The Churches: Judas, he OK

Sunday, April 16, 2006

Judas, he OK

About 400 of about 1,370 Gospel of Judas news stories say it's a Gnostic document, says the gospel according to Google. Too bad for us readers. Gnostics were gotcha writers who predated Christ. They rehabbed Cain too, portraying him as a decent fellow even if he did do his brother Abel in, and Esau, famous seller of birthright for mess of pottage. In this one they rehab Judas, "a good poster boy for the Gnostic movement." The news prompted one writer to Chi Trib -- not for or in it, thank God -- to call for his canonization, arguing that there would be no Christianity if not for St. Judas.

Gnostics -- opposite of agnostics, remember, the prefix "a" being Greek for "non" -- were know-it-alls. Rather, they knew things the rest of us didn't. How did they know it? They just knew it, that's all. You had to join.

Meanwhile, Chi Trib's John Kass celebrates Easter with the frankest statement of faith in a daily newspaper that I have seen. Not even op-ed writers are as clear, being at pains to win over the other side and not too sharply to delineate their own. He swings from the Eastern Orthodox side of the plate but is kind enough to go Easter today, not next week.

He notes his secular-media colleagues' penchant for "skittish" approach to religion but "dogmatic" approach to "scientific progress [and] the ability of government officials and technology and reason to solve the problems of the modern world" and the like, but begs not to offend. "My sins haunt me," he says, "and what they've left behind reminds me that I'm nobody to tell others about what should be in their hearts."

Hollywood's doing the "Da Vinci Code," he notes, however, and there's the Judas gospel, covered "as if it were a missing companion to the other four" when it never was even a runner-up. They both feature doubt, and no doubt about it, "doubt sells." Put another way, "Jesus saves--circulation," a friend at a newsweekly told him. Put yet another way, man biting dog is headline stuff; so is the St. Judas idea. And promoting it may even be rich fun for the promoters.

National Geographic Magazine, for instance, says the newly discovered document offers "new insights" into Judas. They collaborated in its discovery and are in fact selling it.

It ain't all bad news on the Christian front, however. Yesterday's page one story on Holy Family RC church, in Inverness, by Chi Trib's Margaret Ramirez, was on the mark as depiction of energetic competition between Christian camps for spiritually hungry parishioners. Holy Family got its start as alternative to Willow Creek "mega-church" three miles away, she reports. Cardinal Bernardin put it in play. What the hugely successful Willow Creek thinks about it is not mentioned, but one can allow a little entrepreneurship in these matters, and this startup is thriving. (So is Willow Creek, we presume.)

Holy Family competes in Wesleyan fashion with Willow Creek, applying the latest in Evangelical-church devices -- big-screen shots of hymn lyrics, for instance -- and at least one very old one, a baptism-by-immersion font. There would be no kneelers in the recently renovated building -- sanctuary, say Protestants, body of the church or just church, say Romans -- but Downtown said put 'em in, exercising some very non-evangelical central control. Cardinal George is fingered as the authority in effect, which he most certainly is. But Cardinal George, are there kneelers in St. Peter's in Rome? (No.)