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My dear pal, Bergy (aka Jorge Mario Bergoglio, aka Pope Francis) has popped his clogs.

Bergy has the distinction of the being the Pope who came the closest to condemning the Catholic Church for it’s many criminal acts over the centuries.

By the way, that’s me above, practicing sainthood. It’s a cinch. First, you got ta organize a halo like mine. Doesn’t matter if it is thin and stringy. A halo is a halo. It remains in place right above and adjusts itself like a gyroscope when you move your head. You jump up and down and your halo will jiggle gracefully up and down, like size-DD boobs.

Now I may be 70 but I am a horny male, so don’t get me started on breasts. This post is not about breasts.

Getting back to the halo, remember not ta move your head too suddenly. Bumping into your own halo is a sin. But if you’re careful and you gently sway your head around, you can play with it like a halo hoola hoop.

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It is Labour Day 2016 and I am driving to the Hudson ferry when it comes over the car radio – Mother Teresa has been canonized a saint, 19 years after she died. A second miracle has been authenticated – that of a Brazilian man who has been completely cured, after he was diagnosed with malignant brain tumors and given little chance of making it by his doctors.

I am wondering how Mama Tee could figure in this ‘miraculous intervention’ given that she died in 1997 but I am afraid ta ask. Maybe she bumped into him and blessed him when visiting Rio while she was alive and it took twennie years for the man to recover completely.

Or maybe Mama Tee enrolled in Johns Hopkins University after her Brazil visit, got herself an advanced doctorate in neuro-oncology, completed a gruelling internship, did her Masters and wrote a PhD thesis and rushed back to save the guy……as a ghost. She was dead by then, remember?

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In case you are confused, Canonization is the process that ends in bestowing sainthood on a mortal. It is a recognition by the Catholic Church that is the spiritual equivalent of the Presidential Medal of Freedom or the Bharat Ratna or the George Cross.

There’s another recognition that the Catholic Church likes to dole out – beatification. It’s like Canonization-lite. It is the recognition by the church that a dead guy has entered heaven.

Both, canonization and beatification, have one prerequisite – you have got ta be raising the daisies, ie:dead.

Until the mid-1600s, just about anyone – even local bishops – had the power to beatify but in time, the Catholic Church realized that complete jerks were being beatified. It got so bad that soon there were more assholes in heaven than in hell.

Not that one cannot be a saint and an asshole at the same time. In September 2015, Pope Francis canonized Junipero Serra, a Spanish missionary who first brought Catholicism to the natives of California in the early 18th century.

“Brought” would be a very charitable use of the word actually. “Rammed in“ would be more appropriate. Junipero Serra achieved the catholicization by brutally suppressing the native American culture and banning native rituals under pain of torture and even death.

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Here’s a few things you need to know in case you fancy the idea of being canonized a saint…….

Like I mentioned earlier, the number one requirement is that you need to be dead before the procedure can even begin. Of course there is an oxymoron here – if you are dead, would you give a fuck if you became a saint or you didn’t? It is like winning a posthumous medal. Would it have mattered to Capt. Vikram Batra that he won a Param Vir Chakra at Kargil? Or Navy Seal Michael A Monsoor for his Medal of Honor at Ramadi? Of course it wouldn’t.

The other thing is that you will be among the 900+ canonized guys and gals and you’ll be in haloed company.

The first three Abrahamic saints were male – the archangels Raphael, Michael and Gabriel. Raphael and Michael were low-key, except when they were required to slaughter sundry non-believers and assorted barbarians.

The rock star was definitely Gabriel. He was the one who came down to earth and conveyed God’s messages to Mohammad on a mountaintop cave near Mecca, where he went, evenings, to reflect in peace and quiet. Mohammad then packaged his jottings into the Quran.

I too like to go sit on that grassy knoll at the edge of our backyard sometimes, on summer evenings, to reflect on life. If then on one of these evenings, the angel Gabriel appears and expects me to take shorthand, I know what I’ll do….. tell him to fuck himself.

When I smoked Trichy weed in college and laid down to listen to Emerson, Lake and Palmer, I too saw apparitions with wings lecturing me. If only I had compiled ELP’s psychedelic words into a best-selling book, I too would be a messiah by now. Only, my following wouldn’t be a murderous one.

Raphy, Mike and Gaby were the only ones who didn’t have to earn their sainthood. They were born with it, somewhat like the Dalai Llama or Nepal’s Living Goddesses. They were God’s way of creating limited editions, I guess.

In order to be ordained a saint, the Catholic Church deems that you have got to perform at least two verifiable miracles. The most popular of all miracles has been curing someone of a terminal illness. If you think you’ll be made a saint just because you won a Presidential election (like Obama), forget it. This is not the Nobel Peace Prize. That’s not the way it works.

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Here lies another oxymoron – if one of the basic tenets of Christianity is the principle of ‘as you sow, so you reap’, ie: if Christianity wants us to believe that we ultimately get what we deserve, then why should someone be miraculously saved without having to complete his suffering?

Doesn’t a miracle set a wrong example, send the wrong message? Like, you got tumors protruding out everywhere, tough shit, man, you musta done something wrong and so you had it coming. Isn’t that what Christianity preaches – that we must suffer for our sins, even when we do not always know what they are? There must be millions on earth, suffering the way that the Brazilian whom Mama Tee saved was suffering. Why should one chosen man be miraculously benefited, while the others are left to die agonizing deaths?

Don’t get me wrong. I hold nothing against Mother Teresa being canonized. It wasn’t her idea, I am certain of that. Left to herself, I am sure she wouldn’t give a flying fuck if she was made a saint or she wasn’t. She was a great human being and the world already knows it. Does her sainthood change anything, make us revere her more, turn us into better human beings? No, it doesn’t, not one bit.

Or is it just one of those last-ditch efforts by a failing faith that is in its death throes, trying to prop itself up by petty self-aggrandizement? One of the things that Hitler started doing at the fag end of the Second World War was to award every (Tom)as, von (Dick)en and (Harry)hausen the Knight’s Cross with the Oak Leaves, to raise flagging morale. If I look hard enough, I am sure I’ll find that Nixon did pretty much the same thing, throwing around Medals of Honor like confetti, after sensing flagging morale and defeat during the closing days of the Vietnam War.

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I believe that if one has done something exceptional, it shall be automatically registered and recognized ‘up above’, if at all there is someone there. Attaining true spirituality means that one doesn’t care about earthly recognition, like canonization.

True spirituality does not require me to sit up and say, “Wow! Look what a great faith Christianity is! It has so many saints”! Instead, true spirituality shows me the distinction between going to bed with choir boys and platonically loving fellow human beings.

Today, we have a world virtually on fire, consumed on all sides by racism, bigotry and hate and here we have a church that is totally out of sync with reality, busy making someone who died two decades back, a saint.

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At this point I am on the beautiful strip of asphalt that winds along the southern shore of the Lac Deux Montagne. It’s 11am on a beautiful day and time to banish all thoughts of the crap they call canonization and listen to “Wait wait, don’t tell me”.

I punch the preset on the FM button to 107.9 (NPR).