Oh, yeah? Who says?

by David Benjamin 

“”The Roman Pontiff, head of the college of bishops, enjoys this infallibility in virtue of his office, when, as supreme pastor and teacher of all the faithful—who confirms his brethren in the faith he proclaims by a definitive act a doctrine pertaining to faith or morals.”

—Catechism of the Catholic Church, Paragraph # 891

 

MADISON, Wis.—If you read the above sentence, you’re likely to have reacted by saying, “Huh?”

I did, in grade school, in catechism class at St. Mary’s, when Father Rourke tried to explain the “infallibility of the Pope.” It’s a hard concept to get across to a grownup with a Bachelor’s degree, much less a bunch of third-graders with shaky reading levels.

Eventually, I got it, largely because of the innate ambiguity of the relevant dogma. Besides telling my class that the Pope (at the time it was Pius XII) could never be wrong, Father Rourke added a sort of all-canceling caveat. The Pope, he said, is infallible only insofar as he interprets sacred doctrine. On other stuff, he’s more or less just a guy. 

Now, I didn’t understand “sacred doctrine” in third grade, and I’m still fuzzy. Catholic dogma, to anyone but a Vatican theologian, is a vast cotillion overpopulated by angels dancing on pinheads. But, as I understood Father Rourke, any opinion uttered by Pius that fell outside his jurisdiction was arguable. If, for example, the Pope were to elucidate the precise instant, in the act of transubstantiation, when mere wine becomes the blood of Christ, well then, nary a Cardinal would dare to say Pius nay. But, if the Pope were to announce that he’d had a vision of the Holy Ghost in his bathroom mirror and realized that the Ghost is the spitting image of Adolphe Menjou, even a clueless third-grader would be entitled to snort incredulously and say, “Aw, c’mon, man!”

Every kid at St. Mary’s knew that the Pope is the holiest dude on earth, but our teachers scrupulously reminded us that he was not God, nor Jesus, but mortal like us, and (once in a blue moon) capable of error. Even as we learned our faith and did penance for every deviation, we were, ironically, schooled in skepticism. 

Established religions are among the most conservative and hidebound human institutions but, from my first lessons in Catholic school, I sensed an unease—among my mentors—with the absolute. I saw this in Jesus’ embrace of lepers, whores and Romans, and in his fierce opposition to the Pharisees’ rigid and arrogant orthodoxy. 

I thought of that contrarian Jesus after receiving from a dear friend, Judy, the strange results of a YouGov survey. Among its findings were that the respondents believe that half the marriages in the U.S. are mixed race, that 30 percent of Americans live in New York City and that a third of us are homosexual.

Aw, c’mon, man!

The actual numbers for these line items are 1%, 3% and 3%.

Evidently, YouGov didn’t ask its “respondents” where and how they picked up their harebrained notions—although it’s easy to guess. Whoever sent Judy the results accused her and me, and Marty (another guy who loves Judy) of being “brainwashed.” This is unfair because neither neither Judy, Marty nor I share the misconceptions of YouGov’s deluded pollees. 

Rather than regard this weird result as the product of some mass indoctrination carried by a sinister “deep state” conspiracy, I see in this widespread onset of absurdity a a crisis of skepticism. The current trend of political monotheism—fueled by cable TV propaganda and fermented in social media silos—has stripped from our vernacular a phrase that I heard repeated on a daily basis among even my devoutest Catholic schoolmates:

“Oh yeah? Who says?”

We were, as children—a lot of us not that bright—not just skeptics. We were proud of our skepticism. Whatever we were not compelled to accept at face value, we didn’t. We peeked under the hood. We pulled the curtain aside. We lifted the rug. We didn’t just want to be told. We wanted to get it right, if only to mock the kids who got it wrong and yell, “Nyah, nyah!”

Skepticism was never emphasized. Our priests and teachers, after all, wanted us to kneel and confess, to pray and believe. But a subtly implied skepticism was our prophylactic against the sort of religious sociopathy that gave us the Inquisition and the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. It affected our perception of everything religious and political. Our priests and teachers never claimed flatly that the Old Testament was “history” the way the Declaration of Independence and the Civil War are history. We understood that the Bible jumbled together real historical fact with legends, fables, parables and fabulations based on the memories, dreams and folk tales of an oral culture centuries past, when almost nothing was written down and the story of an entire civilization could be erased by the death of an elder poet.

In our lessons, uncertainty about the legal admissibility of sacred scripture was implicit. The balance was delicate. We worshipped the Gospel, but we were careful not to fact-check, lest we find enough fibs to fracture our faith. By learning Scripture without dissecting it, we avoided—or at least postponed—the angst and disillusion that comes with doubt. But doubt, silent and stubborn, was our co-pilot. 

Weren’t we allowed, after all, to doubt the Pope?

Even if we kept perfect faith, even if doubt never eroded our devotion to the Church and its teachings, we had learned to look beyond. It was part of our catechism to accommodate not only the doubters who have thought too much and departed the faith, but to love our neighbors, friends, even family, who harbor an entirely different (but strangely similar) faith. We found inspiration and comfort in a community of shared belief, but we felt pride in our pluralism.

Even in a small town that revolved around its established parishes and congregations, there existed pockets—not far away—of absolute, literal fanatics with beliefs and rituals that seemed outright scary. These fringe fanatics are a feature of history so feared and despised that we accused them of witchcraft and deviltry, burned them at the stake, torched their villages, forced their women and children into slavery. But, often, those frightening cults, if they persisted, somehow normalized. As time goes by, crazy heretics tend to settle down and become more like everybody else. Mormons were once, for example, demons of Christian apostasy whose presence threatened the Apocalypse. Nowadays, they’re Utah white bread and comic foils in a Broadway musical. 

Mark Twain, perhaps our greatest agnostic, helped fearful Christians to reconcile with Mormonism by explaining it—with tongue in cheek—and getting us to laugh. Twain’s wry skepticism was balm that helped save the Mormons from obliteration and the rest of us from the shame of obliterating them.

More than ever now, we should remember what I learned in third grade from the sternest priest I ever knew, that the devout must include in their faith a small, sane measure of reserve. We must concede that both our current pontiffs—one in Rome and the other in Palm Beach—are fallible and mortal, players in the human comedy. Squinting into the mirror, we might even notice that the Holy Ghost—especially when he raises his eyebrows and twirls his mustache—bears an eerie resemblance to Adolphe Menjou.