Salon: Why I can't mourn the pope

[regnaD kciN]

My mother stopped going to church a few months before she died. It was an odd time for a lifelong Catholic with terminal breast cancer to forgo the solace of Mass, but one day it wasn't solace anymore. She came home on a Sunday in early 1976 in tears. Looking for spiritual comfort, time with God, transcendence as she approached death, she'd instead been subjected to a sermon that was a fiery antiabortion harangue, in which the priest proclaimed that pro-choice Catholics weren't Catholic at all and were going straight to hell.

The sermon enraged my mother, even though I don't think she considered herself a pro-choice Catholic. I'm a little ashamed that I don't know for sure, but sometime in the early 1970s we stopped talking politics. I knew she was the house conservative, since my father's politics were well to her left. Still, she was appalled by the church's turn to blatant political campaigning on culture-war issues, especially abortion, at the expense of dispensing spiritual wisdom and comfort. I've thought about my mother all weekend as I found myself unable to mourn Pope John Paul II. Although he didn't reach the Vatican until two years after she died, when he got there he promoted leaders just like the antiabortion zealot who so wounded my mother. He cracked down on all dissent and toughened the church's teachings on issues of sexuality -- which happen to be issues of love -- which even my somewhat conservative Catholic mother was wise enough to know might require different answers for different hearts.

I don't completely know why my mother snapped on that Sunday when she heard the antiabortion sermon. Maybe she worried the priest was right, and even if she went to heaven she wouldn't see her pro-choice husband and daughter there. I just know that she was crushed, for that afternoon anyway. But I should note that my mother didn't die without the church. She'd befriended enough priests over the years that they came and said Mass at her bedside, gave her communion, provided her the last sacrament, the anointing of the sick. And they didn't trouble her with talk about abortion.

So I've watched the long goodbye to John Paul II a little aghast at the uniform tone of celebration, as though this pope had not presided over the shutting down of hope for so many Catholics with his 26-year reign. I applaud his commitment to youth, to the poor, to the Third World; his support for a Palestinian state and his opposition to the Iraq war. But I abhor what he did to the church itself. The priesthood is shrinking, thanks at least in part to the prohibition against marriage and against ordaining women. The sex-abuse scandal, which he did far too little to address -- and refused to directly apologize for -- drove more people away. And he enshrined a leadership cadre of close-minded zealots. We could next have a Nigerian pope, which would have thrilled both my parents, but like most of the cardinals appointed by John Paul II, Francis Arinze is a strident traditionalist who weighed in during last year's presidential campaign with the news that a pro-choice Catholic politician "is not fit" to take communion. I wonder if Arinze would have delivered it to my dying mother's bedside, given her doubts about the church's crusade against pro-choice Catholics. This is not my mother's church, and it certainly isn't mine. I say that with a great sense of loss and sadness. Watching the pope's long death, I envied him the peace his faith gave him when he needed it most. I found it hard not to resent the fact that men like him denied it to my mother when she most needed it, choosing instead to harangue her about abortion. But she found the church she needed in the end. I don't expect to be so lucky.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/04/05/mother/index.html

[oscar111]

1. The poor? third world? someone thinks he helped them?

the Church has many fine clergy in its ranks. I hope the next pope will come from them, for a change.

Argentina is said to have a good cardinal.