Religious Fairy Tales vs Gay Marriage

Richard Ammon
GlobalGayz.com
May 13, 2010

Today’s news brought a hysterically horrid report about the Pope in Portugal. He called for pastoral action to tackle abortion and same-sex marriage, which he called "some of today's most insidious and dangerous threats to the common good".

(Insidious means: harmful but enticing; seductive; having a gradual and cumulative effect; spreading harmfully in a subtle or stealthy manner.)

These vile words came as he spoke at the famous Fatima shrine, Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary, one of the most revered sites in Catholicism.

The basilica (photo right) was built to commemorate alleged events of 1917 when three shepherd peasant children claimed to have had a vision of the "Virgin of the Rosary", (Our Lady of Fátima). The little children experienced the purported ‘Marian apparitions’ in a nearby sheep pasture. Strangely, people believed them and today millions of Catholics flock to the site in search of miracle cures and to worship there.

I find it incredulous that a modern Christian mind whose job it is to have compassion in the world for real human conditions could have such devout faith in unproven non-human fairy tales told by naive shepherd boys--and at the same time discredit real-life authentic love between two adults.

What’s terribly wrong with this picture!?

The Pope has no clue what gay marriage is and doesn’t want to know. He refuses to accept that it’s about love. That it’s a ceremony of devotion and commitment between two same-sex adults in the non-airy-fairy working world finding realistic ways to enhance each other’s daily lives.

The challenge is whether to attend to imaginary mythology or real life love? The choice seems so obvious as to not be a choice. Yet this supposed religious leader who wishes the world to be a better place, chooses to favor magical mysteries over real hands-on goodness in action.

The world will not be a better place until such influential leaders dressed in spotless while linen clothing and gold rings gives up his lofty spiritual myths, throws off his sterile robes and lives among the poor laying bricks and seeing the validity in all forms of human love.

He would rather protect sexual criminals in order to maintain hypocritical clerical ‘purity’ (talk about insidious!) than to recruit openly loving gay and lesbian adults into the church and bless them with marriage.

Circumcision, Jesus and the Faithful

Westhampton, MA - September 4, 2009
Richard Ammon - GlobalGayz.com

Given the current swirl of science, medicine, folk opinions and religious attitudes about male circumcision and its correlation (or not) with HIV infection in Africa and the West, it should not come as a surprise to see a zany book come out of left field regarding circumcision of the Savior Himself.
Can we not be spared the most private details of the most unusual holy relic - Jesus' foreskin (aka the Holy Prepuce) !? (Yes, Wikipedia has an entry about this item.)

Apparently not:
(From Publishers Weekly (July) . Copyright © Reed Business Information.)

"Until one mysterious day in 1983, the foreskin of Jesus—once one of the Catholic Church's holiest of relics—lay nestled in a box in a small church in Calcata, a village in the hills of northern Italy. On that fateful day in December, however, priest Don Dario announced to his tiny congregation that the foreskin had disappeared.

"What happened to this holy relic? Who could have taken this piece of the divine that medieval saint Catherine of Siena was purported to have worn as a ring around her finger and about which writers as diverse as Joyce, Stendhal and José Saramago have written? Some postulated that it had been stolen by Satanists. Some said the priest himself was to blame. Some even pointed their fingers at the Vatican.

"In 2006, travel writer David Farley moved to Calcata, determined to find the missing foreskin, or at least find out the truth behind its disappearance. Farley recounts how the relic passed from Charlemagne to the papacy to a marauding sixteenth-century German solider before finally ending up in Calcata, where miracles occurred that made the sleepy town a major pilgrimage destination. Farley's adventures are told in his recent book An Irreverent Curiosity .

"Over the centuries, as Catholic theology evolved, the relic came to be viewed as something of an embarrassment, culminating in 1900 when the Vatican decreed that anyone who talked about the holy foreskin would face excommunication, thus cutting off its status as a holy relic. However, the parish church could display it but only on New Year's Day.

"In this humorous narrative, Farley sets off to solve the mystery of the missing foreskin. Part travelogue, part mystery story and part religious history, Farley's tale involves local winemakers, actors and priests, many of whom are tight-lipped about the relic's disappearance.

"Farley discovers that no one really knows whether this piece of holy skin ever existed in the first place, and that no one knows its whereabouts now. Although Farley's often repetitious tale might have been sufficient as a magazine article, his fast-paced storytelling and winning humor raise thoughtful questions about the nature of faith."

An Irreverent Curiosity interweaves this history with the curious landscape of Calcata, (photo right) a beautiful and untouched medieval village set atop four-hundred-fifty-foot cliffs, which now, due to the inscrutable machinations of Italian bureaucracy, is a veritable counterculture coven. Blending history, travel, and perhaps the oddest story in Christian lore, An Irreverent Curiosity is a weird and wonderful tale of conspiracy and misadventure.


About the Author
David Farley's travel writing has appeared in The New York Times (including a feature on Calcata), The Washington Post, Condé Nast Traveler, Slate, and many other publications. He teaches writing at New York University.

An Irreverent Curiosity; published by Gotham Press
Available at Amazon Books

Also see our previous blog on circumcision.