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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   1629 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 22, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Who has fun stories about saints/spiritual figures?

My favorite is Saint Thomas Aquinas. He wanted to be celibate and his dad disagreed. His father ended up sending a prostitute to his room, and Thomas literally grabbed a flaming stick from the fire and beat her away, then used the torch to draw a cross on the wall or some shit.

Hardcore.

Sounds like an extreme maniac (of course, it's probably false anyway). I mean, if the prostitute has already been paid, all he had to do is to tell her "go away, I don't want your services" (or, maybe, just have her sit in a corner for 10 minutes - though for a virgin probably even 5 minutes should be enough - just to be believable and then make her go away) and she would - who wouldn't be happy to get paid without doing any work? If she hasn't been paid (in which case, wtf was his father is thinking?), then pay her and see above. WTF does he need to do with the flaming sticks and what exactly she got beaten for? She was just doing her part of the deal, she didn't do anything wrong. It's not even claimed she was the devil or sent by the devil or anything like that - she was just a hired worker that came to do her work, what the heck she deserved to be beaten with a flaming stick for? This is an insanely messed up story!

Yeah most of the saints were maniacs in one way or another man. Comes with the territory.

The San Francisco guy preached to birds and animals, but didn't hit anybody with flaming logs. That's much better IMHO.

St Jean Vianney was approached by a noticeably plump woman seeking advice- she asked what he recommended for her. He said 'three Lents' referring to the need to eat less.

  • The story of Genesius of Rome. An actor who wanted to parody and mock Christian rituals, he had a religious experience during one of his mock baptisms and genuinely converted. It gives me a fun mental image of an actor whose role is to exaggerate, but one performance his baptism was genuine, and so the audience is left quizzically wondering what is going on, like a Charlie Kaufman skit. It’s also symbolic of the “fake it ‘til you make it” nature of affirmative rituals — probably, in some sense, everyone’s worship is inauthentic until it’s not.

  • St Sebastian is interesting because his art is so sexually-charged. Example 1 and 2. Some mistakenly think that the nature of these paintings is sexual, with the religious garb acting as plausible deniability. But it is closer to the opposite. Girls (and gays) are attracted to attractive men, so portraying an attractive saint in attractive situations is a valid way bring the lustful to God. They start at the lust, they end in identifying with a holy struggle.

Lmao this would be hilarious to watch

also, this is so very you. I love it.

In terms of cantankerous sass, it’s hard to beat St. Lawrence, a third century deacon in Rome. Immediately after the bishop of Rome was executed by order of the emperor, Lawrence was ordered to hand over the church’s treasury. Instead, he spent three days feverishly giving away as much as he could to the poor, then “presented the city's indigent, crippled, blind, and suffering, and declared that these were the true treasures of the Church: ‘Here are the treasures of the church. You see, the church is truly rich, far richer than your emperor!’” This naturally pissed off the authorities, so they decided to roast him alive on a giant gridiron. After he’d been roasting awhile in extreme agony, he told the guards, “Turn me over. I’m done on this side.”

Damn sassy as fk. Holy shit what a beast. I love stories like this hahaha wow. They really made em different back then huh?

It’s also hard not to appreciate St. Jerome, who is most famous for his translation of the Bible into Latin, but who was also, as one scholar put it, an “irascible, morbidly sensitive old curmudgeon,” who made frequent acerbic comments to and about his fellow clergymen, including Sts. Ambrose and Augustine.

A quick search pulled up this article, which includes some other gems:

When Jerome experienced his own sort of exile after the death of his patron Damasus, he venomously hissed at the “Senate of Pharisees” for having driven him from his beloved Rome.

He was not the continent Augustine who never hinted at struggles with concupiscence after his famous moment in the garden that brought him the chastity for which he had been praying. In his mid-seventies, Jerome tells us that it was only when his body was broken by age that he was freed from his disordered desires.

He was not the disciplined Antony of Egypt who spent 20 years alone pursuing a life of renunciation and who perfected the art of self-mastery. He completely failed at his own desert experiment, even though he had dragged his sizeable library across the Mediterranean to keep him company (what a spectacle that must have been!). Years later, he said of his time there that “when I was living in the desert, in the vast solitude which gives to hermits a savage dwelling-place, parched by a burning sun, how often did I fancy myself among the pleasures of Rome. I used to sit alone because I was filled with bitterness.”

Honestly, he sounds a lot like a Mottizen.

Yeah he definitely sounds like he would belong here. A Mottizen in spirit.

Makes you wonder how often a religious vocation was used to mask symptoms of what would now be called autism. Or homosexuality.

My post from last year sparked some discussion of this.

I’m not sure about clergy, but I’d wager a supermajority of religious (monks, nuns, deaconesses, and the like) are autistic.

Eh, my experience with the young women who become nuns is that they tend to be highly agreeable young women wanting to do something valued by the community and the main other thing they have in common is not being baby crazy.

Monks, you may sort of have a point; a lot of them didn't fit in as a layman.

BTW deaconess is not really a monastic thing(Carthusian nuns have some honors of a deacon when fully professed, but they're still just nuns)- a small number of Eastern Orthodox jurisdictions ordain female deacons who are 'in the world' as diocesan clergy, and there are no Catholic deaconesses(although the RCC now has women in minor orders, while the EOC does not). There was such a thing as a 'deaconess' in ancient Christianity but it was a term for women who assisted in certain church administrative tasks and also not a religious vocation.

BTW deaconess is not really a monastic thing

That depends entirely on your tradition. Lutheran deaconesses traditionally (and in the case of at least one deaconess house, still do) live together in community, wear habits, take the honorific “Sister,” and vow to remain celibate for as long as they remain deaconesses.

Homosexuality – I’d guess 9 out of every 10 vocations, at least.

Priests are only about 50% gay and the percentage is dropping.

How could you possibly measure this reliably?

You can't, but it is what the RCC estimates- and I know enough to say that they might be misestimating, but they're definitely not knowingly lying.

More to the point, one of the major roadblocks to addressing clerical sex scandals was that they were often covered up internally by being listed as 'disciplined for violating celibacy- heterosexual prostitute/adult girlfriend', which indicates that while there are gay priests, it's not some 9/10 supermajority.

You can't, but it is what the RCC estimates- and I know enough to say that they might be misestimating, but they're definitely not knowingly lying.

The Rabbinical Council of California?

More to the point, one of the major roadblocks to addressing clerical sex scandals was that they were often covered up internally by being listed as 'disciplined for violating celibacy- heterosexual prostitute/adult girlfriend', which indicates that while there are gay priests, it's not some 9/10 supermajority.

I don't immediately understand the connection between the coverup documentation and the rate of gay priests. Are you saying that if 9/10 priests were gay the sex scandal would be internally listed as "homosexual prostitute" instead?

I would guess that RCC = Roman Catholic Church, but that's just a guess on my part.

Definitely yes.

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