Why I am running for the “office” of

Pope of the Roman Catholic Church

One reason is that, as someone whose business card reads: “Social Philosopher ... and occasional fool”, it amuses me.  It lets me challenge something that should be challenged, and at the same time to do it with a healthy sense of humor and an appropriate dose of whimsy.  The Roman Catholic Church already takes itself too seriously, and as a male and a member of the Church (all the qualifications to be Pope that I apparently need by the way), my view is we need to heed Christ when He says: “Lest ye become again as little children, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

If the Church can’t laugh at itself, it is of no use to anyone, and the current hierarchical leadership is way too serious about almost everything.

Now it will be obvious that I am not going to be elected Pope.  Not only is there no real democratic process in the Church, but I am so far away from being a member of the in-group that runs the Church, that were someone to seriously propose me for Pope would be considered madness. Yet, madness is where the “fool” must go, so if you want to join that, then follow me by reading what is below.

The essential question is “authority”.  The spiritual purpose of having a Pope is having the leadership of the Catholic Religion be open to some form of spiritual authority - which authority has to come  from an answer to the question of: Who can speak for God?

Now in order for the Roman Church to survive as a social institution, during the Fall of the Roman Empire, it believed it needed a hierarchical organization, because it was otherwise surrounded by similar organizations (the various aristocrats of blood and sword that ruled most social forms such as city-states, nations and so forth).  

Religious and State “authority” were highly present in those formative years for the Roman Church, in a mixed form.  For example, a leader of the State often needed to present himself as a member of the dominant religious impulse of those people he/she wanted to rule. 

Please note that I am making a distinction between the Catholic Religion and the Roman Church.  Details can be found in my essay: Saving the Catholic Religion from the Roman Church: through deepening our understanding of the Third Fatima Prophecy  http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/SavingCatholicReligion.html

This spiritual “authority” can be claimed, or it can be demonstrated.  It can be demanded or it can be natural.  The best way to appreciate this distinction is to notice the struggles over the centuries between the “authority” of the Saints, who founded the various religious orders within the Church, and the “power" of the hierarchical leadership.  The hierarchical leadership claimed it possessed the power-like “authority” to speak for God, while the Saints demonstrated through their religious practices “by-example authority” to speak for God.

One is an enforced social power, the other a real spiritual power.  The social power demands obedience, and the real spiritual power naturally gathers followers.  The social power enforces its powers by the withholding of communion and the possibility of enforcing permanent excommunication.  A  real spiritual power leaves the “followers” free to make all their own choices.

Which kind of “authority” did Christ demonstrate?

If you build your house on sand, as the last teaching of the Sermon on the Mount points out, when troubles come the house fails.  This we are seeing in the present state of the Roman Church.  It is failing, because inwardly it has not engaged enough in “practice”.  The child abuse scandal is just one more example of what the too political and too earthly Roman Church hierarchy has fostered: hypocrisy and immorality.

Against this broken “standard” lives what happens among the Laity - what is called by the Catholic Religion: the Body of Christ.  The Laity does not claim “authority”, - in fact as best as it can its tries to be faithful to what it understands is the truth, as the Laity has learned from the Gospels.  Nor does the Laity present itself to the world as perfect or rightfully authoritative.  It is rather simply human, and often forgiving of human frailty. 

It is the Laity that is ready for women to be priests.  It is the Laity that is ready to abandon (and already has) the absurd rules against birth control.  It is the Laity that while opposing abortion knows better than to kill to enforce their answer to this moral dilemma.  It is the Laity that suffered from the abuse scandal.  It is the Laity that best today demonstrates simple Christian virtues.  It is the Laity that struggles to accept homosexuality.  It is the Laity that is modern, and ready to move on from a no longer useful past.

Now I am not so much running for Pope, as already being the next true Pope.  I am declaring victory and moving on, such that even before being selected I am resigning.  This next is my last few words of this teaching during my amazingly foolish and instantaneously short reign as Pope.

Not only should the Pope be selected by the Laity, instead of the now clearly dysfunctional hierarchy, but so should the priests.  Right down at the basic level of the practice of the Catholic Religion, the Laity should determine who is to serve in the role of Priest.  The Catholic Religion needs to be in world-wide rebellion against the Roman Church, for only in the Religion and among the Laity (the Body of Christ) does God anymore speak. 

First elect the Priests, then elect the higher officials.  Change the Church from the bottom up using the spiritual - religious - authority of the Laity.  Don’t wait for reformation from the top down.  That’s not where the Holy Mother works, ... She works from the bottom (the social commons) up.

God speaks now from the Periphery, not from any organized Centers.   The Center has no more “authority”, having squandered it for Centuries in the seeking after earthly power.   This has always been actually true, it just has taken until the Third Millennium for the Body of Christ to be ready to assume this “authority”.  Before that they were not ready, and the tensions between the Roman Church and the lives of the Saints were a necessary social stand-in for what was the slow incarnation of Christ’s true teachings into humanity in general.

“All things happened through It [the Word], and not one thing that has happened, happened without It”  Prologue to the Gospel according to John.

This is literally true, and includes all the “true” facts so far discovered by natural science [science has a lot of things wrong, as being a human endeavor it naturally makes all kinds of mistakes].  All that exists is/was/will-be sourced in the Creator, whose nature we are still far from understanding.  My “authority” for this is demonstrated in my book: The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/artofgod.html

“In It [the Word] was Life and the Life was the Light of the World”  Look outside.  The “Light” is the Word.  Everything is the Word.  You are the Word.  Every thought you think is of the Word.  As the Beatles taught: “All you need is Love.”; and, the Word certainly is Love. 

What would Love exclude? Nothing and no one.  There are, for Love, no one who is better or more perfect.  For Love we are all just humans, and equally Loved, including the fallen hierarchical “leaders” of the Roman Church.  Join the Mother, working out of and through the Laity, the Body of Christ, and thereby rebirth a living Universal inclusive (Catholic) Religion from within the social commons, where all are Loved and forgiven - no exceptions at all.