I get the reference, but, you know, it’s still probably just a little bit tone-deaf to use the word “cock” in the title of a post celebrating the Catholic Church. Just a bit. But read on, and you’ll discover that self-awareness does not seem to weigh all that heavily upon Valle’s God-besotted head in any event.
Look, I understand how “recent events”—ahem—might cause anyone to hand in their walking papers. Droves of people all over the world are doing just that because if you are a baptized Catholic, your name is still counted in the figures. People who are P.O.’d about Holy Mother Church’s complicity in the global rape of children are filling out convenient online forms and getting themselves counted out, officially. I have been tempted to do so myself.
But too many people lately seem to have forgotten the spookily great and possibly “cool” parts of Catholicism. I’m a big fan of saints, miracles and devotions. My late-night reading tends towards such subjects as incorruptible corpses and ex-nuns whose struggles seem to mirror my own. I own (and enjoy) many volumes of Lives of the Saints, who tend to meet their ends in rather unfortunate ways, but joyfully. I stumbled upon a copy of The Secret of the Rosary at a church library sale, and by the end of the book I was thinking, St. Louis de Montfort, you’ve made a believer out of this lady. I’ve become a card-carrying member of the Confraternity of the Rosary; I wear a sparkly Miraculous Medal; I carry (and use) a custom-made rosary in my purse.
I’ve been to church more in the past year than I have since leaving for college. I’m not just taking Pascal’s gamble—well, not solely. The church’s recent troubles (along with my own) actually seem to draw me closer. I suppose I like losing propositions. I root for underdogs, usher live insects outside, snatch mice from the jaws of my cats and set them free.
Rub your eyes. Shake your head. Look again. Yes, she really said that. She really presented it as: on the one hand, a horrifying epidemic of rape and child abuse, with complicity reaching the highest levels. On the other hand, some super-kewl clubhouse rituals, awesome books and shiny trinkets (and her own narcissistic agonizing over being “tempted” to display some signs of a moral conscience). Decisions, decisions!
Ah, but lest you begin to recoil in horror, remember, she roots for underdogs! Like one of the most powerful, obscenely wealthy criminal organizations in history in their battle against the oppressive forces of law and basic human decency. The poor Church, just a helpless little mouse in the jaws of the, uh, kittycat of secularism.
If you’re not already sick from being exposed to the noxious idiocy of this vapid twit, go and read Barry Crimmins’s four-part series on his own experiences within the Church and then come back and read her again and see how you react. Projectile vomiting is a good sign that you’re not a monster.