1208

 Thursday, December 8, 2022

Feast  of  the Immaculate Conception

In bed at 10, awake @ 6, up at 6:30, 3 or 4 pss, 1 snifter of cognac, and some IC discomfort, not pain.  32 degrees, high of 36 predicted.

Blessed Pio Nono, Mariolatry, Impregnation  Today is the day many practicing Catholics go to Mass (a 'holy day of obligation") to celebrate the wrong thing.  They think it's a celebration of Mary BVM being impregnated by the Holy Ghost so as to produce the ManGod without the necessity of semen and sperm.  Once at Mass, they will be reminded by the priest that no, that celebration is the Feast of the Annunciation, which will be observed in March.  Today's feast celebrates the fact that Mary, though conceived by the normal union of her father's sperm with her mother's egg, was spared the burden of Original Sin which infects every other human being since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.  Mary's primal sinlessness goes along with her purity, another word for chastity or virginity, the notion that she not only gave birth to Jesus without the necessity of carnal relations with a man, to wit, her husband Joseph, she also never had sexual relations with him to produce those bothersome 'brothers' and 'sisters' of Jesus referred to in the New Testament.  They are explained away as Joseph's children from a prior marriage, or as cousins.  Some has explained them as 'half-siblings' on the theory that Joseph and the BVM consummated their marriage after Jesus was born, but that theory was disfavored by those who wished Mary to be "ever-virgin."  It's all very messy and most Christians do themselves the favor of simply not thinking about it.  In any event, the Immaculate Conception is not about Jesus' conception and birth, it is about his mother's conception and the intrinsic sinfulness that Adam and Eve passed down to the rest of us.  

The Church has long been concerned about the general tendency of men and women to interact with one another carnally.  It was clearly important to the evangelist Luke to have Jesus the only human being in the history of the species born without the necessity of a male sperm interacting with a female egg.  How could the Son of God also be the son of a blue-collar carpenter and his teenage bride?  Much better to have God Himself, the Big G, impregnate the human who would bear his Son. (Don't get confused by all those pagan stories of gods having sex with humans; they're irrelevant.) And best to keep the Divine Impregnation a secret from the world for the period of the pregnancy and another 30 years or so, except for the Magi and a guy named Simeon, who praised the Big G and asked to die as soon as he recognized what had happened.  God's ways are not Man's ways.

It was the redoubtable indefatigable Pope Pius IX, or Pio Nono, who in 1854 declared the Immaculate Conception a DOGMA of the Church, not just a theory or a tradition or even a doctrine but rather a DOGMA, doubt it at your own peril.  He was a bit of a Mariolator himself, supposedly raised that way by his mother who was, as we would say in the Church, "devoted to Mary."  It's a nice way of referring to what, despite all the explanations to the contrary, is the problem of polytheism in a professedly monotheistic religion.  It starts with the "mystery" of the Trinity, the Three in One Godhead, but it is compounded by the status of Mary in Christian and especially Catholic cosmology.  Officially, Mary is never adored, only venerated but in practice, it is often Mary who gets all the attention, not the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.   It is Mary who makes appearances on the planet Earth to the faithful, not Jesus.  It is Mary who many Catholics pray to, not Jesus.  "Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thine intercession was left unaided.  Inspired by this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, my mother; to thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy mercy hear and answer me.  "Amen.  Adoration, veneration, iceberg, Goldberg.

The Hippopotamus by T. S. Eliot

The broad-backed hippopotamus

Rests on his belly in the mud;

Although he seems so firm to us

He is merely flesh and blood. 

Flesh and blood is weak and frail

Susceptible to nervous shock'

While the True Church can never fail

For it is based on a rock.

At mating time the hippo's voice

Betrays inflections hoarse and odd,

But every week we hear rejoice

The Church as being one with God.

BTW, Pius IX who made it a religious duty for Catholics to profess belief in the Immaculate Conception, drove the point home later, at the 1st Vatican Council in 1869-70,  with his pushing of the DOGMA of Papal Infallibility on matters of Faith and Morals, when issued ex cathedra.  Pius was nothing if not self-assured.  The best thing to come out of Vatican I and the myth of papal infallibility was the opposition it stirred in a Catholic British nobleman (not many of those) Lord Actor who wrote in a letter his famous truth: "I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King, unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power . . . Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority."  I note that this famous quote is very often, perhaps most often, misquoted as "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."  Acton was correct, I think, is saying only that "power tends to corrupt" whereas "absolute power corrupts absolutely."  Much of human relationships consist of power relationships, where one person has power and another doesn't.  Parent-child is I suppose the simplest example.  The exercise of power can ennoble an actor as well as corrupt him; 'it all depends,' as we say.  It was only absolute power that Acton says, without a qualifier, corrupts, power like that that Pius IX sought at Vatican I and that Donald Trump seeks when he urges 'termination' of the Constitution and his reinstallation as 'the Decider' [pace George W. Bush}

One last point about the Blessed Virgin Mary,  the Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, perpetual virginity, the Church and sex.  The Marian doctrines and traditions and dogmas all fit in nicely with the Church's attitude towards sex and sexuality.  In a word, they were against it.  I remarked on this in the memoir I put together some years ago:

     "I remember the prayers recited by rote and in unison and I remember the nun’s large rosary beads, worn as a cincture, clacking as they moved.  In June of 1950, as I approached my 9th birthday and entering 4th grade, Pius XII canonized the Church’s youngest ‘saint and martyr,’ St. Maria Goretti.  Maria was stabbed to death in 1902 at age 11 years, 9 months, and 21 days, by Alessandro Serenelli, a 20-year-old neighbor who attempted to rape her.  She resisted at the cost of her life.  This terrible crime was a cause celèbre in Italy and was picked up by some Church people as evidence of what was wrong with Modernism and Worldliness (Alessandro) and of the value and the primacy of Purity (Maria.)  Maria’s canonization was more significant than most because she was made not only an official saint but also an official martyr.  “Martyrs” were traditionally those who were killed “for the Faith.”  They were the Christians in the Coliseum, the Vietnamese martyrs, and the like. Alessandro killed Maria not because she was a Catholic or a Christian, but because she refused to “put out.”  Designating this young victim of murder and attempted rape a martyr carried the message not that sexual assault was evil, a given, but that sex was evil.  It was better for Maria to suffer the fatal penetration of 14 stab wounds than to suffer the unwanted but nonlethal sexual penetration. Maintenance of virginity was exalted over maintenance of life.  The ‘sex is bad’  message was not lost on those of us growing up in the American, which is to say Irish Catholic Church.  Pictures of St. Maria Goretti joined pictures of St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower who entered the convent at age 14 and died of tuberculosis, a virgin, at age 24, on the walls of St. Leo Grammar School and countless other Catholic schools around the world.

The Chapel of Love by William Blake

I went to the Garden of Love

And saw what I never had seen;

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut

And "Thou shalt not" writ over the door,

So I turned to the Garden Love

That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tombstones where flowers should be;

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires.

I cannot write of Maria Goretti and Alessandro Serenelli without thinking of my mother and [her rapist] James Hartmann.  My mother suffered slashes rather than deep punctures and Hartmann, unlike Serenelli, had his way with her.  If she had resisted unto death and he had killed her with his knife, as he did with Gracelyn Bush, would she have become St. Mary Clausen?  The answer clearly is ‘no,’ because Mary, unlike Maria, was not a virgin.  Mary Clausen, unlike her namesake the BVM, was not a virgin.  Mary Clausen, unlike the primitive church “virgin martyrs,”  was not a virgin.  She was 25, married with two children, and living in the world when she was assaulted, not a child like Maria when she was killed or an adolescent like Therese when she entered the convent.  So my mother, as a woman living in a dangerous and complicated and inhospitable world was hardly a candidate for sainthood in the Church, even if she had died fighting James Hartmann and his knife.  The Church prefers virgins and celibates and assorted wackos for sainthood, not moms and dads."

Notorious American fop and member of the College of Cardinals Raymond Leo Burke, former bishop of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and archbishop of St. Louis, MO, and former member of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, notorious for his very expensive clerical garb: robes, trains, lacy gowns, etc.  The subject of a piece by Mike Barnacle in The Daily Beast aptly entitled "Meet Cardinal Raymond Burke, Catholicism’s Most Offensive Mansplainer.''   "Cardinal Raymond Burke is a 66-year-old guy who lives in Rome, dresses like Queen Elizabeth, and talks like someone who majored in misogyny at some bogus, backwoods, Bible-banging tent school. Until Pope Francis stripped him of the powerful Vatican post Pope Benedict had handed him, Burke behaved like the Catholic Church’s version of Ted Cruz, operating with an ego and an attitude that proclaimed him to always be right on matters of doctrine and dogma. "