Say What, Your Holiness?
The Pope, in Portugal, claimed abortion and gay marriage to be among the most dangerous threats on earth. Interesting.
I suspect the Pope, having a hotline to God, must have heard of this imminent gay threat from Him. Because I have to believe that in his infallible knowledge, the Pope knows Europe is on the verge of a financial catastrophe. I suspect that he has been informed by someone at the Vatican that the government in Thailand is basically a shambles and there's a real possibility of continued political violence. I suspect that he has been told by at least one or two of the American cardinals that there are hundreds of thousands of troops, American troops -- constituting the most formidable army in the world -- occupying two countries in the Middle East. I suspect someone mentioned to him that there is a hole in the earth, a mile below the ocean, which is spewing raw oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Apparently, not. It seems the Pope actually knows little about the current state of world affairs, except this one thing. He knows that for five centuries the Church has been fighting a losing battle for the soul of Western Civilization. He knows there was a time when the Church controlled every aspect of life in Europe and its political dependencies. A person was not a person until his baptism. That same could not leave earth (for the wonders of Heaven) without his last rites and a burial in dirt blessed by the Church. Anyone lucky enough to be educated recieved his education from the Church. Meanwhile, the great masses who lacked education were involved in an economy related to the building of Europe's cathedrals and feeding its pilgrims. Charity was dispensed by the Church or at its doors. It consecrated wars. And of course it defined the family in terms of the sacrament of marriage -- in so doing, it legitimized the movement of titles and property from one generation to the next. Children born outside the bonds of Church-sponsored matrimony were deemed illegitimate and often became orpans (wards of the Church) to avoid the inconvenience they might cause their "alduterous" or "fornicating" parents.
But science and the printing press began the end of the Church's grip on the lives of Europeans. With time, rational government co-opted the prerogatives of the Church. The State now issues birth certificates and death certificates. The State provides pensions and poor relief. The State provides education to the people. The State governs economic affairs. The State gives license to marry.
The Church has remained relevant under the ascendancy of the State so long as it has been allowed to exercise cultural control over marriage. This relevance is now become marginal, at best. When the State moves from honoring the Church's notion of marriage to honoring its people's notions of marriage, then the Church will become finally and completely irrelevant. The Pontiff, if he knows nothing else, knows that the advent of gay marriage is not truly a threat to the world. But it is an absolute threat to his Church.
