Cody
Williams
Wrong Pope
In choosing the most recent pope the Catholic Church proved itself to be true to its god – Tradition. In doing so, the cardinals who chose the newly elected pontiff missed a tremendous opportunity to offer its best to humanity. They chose to perpetuate an exclusive, old-boy megalomaniac white patriarchal religious tyranny rather than open its outreach up to all humanity, as Christ did in his life and teachings.
Benedict XVI, duped the Champion of the Faith, is not much different from the other old white European men who have led the unyielding dogmatic institution for the last millennium. Benedict XVI is not expected to promote change in any of the faith’s doctrine or theology. We can’t expect that soon priests will be allowed to marry, women to be elevated to positions of leadership or physically intimate human relationships to be condoned outside of procreation. Church tradition dictates hard lines be drawn on these issues. God does not.
Religion is what man says about God. God is just God.
Tradition maintains social order, civilization’s bedrock, without which social anarchy would reign. Traditions are the standards we choose to live by instead of the fleeting whims of new ideologies. Traditions ground us. Short of genetic hard coding, mankind needs traditions to exist. Without the adherence to some traditions we get the malaise that exist in places where through war and rapid change social upheaval have dominated.
However, some traditions have too suppressed change and development, been used to oppress peoples and genders and create an unequal distributions of the world’s resources. Forcing one group’s traditions on another has led to genocides and holocaust, enslavement and exploitation, misery, poverty and heartache. Adherence to tradition is and can be a double edge sword that swings both ways.
Traditions are human creations: The letter of the law, enacted to stabilize the conditions of man.
Traditions are perpetuated by those of us in power, generally to maintain the status quo. White men have been in power in Western Civilization since the fall of the Moorish Empire seated in South Spain’s Andalusia, at the end of the twelfth century. Western traditions, ardently adhered to and spread through colonization, war and imperialism, have kept them in power. The Catholic Church has been a major purveyor those traditions.
Church leaders claim to be followers of Jesus led by the Holy Spirit when they elect Popes. Yet, Jesus Christ, it can be said, was clearly a non-traditionalist. His teaching over turned long held Jewish traditions as if they were the tables of moneychangers he turned over in the temple. Traditions often become the letter of the law in our societies. Jesus said, “The letter kills. It’s the spirit that gives life.”
The Gospel tells us that the Creator of the Universe was made flesh and dwelt among us. God, in becoming man did not come to earth as part of the power elite, protected by tradition, surrounded by pomp and circumstance. The story of Jesus starts humble, simple: a defenseless baby born in a stable to a common laborer and his wife who could not afford better accommodations. During his life Jesus mostly walked with society’s outcast, those shunned by the power elite and the rulers of the synagogue, scribes and Pharisees. After his death his body was placed in a borrowed grave.
With the election of each pope Catholic cardinals have an opportunity to recreate the message of Christ. The creator of the universe cares for all mankind, most notably the meek and humblest of us. Had they selected a pope from the developing world, Nigeria’s Bishop Arinzi for instance, breaking away from the tradition of picking white European men, further solidifying their stranglehold on the world’s political and economic power, the church, like Christ, would have demonstrated its true concern for all humanity, not just those at the top of the social economic order.
Before Christ, Jews believed salvation was exclusive, that God singly had a personal relationship with them and no other group of people on earth. This relationship, tradition held, was to be born into and maintained by committing a series of religious acts and following certain laws. Jesus not only opened salvation up to the Gentiles, he also did away with many of the traditions Jews maintained believed to solidified their relationship with God. He broke down those traditional strongholds. His new ‘inclusive’ ministry also invited in the formerly left out, the shunned, the outcasts – women, eunuchs, leapers, gentiles, pagans, the divorced -- and called them equal; equal to other Jews and equal to Him.
Omigosh!
Those cardinals would have done good by truly following in the footsteps of Christ, showing the world that the Holy Spirit moving today leads and acts just it did for Christ, non exclusive, non-elitist, non-traditional and non-racist.
© Cody Williams 2005
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