Our Muse
This website is intended first of all for all kinds of ex-, lapsed, former, recovering, cafeteria-style, or simply disgruntled Roman Catholic victims and survivors. And all the weird ideas these kinds of folks entertain. Heretics welcome, but adults only, kids!
It’s not just for sexual abuse victims, however. Virtually anybody with that “indelible mark on the soul” of having been raised Catholic, attended parochial schools or catechism classes is in some sense a victim, in my view. Everyone has been lied to and manipulated by a cynical hierarchy with an age-old agenda to remain the sole purveyors of truth, most especially the lower clergy.
This site is not strictly “anti-Catholic” – more like “anticlerical” and “antihierarchical”. Despite my profound disagreements with the people in charge and their dogma, there is much of Catholic culture and achievement that I admire and I still consider myself very much culturally “catholic”.
However, I no longer believe that reform is possible. As for the Catholic Church, perhaps Giordano Bruno, one of the Inquisition’s most prominent victims, judged it best in his book, The Torch Bearer:
“You will see, in mixed confusion, snatches of cutpurses, wiles of cheats, enterprises of rogues; also delicious repulsiveness, bitter sweets, foolish decisions, mistaken faith and crippled hopes, niggard charities, judges noble and serious for other men’s affairs with little truth in their own; virile women, effeminate men and voices of craft and not of mercy so that he who believes most is most fooled and everywhere the love of gold.”
This site exists not just to criticize the Catholic Church and mock the pope, but to help preserve the good it has done from the shipwreck it has become, and to explore positive spiritual alternatives, including the occasional entertaining heresy. I hope you enjoy it, too.
Thanks for visiting!
Jay Nelson