Clownishness reached new depths several months ago in the Philippines. Not the Bozo kind, the Catholic kind. Cardinal Antonio Tagle took to the stage, donning a chorus line outfit, microphone in hand, bobbing and swaying as he crooned John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
For those fortunate to have escaped the cultural junk-littered demi-monde of the ’60s and early ’70s, this song was a paean to the consolations of atheism. His Eminence held the Filipino Catholic crowd in thrall as they, too, swayed to this spectral reinvention of Catholicism. Yes, this was in the Philippines, where Roman Catholics reach 78.8 percent of the population.
Disturbing as this should be to grounded Catholics, it should not be considered heretical. Heresy is far too respectable to descend to such redoubts of vaudeville religion. Heresy takes the Faith in great earnest, enough to understand its central dogmas and to calculate fatal substitutes. Heresy is a serious business, and it requires serious thinking.
No, what we have in Cardinal Tagle’s nightclub gig is making the Faith nothing more than a joke. More menacing, it is an embalming of religion, making it a shadow of itself.
For Catholicism’s approved cognoscenti, this approach has become their preferred line of attack for tweaking of the Old Faith. Its ground plan is to infantilize religion to such a degree that it becomes no more demanding than a sandbox exercise. Trying to critique it is rather like attempting to nail down raindrops. Its purpose: that all feel well, all be smiling, no one be unwelcome, and bonhomie fill the room.
Aborning here is no-fault Catholicism, where no one is banned from the reception of the “bread,” God loves everybody, and “love is love.”
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