Footnote to Discussion of Clerical Self-Bondage Story: Time to Retire Poor-Father Mantra

Know what I'm tired of? The poor Father parables:

Poor Father, God love him, it's a lonely life.

Let's forgive his fondness for a bit of the craythur,

For a taste of the whip and chains and handcuffs.

Poor Father, God love him, it's a thankless life

Serving others, a cold, empty bed to come home to.

Let's forgive him his little peccadilloes and falls

With those sexed-up pre-teens who won't stop courting him.

I'm tired. I'm really tired of all the lies and hard-bitten meanness this mantra, which is deeply woven into the fibers of tribalistic American Catholicism, comprises. Us against them. Us against the world. Our leaders untouchable. 

Any attempt to understand a system built right into the life of our church that produces astonishing narcissism and relentless cold-hearted attacks on minority groups in the name of God immediately smacked down as anti-Catholic bigotry rearing its ugly head again via the secular media and enemies inside the church!

Time for us to get out the cudgels and fight back.

I'm tired. I'm tired of having to look at pictures like the one above of the new archbishop of Portland, Alexander K. Sample.

Poor Father, indeed, with his silk and lace and jewels, with his medieval signs and symbols of his status as an overlord and ruler.

I'm tired of the hordes of tribalistic Catholics who swarm across the comments boxes at National Catholic Reporter now that NCR has an enhanced comments system. They're there for one quite specific reason: to shout down anyone calling for honest conversation about lying mantras like the mantra of poor, poor Father and poor, poor little embattled Catholicism. They're there to stop the conversation.

I'm tired of the astonishing mean-spiritedness now pouring forth in God's name from Catholic hearts in battles against the rights and humanity of LGBT persons in the U.S., in England, in France, and pre-eminently in the Vatican itself.

Just plain tired. And not inclined to pity poor Father in the least.