Genuine loonacy is a thing to be loved and treasured, and it being Sunday, it's time for a little theological loonacy.
Everybody has bees in bonnet, buzzing away, and sometimes the bees can be splendid. Repetition is a favourite device, as with composers seeking to take a musical score to a pounding climax. So Phillip Jensen in Hearing the Voice of Satan in May tells us about people speaking with the voice of Satan:
They may be leading academics or churchmen, teachers of another religion, actors or journalists; the devil is not discriminatory in whom he gets to tell his lies - the more high profile and popular the person the more likely to be used by Satan to lie to the public.
And then in I am the Antichrist in June Jensen reminds us:
Jeeves, fetch the bee keeper. The bees are exceedingly restless and noisy and vexatious and worrisome, and quite possibly are in cahoots with Satan, and Satan is all around us (and for more From the Dean pieces, written by Phillip Jensen in his role of Dean of Sydney at St Andrew's Cathedral, go here).
But here's the trouble with the nepotic Jensen and the like. The intertubes is full of people with biblical bees in their bonnets, and keeping track of them all is an exhausting task (and we don't even begin to contemplate scientologists and extreme fundamentalists of the Islamic kind).
Take Cardinal Pell - please someone take Cardinal Pell, because Pell holds down a regular spot in the Sunday Telegraph, whereby you can get an insight into antediluvian Catholic conservative thinking.
Right now Sydney-siders are undoubtedly reading the freshest thoughts of Pell, but I'm too stingy, and anyway refuse to buy Murdoch publications, so let's head off to the back catalogue here.
A couple of weeks ago, he was Cardinal Pell, art critic, in Archibald Finalists, delivering his take on the winner:
Margaret Olley was also the subject of Sir William Dobell's prize winning Archibald portrait in 1949 and the two paintings show how styles and taste have changed. Quilty's portrait does have insight, but it sets out to be rough and crude. Dobell might be a finalist today, but Quilty would not have made the cut 62 years ago.
Is Pell completely obtuse, or simply unaware that the chocolate box Pellists of the day took William Dobell to court for winning the Archibald Prize with a painting of Joshua Smith, with the claim that the painting was a caricature and not a portrait?
Dobell won the court case but his confidence in his art was destroyed. After the court case in 1943, Dobell came to Wangi to escape the ‘notoriety’ the case had brought. He was nervously exhausted and unable to paint. (here)
And what are we to make of the notion that Quilty wouldn't have made the cut 62 years ago, and is rough and crude, as opposed to clever and dextrous and with an awareness of paint and light, the prerequisites of any good painter?
Given the conservatism and provincialism extant in Australia at the time, Picasso or van Gogh wouldn't have made the cut either. So what?
And what to make of this opening par?
Nobody could claim that the finalists each year in the Archibald Prize for portrait paintings give us an accurate snap shot into the Australian soul, despite many of the artists relying heavily on photographs.
Well I guess nobody could claim that reading Cardinal Pell gives us an accurate snap shot or insight into the Australian soul, but he certainly gives us an understanding of current conservative thinking (and if you want to see the Archibald finalists, here they are).
Take Pell's piece on Priests last Sunday - please, someone take it somewhere.
After the fracas involving Bishop William Morris of Toowoomba (Vatican forces outspoken Qld bishop to retire), for daring to suggest the Catholic church be more open towards ordaining married men and women to counter the looming shortage of priests, Pell offers up some hearty oppositional blather which follows the official line.
I am not in favour of abandoning mandatory celibacy for priests in the Latin rite (or tradition) of the Catholic Church. The Orthodox Churches, although their bishops are unmarried, and the Anglican and Protestant Churches all have married clergy. Despite these many counter examples, I believe Catholic vitality and identity would be radically weakened by such a change.
Which of course begs the question of the clever switcheroo by the Pope in allowing Anglican converts to Catholicism to stay married - and priestly - as a way of sticking it to the Anglican church (Pope allows married Anglicans to become Catholic priests in bid to tempt them to defect).
There's more about this curious device - the personal ordinariate - in its wiki, and in particular details on the rules in relation to married former Anglican clergy and rules on celibacy in this section (the wiki has all the signs of a conservative Catholic editorial hand at work).
The wondrous thing about all this fine Jesuitical logic - of the kind big and little endians know only too well - is the hypocrisy it offers:
Being a spouse and a parent are wonderful vocations, life-giving physically and usually life-giving emotionally and spiritually. To do these tasks properly takes considerable time. Priesthood is also a full-time job, when taken seriously.
Uh huh. So know we know that Anglican convert priests by definition are simply incapable of taking the priesthood as a serious full-time job, a bit like inner city trendies trying to be solid suburban citizens.
The Catholic Church is different, primarily because of its unmarried priests, brothers and nuns. It is also better because of them.
Sssh, and not a word about the way it's been tainted by those cross-bred Anglican half-castes ...
The going does not get better when you squander your assets.
Squander your assets? Is that the same as spilling your seed?
Well indeed it might, if an earlier part of the writ is examined:
Some Catholic communities are unfortunately no longer life-giving. Everything looks good on the surface, but when no young people step forward to lead and serve across years or decades, we have to ask whether these communities have become contraceptive, so arranged that new life is impossible to conceive.
Eek, contraceptives - possibly even condoms - in the church. And it gets worse. Remember that other line?
I believe Catholic vitality and identity would be radically weakened by such a change.
Well you can see where all this is heading. It's yet another reading from the holy writ of Dr. Strangelove, and the most catholic thoughts of General Ripper, as amended and enhanced by the pond:
Ripper: do you realize that in addition to fluoridated water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream and the Holy Communion wafer? Wafer, Mandrake, the Catholic church's wafer?
Mandrake: Good Lord.
Ripper: You know when fluoridation first began?
Mandrake: No. No, I don't, George. No.
Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty six. Nineteen fortysix, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your postwar commie Anglican married convert conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard core commie and cucumber sandwich married Anglican convert works.
Mandrake: George ... George, listen, tell me, ah... when did you first become, well, develop this theory.
Ripper: Well, I ah, I I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of meeting life-denying Catholic communities.
Mandrake: sighs fearfully
Ripper: Yes a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. A radical draining and weakening of Catholic vitality and identity, Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly: loss of essence, a squandering of assets.
Mandrake: Yes...
Ripper: I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Married Anglican converts ... married Anglican converts sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid married Anglican converts, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.
And so on.
Meanwhile, you might care to contemplate whether there's any difference between the religious police in Saudi Arabia, or the Taliban, and the activities of conservative Catholics , dubbed the temple police, as outlined in Catholic church that opens its arms to gays divides faithful:
Three or four times this year, groups of up to 50 Catholics have gathered to pray outside St Joseph's in Newtown during its gay-friendly Mass.
Sometimes they stop worshippers as they leave the service, demanding to know if they took Communion. If confronted by the parish priest, Father Peter Maher, they recite the rosary. On other occasions, one or two enter the church mid-service, and watch from the back.
And so on, as the fundie thought police, the temple police, go about their persecutions and their prosecutions, and their snitching to Rome.
That's where the comedy of fundamentalism and Pellism becomes something else. Old fashioned Satanism of the kind that brought us the Inquisition and the witches of Salem ...
Speaking of persecution, if you're still not satisfied - as if Jensen and Pell weren't enough by themselves - you can also find rich pickings any day of the week at the Sydney Anglican site, here.
Read and marvel with Michael Jensen, for example, in Is God a Monster, as he tries to wriggle out of Deuteronomy:
... as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them-- the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites-- just as the Lord your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God.
Oh the dancing on the head of a pin that follows is truly marvellous, and it seems god was only talking about a football match - you know like smashing Collingwood because they're a bunch of gherkins - and utterly destroyed doesn't mean utterly destroyed, and anyhoo there were probably no civilians hanging around and ...
Next week, Michael Jensen explains how god only wiped out the entirety of humanity apart from Noah and family and sundry two be two creatures because the rabble were fanatical Collingwood supporters, and there's simply no room for that kind of heretic in the world ...
Oh there's only so much time in the world, but surely the Jensenists and the Pellists deserve a little of your time, if only because Fawlty Towers is now a little long in the tooth ...
Holocaust? Complete extermination? Annihilation? That's a laugh. Easier to find a packet of sliced hippopotamus in suitcase sauce than a decent bit of god-ordained killing in this bloody bible ... (and apologies to lovers of Waldorf salads everywhere).
Speaking of Waldorf salads, that brings us back to the United States and the way that fundamentalism there intrudes on the political debate.
Take Michele Bachmann - please someone, anyone take Bachmann - who, according to the Speculatron, belongs to the Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church of Stillwater, which maintains that the Pope is the anti-christ.
Bachmann also has a few choice words to say about evolution:
In 2006, Congresswoman Bachmann claimed “there is a controversy among scientists about whether evolution is a fact… hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel prizes, believe in intelligent design."
It's actually taken a seventeen year old blogger, one Zack Kopplin, to call out Bachmann and note that the empress is short of a few intellectual clothes (17 Year Old to Michele Bachmann: Show Me Your Nobel Laureate Scientists).
It says something about the robust nature of American democracy that Bachmann could throw her hat in the ring as a presidential candidate. I'm not sure what it says, but it sure says something.
Meanwhile, Sarah Palin continues her tour, alternately wearing a large cross (Cross pendant in D.C.) or donning the star of David in New York, just in case there might be Jews around (Sarah Palin Wears Star of David on New York Trip).
Clearly, being theologically confused, Jensen must adjudge her a Satanist.
Palin's also historically confused, mangling Paul Revere:
PALIN: He who warned, uh, the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms uh by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free and we were going to be armed. (catch the full eye glazing, mind numbing impact of the video here).
Which brings us back full circle.
Would you rather be a follower of Palin, and other conservative politicians inspired by god, Jensenism or Pellism, or would you rather be a satanic member of the inner urban elite, keenly aware of the theology of the pizza?
Yes, in New York, worship of the pizza is everywhere, and while waiting for an opera at the Lincoln centre, I recently attended a service at Café Fiorello.
(above: the holy temple of worship)The wafer was inclined to be a little salty, and over-priced and a huge serving in the American style, but it was also thin, relatively free of cheese (unlike chain pizza), and decorated with a subtle melange of ingredients which made it a worthy Sunday service, where the congregation left satisfied and in touch with their inner soul. (Pizza Wars: Keste vs. Cafe Fiorello).
Yes, there is good food in New York, if not in America, because that's where inner urban elites gather to worship, to eat pizza completely unlike the chain pizza which enticed Sarah Palin and Donald Trump to dine in Times Square.
Which at last brings us to Jon Stewart and his take on Trump eating pizza with a fork which has got the Gothamists wildly excited (Berserk Jon Stewart Shreds Trump's Pizza-Habits):
So whether you express your inner elitism through stamp collecting, or listening to the works of Motown, or enjoying art without the silliness of a Pellist perspective, or video gaming, or pizza eating, stay strong and proud.
Remember the true theological crime. Eating a pizza with a fork ...
Truly, verily, I say unto you this Sunday that this is the work of the Devil, this is Satan's doing. La forketa satanica! The tool of el Diablo ...
Now we patiently await a column from Phillip Jensen explaining how Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump are tools of Satan, and being used by Satan to tell lies to the public ....
Alternatively, bring on the rapture ...
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