Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, a Catholic priest who was the General Secretary to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, was recently discovered to have used Grindr to search for hot dudes. I guess Grindr is an app for locating fellow gays.
Burrill until Tuesday was the top administrator for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. He stepped down after a Catholic newsletter presented conference officials with allegations that cellphone data indicated he had repeatedly used Grindr and visited gay bars.
Everyone had their pre-programmed responses loaded in memory, an interrupt was triggered and the processes ran. "He's betrayed his vows!" howled the conservatives. "He's a hypocrite!" screamed the libs.
Well, yes, he did both of those things. So what?
We all have a lizard brain at the core of our cortex. It's our limbic system and we share it with every vertebrate from lizards to birds to marmots.
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| Marmots are way cuter, though. |
Your lizard brain is only concerned with food, orgasms* and avoiding predators. It's there 24/7, working to dominate your life. It's why we watch porn when we know it's bad for us. It's why we eat fried foods. It's why we snarl at other people when they make us cross. We all give in to the lizard inside us every day. One of my recurring problems is drinking 4 pints when I should drink 1, at most. I know it's wrong. I tell others it's wrong. I'm a hypocrite.
The Catholic Church teaches us that we are all sinners. Jesus Christ died on the cross to save us from our sins. We go to Confession to be absolved of our sins. We then go out into the world, fight with the lizard and lose again. Lather, rinse, bask in the sun, eat a few bugs, repeat.
Again, so what? Our failures only serve to prove the truth of Catholicism. We are sinners. We sin. Why the hysteria that it happened?
That the lavender Monsignor sinned is indeed a sign of hypocrisy, but only half of his hypocrisy contains information. That is, we all knew he had a lizard inside him, but his faith tells you that he strove to fight it. That's a good thing.
Here are people who aren't hypocrites. They've submitted to their lizards.
To yell and point at the Monsignor while describing those twerkers' role model, Cardi B, as a "strong, black woman" is to encourage people to surrender to their inner lizards. It's yet another conquest by the Lizard Empire.
For my money, Burrill should have been counseled, sent to confession and given a support system to fight his lizard. After that, he should have gone back to work and the Church should have moved on to more important things.
Firing someone because they gave in to a perfectly normal sin, one that didn't have serious ramifications, is like firing the guy because the sun rose in the east.
* - For lizards and such, it's concerned with mating, but thanks to human birth-control and baby-slaughtering technology, we've replaced mating with the immediate payoff for mating, orgasms.
1 comment:
You seem to be minimizing the importance of hypocrisy. I think that is extremely, extremely dangerous, and that you don't fully appreciate just how corrosive hypocrisy actually is. We aren't talking about people who are open about their temptations, and how they wrestle with their inner desires and, while they sometimes fail, are at least trying to be better. No, we are talking about people who know they are doing wrong, and hide it until they get caught, and only then get apologetic and contrite and weepy and beg forgiveness. And meanwhile, everyone suspects strongly that they really aren't sorry for their original sin, but only sorry that they got caught.
If you read the Gospels, something will (or should) strike you as significant. While Jesus talked about a lot about sin in a generic sort of way, there was only one sin that he really came back to over and over again by name, hammering away at it because it offended him so deeply. That sin was hypocrisy. If you are minimizing the significance of the one sin that Jesus clearly felt was so deeply terrible that opposition to it formed a key part of his ministry, can you really call yourself a christian?
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