For the last fifty years, Roman Catholic politicians have
been talking “ChristianLite” when invoking God. That changed in the last
Republican presidential debate before the Iowa caucus, when Marco Rubio boldly
worshipped his “Jesus Christ, who came down to earth and died for our sins.”
Most of us have not heard that kind of theology since the
days when, as children, we had to memorize the answers to all those perplexing
questions in the Baltimore Catechism.
Little Marco obviously learned them well, and his pious proclamation on the
floor of the debate should put tears of joy in the eyes of every American
cardinal and bishop who have in him a candidate they can control.
We have had all sorts of Christian presidents, including one
– Taft – who did not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. We have had a few
who were disinterested in religion – Andrew Johnson, Hayes, Lincoln – and we
have had exactly one Roman Catholic president - John F. Kennedy - who adored
Marilyn more than Mary. In Rubio, we would get the real Catholic deal, and this
should be frightening to any God-fearing American man or woman who is
disinclined to bind the country under the yoke of the papacy.
The most startling aspect of Rubio’s debate proclamation is
his clear belief in the pre-existence of Jesus Christ. Rubio believes that the
son of God existed somewhere in the universe (in heaven maybe?) before he “came
down” to earth to fix the mess we have made. In Rubio’s belief, Jesus wasn’t
just a twinkle in the eye of God but rather a real guy waiting in the wings, or
on the bench, for his chance to be born and die. Like God the father, Jesus had
been around for all eternity, killing time with his dad somewhere outside the
boundaries of time itself, until he got the irresistible urge for his brief
Middle Eastern saga.
When I was a child in Catholic grade school and menaced by
the Sisters of Mercy, I did not cotton to this bit of theology. It seemed to me
to be downright stupid for God to pre-arrange something like the passion, death
and resurrection of his only son. The script of any episode of I Love Lucy made more sense to me,
concurrently schooled as I was by early television, than did the idea that the
life of Jesus Christ was, in literally excruciating detail, inevitable. I kept
this heretical opinion to myself, and recited the words of the Creed just like
all the other kids, figuring that they had not yet realized the nonsense of at
all.
There is a second aspect of Rubio’s debate proclamation, the
notion that Jesus had to come down here to take on our sins. As a child, I had serious problems with this.
Why couldn’t God just snap his fingers to clean up our sins the way ladies on
the television make their kitchen appliances sparkle with a quick swipe of
something new? Why couldn’t he just
clear the table in his workshop? Like every other kid in my hometown, I had an Etch A Sketch with which I could make
any design I imagined and then simply flip the toy upside down to erase it and
start over again. Surely God in his infinite brilliance could do even better
than that.
Also, I never felt that I had been born bad, or that without
redemption by Jesus I would go to hell. In second grade, I pestered Sister
Josephine about the idea of baptism. “You mean we were born with sins already
inside us?” When she nodded yes, I could see in her eyes that she knew I would
be trouble. (She eventually left the convent, married and had her own kids. I
wonder if she had them baptized.) The seven-year old heretic, I kept my
reservations private while I made my first Confession and received my First
Holy Communion, carefully keeping the host from touching my teeth because Jesus,
who had been floating eternally in space and had then taken on human flesh, was
now a piece of bread that I had to eat in order to get to heaven where all of
this stuff would finally be explained.
How would we do with a president who energetically spouts
his belief in the literal particulars of Roman Catholicism? Not well. He would
have to dismantle same-sex marriage. He would have to say that it is okay to
feel gay urges, but sinful to have gay sex of any kind. He would have to make
sure that children are adopted only by couples consisting of one man and one
woman. He would have to get LGBT teachers out of classrooms. He would have to
insist that Americans keep every sex act open to the possibility of
procreation. He would have to reverse Roe
v. Wade and instruct all Americans that abortion is murder. Worst of all,
he would appoint Supreme Court Justices guided by “Jesus Christ, who came down
to earth and died for our sins.” So many awful words to be added to the Pledge
of Allegiance.
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