Letters...we get letters... (Responses to various readers)

I owe everyone an apology. Due to a couple of bad decisions (NEVER sign up for a mailing list of any sort), I now have about 1500 unread pieces of mail in my in-box. For the past few days, I haven't even had the courage to open up my mailbox.

Since work will soon let me have a bit more free time -- finally -- I'll be able to winnow through that backlog.

I really should not have been writing at all for the past two weeks or so, since the business of keeping a roof overhead in Southern CA has proven particularly murderous. The blog is an indulgence. But having sworn off train derailments (the twelve-step meetings were a godsend), I have very few vices left. Blogging, pizza, vampirism...and not much else, really....

Let me here respond to some feedback in the comments section:

Those awful, awful Catholics. I stand by my assertion that the Pope has far less power than many prefer to believe.

For one thing, Americans tend to think that the rest of the world accepts supernaturalistic claims as readily as we do. Most denizens of the United States somnabulate through a hallucinatory, metaphysical haze -- a weltanschauung derived from Hal Lindsey and the Weekly World News. That's why polls reveal that roughly half of our countrymen disbelieve in the reality of both evolution and project Apollo. That's why the majority of your fellow citizens remain convinced that Saddam and Osama were bosom buddies. That's why so many people scried the devil's face in photographs of smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center.

Outside our borders, people are more sensible -- especially in Europe, which is, for the most part, a post-Christian culture. No religious figure there has anything like the power exercized here by James Dobson, Pat Robertson or the Reverend Moon. In civilized nations, the citizenry simply does not tolerate the admixture of church and politics.

In Germany (for example), everyone pays the church tax because they presume that the money goes toward charitable works and the upkeep of historic buildings. But how many actually go to church? How many would let fantasists steeped in Apocalypse porn grab hold of supreme political authority?

Even within this country, the religious fanatics scurrying for power all operate within the Southern Baptist tradition -- with the exception of Moon, who exists within a tradition of his own, and must therefore function covertly. Neither mainstream Protestants nor the Catholic clergy exercise much temporal influence. Pro-theocracy voices speak with a southern accent.

Nevertheless, many Americans -- even those progressives who despise the current march toward theocracy -- refrain from bashing the Southern Baptists. Instead, in a process psychologists call "transference," we re-direct our antipathy toward the RCs, a tradition we've upheld since the heyday of the Know-Nothing party. Why? Because anti-Catholicism is the acceptable analogue to anti-Semitism; it allows us to blame a culture which seems greasily foreign, rather than healthfully home-grown.

The Pope is the Other. The Crouches are, god help us, Us.

That's why, to use a pop-culture example, the ultimate villain in Sin City is a Cardinal. In real life, no American Catholic clergyman holds that level of power. The audience would never have accepted a scene in which Mickey Rourke sliced up the face of (say) a lightly-fictionalized version of Jerry Falwell. But torturing an uppity mick? Yeah, that's fine.

The truth: Once you get away from below-the waist issues -- the only issues most people seem to care about, alas -- RC clergymen are often far more humane than their southern evangelical counterparts. Even the conservative John Paul II (and Ratzinger, his latter-day amanuensis) opposed the death penalty and supported social justice in Third World nations. Our Southern-fried fundies invariably view "social justice" as a code term for Marxism, while the RCs tend to have a better understanding of nuance. To that degree, I wish the Catholic church did have more influence.

Yes, there is a fundamentalist, pro-theocracy wing of the RC church, best exemplified by the Opus Dei movement and the Tradition Family & Property sect. This tendency must be watched and opposed. But here we encounter an automatic braking system: Those American Catholics attracted to such far-right splinter groups often decide that they cannot reconcile themselves to the Vatican II reforms. And so they follow Mel Gibson's lead and scuttle off toward breakaway churches.

Outsiders erroneously call these churches Catholic, even though they really aren't -- they denounce all popes since John XXIII as "anti-popes." These groups are tiny. True, their members would impose the most horrendous theocracy imaginable if given the chance, but that chance will never come.

As for the RC church's insanely retrograde stance on those dreaded below-the-waist issues: Most American Catholics scoff at the strict principles of the church. Trust me, fellows: Lots of Catholic girls are easy, and they use the pill.

Many priests privately do not accept Vatican teachings on birth control and abortion, although they cannot so admit in public. And as for those few laymen (pardon the term) who do choose to follow those teachings -- so what? As long as no guns are held to heads, it's all a matter of personal choice, just as it is the personal choice of some Jews to follow certain dietary restrictions which strike the rest of us as silly.

None of my business. None of your business. End of story.