Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception

There are over one billion Catholics in the world today, with a growth rate that is just a little bit ahead of the overall population growth. In the U.S. nearly one-fourth of us identify ourselves as Catholics, over 67 million of us. Small wonder both Mady and I found it natural to begin our explorations of religious experience with a Catholic church. We chose the one with a name that seemed the ultimate in Catholicism: The Basilica of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. It is, in Denver, the home of the Archbishop, about whom I know very little except that his name sounds Spanish (Chaput), fortunately for him, because in German it would mean "Finished!" I have never seen a picture of him in which he was not wearing robes; I have never seen a picture of him laughing. I will take it on my own peculiar faith that he doesn't wear a nightgown to bed and that he laughs when someone tells him a good joke, preferably one about the Rabbi, the priest, and the Unitarian.

He was not there today, but I have a hunch that one of the more elaborate chairs on the "stage" is his and his alone. "Thrones," I think of them, really. It was like the house of the three bears: there were small chairs for small boys in robes, medium chairs for the medium boys in white robes, larger chairs and more ornate, for the two men in green robes. "I'll take the medium boy in white," did one of them ever opine. "He looks JUST RIGHT." There was something creepy about the array of boys on the stage with the priests. Why the heck were they there? Most of the time, they did nothing. Occasionally, one or the other of the five, arranged like a menorah, the tallest in the middle, tapering down like true candles to the small boys on either end ("just right.."), one of the five would rise and walk solemnly to some other place or disappear into a slit in the drapes behind them. Even more occasionally, one or two would fulfill a genuine function, holding a candle, presently the incense burner, following a priest dutifully, with hands piously pressed together in front of them. Where do the Catholics find these boys, who at eight or twelve or even 15 are not embarrassed beyond measure to wear short white frocks and mince across a stage with their hands pressed together in prayer and never a laugh, no, not so much as a twinkle in their eyes.

Indeed, the whole place was utterly without humor. There was no humor in the priest's sermon, no smiles exchanged among parishioners, not even a genuine smile anywhere to be seen during that worst of all modernizations of church ritual: THE SHARING OF THE PEACE. A bunch of robots, acting upon the command of the priest, turning to each other and stiffly shaking hands, "Peace be with you." If that be peace, give me war.

Not surprising to think of war in these reflections, for the whole service pulsed with what I can only typify as repressed violence. The music, changing in one instant from some forgettable lightness of being to crashing chords and frenzied beats that were like Wagner on acid. The incense in what I think is called a censor being swung nonchalantly by the little angel boys initially, then, in the hands of the priest, being swung harder and harder, like a playground bully pushing a girl on the swing until she is terrified and screaming, swing it harder and higher and harder and higher...

It was all very sexual. When the priest reached into what I thought was just a velvet curtain at the back of the stage (I know this is not called a stage, but what IS it called in a cathedral, this sacred stage full of altars and trinkets and statues and gold?), I nearly gasped in fright. He parted the curtains, the soft, velvet, labial curtains with his hands pointed in, arrow like, thrusting and parting and pillaging. And then he pulls out, not a baby, immaculate or otherwise, but a chalice, the symbol of womanhood, the symbol of receptivity. the keeper of the sperm of the holy of holies. And he and the other priest and the angel boys all drink from this, spinning the metal chalice slightly in between tastings, wiping it clean with a white handkerchief. Women are filthy, you know, you know, don't you boys? Men are so much cleaner. Always carry a clean white handkerchief, certainly. Or, failing that, don a white little angel's robe.

There was not a single trace of joy in that whole cathedral that I could see, excepting the baby boy in the pew in front of us, who alternated between his mother's arms and his father's. "Holy infant, so tender and mild." Will he grow up to be an altar boy? He almost certainly will not grow up to become a priest; Americans don't produce priests any more. Like almost any other commodity we value... cars or electronics or priests... we import more than we produce, and we export, effectively, none. We bring them up from Latin America and, increasingly, from Africa now. The priest at the cathedral we visited was definitely Latino. Does that have anything to do with the fact that the biggest, most gorgeous (truly gorgeous!) cathedral in the Rocky Mountain West was nearly empty on a beautiful Sunday morning in February? Or was it the mean street outside, dreary, crime ridden, poverty stricken Colfax?

We would have to think about that over breakfast in the coffeehouse two blocks away, the Bump and Grind. Yeh. Think about such holiness while a drag queen lolled on our table, her knees demurely pressed together in truer piety than I saw anywhere in that damned cathedral.

Church of The Immacuate Conception

2/4/07 I’d been to Catholic Church a couple times before. This was decidedly a different experience. Several Catholic components that I’d thought were crucial were missing. It seemed that no one in the whole place actually knew what was going on. I sensed a kind of bystander effect. People appeared to hope no one would recognize they were clueless if they looked forward without blinking.

The sieves by the door that usually hold the holy water were both empty and saran wrapped. You couldn’t touch them, much less the water which should have been inside. There were no welcoming smiles, which, normally I understand to be requisite. No one said Hello, Good Morning, or asked us how we were doing. The Holy Ghost seemed more ghostly than usual. Like maybe he doesn’t translate well to a neighborhood of pawnshops and drag bakeries.

At the first hymn, and due to almost irreversible conditioning, which is even instilled in me although I was by no means brought up in a church, my mom and I both leapt into song. She is one of those soprano singers who always sings in her top register, and while it's not bad singing, in your head you debate over whether she’s living a solo diva fantasy or confused her connection to God with “trueness” of pitch. As if music by its shear impact communes to holiness. 3/4^th of the way through the song my mom elbowed me in the elbow and mouthed, “Is anyone else singing?” My mouth froze as I looked around because I (apparently along with the rest of the congregation) had the fear that my ignorance would be uncovered. Practically no one else was singing. Those who were singing could more aptly be categorized as minging or sumbeling to his holiness.

To make it stranger still at the end of the hymn the keyboardist started to go off on an organ rant which felt like Beethoven’s fifth meets a high speed chase scene, and perhaps we were advancing into a medieval music video written and directed by a chimpanzee on prozac and coffee. According to the surroundings no one had yet noticed except us.

It was a surreal mixture of things that seemed old school catholic and present comatose at the same time. As the time for communion commenced I found myself pondering where Christ’s body is manufactured. Upon research, I found out several interesting facts.

Communion wafers are largely made in convents by nuns. While this used to be an easy enough process, globalization, it seems, has become a nun-struggle. Less nuns coupled with an increased demand have meant increased work for the nuns. It has become difficult for them to balance the constraints put upon them by prayer and production of the lords body in a thin tastless wafer. An exemplary case from Cape Town, South Africa tells how they used to have enough nuns to provide. Now they have to employ both machinery and outside workers to keep up with demand. However, for nuns, the wafers still have a spiritual power. While speaking to a group of children about the crackers one nun explained. “Eucharist, she told the children, heals and unites. To make her point, Sr Catherine took a freshly baked sheet of altar bread, and crumbled it on the table before her. The pieces, she said, represent "the hurt world"”. (http://www.thesoutherncross.co.za/features/hosts.htm).

I never knew this, I thought the hurt of the world was more vividly described in pictures of things and people in pain, or struggle. I had no idea about the intense import that is bland bread shards.

In Quebec, communion wafers have become a diet food. While most of Quebec is secular and unbothered by having Christ’s body next to Cheese-Its, others do not feel so sure about this. “People are snacking on hosts and host pieces like it’s candy. They’re not distinguishing between the body of Christ and something you nibble on at home,” said François Trudel, a former Catholic missionary familiar with the production of communion wafers in Quebec. (http://seedlings.wordpress.com/2005/12/31/communion-snack-food/).

My favorite part about this is how he calls it host pieces, like a whole wafer is some sort of completeness.

Further controversy has arisen over the necessity of wheat in Jesus’s bod. Apparently, Catholicism states that Jesus must have wheat to be the real deal. This is met with cries of damnation from coeliacs all over the world. Who want a new Christ. A gluten free Christ.

Father Williams said gluten-free communion wafers have been available to coeliac sufferers for a decade, kept in a separate dish. But the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had recently determined that only wheat-based flour was valid matter for celebrating the eucharist.

"The church would not deliberately attempt to poison its communicant members," he said. "The last thing we want is to alarm Catholic coeliac sufferers."”
(http://www.theage.com.au/articles2004/08/19/1092889278988.html

So, it seems that there is more to this communion business than originally meets the eye. Funnily enough, in the face of other rituals such as the promenation of a GIANT GOLD BIBLE, the virgin altar boys-not to mention a virgin mother, the incense which must be swished a certain number of times and ways, a Father with an accent that caused him to say "Praise God's Wort" repeatedly, a chapel clearly not designed for the P.A. system and the reverberations that it causes, and sitting under pictures of a man whiter than a sweed, yet by all logic should be brown nailed to a cross in blood and gore, it didn't seem that weird.