YOU HAVE NO IDEA

The Winter 2014 issue of the UU World emerged from the pile of paper and books next to my reading chair and -- holy cow! -- in it was an article about “sex offenders” by Kimberley French, who writes about these matters and other problems of tolerating those outside our moral guidelines.  I thought, “amazing!”  She was quite self-disclosive, telling about a friend who finally told her he was a listed sex-offender.  She had had no idea.  He was a nice guy.  She felt bad for him.  She just didn’t know what to do about it.  There are principles, but then there are practicalities.

Naturally enough, she looked to her congregation -- accepting, healing, guiding -- to know what to do about sex offenders.  Statistically she knew there had to be several there, unknown, unidentified.  Statistically she also knew that there must be about one-fifth of the females and a fewer number of the males who had been sexually abused, all sitting quietly in those pews.  Someone said all pedophiles should be thrown out of the congregation -- but unless they had a criminal record, how would you know who they were?  (The minister muttered, "Maybe we should just throw out all sinners.")  (What if it's the minister?)

In short, this nice woman knew a lot about the subject of "pedophiles" from reading respectable sources.  She knew all about the problem from A to B.  (You know that review of an actress who was said to run the gamut of emotions from A to B?)  Actually it was more like from M or N to O because only the middle of the spectrum was anything she knew existed.   The two ends were invisible.  On the "high" end, I’ll bet you five dollars I could listen to her talk for half an hour and spot a dozen sex-and-gender-related assumptions she was making.  For one thing, I think she severely underestimates how much the culture is guided by these assumptions.  (Like the “pinkifying” of the UU ministry which has turned clergy into counselors, made them comfy moms, wide-waisted assurers of big hugs.  Jesus loves you, oh, yes, She does. ) 

On the low end French seems not to understand that sexual abuse of children is often murderous violence -- I mean death -- nor how many children live out on the streets, barely alive, doing sexwork in order to eat, taking drugs in order to do sexwork.  Nowhere near the number of shelters needed exist and many of them are dangerous for kids.   Boys in particular are turned out of “nice” households with educated parents.  I mean kids whose main criminal tendency is defiance.  UU’s ought to be able to grasp that.

There IS discussion of clergy misconduct in French's article.  The Emerson Avenger, a blogger who has been holding up the issue for decades, is vindicated in terms of admitting it happens.  

All this is so much beyond buying a t-shirt.  So much a deformation of “love.”  It isn’t really even about sex, or about how moral, educated church people should react to it, even if they "stand on the side of love.”  It is about a world disorder that denies that human beings are even living creatures, that they matter at all, that they are anything but puppets or livestock.  What I'm saying is that when we consider sexual abuse, we think it's about sex, but it's really about being inhuman in an unforgiving world.  Sexual predation is a symptom.

This week I saw a bizarre movie that I wish I had not.  It’s called “The Act of Killing.”  Here’s the Netflix squib: “A 2014 Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature, this film follows two former death squad leaders as they reenact atrocities they committed during a bloody era in Indonesia when more than a million people were slaughtered.”  As another critic more eloquently put it, the film starts out as a self-justification and glorification project by a little cluster of men who are as amoral as humans can get -- psychotically self-involved -- whose ambitious re-enactment starts with dreams of fame and fortune (as filtered through gangster B-movies from Hollywood and Bollywood-style dance routines) into a surrealism that leaves even the Big Star vomiting.  (Although, I suspect he was acting as much then as he was earlier.  He had only realized that his audience might want dramatic repentance.) 

Anwar Congo, well-dressed killer

These guys are the Laurel and Hardy of inhuman behavior and there’s little sex in it directly.  The sexual abuse comes from their worldview of entitlement.  There’s no pleasure, no sophistication, not even real power.  They are death squads with no black balaclavas over their heads, happy to be seen as the monsters they are because they don’t know monsters from a palm tree.   As long as they're famous, "the most", number one.  They predict that everyone will be blown away by how daring they are -- and they're right.  This movie is prize-winning, highly praised.  "A masterpiece!"  Intellectuals love to exploit the miserable, all their  academic, cynical rage and powerlessness coming out in mockery, excusing them from getting really involved.  It’s the equivalent of the old-fashioned freak show where deformed is paraded.

A scene in another more conventional movie showed a man solicited by a hustling kid.  The man was a law enforcer and pursued the kid to beat him up and bring him in.  A critic writing about the scene remarked that its power and meaning came from the inclusion of an older man standing nearby, leaning on a furled umbrella, calm and unmoving, witnessing.  An alert viewer of the movie could see through this unblinking man how stupid and excessive the behavior was.  

The only redeeming quality of this extravaganza of crocodilian immorality is that at the edges of some scenes there were quiet gray men who looked away, some with wet faces.  Otherwise, this film could make a racist of me.  You know, of course, that Indonesia is noted for sex tourism and child trafficking.  (Do you follow Nick Kristoff? )  This horrific stuff REALLY HAPPENED and America was involved.

Jack again:  “You can’t handle the truth.”  The truth is that child molesters are us.  The victims of child molesters are us.  Pogo:  “We have found the enemy and they are us.”  There is nothing protecting you from atrocities except chance.  The ground gapes beneath our feet.  Homeland Security cannot (will not) protect you.  On other people’s children we use predator drones.  On our own people we are more subtle.  Mostly we push people of color into poverty -- that will kill them soon enough. 

When smug UU’s throw up their hands over pedo-priests, I like to joke that UU clergy don’t bother with children.  The men look for rich women and the women cruise for power.  Children don’t normally have either.  Sex can’t compete with money and power.  When I entered the ministry, the curtain was swept back.  In fact, I’ve spoken before about how I attended a workshop that explained that the roots of domestic abuse are in the desire to control -- and recognized the signs in my own congregation.  And myself.  

A complaint about both Unitarian and Universalist strands of our historical theology is that we deny evil.  I think this is true.  Some of us have seen it, even opposed and bested it, but many people think that when they’ve found their church of choice, they’ve found safety.   Why else would they join? 

A grotesque Laurel and Hardy of horror

That's when the ridiculously thin edge of Evil finds its way in, wearing a hot pink cowboy hat.  It's on YouTube if you have the stomach for it.   http://youtu.be/3tILiqotj7Y

WHY BOTHER ABOUT AIDS?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124001493

Recently rapes on campuses have become a big deal.  Not just fooling around in the showers, and not just a few obnoxious meatheads or criminal invaders, but sexual abuse rates of one-fifth, one-third, one-half, one in eight, one in six, both sexes, very often related to alcohol and/or drugs.  The kids shrug.  “What’s the big deal?  These days, if you’re on the pill, what’s to worry about?  Anyway, just use the back door.”  (They evidently don’t know there are hazards besides pregnancy.  Not even counting emotional chaos.  Do I smell denial?)

A raped co-ed gathered up her courage and went before the board the university provided to deal with such matters.  It took months and lining up a couple of other women attacked by the same guy.  She had had consensual sex with the guy twice.  This time they came home from a party, he was drunk, suddenly flipped her into position and entered her anally though she was fighting and objecting.  The board did not believe the woman because one woman board member stubbornly insisted it was not possible to enter anally without lubrication.  (I got this out of the ordinary newspaper, not some secret source.)  No news about HIV status.

Normally, one accepts the authority of people because they know more, are ethically more grounded, protect everyone involved, and, of course, have power over one.  How this stubborn female authority came to her convictions about anuses is a question less important than how she was thought to be capable of judging cases like this.

Jack

Our hero Jack snarled,  “You can’t handle the truth!”  In fact, a lot of people have so little experience with the truth that they can’t recognize it.  Esp. if it has to do with stigma, censorship, prudery and so on.  Even here in cow country where people put their arms up cow butts and see the whole process of creating a new calf, can tell a lot of sheep jokes, and feel like Saturday night and enough beer is a license to . . .  well.  Most people have a lot to learn.  Much of it is about misery, but they have no incentive to go out there looking for it in order to alleviate it.  Until it happens to them.

Much of the trouble begins and continues in the home, until the kid gets thrown out, the woman gets killed by violence, or both just leave, which can be a disaster for them.  But the forces that push people towards abuse are in the larger society.  Not just being poor or alcoholic, but the constant sneering, the lack of credibility, the scorn, the arrogance.  Stigma.

Heads on pikes

I watch the dynamics portrayed in series on the cable channels and sometimes wonder whether we aren’t promoting the culture of maybe 1400 or 1700.  There must be rooms of severed heads in the prop department.  I don’t mind naked people but in the name of equity, I think that for every show with naked women being rolled around, a photo of the director’s genitals should be posted at the beginning.  No need to show his head.  ("His," right?)

The thing is, I’ve given up the idea of pornography.  It’s just too hard to figure out what is and what isn’t and what gives entitlement to watch it outside of being on the censorship board.  Age, money, success in marriage, a clinical test for maturity?  A science degree?  Ordained?  Personally, I think the criterion should be whether the work is smart, well-done, tells us something we didn’t know before but ought to.  Playboy-style pretty-girl bare-bottomed Barbies are not pornography -- they're candy.

Linda Lovelace

When I was an animal control officer, I felt a certain entitlement and immunity, considering that I was entering whore houses and so on.  (Where we go, our dogs go.)  So I went to see “Deep Throat,” which was playing in my beat.  (I didn’t go in uniform with my badge.  As the only woman there besides the ticket taker, I was scary enough to all the guys with raincoats over their laps.)  The movie had played for so many years that the court ruled it was the bright line between what was pornography and what was not, since it had not been closed by the law and therefore was not.  But it WAS porn.  A poorly made movie with only one joke, a dumb and childish one.  What was worse was finding out over time that Linda Lovelace hated being in it, was oppressed and used, and took years to recover.

Stigmas are stupid.  They also make money because not-knowing or believing that there’s some magical thing to find out what only certain privileged people can know will cause people to pay.  Money is the ultimate porn.

Orphaned by AIDS

That doesn’t mean that what’s free is okay.  Esp. with sex, the price may not be in money right there at the moment, but in terms of emotion, family, and medical bills for the rest of one’s life, the cost can be beyond measurement.

I ask myself why I’ve gotten so interested in HIV/AIDS without actually interacting in real life with people who are suffering from it, at least not knowingly and in person.  Here are some reasons:

1.  I get tired of everything being dominated by big cities on the coasts.  Maybe out here on the prairie we have a few observations.

2.  It’s entwined with the issue of “gay” which is embedded in the cultural binary that stuffs people into either male or female.  Even GLBTQX is only six choices, each with salesmen standing by to give you marketing advice.  Where’s eclectic?  Where’s mix-and-match?  Where’s a blend?  Where is “I-stand-alone”?  It’s about DESIRE, not fertility.  (That’s why I like to add the X -- for the situational, the exceptional, the unexpected.  Desire is like the Holy Ghost -- it goes where it wants to.)

3.  I’m interested in freedom and the San Francisco sexual revolution accompanied a lot of other freedoms, released a lot of energy.  If at the same time the jungle in Africa had not been pushed back enough to release HIV from the chimps (and who knows what the melting glaciers will release?) the story of Gay Liberation would have been quite different.  As it is, we’ve been forced to rethink ALL physical and sexual practices.  Not just gays -- straights, vanillas, babies, oldsters.  

4.  HIV is a way into our medicalized world in which we are learning an incredibly overwhelming amount of technical information about bodies.  I’m fascinated but I need a focus that isn’t just about getting old.

Sometimes you need a guardian.

5.  It’s a vulnerability disease and vulnerability interests me as much as freedom because they’re so related.  HIV makes you a banquet for microbes, which may end up ruling the world if they don’t already.  Know your adversary.  And then the vulnerability of behavior -- how to be open to intimacy and disclosure without being destroyed by them.

6.  The consequences of any plague-level disease are so devastating that whole generations, and therefore nations, and therefore civilization itself can be brought down crashing into war, famine, population displacement on a massive scale, and therefore the whole planet could be spun back into chaos.  At least until the humans are gone.

7.  The ongoing struggle to understand what it means to be human starts with a boy thrown out of his home because he is considered gay, therefore undeserving, and converted by need to make money into a vector for diseases carried back to families by ruthless men.  I find these boys an opening through their misery to an understanding of ruthless and clueless men -- and women.  I need to know where they come from.  It’s a bioreligious question.

THE SYSTEM HAS A BLACK EYE

(This is the last in a series responding to "Circle of Violence," an article by Hall and Finley in Indian Country Today.  I might return to the subject later.  I welcome your comments.)

As I read through the studies of violence to Native American women, which were mostly anecdote mixed with statistics and a little art work to relieve the grimness, several thoughts began to form about why nothing seems to be effective in changing the situation in spite of decades of activism and its obvious atrocity.

Shame and fear are in the way of gathering decent statistics.  Over and over the studies gave figures showing that NA women were raped more often, battered more often, killed more often, more likely to be attacked by white men, and so on, but ALL of them were accompanied by notes about how reluctant everyone was to be interviewed, how untrustworthy the figures were, how few women even bothered to go to the police, how many reports were simply lost, hidden, ignored or discarded.  No one really knows or could prove how bad it is.  But let me assure you that on the ground where it happens, people KNOW it is very bad indeed.

I’ve never forgotten the power of disclosure at the U of Chicago one spring.  Women had been complaining about violence against them -- you understand these were hyper-educated, very hip, politically-empowered feminist women -- but the administration had done nothing.  The women made stencils that said,  “A woman was raped here” and went out in small groups one night with a map they had gotten from police reports.  They marked the places and they were EVERYWHERE.  Talk about consciousness-raising.  But there was always the nagging problem of not knowing who the predators were.  U of Chicago is on the South Side, surrounded by poor people crammed into bad housing.  Black people.  The liberal bias against portraying black-on-white rape was strong.  The rapists were bad because they were poor, deprived, put-down.   But in the case of white-on-red rapes the liberal bias goes the other way, to sympathy for the victim.  Unfortunately, there are not a lot of liberals on reservations.

Rape has been discussed and expanded by one sector of the feminist movement until it is diluted to impolite behavior on first dates.  The sexual revolution, in trying to say women are entitled to sex, has seriously eroded our understanding of rape as a serious crime, not because it’s naughty but because it does bodily and emotional harm of deep seriousness.  Because it has been defined as a crime of men on women because women were considered property -- the real crime was taking a man’s woman and making children on her body without the MAN’S permission.   We reject that now.  But again rape has been trivialized.  If “she” is no one’s woman, she is anyone’s woman.

We are living in a brutal society.  The local kids here think it is very funny to kick a boy in the genitals because it is portrayed that way in movies.  BIG yucks.  Indignation if rebuked.  Rape of men is a joke, a source of plot devices in media tales, a “given” part of a prison sentence.  Rape is thought of by many as something natural, inevitable, and not particularly harmful.  But in fact it is thrusting into a person’s viscera, using force, without lubrication, carrying in infections, tearing through the walls of vagina or rectum, possibly carrying HIV.  With Viagra there may be no exhaustion of the ability of the penis to stay hard so that assault can last for an hour or more.  Without Viagra or even an erection, pushing in objects like bottles, sticks, guns, pipes, is devastating.  What was it that cop used?  The handle of a toilet plunger? 

Rape is a crime of bodily harm that can lead to death.  It is imposed on the weak by the strong, because they can and because they are enraged, damaged, possibly feeling that they themselves are raped by economic and social forces.  Maybe just looking for a way to go up the pecking order, whether in prison or in the schoolyard.  The “weak” might be younger, more stigmatized, signaling vulnerability because of previously being bullied or abused (often by parents), smaller, “other” in some ethnic or physical way or in sexual orientation: gay,  Whatever “gay” means -- originally it was supposed to mean desiring the same sex, but desire has nothing to do with rape.

While I was at our little clinic to get some blood tests, the receptionist’s son came in for some papers, a ten-year-old with a cowboy’s rolling gait and boots.  Later in the conversation bullying came up.  The mother said that she had taught her children to never, NEVER, let any belittling, shaming or mocking talk get into their heads.  No matter how much other people try to put it there.  Never look at yourself that way, she said, and she was so right.  I hope she also taught him the converse: never make other people feel that way.

When people begin to think they deserve rape, are somehow attracting it, that kind of abuse becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.  The stigma of rape is sometimes stronger in a community than the stigma of being a rapist (“blame the victim”) and having been raped can even constitute “permission” to rape someone again since they have “lost their cherry.”  (Another value left over from the idea that men own women who ought to be virgins so the men can be sure the children were theirs.)  

Great Falls has just been jolted by a sequence of babies killed by stepfathers and boyfriends: infants and toddlers struck, shaken, thrown, bones broken.  It’s the same phenomenon as rape, just at a different place on the continuum.  Women can get low pay jobs pretty easily because they turn over all the time.  When men go out of work, maybe because they do something seasonal, they tend to be idle for weeks or months.  With the economy the way it is, they may be out of work for years, even though they’ve had respectable continuous careers.  They end up mooching.  The cover story is “house husband” or “babysitting.”  The actuality may be vicious depression -- mixed with drugs or alcohol -- that is taken out covertly on whomever happens to be handy.

The main thought I have is that ANY kind of violence, sexual or not, physical or not, affects EVERYONE.  We preserve our sense of safety with our “white woman bubble” or our “proud squaw bubble,”  and that helps but it is not enough.  It is not a woman’s problem or a Indian problem.  It is a human problem that affects everyone throughout their lives from their educational aspirations to their success in relationships.  Solving unemployment saves babies by preventing the violence of frustration.

Partly because of knowing the world of the bottom, partly because of law enforcement and partly because of working alongside “drunks” and “bums,”  I think the needed changes keep failing because the studies and changes are all at the top.  The people at the top appoint a committee, pay for a report, and put it under the blotter.  They don’t think of it as their problem, though rich white people are just as prone to violence.  Covering it up is easier.

The place to start is first-line contact:  training all emergency responders how to take a good report, including photos; how to use rape kits; how to proceed in ways that protect even the guilty.  We must agitate to get police and EMTs the equipment and funding they need.  We must accumulate evidence and statistics, support people who will testify, and keep the conduits to both the public and the supervisors open and flowing.   Police are our witnesses.  Society gives them permission to use whatever force can be justified.  They must not allow themselves to align with violence, out of despair over not being effective.  I’m talking ride-alongs, victim advocates, volunteer witnesses in court, and neighbors who intervene in subtle ways.  I’m talking call the police about violence even if it’s only overheard, keeping a journal of when it happens, and NOT blaming the victim.  If we wait for some big authority figure to solve the problem, then we are setting ourselves up for a kind of rape.

WHAT DEMOGRAPHERS DON'T KNOW

It’s so easy to slip into Us vs. Them thinking.  That’s how we got so screwed up with this question of jurisdictions.  At first white contact it might have been possible to defend the idea that tribal people were fundamentally different from Euro-whites, because the former had been here for enough millenia for the land to shape them, both genes and memes.  But the Euro-whites were still shaped for Europe with a whole different set of ideas in their heads.

In Montana the state law requires that the history of the Indians be taught.  A well-educated, even bookish, white woman said to me,  “I don’t see why I should have to study THEIR history.”  She said this standing on land with thousands of years of Indian history and maybe 150 (pushing it) years of Euro-white history, much of it conflict.

In an essay by James Clifford about the Mashpee tribe trying to establish in court that they WERE a tribe, I found a good answer.  A Indian woman on the stand (everyone seemed to agree she WAS Indian, though the whole definition was in question) said that she was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.  “How could that be?” questioned the lawyers.  

“Well, 149 members of my tribe died fighting in the American Revolution on the side of the Colonies,” she said patiently.  They are us.

But we are many.  The arbitrary distinction between Indian and white was full of exceptions and contradictions from the beginning and now that’s even more true than ever.  The idea that there should be one set of standards about sex and violence for Indians -- either because they are naturally savage and uncontrollable or because they are naturally noble and protective of the vulnerable -- and another for whites (unnatural?) is pretty much nonsense.  In terms of both genes and memes, the ecology (which IS the economy) is pulling everyone back into a unity, lumpy and contentious as it may seem.  We are far more alike than different.  Our interests are mostly common interests.  We learn as we go.

You can go to any number of websites that will tell you the average rez salaries (low), the value of the homes owned (the websites won’t know what to do about tribal housing), the age groups and racial groups, though only the ones that the questionnaire makers put on the list, which change quite a bit over the years.  (We don’t think about how many “octoroons” there are these days.  We question the definition of “race.”)  Surveys can’t capture things the surveyors never thought of.  One variable that does show up is that a high proportion of the population is quite young and the rate of births to single mothers is high.  Not only does this mean a burden on the welfare system but also that the maturity to raise kids is diminished and fathers are not involved.  In fact, male death rate due to violence, drinking and now diabetes is high, which forces single motherhood.  A high diabetes rate also means problematic pregnancies.

A variable that does NOT show up is the kind of grandmothers that were present and involved when I came in 1961.  Born in 1880’s, they had gone through enormous hardship but had also been mission-educated by tough no-nonsense people, whatever some of their faults.  Those old Indian ladies would not put up with nonsense.  Their grandchildren, born in 1920 or later, were the first educated in public schools and employed as clerks, nurses, and teachers.  Then the children of those women, born in 1940 or later, were the seniors I taught in 1961.  

They were “tracked” in school and in life.  The “high track” has done extremely well, often becoming professionals and leaders in the tribe.  The low track despaired and thought their lack of prosperity was due to being Indian.  But they still obeyed their grandmothers, who never despaired, even when their granddaughters became drunkards.  It’s the children born in the 1980’s and later -- beyond the lifespan of those original hardy grandmothers -- who are now enmeshed in careless sex and violence.  

The three towns against the border of Glacier National Park (East Glacier, St. Marys, and Babb) which are tourist towns in summer, have quite different seasonal dynamics but are pretty “acculturated”.  The two “old-timey” towns (Heart Butte and Starr School) have no bars but more poverty.  Browning, as the hub, is a multi-celled town with its own jurisdiction problems.  Most of the federally subsidized housing projects are outside the formal city limits while the older part of town has deteriorated and fallen into fractionated ownership (split out repeatedly because of inheritance without re-consolidation) so that there are always derelict buildings where drunks can cluster with their dogs and broken glass to risk fire.  They are regarded with both shame and derision.  At the same time, there is a center where such people can go, especially in winter.  

The number of bars in Browning is far fewer than it was in the Sixties and the number of AA meetings have multiplied quickly.  Dry-out programs abound and the old hospital building is now dedicated to it.  The adults of 2000 are actively addressing the problem.  It is clear to everyone that rape and violence are wrong.  It is not clear how to get a grip.  In the case of men from other places (who might be any other races) who are already drifters and felons, law enforcement needs all the help they can get.  Such men defeat far more formidable jurisdictions than a remote Montana reservation, but that doesn’t excuse the community from demanding a higher standard of order, particularly and specifically in regard to intruders.  The message needs to be sent that a reservation does not exist in order to host parties.

Last summer I went to attend Curley Bear Wagner’s funeral, as I try to do for all my former students.  I was too early and sat out on the steps of the church with a little cluster of street people, both men and women, visiting about who we knew and just life in general.  I thought how natural and easy it seemed.  How much we shared.  Then they wandered off to sleep in the brush along Willow Creek.  They had a bottle.

EGGS BENEDICT: a Dish for Popes

In trying to ram through the sainthood of his old buddy John Paul II, Benedict XVI is running up against both historical scandals and contemporary law, some of it church law that grew out of those scandals.  One of those scandals involved Popes who tried to create hereditary empires so they could extend their power beyond the grave through their sons.  Another was the scandal of female popes.  (It happened long before women’s lib.)  Christians have always struggled with confusion over issues of birth and sexuality, since their founding figure had a virgin for a mother and a god for a father, but no descendants we know of, though there have been hints.  In short, supernaturalism collides with human reality.

One of the first -- and most brilliant -- bits of mental footwork came in dealing with the idea of a Jesus who was the Christ, who would return on a horse at the head of a cavalry that could rout Roman centurions.  (Call Mel Gibson.)  People then, as now, were given dates and deadlines and some took them seriously enough to make practical preparations.  When the dates passed, then as now, some lost their faith and others sought an explanation, which was that the return was “not of this world.”  That the battle was a “virtual” one, a struggle of inspirations, a different dimension.  This also meant, as Paul appreciated, that Christians were more than a sub-group of Jews who thought Jesus was the Messiah.  If this real (incarnated = made meat) man were translated into a virtual (spiritual) figure, the opportunities for expansion were unlimited.  

But in some ways the Christian doctrine was doomed by a merger with the very Roman Empire that had oppressed them.  (Another story that repeats through history.)  In taking on Caesar’s Rules of Order, the Roman branch of the Catholic church assumed both privileges and obligations.  (USA take notice.)  It’s hard work to maintain an empire and the Romans found that the near-deification of leaders was very helpful.  No one wants to follow a loser.

So the rule of celibacy (an anti-Caesar rule) was coupled with infallibility and the requirement of absolute obedience to the Pope.  It was a Devil’s bargain.  The only way to be so “un-human” is illusion.  (And so we leave Kansas now.)  There was still sex.  Sometimes there were probably well-hidden babies and maybe a few secret ladies if not a few “accidentally” deceased.  But one strategy was partners who were obedient and powerless, who could be pulled into the family business (Mafia), and who would NOT get pregnant.  Boys.

You can’t make an omelet or even eggs benedict without breaking eggs (babies) and here we are with another semi-secret scandal that has escaped (hatched): the sexual abuse of boys.   I don’t know where dead Popes are before they are sainted -- a kind of Limbo, like unbaptised babies?  But I know how John-Paul, assuming he’s not in Hell, can become a saint for sure.  One of the proofs for sainthood is an act of healing.  All he has to do is to heal every boy infected with HIV by sexually abusive priests.

If it turns out that if John-Paul is not in a position to perform miracles, Benedict could do a lot of good.  I recommend these courses of action:

1. Immediately rescind the ban on condoms.
2. Make condoms freely available in every Catholic church and rectory.
3. Devote the Vatican treasury to financing research for a cure for AIDS and to subsidized meds for low income people with AIDS, worldwide.  Much better to spend the money upfront and aggressively than to pay out huge amounts for litigation later when sued.
4.   Return to married priests as preserved in practice by Greek and Russian Orthodox churches (and in some circumstances by today’s Roman Catholic Church).  
5.   Allow gay marriages on the same terms.  (Gays are not necessarily pedophiles, who should be absolutely excluded as is now only theoretically enforced.)
6.   The polyamorous should be excluded from the priesthood on grounds that they are likely to be also polyreligionists, unsuited for the demands of a committed clergy sustained by an institutional church based on faith in one concept.
7.   Allow female priests on the same terms as males.
8.   Include in the curriculum of seminaries and their feeder all-male schools, particularly those that are residential, an overview of human sexuality.
9.   Elevate to a newly created category of sainthood all those killed by AIDS contracted from a priest.
10.   Add to the prayers of every mass, prayers for the souls of priests who prey on children.

One might argue that these policies and practices would eliminate the Roman Catholic Church as an institution.  Resisting the impulse to ask “What’s wrong with that?”  we must point out (as Protestants do) that Christianity did not begin in all-male splendor and arrogance like the Roman Empire but in fact was born in congregations based in homes and community, recommending both humility and generosity.  This was the revolution powered by the personhood of Jesus, who was revolutionary and heretic in terms of the standing order of his times.  Not to accept and live out Jesus’ Gospel is not to be Christian.

There is something in humans that wants empires.  As soon as religion-based institutions are founded, unless there are efforts at prevention, there begins a drive towards empire, special classes, and the accumulation of wealth.  This is true of Hindu and Islam and Native American tribal groups.  Many worthy religious systems try to build-in ways to restrict or shape such tendencies:  jubilee, tithing, potlatches, reversals, parables, and so on.  The priests’ vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience were meant to be this kind of restraint.  If the Pope is indeed the top of the hierarchy and if a Pope like Ratzinger spent years as an enforcer of the rules of the historical institution, then his business is to be rooting out abuses, not suppressing and denying them.  This should take precedence over seeking sainthood for old friends or protecting the image of the Church.

I am aware that many priests, especially in the immediate past decades, live harsh, pinched lives, overburdened with sometimes impossible tasks and diminished resources.  I am aware that priests in Ireland have grown up in a political and economic system that has deformed and famished them.  The church should feed and console its priests as well as guiding and shielding them.  The terrible craving for power and the willingness to use little children for sex are linked.  Linked.  Entwined.