60- IMMACULATE CONCEPTION?
Priest furious with jesus christ for denying original sin
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RACHEL We’re still in Nazareth, the heart of Galilee, and Emisoras Latinas is in the heart of all of you, our wonderful listening audience, who are following step by step, interview by interview, controversy after controversy, the second coming of Jesus Christ to earth. Mr. Jesus Christ…
JESUS Tell me, Rachel, am I here on time?
RACHEL You always arrive on time for our interviews. How do you manage it without a watch?
JESUS We country folk can tell time by the sun. So what do you want to ask me about today?
RACHEL Well, we have already talked a lot about your mother Mary, about how she gave birth to you, about the other children she had. But we are perhaps forgetting the most extraordinary aspect of her personality her immaculate conception.
JESUS What are you referring to? I never heard her talk about that.
RACHEL Well, in reality even she couldn’t tell you about it because that marvel happened without her even being aware of it.
JESUS But what did that marvel consist in?
RACHEL I’ve done my homework on this on the 8th of December, 1854, Pope Pio Nono declared as a dogma of faith that your mother Mary, given the sublime mission given to her in the history of salvation, was born without the original stain that sullies the souls of all of us human beings at birth.
JESUS Are you going back over that story of the sin of Adam and Eve? As I already explained to you, Rachel, that story is a parable, like the ones I used to tell. For example, once I spoke of a powerful king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. Another time I spoke of a shepherd with a hundred sheep, and one of them got lost. Those things didn’t really happen, they’re just comparisons…
RACHEL We have a call coming in… Yes, hello?
PRIEST Begging the pardon of Jesus Christ or of whoever that fraud is, I beg of you, I demand of you that you stop talking about original sin.
JESUS What I was saying was….
PRIEST I don’t know what you were saying, and I don’t care. I repeat. Don’t touch original sin. Don’t touch it! Don’t touch it!
RACHEL I can’t understand why this listener is so irritated… Sir?
PRIEST Don’t call me “sir”. Call me “father”. I am Father Jaime Lorin.
RACHEL Excuse me, Father, but… why don’t you want us to touch on original sin in our interview?
PRIEST Don’t you realize? If there is no original sin, why would Jesus Christ come into the world? There would no longer be any virgin or any star of Bethlehem. If there’s no original sin, what did Jesus Christ come to redeem us from? There would no longer be any cross on Calvary. And if there’s no longer any cross, there’s no empty tomb. If there’s no original sin, then why get baptized? There’d no longer be any baptism or masses. And if there are no masses, there’s no longer any church. And if there’s no longer any church, shit, then I’m done for. So that …
RACHEL So that what?
PRIEST So that … don’t touch original sin!
RACHEL Whew! Jesus, what do you think of this tirade, I mean, this estimable opinion of Father Lorin?
JESUS Talking about parables, I just remembered one that I told, the one about the two houses, one built on rock and the other on sand. The rains came, the winds blew, and the house built on sand collapsed. The same thing will happen to these people who have built everything on a fable, on the story of original sin.
RACHEL [announcer’s voice] Will our house also collapse? What have we built on sand or rock? Don’t miss our interview tomorrow with Jesus Christ in this special coverage of Emisoras Latinas. This is Rachel Perez, reporting from Nazareth.
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ANNOUNCER Another God is Possible. Exclusive interviews with Jesus Christ in his second coming to Earth. A production of María and José Ignacio López Vigil, with the support of the Syd Forum and Christian Aid.
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The original myth of Genesis
The narrative of Genesis tells of how Adam and Eve were tempted by a serpent to disobey God by eating forbidden fruit and subsequently expelled from Paradise for this sin. It is at the beginning of the Bible used by Jews and Christians and appears also in the Koran of the Muslims. The three great monotheistic religions have incorporated this myth of origins into their religious imagery, but they interpret the nature of that “original sin” in different ways.
Jesus never referred to this myth in his teaching, although he naturally knew it well. The Talmudic tradition (the oral tradition of Judaism, consisting of a collection of the theological debates of the rabbis) teaches that the consequences of that “primordial fault” are hard work, sickness and death. The idea that because of that fault all the descendents of Adam and Eve are born with sin is not part of Jewish doctrine.
The progressive currents within contemporary Judaism even interpret that “sin” in a positive light: they see in it the first human act of free will; they consider the acquisition of freedom to be part of the divine plan, since if there is consciousness of fault, then there is acknowledgement of responsibility. According to this perspective, the Genesis myth would be an elaborate allegory of humanity’s passage from childhood to adulthood and so to autonomy.
If original sin is touched…
The Christian doctrine regarding original sin is not found in the texts of the gospels, and it finds practically no basis in any New Testament text, with the exception of some allusions made by Paul in his letters (Romans 5,12). The dogma of original sin was decreed in the fourth century at the Council of Carthage, and it was given precision at the Council of Trent, after the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. Trent was one of the councils most concerned with doctrine in the whole history of the church.
The Council of Trent established that that sin is transmitted to all human being through generation, nor through imitation. That is to say, it is inherited. The doctrine of original sin had been solidified above all by the Manichean mind frame of Augustine of Hippo (4-5th century), who viewed human nature as riddled with sin and evil and who professed a profound repudiation of women – for him Eve was the one responsible for all evils since it was through her that sin entered the world.
It is truly incredible to think how much is based on this myth: all the Church’s theology of salvation positing the death of Jesus Christ as “necessary”, all its sacrificial theology, all its sacramental theology, all its negative vision of the world, all its repudiation of the body, of sexuality, of women. All such teachings are based on this narrative of Adam and Eve, on the dogmatic belief in original sin, a belief derived from an ancient Hebrew myth. Therefore, if someone “touches” original sin, if this idea is suppressed, if this dogma is questioned, if this belief is rejected, then everything is shaken and all the traditional theology begins to come undone. As Jesus explains to Rachel, recalling the parable of the two houses, one built on sand and the other built on rock (Matthew 7,24-27), nothing important would be lost in such a shake-up.
What the Catechism says
There are constant allusions to original sin in the Catholic Catechism, and enormous importance is given to the Genesis myth. For example, number 289 of the Catechism shows how this myth gives rise to many other beliefs (see underlined text): Among all the Scriptural texts about creation, the first three chapters of Genesis occupy a unique place. … The inspired authors have placed them at the beginning of Scripture to express in their solemn language the truths of creation – its origin and its end in God, its order and goodness, the vocation of man, and finally the drama of sin and the hope of salvation. Read in the light of Christ, within the unity of Sacred Scripture and in the living Tradition of the Church, these texts remain the principal source for catechesis on the mysteries of the “beginning”: creation, fall, and promise of salvation.
The illogical and toxic belief that this sin “is transmitted” from generation to generation is resolved in the Catechism by having recourse to “mystery”. Thus we read in number 404 of the Catechism: How did the sin of Adam become the sin of all his descendants? The whole human race is in Adam “as one body of one man” (Thomas Aquinas, De Malo, 4,1). By this “unity of the human race” all men are implicated in Adam´s sin, as all are implicated in Christ´s justice. Still, the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand.
For thousands of years women have been stigmatized on the basis of this perverse foundational myth of Adam and Eve. To the shame of the Catholic world, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, today Pope Benedict XVI, drew once again on this when he authored a document pompously titled a “Letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church on the collaboration of man and woman in the Church and in the world,” a text which expresses an extremely obsolete vision of man, woman, the Church and the world.
Among Protestants, Evangelicals, and Muslims
While Catholic doctrine has remained permanently affixed to the myth of Adam and Eve as an explanation of the origin of human history and has made this Hebrew myth the basis of a sacrificial theology and a sacramental theology, many of the historical Protestant churches have been distancing themselves from this vision. Such is not the case, however, with the modern Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal churches, which have at the center of their whole theology a literal reading of the Bible and the certainty that we are born “evil” and steeped in sin.
Although the Koran narrates the story of Adam and Eve, Islam does not have any notion of “original sin”. According to the Koran, responsibility for the original transgression was shared by both Adam and Eve, and it was adequately punished with their expulsion from Paradise. Islam explicitly rejects the idea that one person should pay for the sins or the errors of another. Nobody shall bear the guilt of another (Sura 17, verse 5). The idea of individual responsibility is central to Islam, and personal freedom is the basis by which God decides whether to punish or reward people.
The dogma of the Immaculate Conception
The dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, meaning that Mary was free of original sin, was proclaimed by Pius XI on December 8, 1854, in the dogmatic bull “Ineffabilis Deus”, in which he stated: We declare, promulgate and define that the doctrine which holds that the Blessed Virgin Mary was preserved free from all stain of original sin from the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God, in anticipation of the merits of Christ Jesus the Savior of the human race, is a revealed doctrine.
In the judgment of Hans Küng, theologian and church historian, Pope Pius IX was “ a man emotionally unstable and devoid of any intellectual doubt; he showed symptoms characteristic of a psychopath” in his obsessive desire to strengthen the papacy and Marian doctrine, in order to give “emotional security” to the Catholic flock in a time of great historical changes. Among the changes was the theory of evolution, proposed by Charles Darwin in the same decade that the Pope proclaimed this dogma, the first in which the Pope sought to show himself “infallible”. According to Küng: This is a doctrine about which we find not a single word in the Bible or in the Catholic tradition of the first millennium; it is a doctrine which makes no sense in light of the theory of evolution.
Evil in the world
Many evils that we see and feel in the world we know – sickness and death, natural catastrophes, the negative impulses of human beings – are simply expressions of the limits proper to all vital processes, whether they be our own life, the life of our brain, the life of the planet earth or any other form of life. Attributing those evils to an offended supreme being – and to human beings who offended him and so inherited that “stain” – is a truly archaic, primitive religious conception.
There are also in the world we know many other evils – exploitation of labor, violence against women, abuse of power, uncontrolled ambition, avarice, wars, and torture – which do not derive from any inherited original sin either, but have their origin in the free choices of individual persons and in political and social systems freely developed by individual persons and human collectivities. They are avoidable evils that cause unnecessary suffering, and their suppression depends on human beings.
Among its many negative consequences, the doctrine of original sin as the cause of the world’s evil foments both insensitive irresponsibility in the powerful and fatalistic resignation in the powerless. Therefore the best thing is to “touch” that doctrine – shove it, oust it, eliminate it – so as to do away with all the false beliefs linked to it.