Adulterer behind me, adulterer in front of me. Both freshly unrepentant. All three of us at Mass to celebrate First Communion with our sons.
My distaste for American Catholicism spiked at that Mass, but it started long before, back before my conversion in 1991, when I was a Lutheran enamored with all things anti-Catholic, sneering contempt at every Pope and every Catholic invention like Purgatory, lustfully rejoicing with Billy “Only the Good Die Young” Joel when pure (and preferably hot) Catholic young things succumbed (alas, never to me, but to my friends, who would later tell me about it).
Don't get me wrong. I didn't approve of fornication, either, but when Catholics fell, it was for the obvious reason: their theology is so backwards, they can't distinguish between chewing gum in class and backseating their boyfriends.
Bad theology creates bad people. It was pretty clear to me.
But then I became a Catholic. I became enamored with everything anti-American Catholic.
Sitting at that Mass with the joyful adulterers (mothers, by the way, which makes it worse, no matter what the gender-equity hounds say) brought it all to the surface: I didn't like Catholicism while growing up, and I don't like it now, albeit for completely different reasons.
I liked American Catholics and their fun ways while growing up, but didn't like Catholicism as a dogma machine. After my conversion, I liked the dogma machine, but not American Catholics.
But it has always gnawed at me: If bad dogma makes bad people (and I still think it does), shouldn't good dogma make good people? St. Clement of Alexandria thought so: “He does not live rightly who does not believe rightly.”
If Catholicism has good dogma, why does it produce so many moral dogs?
I'm not just talking about ideological dissidents, by the way, those left-wing nuns that ordain each other priests and the NAMBLA priests that crave a little, you know, loosening of the sexual norms. I'm talking about Robot Dissidents: those people who go their life, somnambulist-immune from Catholic teaching and behaving in ways that the Church characterizes as gravely sinful, but still calling themselves Catholic, taking the Eucharist, apparently oblivious to the logical inconsistency between the two acts.
I detest the Robot Dissidents, the folks who don't even seem to know they're dissenting: the kinds who cheat on their spouses, then show up in church, then go back and do it again without a second thought or second visit to the confessional. Why be Catholic? Go worship with the Wiccans, Utilitarians, and Weathermen. Better yet, start your own church. Call it “Church of the Humongous Phallus” or something else that captures your gaze. I don't care.
This isn't a moral thing with me. It's a logic thing.
This is America. Get laid, get drunk, greed for money, stomp on the poor. I don't care. In fact, I applaud the agnostics and atheists that do such things: They're living the godless life, consistent with Dostoyevsky's observation that without God, all things are permissible. I can respect the logical connection between their beliefs and actions.
But the people who do those things then show up in Church?
At least have the decency to cover yourself in ashes first, sit in the back row, and crawl to communion. I might then believe you're sorry.
Or just go to confession first. That's what I do after getting horribly drunk. It ain't that hard.
But it is hard for the person who doesn't even recognize their sins, for the person who says he's a Catholic but behaves like every schmo on the street, for the person who has some vague notion of sin but doesn't apply it his life, for that schizophrenic animal that is the American Catholic.
