Let's get this out of the way: being Catholic is not cool. Ever since freshman year at Saint Shabby's High School, the urge to belong to a much groovier religion has overruled my childhood bonds with the Vatican. Every creative person I know is agnostic or atheist. Almost all of the musicians and writers I love are Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or nothing. People are dumbfounded to discover that I, a lefty to the core, voluntarily go to church. Is there anything less religiously fashionable? I'm not going to lie: being a Catholic these days, in the crowd I run with, is hard.
When I quietly started attending church again after a fifteen year lapse, I went for the feeling, not for the dogma. It's hard to write this without sounding defensive, but being Catholic among 30-ish friends in a liberal town is sort of like being a Republican. You've got to live with the bugged-put looks and shocked reactions when you come out as being down with Jesus. One of my friends practically shit herself when I told her I was going to mass. "Why", she asked, "would somebody smart believe in God?"
That's a good question, and pertinent in the current spiritual climate. If Jews are cool and Buddhists are trendy, Catholics are the nerd in the corner getting his ass kicked. In the eyes of the left, we represent everything that's wrong with America. The thing is, though, that not all Catholics wear hair-shirts and genuflect before pedophiles. Some of us live to the left of the left, but we like the church's traditions of loving thy neighbor, pacifism and charitable acts, and we try to turn a blind eye when the Vatican issues another edict that takes us back to the crusades and keep on worshipping on our own way.
It's been even harder to 'fess up to my nighttime recitations of the Paternoster and the Hail Mary since the church recently replaced John Paul II, who was already one of the most conservative popes since medieval times, with his right hand man, Cardinal Ratzinger. Just saying that guy's name aloud makes me a little ill. Ratzinger. Against my better judgement, I got caught up in the papal conclave, maybe even a little more than I got caught up in Bush versus Kerry last year. Sure, I voted, and gave some cash to MoveOn, but I knew the election was doomed. I had a bad feeling waking up that morning, and it hasn't really gone away.
The conclave, of course, is totally different as a process of election. The cardinals who elected Ratzinger… excuse me, Benedict, aren't voted on by the billion plus Catholics worldwide, like our Senate and Congress; they're hand picked by the previous pope. JP II got busy when his Parkinson's started appearing and slotted in all but three of the cardinals who elected his successor. Ratzinger, like Bush, was on the inside track to lead the Vatican for however many more years he lives with the same problematic dogma that JP II pulled us into. It was pretty much common knowledge that the secret juju ceremonies leading up to the election of the new pope were rigged all along, and that nothing any parishioner wanted had anything to do with who would be chosen.
But leading up to the chimney-poof letdown this April, if you were a liberal Catholic, like all of us who foolishly believed Kerry might actually be able to pull it off, you crossed your fingers, went online, and placed a few bets on some of the Liberation Theologists and third-worlders who might have made a tolerable pope. My money was briefly on Honduras' Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga, because he plays the saxophone, but he unfortunately turns out to be not so friendly to the radical priests of Central America who tried to embrace the impoverished people they serve. He's also a mere 62 years old, making him too babyish for the pontiff's position. The cardinals wanted an oldster, so as to avoid another long papal reign. They also wanted to keep the Italians out of the Room of Tears1 for various political reasons, which eliminated the smiling Italian senior citizen in a little red hat from Milan.
This narrowed the field down to Cardinal Francis Arinze, of Nigeria, who might have been an awesome candidate as the first black Pope, but who unfortunately also is about as right-wing and conservative as you can get, some guy from Austria (homeland of Schwarzenneger), and Ratzinger. Oh, Ratzinger, with his homies in Opus Dei2, his dour expression, his former membership in the Hitler Youth3, his speech about being the church's shepherd, which inevitably lead to a lot of German shepherd jokes. Oh Ratzinger, who cracked the whip throughout JP II's reign, smacking down attempts to ordain women, to condone condom use in AIDS ravaged countries, who backed up the nauseating idea that to live with homosexuals we should "love the sinner, hate the sin".
I can't live with any of that, but it's hard to just stop believing. Democracy still works, theoretically anyway, and, in some ways, so does Catholicism. Post-November, I heard a lot of people swearing they'd do whatever they could to keep another Republican out of the White House, but I heard very few people saying they'd never vote again. Ratzinger's election to the papal office means that liberal Catholics are going to have to retreat to the way we lived in the earliest days of the church, when splinter groups like the Gnostics, who believed God had a female personification named Sophia and that Mary Magdelene, not Paul, was Jesus' chosen person to lead the church, hid out in caves and did things their own way. It's a little dark in here at the moment, but we'll just keep crossing ourselves and hope for the best the next time the cardinals shut the doors behind them, leaving the rest of us out.
1 There really is a Room of Tears in the Vatican. This is where the newly elected pope heads to change into his vestments. In my house, the Room of Tears is the bathroom, where I keep my scale.
2 Neo-conservative wing of laypeople in the church. Mel Gibson might be a member.
3 I'm not going to defend Ratzinger, but I have read that he was drafted into the Hitler Youth involuntarily; every young person in Germany was forced to join, and he left as soon as he could. But still, does the church really need a former Nazi to lead it?
Catherine Joan Mary Magdalene Oakes, aka Kaya Oakes, is one of Kitchen Sink's Senior Editors. She occasionally goes to mass at Saint Joseph the Worker, where the late radical priest Father Bill O'Donell frequently missed mass due to being arrested while protesting at the School of the Americas.