FIFTH PART

Jesus and the Church

Giving wings to imagination, we can visualize, two millennia ago, the figure of a pilgrim, approaching middle age, wandering with his disciples across the fields and the arid roads of Galillee, Samaria and Judea, or in the old alleys of Nazareth, Cafarnaum, Bethany and Jerusalem. He walks, rests and walks again. And keeps going straight ahead, lecturing to those that give him their ears. He exalts the Kingdom of Heaven, preaches the merit of love and charity, cures the sick and utters words of faith and hope. And he tries to change the image (abstract, of course) of God: from a hard, revengeful an implacable "Lord of the arms" to that of a fair but kind Father.

With the same naturalness, he dialogues with humble farmers and fishermen and with the proud and pompous scholars and religious leaders. He respects the Laws of Moses but, slowly, starts to introduce unique alterations in the way they were usually interpreted.

He is humble in his human condition, but shows pride in relation to the mission that, so he believes, God gave him to exercise.

He doesn't care about taxes and other mundane things, much less about politics and seems to be indifferent to the ideas of many Jews, particularly the Zealots, to carry on a revolt against the Roman conquerors. "My kingdom is not of this world" - he affirms frequently.

And he goes on traveling, always leaving behind beautiful messages and wise teachings.

Because of all these things, it is very difficult to accept that such a man could desire or even imagine that his theological philosophy should become an instrument to buid up a powerful structure - the Christian Church - which, in his name, would come to perpetrate abominable acts, like, for instance, the atrocities executed by the Inquisition, when thousands of people, after severe tortures, were killed in bonfires, under the accusation of witchcraft practice or heresy.

And in that matter, Catholic and Protestants acted with identical cruelty.

A Church that, to assist the political and economical interests of kings and emperors, promoted, on behalf of God and Christianity, the stupid adventures of the Crusades, thus creating an hostility between Chistians and Islamics that persists until our current time.

A Church that, during centuries, attached to the temporal powers, used all means - some, quite sordid - to influence the political and military decisions of dozens of countries.

A Church that, during the obscurantism of Middle Age, monopolized the whole knowledge we inherited from Jewish, Greek and Roman cultures.

A Church that, through all its ramifications, since Paul - "That the slaves remain submissive to their masters in all the things " (Titus,2,9), until the XIXth century, approved slavery, both theoretically and practically. Slavery that, according to what the historian David Davis says in his book: "The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture " '...goes beyond cruelty and exploration, because it sustains the underlying conception that the slave is a transmissible property, without any autonomy to have his own desires and whose conscience equals those of tamed domestic animals'

A Church that, apart a few honorable exceptions, served the ruling classes, ignoring Jesus’option for the oppressed, expressed in so many of his messages, like the Sermon of the Mountain.

A Church that, by leaps and bounds, and under a mantle of injustices hosed with blood, stayed united for more than a thousand years, but that reached the end of the second millennium theologically divided. And, in certain cases, not only theologically. In Ireland, Catholics and Protestants keep grabbing each other, for dozens of years, as an example of what religious radicalism can generate: intolerance, hate, conflicts and deaths.

A Church, whose Catholic faction, due to the political posture of Pious XII, silenced before the Holocaust and, at the end of world war II, in exchange of treasures, facilitated the scape of Nazi criminals to the Iberian Peninsula and South America.

That same Church, during John XXIII' s papacy and through the Second Vatican Council, seemed to open up to the reality of the new times and, with the institution of the so-called Theology of Liberation, apparently intended to adopt an "option for the poor ". But, not long after John XXIII’s death, the Vatican returned to its conservative policy: through the publication of its new Catechism in 1992, it revived Paul’s and Constantine’s "Theology of Domination", declaring that "the person doesn't possess another freedom besides that granted by the obedience to his priests, who are responsible for it, under the orientation of the pope, who retains, by divine determination, the supreme power over the mission of the souls " and that "...the Church recognizes in Jesus’ fundamental characteristics the messianic son of David" (whose ‘reign ' was conquered through slavery and massacre).

Therefore, the promise of the human Jesus of "a reign of love and of a fair and kind celestial Father", (who has nothing to do with David’s Jove), was definitively buried.

An obscene and possibly fatal retrocession. Perhaps the beginning of a long but inexorable march of Catholicism towards the decline of history.

A Church, whose Protestant faction is fragmenting, every day, into multiple " mini-churches ", many of them without any theological knowledge, but saturated of demagogic ‘bishops' and ‘pastors’, eager for personal power and easy enrichment.

A phrase once uttered by the great Mahatma Gandhi, adjusts perfectly to these false wiseacres prophets, betrayers of Jesus theological philosophy: "I love the Christ but I despise the Christians , because they don’t live lke Jesus did"

A Church, whose Protestant fraction is so sectarian that its followers and, was is worse, even its ‘pastors’, sustain that only they are the true believers, only they are Christians. A discriminatory posture that reaches the limit of factious fanaticism, when equals Catholics to Islamics, Jewish or Buddhists, as non-Christians. A semantic, theological and historical mistake.

An stupid arrogance of persons who intend to be the ‘elected’ followers of the non-discriminatory Jesus. Those Protestants forget or ignore that, in spite of the many terrible errors that it did for many centuries, the Catholic Church preceded Protestantism for more than fifteen hundred years and that the main leader of the Reform, before rebelling against the pope authority, was just an agostinian monk!

No, Jesus never imagined or wanted and, certainly, would never approve such a Church. Actually, it is conceivable that the Nazarene never intended to create any kind of church. According to Juan Arias, he only desired to propose a different way of conducting human relations, based, not on power, but on love and fraternity.

It is true that, according to the Gospel (Mattew,16,18), Jesus said to his senior disciple, the famous sentence: " You are Peter and on this stone I will build my Church ". It is possible that he made such a statement. However, we believe that Jesus imagined "his Church" as something not larger than a temple, that would serve as a place to congregate his followers and a source from which to propagate his messages. Never a colossal organization, to much dedicated to mundane affairs, wealth and temporary powers.

Or then Jesus didn't say the famous sentence and Peter, longing to lead the emergent Christianity, said that Jesus had said!

Anyway, the phrase, real or invented, might have been important in defining the control of the religious leadership in the first century: the old fisherman assumed the command of the Church of Rome and became the first pope. And the ones that came after him, became known as ‘Peter's successors’.

The Protestant Reform

It started in 1517, when the German monk Martin Lutero, using as excuse the sale of indulgences by the Roman Catholic church, began to rebel against the pope. The sale of indulgences was destined, officially, to collect money from Christians, in order to build and reform churches and cathedrals. But, in reality, it also sustained the luxuries of the Roman curia.

How did the indulgence system work? When the person donated a certain amount of money, the penalty for his sins would become smaller in the Judgment Day, or he would have reduced the time of his permanence at the mythological Purgatory, where he waited to be conducted to the Kingdom of Heaven... A deceiving and sordid blackmail.

The Lutherans of the time attributed to the dominican priest Johannes Tetzel, one of the principal collectors of donations, the following sentence: " When the money tinkles in the box, the soul arises to heaven ". Maybe these were not, exactly, his words, but that was definitely the idea of the hoax !

Ironically, four centuries later, the Pentecostal or renewed Protestant sects revived the "ideology" of indulgences, with promises of privileged places in Heaven, special graces and miraculous cures, in exchange of donations.

In Brazil, the "Universal Church of God’s Kingdom" and the " Alive Christ Evangelic Church" are two examples of that false and sordid procedure.

After thirteen years of theological hesitations from Lutero and because of some disagreement anong him, Zwingli and Calvino, the Protestant Reform finally defined the basic principles of its doctrine.

The German former monk promotes deep dogmatic alterations in relation to the doctrine of the Roman church. Among the most significant we have the exclusion of saints, the extinction of celibacy for priests and the reduction in the number of sacraments. Only three remained: baptism (and just for adults), marriage and the "holy supper" (in substitution to the Eucharist).

But the Reform doesn't reform nor reformulates the unshakable dogmas of the Roman church. In this matter, the Protestants become more orthodox than Paul. In relation to the subject of salvation, Lutero is even more radical than the apostle, when he utters: "Nothing can give man the guarantee of salvation; that can only be obtained through fear and tremor ".

Protestantism began its existence sustaining the principle of submission by means of terror!