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04/02/2005: "On the Eve of Wojtyla"
On the Eve of the passing of a great scholar, a great hero, and a great reformer, my first instinct is to joke.
I was raised Roman Catholic.
Now, there are people who are going to respond, "I, too, was raised catholic." No, no, no . . .
I was raised Roman Catholic.
I was taught to believe that mere 'catholics' were going to hell. I was raised to believe that The Pope is God. The Pope for Roman Catholics is the most perfect divine and human emissary, hand picked by God, from whose will His will will come. The Pope's the dude. He gets the cool hat, he gets the popemobile, and (oh, yeah!) and an independent country, .17 square miles, with no worry for defense of borders.
I was confirmed a Catholic in the sixth grade. Archbishop Anthony Bevilacqua had just become Cardinal at the time. And it was in (what seemed for an sixth grader) his first act as Cardinal, I confirmed my commitment to the very religion which exists as the last great remnant of the Middle Ages, feudalism, and the Holy Roman Empire.
I was raised Roman Catholic.
I often still have the urge to 'joke' about religion, as it is fashionable in academic circles to do so. My discoveryies have brought me odd teachers. I was enthused when I found such people as Feuerbach and (and more popularly by) Nietzsche, in that there is a fantastic Weltgeist which believes in freedom, in possibility, in hope. At an early age, I decided that this religion is not for me. I found philosophy because it allowed me the freedom to transcend the ideology that I was spoon fed. What ideology?
- America. Freedom. War.
Disney. the NASDAQ. Work.
Religion. Sex. Violence.
I never got it. I never got the cultural form that I was born into.
In my early studies in philosophy, I used to be a rabid atheist: I used to argue that people should not say "God Bless You," when someone sneezed. When on occasion I would read Locke or Hobbes, I would have to think "Science!" loudly in my mind when my eyes got to the word "God" on the page. I refused to read a book for a course because the first three words were "The Pagan Aristotle . . . "
I was raised to believe that this man instantiated the god that I have since denied.
This is all a roundabout way of remembering a great man who passed today. He tried to give us value in this moral desert we try to call capitalism. He tried to give us meaning in a world totally devoid.
A great influence on me, Mary T. Clark, and another, Graham Greene, taught me to understand catholicism in a new ways, ways that allowed me to understand what it means to be a young Karol Wojtyla, a philosophy graduate student, and, to (I dunno . . .) re-think the way religion is done.
Vatican II is in the same spirit as "God is the opiate of the masses," and "God is Dead," in that it has allowed the cultural form to loosen up a bit, to lead us from the 1950's to the 1970's, to allow us to be here having the freedom to choose religion or to not. And the late Holy Father, this dead pope, was instrumental in this great re-thinking, to ultimately making God personal to people's lives.
I just chose not. But one is tempted, as I was, to joke. "But," you say, "we are liberal, we are freethinking, so of course we are atheists!"
I'm not an atheist. I'm just not yet convinced.
