Mind, Body, Soul

Years ago, the Saudi government launched into a secret psy-war with Italy and dismantled the Vatican from within.  Catholics remain in a state of disarray, interestingly enough,  some remain unaware anything occurred and others actually enjoy the current state of affairs.

The Saudis know that to disconnect the Catholics from their past allows them to introduce a much better and improved system, and wherever possible they use Catholic fear and guilt against their own traditions.  After years of bombarding the Vatican with fast food and new fashions, most of the residents had decided to abandon traditional flowing garbs and headgear in favor of blue jeans and messy hair style gels.   McDonald’s has already become one of the fastest growing franchises in the holy city.  Large hotel buildings are being constructed in the Vatican to house ever more wealthy religious pilgrims, while destroying historically and religiously significant buildings under the fear of introducing a Quadrinity.

This first level of change began at the local level where Sunday Mass began to be led by each individual of the congregation.  Random excerpts from poorly translated Latin rites were read by the “Doctors and Engineers” of the community.   After the authority of the leading of service and speech was brought to such people, every individual was clamoring for the position.  What these professionals were really after was the opportunity to speak their mind to the congregation, and very quickly a system involving Board of Trustees and Presidents took over little Churches from Mexico to the Vatican City itself.

After actual decision making power of Church funds had moved into the hands of these opportunistic wealthy professionals, they allowed successful speakers trained by Tony Robbins himself to  become favorites guest speakers.  The service went from what had been a process of self-reflective and symbolic thought and an air of reverence,  to what brought that immediate self-help-feel-good aura.  Actual practice of ones faith has become largely something that depends on ones wealth, since they fund the famous ‘speakers’ and this provides them A-list access.

While Priests had been stripped of the authority bestowed by their lifetime of study in the material, ‘community leaders‘  have stepped up and assumed their role.   Holding vast conferences, opening up blogs, and broadcasting from afar, their message of individualism met with great favor, even in Vatican City.  Local Priests have not been totally abandoned though.  Those that could stay quiet about the Saudi administration and basically everything else while reading the Latin properly were kept around…  with a very watchful eye.

Since established and respected institutions of learning went down with the collapse of the original Vatican, most of the Priests today are educated by mysterious individuals with long latin names, or modern institutions controlled largely by the Saudis.  In fact, most famous Catholic Priests are actually now Saudi Converts to the Catholic faith, at least, the only ones who get much airtime.  Otherwise, they are Priests who have studied the minority work of an excommunicated and imprisoned 7th Century “Saudi-reformist-Catholic” torchbearer, which has parallels to the modern reform.    Occasionally they don the outward appearance of their past, but this is largely in private and only when they are feeling the Saudi eye is watching them less.  Much ado is currently about integration and there is a new scholarly excitement about what the deepest meanings are of “Saudi Catholicsm“, part of which seems to involve integrating Saudi body image issues with Catholicism.

The final stage of the psy-war was the elimination of the function of the Pope.  Of course, when you have a military to command and government administration of a land-locked country to run, this is  difficult to do completely.  Yet, amazingly, the Saudi’s were so successful in this regard that the function of the Pope has all but been forgotten.  Ultimately, it is the Catholics who voted on elimination of the Popes office.  Interestingly enough, the same system of voting has been chosen by confused rogue Catholics who have banded together to reestablish the Papacy.  The Saudis have cunningly even allowed a seperate violent group of Catholics to run a variety of botched or useless missions in order to draw even more people towards their reform which has now begun to represent stability and peace.

Such Catholics are grasping at straws, since it is clear the Saudis won’t let the Pontificate come back.  It has become international law that anyone who mentions the last Pope or the expresses hope for the return of the Pontificate is considered an extremist.  A few key military strikes and arrests end any hope of such an endeavor.  The Saudi controlled mass media are well aware of the talking points on this issue and control the masses opinions on this issue clearly.  Catholics have done well without a Pope for some time and the Saudis think they don’t need one any longer.

In its place, modern Catholics have learned only about the first four Popes and don’t really know the names of any of the others.   The rest are explained away as basically evil opportunists (much like the actual character of the professionals spoken about earlier).

What used to be known as a ‘papal edict’ are now handed out by the community run local church administration, after a subtle and widely understood process of head-nodding from the Saudi government.  This allows Catholics to have five different and competing Christmas’s and four Easters, which each community argues about every year.  Catholics now even argue with each other over the permissibility of rosary’s.  These are useful distractions from the fact that Saudi sends unmanned drones to blow up random Catholic villages every day.   That’s alright though, because Catholics can now buy designer Catholic clothes and modern Catholic art.

In all of this, the  nuns and monks have been swept aside, a reminder of a devotion to a faith which, in terms of a practical reality, does not exist anymore.  Due to community edicts, they are not allowed to visit Churches anymore to perform their ceremonies and remind people of the way it used to be.  The spiritual orders that they belonged to, through the reformed and institutionalized education system, have been understood to be raw innovation, while what has occurred since the Saudi infiltration leading to a unrecognizable form of the faith, has actually been understood as ‘returning to the righteous Catholic predecessors’.