedience and loyalty to the church. Some Protestantisms have no problem at all with Fideism.
And remember I am not saying the Catholic Church should be destroyed because of child abuse I am saying it should be destroyed because Cardinal Pell had no choice but to act to protect the church, as that is what he had signed up for, a public servant, a departmental head of a long-dead empire.
Originally published at whyweshould.substack.com a year ago in 2023, it has been re-edited re-posted (2024) also at whyweshould.medium.com.
Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash