It was just last month that the Vatican issued a 36-page document entitled ‘Guidelines for the Pastoral Care of the Road,? which contained rules and the Ten Commandments for Catholics to adhere to while driving their automobiles.
Catholics were reminded to ‘respect speed limits? and not ‘consider a car an object of personal gratification? to name a couple of the edicts.
In most quarters, the news was met with muffled laughs and it became fodder for the late night comedy shows. Little did we know that this was to be the precursor for the next admonition.
Just as the road directives were disappearing from the airwaves, the Pope this week reasserted the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church when he approved a document stating that Catholicism provides the only true path to salvation.
To equate this with the previous driving instructions directive, it appears that all of us are on the same highway to salvation, it’s just that Catholics are on the superhighway while others may have to take an earlier off ramp and thus won’t make it to the destination – Heaven.
The document goes on to state that other religious communities shouldn’t be called churches because they lack apostolic succession.
As a result, I suspect that congregations other than Catholics gathering on Sundays would just be considered congenial meetings. And just when Druids and Warlocks were coming into their own! Wow – this will certainly be a setback.
Excuse my intemperance and my light hearted take on this but as a Catholic, former seminary student and altar boy I find this latest proclamation rather humorous.
And all along when a new Pope was elected and smoke wafted from the chimney of the Sistine chapel we thought it was a sign that a decision had been reached on a successor to Peter.
Let’s hope that’s what it was because the alternative would indicate that someone is lighting up some wacky weed in there! How else can we account for the ill-timed, ill-conceived and preposterous utterings that are coming out of Rome?
Let’s examine what other changes the Catholic Church can make to return all of us to the 14th century. Well, how about rescinding eating meat on Friday – or let’s have women start wearing scarves to church services again – and maybe it’s time to put Limbo back on the map.
And how about resurrecting what us Catholics used to refer to as servile work, which meant that on Sundays we could not perform any strenuous work or shop. And as long as we were recreating the past, maybe church hymns can be played on a 16th century clavichord and then recorded on eight tracks for posterity.
I would suspect that the Vatican must have a warehouse of eight tracks and clavichords since their goal seems to return all of us to bygone days!
And how’s this for modernizing the Church – just last week the Roman hierarchy called for the return of Latin in the Mass.
For those of us who have studied Latin in school we will now be able to use our knowledge for other than reading prescriptions or translating the names of plants and foliage, which are labeled in Latin.
Well, this directive will certainly go a long way to strengthening ties with the other religions. Perhaps the College of Cardinals should have reviewed Pope Benedict’s resume a bit closer before electing him.
When I reviewed it, I noticed that his previous position was that of a Conestoga Wagon salesman in Florence, Italy. That should have been a clear sign that he was still wed to the past.
Oh well, time to go. I’m off to the jeweler with my own link to the past – my Catholic sundial wristwatch – which isn’t working properly.
I just hope the off ramps aren’t clogged with all those people from other churches who as we just learned won’t be traveling all the way to the Promised Land!