Cultural Catholics
Maureen Dowd righteously plays More-Catholic-Than-Thou in today’s New York Times op-eds on the topic of the Roman Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal. Some of Ms. Dowd’s criticisms are fairly made (i.e., pedophilia has damaged the Church’s reputation; certain individuals covered up these crimes). However, her words belie her Catholicism.
Kathryn Jean Lopez does a nice general takedown of Ms. Dowd’s polemic over at NRO. Go read it. It’s good stuff.
But what really caught ‘Puter’s eye were these two nuggets of Ms. Dowd’s wisdom:
“The powerful symbolism of the priest turning the Host into the body of Christ cracked like an egg.”
and
“The priest was always a revered figure, the embodiment of Christ changing water into wine. (Older parishioners took it literally.)”
In these two short sentences, Ms. Dowd admits for the world to see that she is in no meaningful sense Roman Catholic. She has affirmatively stated she denies transubstantiation (the actual changing of bread and wine to the body and blood of Christ), one of the central tenets of the Roman Catholic faith. Ms. Dowd believes in consubstantiation, which is a Protestant idea, incompatible with the Roman Catholic teachings on the Eucharist. If one does not believe in transubstantiation and yet believes in Christ, one is a Protestant, not a Roman Catholic.
Ms. Dowd is what we call a cultural Catholic: someone who was raised Catholic who no longer meaningfully follows Church teachings, but likes the identity. There’s nothing wrong with that, but Ms. Dowd should refrain from pretending she is something she is not.
Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.
’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.
The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.
His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.
He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.
Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.
‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.