Saints! Preserve Us!

The pope created a new saint in Brazil yesterday – Friar Galvao, an 18^th-century monk to whom is attributed over 5000 miraculous cures (only two of which were recognized by the Church). His cures were effected by writing Latin prayers on tiny pieces of paper that, when swallowed, allegedly remedied a range of diseases.

The pope’s predecessor, John Paul II, beatified or canonized more “saints” that all of his predecessors combined.

This return to crass magicalism is a desperate attempt by the pope to retain believers in a church whose membership, both clergy and laity, is declining. The Catholic Church’s explanations of its god, the world and its people (and their morality) have collapsed when evaluated rationally and philosophically. The Church’s weltauschaung has become more and more abstruse, trying unsuccessfully to comport with “facts on the ground”.

So the Church is retreating to more and more preposterous claims in an effort to sow more superstition among the credulous.

The two “miracle” cures attributed to Galvao took place before he died in 1822, when medicine was still, by any measure, primitive. To make an assertion about diagnosis, Galvao’s intervention, and sequelae, at a distance of 185 years is absurd. It would be absurd even if he practiced some sort of medical procedure on them, to say nothing of his giving them magic pills.

This whole charade belies the real question, which is, why do people believe what they want, rather than what they must? The planet is poisoned by religious/magical thinking, ensuring continued violence in the name of, and justified by, some god. And as long as such thinking remains unchallengeable (which it is practically by definition), superstitious people can swallow baloney such as: “The smartest thing the Devil did was to convince people he didn’t exist.” Bumper-sticker reasoning like this, embraced by tens of millions of people, guarantees that religious slaughter will proceed apace, as it has for the last 2000 years.

Of course, thinking like this wasn’t invented 2000 years ago by the Catholic Church, but the Church has perpetuated, justified, encouraged, funded, organized and rewarded slaughter better, more efficiently, more brutally and more thoroughly than any force in history. It’s the premier crime against humanity, and the pope is bringing all his immense resources to bear to make sure it’s perpetuated by generations to come.