Have you read the segment on the baseball game in the first
chapter of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen? It has nothing whatsoever to do with
Catholicism but it captures the profound hate that for pious zealots of any
creed provides the foundation of their religion. Thus we have ISIS brutally murdering Yazidis
and Christians in Iraq; we have Christians and Muslims killing one another in
Nigeria; we have Russian Orthodox and Greek Catholics locked in battle in the
Ukraine, we endured decades of Catholics and Presbyterians in the most savage
murders in Northern Ireland; we have Israeli Jews and Palestinians Christians
and Muslims in a war with no end; we have Hindu terrorists killing Christians
in India; and we have Buddhists killing Hindus in Burma. Amazingly all these
people have become so deluded by their “religion” that they think that God has
blessed their cause. There is no way
that any such cult can authentically claim to be worshipping God. True religion—regardless of what doctrines
one professes is only as true as are pure the hearts of its adherents. Hearts shriveled and putrefying with hatred
cannot possibly be filled with the love of a deity, any deity, but are in the
grasp of Satan.
One crucial example of religion-gone-rogue that is too often
overlooked in today’s American media is the rabid conviction of the
ultra-Orthodox in Israel that God has given the land of Eretz Yisrael
exclusively to the Jewish People and that consequently the Israelis have a
right—actually a duty—to drive all others out of this land which is uniquely
Sacred to the Lord God. And so farmers
whose ancestors lived in this land and on this land long before Joshua led the
Children of Israel across the Jordan find their olive groves bulldozed, their
houses leveled, their orchards and gardens seized and the land given to the
“settlements” which are nothing less than a patchwork of thievery. And this robbery—and sometimes murder—is
done in the Name of Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of Israel. What sacrilege against the Holy Name! The Rabbis and the pious should shudder in a
morbid fear at their blasphemy of the Holy Name.
Now, to be fair, the majority of Israelis, much less the
majority of Jews around the world, do not subscribe to this violence. Far from it.
This exclusionary Eretz Yisrael in which only Jews should be able to put
their foot to the consecrated land is the doctrine of only a small group,
undoubtedly less than 10%, of Israeli Jews.
But given the peculiarities of parliamentary government, the party in
power needs the support of the political parties of these extremists to
maintain their voting majority in the Knesset (Parliament) and so hatred—hatred
in the name of religion—is empowered to work its evil.
Christians should not be quick to join in the chorus
condemning the sins perpetuated in God’s Name in Israel against the native
population of that land. In many regards
this precise blasphemy should be well known to Christians. When the Jews of Europe were driven from
their homes and businesses in England (1290) and then from France (1306) and
finally from Spain and Portugal (1492), was it any less offensive to Almighty
God? For that matter, was the expulsion
of the Muslims from Spain in 1492 any less evil in the Divine Sight? And what about the pogroms and riots in which,
over the centuries, hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives were lost—was this
true and authentic religion? Is God ever
honored by hatred? Is he honored by
hatred now in the death of a Muslim?
When I look at the Katholic Krazy sites, as much as they
view the world beyond Catholicism with the contempt of a Hasid toward the goyim,
they save a particularly bitter hate for those Catholics who disagree
with them much as Danny Saunders viewed the apikorsim
of the practicing but less orthodox Jews on Reuven Malther’s team. Somehow we cannot bear that Truth or, for us
Christians, Grace, could be found beyond the limits of our own narrow
religiosity and that God’s favor could shine as brightly, or even more
brightly, on those who are different from us.
A sign of religion-gone-bad is when our religion—be it Judaism,
Hinduism, Islam, or pre-Conciliar Catholicism—makes us believe that we stand
alone in God’s love. Such religion is
rooted in the hatred of others and renders us with hearts far too impure to ever
offer God the Sacrifice which is due him.
Our Mass becomes a Black Mass, a Satanic perversion of the Eucharist and
our Sacrifice becomes the sacrifice of Cain as our souls are stamped with the
sign of his evil hatred of his brother.
One of my favorite spiritual writers, the Dalai Lama, says:
“the aim and purpose of religion
is to cure the pains and unhappiness of the human mind. …. I would like to
point out that the purpose of religion is not to build beautiful churches or
temples; it is to cultivate positive human qualities such as tolerance,
generosity, and love. Fundamental to Buddhism and Christianity, indeed to
every major world religion, is the belief that we must reduce our selfishness
and save others.”
Curing the pain and unhappiness of the human soul doesn’t
mean, of course, that we can’t have beautiful churches or magnificent rituals
inside them. No one appreciates Mozart’s
Coronation Mass or the Fauré Requiem more than I, though a capella plain song is more beautiful
still. When I am buying vestments as a gift for the
parish or for a particular priest, I go to Barbaconi; Gamarelli’s vestments are
far too effeminate and foppish. Gilles
Beaugrand were long the best for sacred vessels, but I have heard that they are
closing and would not know where to go for a chalice or monstrance now. I
can’t stand sloppy liturgy and believe that worship calls for a gravity and a seemliness
that keeps us mindful of God in whose presence we stand. All that being said, the true worship of God
does not consist in the externals of rite much less of pomp, but of a
conversion of the heart by which our hearts are conformed to the heart of
Christ so that we can be the worthy sacrifice offered to God and transformed by
his Holy Spirit into Christ for the sake of the world’s salvation. The Dalai Lama is spot on and totally in
conformity with Catholic doctrine when he says true religion will reduce our
selfishness and implant in us compassion for the salvation of the world. The person whose love is for doctrine and
whose devotion is to ritual worships a false god.
Ultimately the hatred of Danny Saunders for the apikoros, Reuven Malther, becomes a
solid and transformative friendship in which their worlds merge in mutual
understanding. It is the triumph of grace over the evils of hatred. At one point the narrow view of Danny and of
his father, Reb Saunders, threatens that evil will overcome good and that
separation will frustrate and win out over the friendship, indeed the love,
they share. Hatred always seeks to
destroy love. Fortunately grace prevails
and the friendship liberates Danny from the life of fear and its consequent
hatred that would have otherwise devoured his soul. We should pray for the soldiers of Isis, for
the Israeli settlers, for the Buddhist monks who are killing Burmese Hindus,
and not only for those katholic krazies who are driven by a hatred for Pope
Francis or for the Church as it has emerged from Vatican II, but also for
ourselves lest evil swallow up good, and hatred devour compassion.
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