MIDDLE-CRASS VALUES

Where it is the duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat. Morley

PL's recent posts about $GG "clergy's" linguistic shortcomings set off a landslide of emails. One correspondent perplexedly asked why these poorly educated "clerical" vipers celebrate the Latin liturgy at all, when they obviously don't know the language in which it's written. Wouldn't every day be a bitter reminder of personal inadequacy, she asked? Wouldn't they live in dread of the kind of exposure they're getting from Pistrina. Wouldn't it be psychologically less stressful not to have to fake it all the time? Wouldn't they be afraid if people started to scrutinize them more closely? And finally, why didn't Dannie and Checkie get into another line of business years ago?

Good, solid questions all.

But the simple answer to each one is: not if there's money to be made, and an easy life to be enjoyed.

Dollars for luxury travel and upscale restaurants go a long way toward pumping up deflated self-esteem. A steady income guaranteed by oafish cultlings shields these unlettered men of the cloth from the effects of outsiders' criticism. A grifter's shallow personality makes winging it exciting, especially when not much effort is needed to dupe the rubes who foot the bill for all the bling. An unchecked effrontery to invent willy-nilly new mortal sins will criminalize any sincere attempt to probe too deeply, so victims will generally keep their trembling lips closed.

Their secret has been to pick the right kind of suckers and then give 'em what their shallow hearts want. Do that, and you really don't need more than a few Latin tags to keep the marks bamboozled.  Recruiting the suckers is the easy part. First, just find the dumbest, least educated, amoral chumps out there. Next growl that only you can save their souls, provided they're prepared to pay and pay and pay, while simultaneously refusing to believe any hard evidence of your unfitness.

But giving the saps what they want takes a more psychological insight than finding them. Notwithstanding the difficulty, the clerical creeps are up to the challenge. It's true they may be lacking the lit(t)erae humaniores, but prudentia carnis they possess in overabundance. Their Latin knowledge is less than a moron's, but they're geniuses at divining on which side of the bread the butter is spread.

Here's their million-dollar intuition: The lay fortune's fools, who've been on the losing end of life from conception, secretly yearn to be mediocre. Therefore, what they ardently desire is not authentic, spiritually uplifting Catholicism under the benign guidance of well-trained, professional clergy, but in its place they want "bourgeois pseudo-Catholicism."

In that sham religion, the emphasis is on materialism (expensive vestments, new organs, deluxe living quarters, luxury spa vacations in the chic desert Southwest). Everything is obsessively commercialized ($GGResources, the big $30-K plan), and no opportunity is lost to monetize the sacred ($GG's Purgatorian $ociety, $t. Christopher for Your Car, All $ouls' Day envelopes). However, "bourgeois pseudo-Catholicism" can't stop at the grubby fascination with amassing goodies and pocketing big bucks. If it did, even the lowlife losers would eventually recognize the snakes they'd let into their lives.

So to keep the suckers in their place, the slithery, vulgarian "clergy" model aspirational bourgeois norms of behavior. Frustrated social climbers without breeding stuck forever at the soiled bottom of society's Everest, the "clergy" awkwardly affect superficial speech patterns and faux-upperclass attitudes learned from the boob tube (Dannie's high-mannerist language, Checkie's pitiable attempts to appear refined, fancy French restaurants for a meat-'n'-tater-lovin' Big Don).

Since they lack real culture (bad Latin, gross errors of fact, mispronunciations like Uneven-Steven's  "impass-say" for impasse, a morbid predilection for fast food), these "clergy" must compensate, or risk an angry pelting from the peanut gallery they call "the faithful." Hence, they're relentless self-promoters who pass off their enormous failures as world-class achievements (Tony Baloney's adolescent, error-pocked WHH as "magnum opus"). It's the only way to maintain the dominance necessary to exact the reflexive, mindless conformity that compels laymen to impoverish their wretched families in order to bestow on these social outcasts the lavish life their hardscrabble backgrounds would have denied them.

To suppress questions before they surface, they coat everything with a saccharine veneer of the kind of low sentimentality that's repugnant to the Catholic culture of the past. Baby Bunnies, pretty pansies, contented kitties, and mistry-eyed meteorological musings form the major topics of Dannie's weekly messages. Far more philistine (and borderline irreverent) is the mawkish characterization of the Mother of God: it sounds as though the cult masters learned their Mariology from a backward maiden-aunt who never reached the fourth grade. Nonetheless, while their cloyingly emotional approach obscures the central rôle of Mary in dogmatic ecclesiology, it's a useful means of stifling nagging doubts about the "clergy's" self-serving motives: Suckers will always succumb to the siren song of bourgeois schmaltz.

So, there in a nutshell is the answer to our correspondent's question about why the Latin-challenged $GG "clerical" louts bother with Latin at all. A teeny, weeny bit will get them into the fly-blown gardens of the witless, who are easy pickings for uneducated but cunning ecclesiastical entrepreneurs with nothing to offer in the way of true religion. But what these serpents do have to hiss about is more than enough to persuade an upwardly mobile, incurious lumpen proletariat to part with its cash and set its soul at risk.