Natalia D’Onofrio
Final Paper
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Natalia D’Onofrio
Professor Michele Brewster
PHL 320 Comparative Religion
04 May 2009
Final Paper
Since the beginning of man, there seems to have been one general consensus that has been carried down the line through the ages. That consensus is that there is a God, he or she does exist somehow and homage must be paid to this almighty being. Whether it be a bloody sacrifice, a primitive work of art, or a ritualistic prayer- man has been worshipping the unseen in a material world for thousands of years. Indeed, wars have been fought and lives taken in the name of the almighty creator, which seems an oxymoron in itself.
It is this school of thought that led us to one of the greatest fallacies and the most shameful public embarrassments of our time, The Catholic Church. The Catholic Church was
King of all Kings for over 2000 years; longer in fact if you include its surreptitious adaptations of Pagan religions and Judaism (Fisher xvi). Emperor of an eon, the Catholic Church knew no bounds. In the name of God and Christ our Lord Savior we ravaged and pillaged new lands, raping its people. This sort of unchecked corruption bred… well, more unchecked corruption.
Globalization in the early 1500’s filled the coffers of the Catholic Church, enabling it to cement its iron grip on the people it subjugated in the name of God (Manning 5). The faithful followers of the Catholic Church thought they were obtaining spiritual guidance as they obediently gave more and more money, resources and human resources to the Catholic Church.

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Fast forward to the year 2002, the Boston Globe ran a series of articles on abuse of young men perpetrated by the clergy and that’s when the proverbial you-know-what hit the fan (Isely para 3). There is no longer any denying what the Catholic Church has hidden behind its sacred robes for centuries. Those jokes about altar boys and priests had merit with their roots stretching as far back as the inception of the Catholic Church’s celibacy rules. Isely states that since 2004
“it was estimated that over $500,000,000 had been paid by the Catholic Church in the United
States to settle sex abuse cases” (para 5).
The gig is up, it’s time to pay. The only positive event that came about from the evil schematics of the Catholic Church, other than the fact that many people still believe in God and the teachings of the Church despite the evidence, is that the Catholic Church has confessed its sins and are attempting to right their wrongs. Maybe saying five Hail Mary’s and three Our
Father’s while jumping up and down a bunch of times will help. God only knows, but the way it has impacted society on such a deep, intimate and spiritual level will take many lifetimes to heal and many hundreds upon thousands of tears to be shed. The exposure of the perverse sexual corruption silently condoned by the Catholic Church has at the very least opened the door to the pathway towards healing some of society’s greatest wounds.
The bursting of the overinflated bubble that was the Catholic Church has left many now commonly referred to as a Recovering Catholic. Ironically, this syndrome couldn’t come at a better time when many are predicting that time is up, Armageddon or something akin to that is upon us. At a time when the new Millennium was supposed to be a promise to many as a sign of hope and good things to come, the scandals of the Catholic Church have left many feeling

Natalia D’Onofrio
Final Paper hopeless, agnostic, atheist, or seeking out new religions. For many, the New Age movement took
3 precedence as people began to look for spiritual fulfillment in a new era.
Perhaps Karl Marx was right when he described religion as “the opiate of the masses…a medicine for the sufferings of the proletariat…religion is the cry of the oppressed creature and the heart of a heartless world” (Hamlyn 509-510). Karl Marx believed “that religion would disappear with the evils which it sought hopelessly to abolish, and it would be out of place in the new scientific and egalitarian society” (Hamlyn 510). Karl Marx may have been on to something, but the human soul hungers for more, it hungers for meaning and belonging. It longs for what it has always longed for over hundreds and thousands of years. It longs for the seemingly intangible force we call God, the Supreme Being, Allah, Yahweh, Shakti, etc., some higher power that can hopefully one day explain our purpose on this planet and perhaps bring us home. Perhaps that longing for permanence in a permanently changing world is what gave us the longing for eternity.
Maybe through the science of nature we will find a path to God. Maybe it’s time to call in the Nature Gods once again. In a time where science is showing us how little time we may have left, people are turning to nature and worshipping what little is left of it. Neo-Paganism,
Deep Ecology, even Baha’i all focus on re-hashing the sacred golden rules and blending them into a format suitable for the children of the Age of Aquarius. Are we really facing a worldwide calamity? Are we closer to God than we once previously thought? Did the mass suicide participants of the cult Heaven’s gate jump the gun and jump ship too soon? Perhaps. According to popular myth the Mayan Calendar indicates that the world is supposed to cataclysmically end

Natalia D’Onofrio
Final Paper
December 21, 2012 (Rossi). Coincidently, “Some believe the calendar marks a time of change in
4 world consciousness, but others, that it marks the end of the world. Interestingly, the date marks an extremely rare astronomical alignment, occurring only 30 times out of 26,000 years” (Rossi).
How very interesting. Maybe faced with all of this scientific evidence of a worldwide ecological meltdown, premeditations in sacred religious texts of Armageddon, the millennium suicide bug AND the cataclysmic Mayan Calendar of 12/21/2012, we should all go grabbing for the nearest God we can get our hands on lest we spontaneously combust! Maybe the world really is coming to an end, like the housing bubble, but we are and were all too biased to see it.
As for the Vatican, they claim that aliens in fact “could exist” (Willey). They haven’t had much luck with credibility lately, so why not embrace alien life and bring back all of those scorned Recovering Catholics who went off in search of little green men? Maybe they’ll boost sales if they acknowledge a little alien-dabbling. All of those people with abduction experiences will be thrilled and will be flooding the pulpits again, attending communion, confession and tithing regularly. The Catholic Church may very well get innumerable Recovering Catholics coming to them saying, “Beam me up Scotty, I want to go home.” Regardless, little green men or not, in order to meet the spiritual and metaphysical needs of people today, organized religions like Islam, Buddhism and Shinto as well as new religions like Baha’i and the Interfaith movement will have to adapt to the motley of socio-economical and ecological challenges facing our world today.

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Works Cited
Fisher, Mary Pat. Living Religions: Seventh Edition. Upper Saddle River: Pearson
– Prentice Hall, 2008.
Hamlyn, Paul. World Religions: From Ancient History to the Present. New York: Barnes &
Noble, 1999.
Isely, Paul, et. al. In Their Own Voices: A Qualitative Study of Men Abused as Children by
Catholic Clergy. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse 17:3, 201 -215
<http://www.haworthpress.com> 4 May 2009. NU Library. Haworth Press, 2008.
Manning, Patrick, ed. Migration in Modern World History, 1500-2000. Belmont, California:
Wadsworth/Thompson, 2001.
Rossi, Holly Lebowitz. "12/21/12." Newsweek 148.13 (25 Sep. 2006): 10-10. Academic Search
Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 May 2009
<http://ezproxy.nu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db
=aph&AN=22416352&site=ehost-live>.
Willey, David. “Vatican Says Aliens Could Exist.” BBC Rome. 13 May 2008. BBC News. 04
May 2009 < http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7399661.stm>.