It was a while ago when I was in conversation with a guy I was friendly with over lunch. I really forget who it was sometimes thinking it was another guy but that other guy would not have been in the country where I remember the conversation took place. I do recall he was a member of an Evangelical group when we got talking about religion. The guy said to me that he supposed I was a member of the Bedroom Church. I said no, I was a Catholic. He said didn’t I just say that?
That passed without too much notice because we got onto the subject of the consecrated host. He asked about it being the body and blood of Christ. I said that is what it is. The guy then told a tale of how he and some others were able to get a hold of a host and the did an analysis of it and found it did not have any other properties than that of bread. There was no human flesh or blood in it.
I don’t remember what my response was but I came away wondering why he was so concerned with what the Catholic Church members believed. I had no thoughts of trying to impugn his or anyone else’s beliefs. Although I have to admit before I went to Marine Basic School at Quantico I was of that mind but discussing religion with guys there especially some who had done some studying of their religion I recognized they had as good a reason for believing what they did as I did, if not better. By the time I left Basic School to head to my first assignment as an officer I had left behind all missionary zeal.
What brought all this back to mind was a recent statement by Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who said of Joe Biden a devout Catholic: “our new President has pledged to pursue certain policies that would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity, most seriously in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender.”
No wonder my lunch companion called it the Bedroom Church. The archbishop’s concerns related to actions that occur in the privacy of the bedroom in the home rather than outside where the issues of social justice, institutional racism, economics, and war and peace are concerns. The archbishop is concerned about contraception which Pope Pius XI declared was inherently evil and any spouse practicing any act of contraception “violates the law of God and nature” and was “stained by a great and mortal flaw.” What do Catholics think of this: “Just 8 percent said contraception is morally wrong, with 89 percent saying it was either morally acceptable or not a moral issue at all.”
That leaves abortion, marriage and gender, the last two relating to gay rights – the marriage between same sex couples and LGBTQ – clearly a bedroom issue. Then the abortion matter which seems to be the one determinate fact for many Catholics on who to cast a ballot for making me think that if Stalin was pro-life he would have had their vote.
The problem with being a Bedroom Church is that when one reads Christ’s teachings He did not appear to talk about those matters at all. He preached about what we should do outside the home in relation to our neighbors; how then did the Church decide to hang its hat on what occurs inside the home?
Matt
It’s all about tribal affiliation, eh?
https://www.rt.com/news/514470-cologne-catholic-child-sex-abuse-report/
German nuns ‘rented’ orphaned boys to businessmen for ‘gang bangs & orgies’ – suppressed report seen by media
3 Feb, 2021 12:33
A report being withheld from the public documents horrific acts of rape and sexual abuse against young boys that were facilitated by nuns belonging to the Cathoic Archdiocese of Cologne in Germany, according to the Daily Beast.
The investigation’s findings, which concluded last month and stemmed from a lawsuit brought against the archdiocese by victims, have not been publicly released, but the contents of the
https://www.personalgrowthcourses.net/stories/myss.relationship_transcending_tribe
Transcending the Tribe
By Caroline Myss
All of us are born into a “tribal mentality” of various forms. These include our family unit, religious background, country of origin, ethnicity, etc. The tribal mentality effectively indoctrinates an individual into the tribe’s beliefs, ensuring that all believe the same. The structure of reality – what is and is not possible for the members of the group – is thus agreed upon and maintained by the tribe.
While the tribal mentality has definite benefits in terms of establishing common ground and ensuring group survival, it is not a conscious agreement. We are born into it. Yet at a certain stage, both personally and collectively, the tribal mentality must be challenged. People can then begin to recognize the need for a personal honor code independent of the tribe. If humanity is to progress, we need to learn how to treat everyone – regardless of tribal affiliation – with honor and respect.
Every one of us is plugged into the tribal mind. We support tribal belief patterns by directing a percentage of our life force into maintaining our affiliation with the tribe. This involves an implicit agreement to think like the tribe thinks, to evaluate situations and people the way the tribe does, and to believe in right and wrong according to tribal values and ambitions. As long as the tribal mentality within us remains unexamined, we unwittingly subject others to our tribal laws.
When we are plugged into tribal thought forms, we can easily believe in nonsensical prejudices held by the tribe. Tribal mentality allows us to hold harsh, judgmental positions or attitudes about an entire group of people: “All fat people are lazy,” or “all Irish are drunks,” or “all Muslims are terrorists” for example.
A rigid tribal thought form may have little truth to it, but individuals hold to such beliefs because that perspective is what the tribe has agreed to believe. Innocent children, born into the hatred and prejudice of their parents and ancestors, grow up inside a tribal mentality that sponsors an endless march toward war against the tribe’s perceived enemies. People grow up hating other people – people they have never seen – based on group affiliation. This is the shadow side of the tribe.
Inevitably, some among us come to a point where we want to break out of the inflexible tribal mentality. At some point, these individuals want to explore, develop, and manage their own consciousness without the judgments and limitations of the tribal mind.
It is easy to spot these mavericks when they start to question and unplug from tribal mentality – they hang out on the periphery looking bored and restless, or whimsical and dreamy. Others may act out the agitated hot-head as they challenge tribal ways.
The unspoken assumption of the tribal mind is that everybody loves being part of the tribe. And in many ways, we do. Knowing where and to whom we “belong” is crucial to our self-concept and sense of safety in the world. Yet when we begin the real deep journey of questioning, “What do I believe?” and start to individuate from the tribe, we often enter a dark night of the soul. It is, by necessity, a passage we take alone.
It’s one thing to reject what we don’t want to believe anymore. It’s quite another to begin to explore what we do believe. All we know as we enter the dark night is that we can’t go back – even when the tribe is the only world we’ve ever known.
At this critical point in our development, the tribe doesn’t feel right anymore. It no longer offers us comfort. Previous feelings of security and familiarity begin to feel like a trap constraining our individuality and hampering our efforts to discover deeper levels of who we really are.
This dark night passage pushes us to look at our false gods – the tribal belief patterns in which we’ve become invested and to which we’ve given our allegiance.
After spending the night at the bride’s home, the newlyweds awake the next day to begin helping with the clean-up from the day before. The couple will spend upcoming weekends visiting relatives, sometimes stopping at five or six houses between a Friday and Sunday night. Wedding gifts are usually given to them at this time. By the spring, the couple is usually ready to move into a home of their own, and the groom will have begun growing his beard. This is an Amish tradition that signifies a man is married. Like all religious groups, The Amish have traditions that they observe upon the death of a family member. And like so many of their religious ceremonies, the Pennsylvania Amish are reminded that their focus should not be so much on this world as on the world yet to come.