Save your soul

Eat a beaver.

No, not that brand of beaver.

You always have to go there, don’t you?

Jeez, what a bunch of filthy bastards.

No, this is filed under: “Why Catholicism cracks me up.”

OK, first appalls, and then amuses.

The Catholic faith has always struck me as, well, ridiculous.

Completely arbitrary. A Semitic faith, 100% inverted away from its original intent. “Repurposed” for a pagan audience, its basic O/S rewritten to make marketing it to its enemies easier, and then screwed on top of the hardware of the Roman Empire for reasons that were almost entirely about political expedience.

The particulars of Christ’s “divinity” and that of his family, and which books -- each contradicting the other about the basic Jebus facts, history and tenets -- written long after his death would constitute the Owner’s Manual of the Faithful...dogmatized by the show of hands of politicians and bureaucrats centuries after He died.

And we shall skip lightly over the whole 1,700 years of persecution, paranoia, forced conversion, Inquisition, corruption, warfare, looting, assassination, the Pope’s Ghettos and the breeding of anti-Semitism into bones of Western Civilization where it is still harvested like winter wheat whenever somebody needs a scapegoat.

And we shall elide gracefully past the whole notion of creepy, celibate men in dresses and funny hats telling human beings how to live, premised on the perverse notion that our most humane impulses are all screwy and we burn in Hell for ever and ever if we ever dared to lay the burdens of their bigotries down and live and love each other freely.

A Church that shelters child molesters while literally beating into its children the mantra that the Holy Writ of the Church are the inviolate Laws of God, and transgression against even the most trivial of them will be a cause for eternal suffering.

Except, of course, when they don’t.

Like when St. Pat’s day falls on a Friday.

During Lent.

And the Corned Beef Lobby brings its full, savory weight to bear on the matter.

And then my local Arch decides, hey, WTF.

Have a sammich!

Lenten Regulations >>
Friday, March 17, 2006: Optional Memorial of SAINT PATRICK: The optional memorial of SAINT PATRICK, March 17, 2006 falls on Friday of the second week of Lent. Because of this, Cardinal Francis George, O.M.I., has given a general dispensation from the norm to abstain from meat on this day. Please note that this dispensation is for Friday, March 17, 2006 only.

On this day (Friday, March 17, 2006) Catholics in the Archdiocese of Chicago who choose to make use of this general dispensation are asked to substitute another form of penance for the Lenten Friday abstinence.

Not that I object, mind you. Quite the contrary. I am terribly pleased that they have finally washed the taste of the Flat Earth out of their mouths, and can now look through telescopes at the Galilean Satellites without stomping off to beat the crap out of the nearest scientist. Also they can peer through the lens of a microscope and accept the WYSIWYGness of the microscopic Universe without freaking out ‘cause there ain’t no germs in the Bible.

And without stomping off to beat the crap out of etc.

And pleased that the Big Hat Church has largely given up on fighting Evolution, at least frontally (although as one might expect there is much theo-frottaging all over the idea of purposefulness outside of the frame Darwin provides, which doesn’t bother me overmuch since on any given day I might do so as well.)

Which tilts in the direction that, more and more -- on matters ranging from the trivial to the tragic -- the Big Hat Church has had to openly cop to the charge that they just make this shit up as they go along. Deciding on-the-fly what’ll be sinful this week and what won’t, and then unmaking those selfsame Eternal Verities as they begin to pinch.

Which, being a oddball, I was talking over with my cool, sage Mom last night when shee was up for a visit to the castle and we went out for our occassional dinner-and-politics.

Mom is always fun to be around.

A woman with a long, narrative arc from small-town, tentative, Christian girl to rebel Buddhist matriarch who her kids are always happy to see. Which means, among other things, she whispers when she swears.

Plus she often brings cookies and lemon bars that would tempt Christ off the cross, and describes the thimble-full of Scotch that she’ll nurse while we talk as “Ohhh. That’s...warming.”

And she tells a pretty good story too, so lo, as we chatted she asked me if I knew why the mighty Beaver was really a Fish.

I confessed that I did not.

“Well,” she said with a sly smile, “lemme tell you…”

And on the subject of Big Hat Church, capriciousness, she hipped me the following, which I looked up when she departed this morning, and not at all to my surprise, Mom was right.

Again.

This is the short version from wikipedia (emphasis added).

Until the 1980s, the Roman Catholic Church forbade the consumption of meat on Fridays (limited to Lent Fridays in Spain as a land of crusade). In medieval times, meat was more expensive than fish; making meat taboo forced austerity on the believers. Professional fisherman were granted favor and economic advantage for various Papal 'gifts', and hence, fish became the 'meat' officially santioned by Rome. There was no Papal condemnation for fish consumption on other days, but penant souls were required to eat fish on Fridays.

French Canadian fisheries were suffering economically until it was learned a penitant offering could be made to their local diocese, thus assuring their financial future in much the way their Roman brethren benefitted. Fish, hence, became favored by the Catholic institution rather than taboo.

As a side note, in the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church classified the tail of beavers (which is covered by a scalloped skin) as "fish" because it was a delicacy favored by the clergy. Thus, beaver tail was for some time the only non-proscribed meat allowed during Lent.

And thus hangs the Tale of the Tail of the Beaver.

Thanks, Mom.