Sister Ethyl and the Antichrist

I grew up in small town Kentucky. When I was a kid the town was still alive and vibrant and on Saturday afternoons the two streets that comprised “uptown” were teeming with people, shopping, gossiping, going to the movies. Mr. Kelly, his body twisted from arthritis like an old, wind-blown peach tree, would sit in his red wagon, smoking hand rolled cigarettes and selling pencils.

Sister Ethyl (I’ll leave her last name out, but I do remember it) would stand at the intersection of Broadway and Main with an open Bible in her hand, preaching. The sermon I remember most vividly was a recurring one against the Antichrist. I was a kid so it took a few Saturdays of listening, some reading in my Bible and the library, and some questions to folks (most of whom seemed embarrassed by my questions) for me to figure out who she thought the Antichrist was.

It was the Pope.

It was a message that seemed well received. My town was filled with churches, but there was no Catholic church. There were no Synagogues either, but that’s another story. There were Catholics and Jews, in the town, who, I learned later, had to travel a ways to find their places of worship. I knew who the Jews were—worked for the Coopers and the Erskinds, who were very nice people and good employers—but only knew of one Catholic family. I learned about Jewish traditions at the Methodist Church. The subject of Catholicism never came up during my youth.

In the Wesley Foundation at Western Kentucky University, I found myself occasionally on a Saturday night debating (it never rose to the level of argument, I’m happy to say) whether or not Jews and Catholics went to heaven when they died. Believe it or not, these debates happened. My position was that my Bible said that Jews were God’s chosen people so why would they not go to heaven? Their response: “The Jews killed Jesus.”  My response: “No, the Romans killed Jesus.”

Luckily, my debate opponents did not get my well-intentioned but naively-counter-productive point here as we moved to the subject of Catholics. My position: “I’ve been to mass at the Newman Center and it seems not that different from the Methodist Church. Why wouldn’t Catholics go to heaven?” Their response: “Because they are not really Christians, they worship the Pope, they have their own Bible, and only Christians go to heaven.” In my ignorance I had no quick response.

Obviously, these were not the debates of theological scholars, just folks sitting around with ideas and wondering about them.

The debates were happening as John F. Kennedy was being elected as President, and as he was assassinated.

I have wondered about Sister Ethyl’s message and these debates for 50 years.

In 1970 I married a Catholic woman. When I took her home to meet family and friends, one of my best friends and mentors asked her, “Are you Christian or Catholic?” She, a military brat who did not share my stellar upbringing, was, to say the least, nonplussed.

Since then, I have worked in a Jesuit university and have come to have a deep respect for the works of Catholics, particularly in terms of social justice issues and serving the less fortunate of the world.

The Catholic Church is a large, well-run, powerful, wealthy organization with a specific, evangelical mission. The Church is compelled by its mission to recruit new members to its faith. The Church is compelled to uphold, and lobby for, its specific beliefs and tenets.

Its “CEO”, the Pope, is one of the most powerful men in the world, devout, and absolutely committed to the “rightness” of his beliefs and the church.

No one could expect this to be otherwise, except Sister Ethyl, perhaps.

I believe Catholics are Christian. I do not believe that the Pope is the Antichrist. I also don’t believe he is anything more than a powerful man in a leadership position. I don’t share his beliefs outside the social justice and service realm.

It is in this context that I’m wondering about the position of one of the GOP candidates in the 2012 presidential election.

I respect a presidential candidate who publically affirms his belief in the absolute truth of the tenets his church.

But when a presidential candidate states that Satan, in the form of folks whose ideologies and religions that differ from his, has infiltrated the U.S. using phony Bibles and theologies, I worry. When his response to these “threats” is to implicitly promise to bring the powerful evangelical businessman leader of one of the most powerful evangelical churches in the world, the political head of a powerful religious city-state outside the U.S., to the table as his partner in his presidency of the U.S., I worry a lot.

I see this candidate through the same lens I saw Sister Ethyl and my friends at Western. He has a right to his opinion, obviously. But I disagree with him just as vehemently as I did with Sister Ethyl’s Antichrist position, and my college friends’ “They ain’t going to heaven” stances.

I disagree for the same reasons: my faith, my research, my reason, and my continuing struggle against bigotry, mine and others’.