The Problem of community implosion

The real problem for the Church goes back to the schism when the gnostics were driven underground and the Church was taken over by a professional clergy that run it as an extension of the Roman Empire.

Thus the resulting organization continues to be more Roman than Catholic. The empire substituted the kissing of Cesar’s ring for the kissing of the Pope’s ring. But the disease is still the same. Hierarchy with no regard for its own community.

 

A Pope with Cajones?

Even though he tried to blame the crisis on “secularization” (as if the world wasn’t “secularized” when catholic priests were profitting from the slave trade in the Congo after their conversion in the 1600s there), well he’s still talking about it, which is more than any other Pope in 2000 years has done. This is still progress.

Ultimately no real change can come without essentially “killing” the priesthood as we know it. We need a priesthood that comes from the people, that is made of women and men.

And with the EGC there is already this, a life affirming thelemicism replacing the cultus of the dying sun, which we know is based on misconception.

So perhaps the Romans are best left to rot to death, but the problem is you still have bishops out there doing the same old thing, and in some states they make it legally easy to do this.

 

the pope’s sort of apology

There’s still a mystery here that hasn’t been cleared up. Where were the policies set? Cardinal Mahoney did apologize for “not taking the issue seriously,” claiming it was a grave mistake. But to what extent does the Vatican set these policies, to what extent are the Bishops and Cardinals simply following orders from the Vatican.

What was the benefit to keeping these abusers around? Certainly they benefited from no one wanting to look too long or closely at their behavior. There was also the mistaken belief that prayer and therapy could turn these guys around. The abusers also worked under a cloak of lies and secrecy, but all of the Church hierarchy also aided and abetted this secrecy and thus the ability of these guys to keep abusing.

Now that the Church has seen the fear of God in the US court system, maybe things will change. But maybe not, maybe this is just one large PR move, we’ll see if any policies actually change or if its all window dressing on the Titanic.

 

A Critical view of the Pope’s visit

I’d like to quote from wsws.org, who seem to have the most incisive view of the meat of the visit:

http://wsws.org/articles/2008/apr2008/pope-a21.shtml

The papal visit had one major institutional crisis to deal with—the long-running scandal over the sexual abuse of children by thousands of Roman Catholic priests. This dimension of the visit brought another display of media adulation and ideological reaction.

The press portrayed Benedict—who adamantly rebuffed sex abuse victims for years while serving John Paul II—as deeply moved by their suffering. In his initial remarks about the scandal, however, as he flew to the US on board his personal jet, the pope bemoaned only the damage done to the Church, not to the victims themselves. The US Catholic Church has paid out more than $2 billion in legal settlements to some 13,000 victims, including $660 million in the Los Angeles diocese alone, and several dioceses have been compelled to file for bankruptcy.

The pope’s closed-door meeting with five sex-abuse victims was presented by Church officials and the media as a major breakthrough, although the five had been carefully vetted by the Boston archdiocese to ensure a relatively harmonious session. A spokesman for the archdiocese said the five had “ongoing relationships” with archdiocesan officials, and had “stayed engaged with the office”—i.e., they had remained loyal to the hierarchy despite the Vatican’s continued defense of Cardinal Bernard Law. As Boston archbishop, Law protected priest-abusers and allowed them to transfer from parish to parish when exposed, rather than removing them from the priesthood.

Benedict even sought to blame the sex-abuse scandal on the excessive sexual permissiveness of modern culture, rather than the repressive practice of priestly celibacy which the Catholic Church, alone of major religious institutions, continues to enforce.

Similar sex-abuse cases have been reported in countries as diverse as the United States, Poland, Mexico, Ireland and Austria. This suggests that the common denominator is not the culture of the specific countries, but the atmosphere prevalent within the Catholic Church as an institution.

As the World Socialist Web Site noted when the sex abuse scandal in the United States first came to widespread public attention, some six years ago, “Every aspect of the sexual abuse crisis—the pain and suffering of the victims, the misery and sexual dysfunction of the priests, the callousness of Church officials—suggests a diseased institution whose practices and beliefs run counter to elementary human needs and inevitably breed the unhealthiest of psycho-sexual climates. The Catholic Church’s essential being flies in the face of modern society.”

 

Who are the Episcopi vagantes

There is more than one catholic church, which most people don’t realize. There is an underground tradition of protest Bishops, who started their own branches of the Church, in rebellion against the abuses of their time.

Despite the fact that the Church has produced luminaries such as Saint Francis, far too often they have produced monsters.

The Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica

Here’s a nice quote from the Wikipedia article on the Wandering Bishops:

Episcopi vagantes (singular: episcopus vagans) are persons who have been consecrated as Christian bishops outside the structures and canon law of the established churches. Many of them are, or claim to be, Roman Catholic. The term is Latin, and means “wandering bishops”.

There are two particularly well-known groups of contemporary and historical episcopi vagantes:

• those who emerged from the Old Catholic movement from the late nineteenth century onwards;
• those deriving their orders from consecrations performed by the Vietnamese Archbishop Pierre Martin Ngô Đình Thục for Traditionalist Catholic groups in the late twentieth century.

Members and clergy of Independent Catholic, Old Catholic, Continuing Anglican and similar groups usually see the term episcopi vagantes as pejorative.

 

why won’t the pope apologize

Not this Pope, he’s declared the issue of clergy abuse closed, even though there are still many lawsuits around the US, and you have states like Ohio which have legislatively dis-empowered victims or potential victims.

In Los Angeles the changes are real. Cardinal Mahoney has actually made a sincere, personal apology, I received one myself and he really made a 180 degree change from when I first approached the Church years ago with the issue, when I was offered to go on trial under Canon Law!

This time the experience was completely different, and it looks like there’s a permanent change in consciousness where it comes to child safety. However you still have altar boys and girls, so you can still have opportunities for issues. What you see is a much larger mass team, so when I go to mass in LA, I don’t see just a priest and altar boys as at the church where I was abused.

Instead you now see lots of lay adults up there, so you don’t see priests being left alone with kids like you did back in 1980s.

The Cardinal now understands that a victim can’t just ask for healing from God, that the experience is truly devastating and really throws a young person viciously out of whack, so there’s a new level of understanding of the viciousness of these crimes. LA has been forced to face the situation and knows that if it doesn’t protect their kids, the legal system will shut the Church down in LA.

Its too bad that they didn’t follow Jesus’ own teachings about the sacredness of children and weren’t protecting us all along, but as the saying goes, better late than never.

The current Pope’s policies in his previous job setup the situation. Since he has diplomatic immunity, he could just apologize, and even if he admitted wrong doing, he couldn’t be prosecuted.

He doesn’t get it, and the vatican don’t get it, that if they apologize for their very real and very bad policies, they won’t turn things around. Ultimately they will cause the church to slowly suicide itself to death.

 

A secret war for the Soul of the planet

Why is it that abusers seemed to be given free reign to abuse without fear of excommunication or even turned back into laety? There is a phenomena that occultists call the black brotherhood, or the black lodge.

This is something very specific, its certainly not the black panthers or afrocentricity. It uses the term “black” in a special sense, as in the mole on God’s face. Its a person who has made a certain level of spiritual progress, but then something goes wrong.

George Lucus immortalized this in his Star Wars saga, where you see a young and innocent, but perhaps a bit unbalanced Anakin Skywalker become transformed into the ruthless black brother Darth Vader.

He made some progress, he was becoming a Jedi Knight, but in the middle of the process he dropped and and completely “lost it.” His ego got in the way and he chose to literally put a wall of steel around his ego.

So the problem that the RC Church has is that is has some Darth Vaders in its midst, because its so easy to wind up like that. When you combine power politics with religious office and attempts at spiritual attainment, you have a dangerous mix.

Some people avoid problems, but ultimately a life lived without genuine Gnosis is a life lived in abject misery. Those too afraid to work towards the Gnosis are damned by their own fear. Fear is failure, fear causes the subconscious mind to produce the object of the fear, an irrational fear can even manifest the irrational into physical reality.

Fear of devil worshipers caused the inquisition to become the very devils they feared, burning countless innocent women to death as scapegoats for largely environmental or public health issues which were ill understood in those superstitious days.

 

The Pope largely ignores the abuse crisis

Yes we’ll see if the Pope has anything to say about the abuse crisis. There is a policy page that is pretty comprehensive.

However to truly reconcile with the survivors of religious abuse at the hands of his Church, he needs to make a personal apology for the mistakes in policy and enforcement that he made as Cardinal Ratzinger. Cardinal Mahoney has made true apologies for his failures as Bishop and Cardinal, however to a great extent he was simply following the policy that had been put in place by Cardinal Ratzinger as the head of doctrinal enforcement. He was far quicker to defrock Fr. Matthew Fox for unconventional theology than he has ever been to defrock a pedophile priest. Why is this? He won’t answer that, except that perhaps the Europeans who run the Church simply have an antiquated view of the problem. Well at least locally we’re seeing the leadership at least pledging to turn things around. Whether we see the Vatican actively fight these reforms remains to be seen.

At least the Papal website acknowledges the issue, but we need a personal apology from Pope Benedict that as Cardinal Ratzinger he made some terrible mistakes in policy which lead hundreds of thousands or more children to be needlessly abused, destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands.

Even though he claims to be a Pope of Peace, in fact his policies led to a recent blood bath even more horrific than the witch burnings of old, the destruction of the children.

 

standard roman catholic doctrine and magick

Yes, although some people in the church, even very high up, understand that magick is not “the occult” or the “summoning of demons” but a sophisticated and very ancient branch of the psychological sciences, unfortunately the current church leadership chooses the path of ignorance.

Its understandable. The Church has so heavily invested in the idea of “Jesus is God,” in the whole mythology of the crucification.

The Nag Hammadi texts have really changed the level of understanding of the teachings of Jesus. The Gospel of Thomas is dangerous to some in the Church. The Sun God myth is a convenient tool for social control.

However the Church doesn’t have to be in the business of social control. That has nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus, in as much as they enthrone kings and work to keep the people docile in their misery, carrying the crosses thrown on their back by feudalism (monarchical or corporate).

This is what the Catholic Encyclopedia has to say about magick:

Magic as a practice finds no place in Christianity, though the belief in the reality of magical powers has been held by Christians and individual Christians have been given to the practice. Two main reasons account for the belief: first, ignorance of physical laws. When the boundary between the physically possible and impossible was uncertain, some individuals were supposed to have gained almost limitless control over nature. Their souls were attuned to the symphony of the universe; they knew the mystery of numbers and in consequence their powers exceeded the common understanding. This, however, was natural magic.

But, secondly, belief in the frequency of diabolical interference with the forces of nature led easily to belief in real magic. The early Christians were emphatically warned against the practice of it in the “Didache” (v, 1) and the letter of Barnabas (xx, 1). In fact it was condemned as a heinous crime. The danger, however, came not only from the pagan world but also from the pseudo-Christian Gnostics. Although Simon Magus and Elymas, that child of the devil (Acts 13:6 sqq.) served as deterrent examples for all Christians, it took centuries to eradicate the propensity to magic. St. Gregory the Great, St. Augustine, St. Chrysostom, and St. Ephraem inveighed against it. A more rational view of religion and nature had hardly gained ground, when the Germanic nations entered the Church and brought with them the inclination for magic inherited from centuries of paganism. No wonder that during the Middle Ages wizardry was secretly practiced in many places notwithstanding innumerable decrees of the Church on the subject. Belief in the frequency of magic finally led to stringent measures taken against witchcraft.

Catholic theology defines magic as the art of performing actions beyond the power of man with the aid of powers other than the Divine, and condemns it and any attempt at it as a grievous sin against the virtue of religion, because all magical performances, if undertaken seriously, are based on the expectation of interference by demons or lost souls. Even if undertaken out of curiosity the performance of a magical ceremony is sinful as it either proves a lack of faith or is a vain superstition. The Catholic Church admits in principle the possibility of interference in the course of nature by spirits other than God, whether good or evil, but never without God’s permission. As to the frequency of such interference especially by malignant agencies at the request of man, she observes the utmost reserve.

Well, they just have it wrong. Magick is not about powers other than the divine. Being made not only in the image of, but the substance of the divine, when we learn about ourselves we learn about the divine, and vice versa. Magick is simply and ancient and poweful branch of psychological science, the science of knowing one’s self. No invocation of “dark forces,” no, its mostly the practice of yoga, meditation, and uplifting ritual designed to put one in touch with one’s higher self.

Certainly there are abusive persons who use magick to try to control other people, but we have to deal with that all the time, its also called advertising!

The magick of the Cabala is about a practical form of gnostic technique to come to understand God through direct experience. This is very dangerous to those who have invested in the idea that God is unknowable and totally separate from Man. The more sophisticated Catholic view in some circles could ultimately be seen as Pantheism, that God is everywhere all the time, within and without at the same time. This is closer to science’s understanding of the universe than worshiping Jesus as a God. Teachers like Jesus are sent here to inspire us, not for us to bow down and worship as idols.

 

The Gnostic part of the Roman Catholic Catechism

Ways of Coming to Know God

31

Created in God’s image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of “converging and convincing arguments,” which allow us to attain certainty about the truth.