The Pope and me

Chelsea was giving out presents on her birthday last night. She and her fiancee Sam had brought everyone gifts from the past six months they spent in Europe. She gave me a bobble head doll of the Pope. She got it at the Vatican where they are really into merchandizing as a way to help pay their legal bills.

That sounded cynical.

It is I guess. I'm not a fan of the Pope. Before he was Benedict XVI he was Joseph Ratzinger and I really didn't like him then. Back then I was really into Liberation theology, a political belief that seeks to continue Jesus' liberation of people from economic, political and social injustice. I was in Seminary and living and working with homeless people and Liberation theology gave me the framing I needed to not grow depressed by the poverty that surrounded me.

My heroes were all Priests (Gutieerez from Peru, Boff from Brazil, Sobrino from El Savador) who were all doing incredible things including overthrowing third world dictators that U. S. politics propped up. They also wrote incredible books about loving the poor because that is where God is ... with those who hurt, suffer, starve and are oppressed. Jewish theologian Eli Wiesel says the same thing when he talks about God being among the prisoners at Auschwitz, the concentration camp in Poland.

I was so enthralled and a solid convert to this way of thinking that I stood up in class in the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary one day and announced that I no longer gave a damn about "western theology" which only cares about why there is evil in the world. I was only going to base my study on Liberation theologians ... those Priests and nuns who were sick of "the way things had always been" and were doing something about it.

Of course this didn't go over real well with the Southern Baptists. I got called into Dean Ann Davis' office and she ripped me a new one. I held my ground and she threatened to kick me out of Seminary. We stopped liking one another. It was at this point that I discovered that lawyers really can be useful.

Ann had recruited me for the social work school which she was launching. I'd been working on a Ph.D. but social work was more in keeping with Liberation so I changed. We had to negotiate all of the classes I'd already taken for the doctorate and determine what classes I would need for a Master in Social Work. It was a contract. My lawyer ate Ann's lunch ... that's how I got my Master in Social Work.

At the time, Joseph Ratzinger was in charge of keeping the Priests in line with the doctrines of the Church. Liberation theology Priests were straying far away from doing it the way that it had always been done. So Ratzinger had them all silenced ... one by one.

And I still hate him for it.

When he became Pope, I remember hearing the news on the radio and pulling the car over to the side of road. I was cussing loudly. I called my friend Mary Ann Beil who crying over where the puff of white smoke blew.

Ratzinger? Seriously?

My dear friend Father Vernon Robertson defended him rigorously but concluded by saying "Popes aren't all they're cracked up to be." It was hard not to love Vernon. I would do the readings at noon day Mass and he would preach on Wednesday nights at the church that I was inexplicably in charge of.

In the end though Joseph Ratzinger killed off Liberation Theology. That allowed American Fundamentalism to gain the upper hand ... so Jerry Falwell, Jim and Tammy Baker, Kenneth Copeland and those people gained influence. Now it's T.D. Jakes and Pope Benedict XVI.

And things remain the same as they've always been.

The poor get poorer. The rich get richer. We spend more on prisons than we do educating kids. Half of the country doesn't have health insurance ... the military still buys $500 hammers ...

And the thinking goes on and on ... stay in a rotten bad marriage because God believes in marriage more than happiness ... have another baby when you can't afford the ones that you have now and you're too ignorant to understand birth control ... condemn people who are different from you because God only likes things one particular way ... or color ...

I walk up to my bobble head doll of Pope Benedict and ask him "You really believe all of this shit?"

And I slap his head so that it shakes from side to side. Then it starts going in circles. Then it ends up shaking up and down.

I laugh.

"Of course you do," I say out loud. "What you believe is more important than ... freedom ... happiness ... wellness ... discovery ... Love!

I remain a believer in Liberation. Damn what anybody says! Or which way their head shakes.