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	Mark Morford: Priests Now Coming with Warning Labels By Mark Morford San Francisco Chronicle December 12, 2007 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/12/DD34TRNSL.DTL&feed=rss.entertainment This is how you know. This is one more of the beautiful, bizarre, myriad ways the Great Shift signals its imminent arrival, in weird cultural burps and from unexpected places that make you go "wow." Take the Archdiocese of New York. It has apparently just released a coloring book for kids all about how to be safe in an age of fear and predation. It is full of nice pictures of kids being sweet and virginal and right, engaging in happy activities that praise Almighty God while protecting themselves from, say, online predators and vegans and atheists. It is about awareness, about listening to your parents and saying your prayers and never, ever being alone with a priest and being nice to animals and never hitting your sister and ... Wait, what? What was that, about the priests? Oh, right. Um, the pedophilia. The sexual molestation and the lawsuits and the hints of deep ongoing perversion for the past, oh, 2,000 years. Yes. Be sure to use your darkest red crayon of bewildered dread when you color this particular page, kids, because there it is, the pedophilia threat, the church's appalling multimillion-dollar sexual abuse scandal, right there on the page in the form of two sweet-looking, grinning (female) angels hovering around an innocent virgin altar boy and warning him - and by extension, you, the innocent virgin coloring-book aficionado - to never, not ever, be alone in a room with an adult you do not know. Much as Jesus intended. But wait, look again. Because there he is, right there in the doorway, a grinning priest, waving to you as the angels go on and seem to imply, "And remember, boys, when we say 'adult,' we actually mean 'priest,' and you should never be alone with one unless the door is wide open or some other adults know where you are or there is a giant window in the room through which other wary adults or perhaps police officers can see if said priest begins to give the holy sacrament to certain parts of your anatomy. Next up: God loves bunnies!" You have to pause. You have to step back for a second and actually look at this, rub your eyes, blink a few times. Wait, seriously? Don't ever be alone ... with a priest? This is the church telling me this? Don't be alone with ostensibly the most pious and sanctified human being you will ever know except for perhaps a nun or the Dalai Lama or Steve Jobs? Can this be right? It is, you can easily argue, another disturbing exercise in fearmongering, in instilling in baffled children even more dread and anxiety about adulthood and God and life itself. "Don't talk to strangers" from the '70s morphs into "Don't IM with strangers" in the '90s to "Don't hang out with a priest too long" in the '00s. Nice world. And yes, well, I do realize this is something the church must do, that church officials are merely trying to do the right thing, trying to make amends, to reassure furious parents that their kids will be safe, despite how more than 4,400 priests have been accused of sexual abuse so far. (Of course, to really make amends they'd have to fire Pope Benedict XVI and hold a Vatican III conference and abolish the silly celibacy law and the abhorrent "no female priests" law and also the homophobia law and the "sex is bad for you" law and, well, pretty much all the laws restricting spirit and sex and gender and love. But, you know, that might be asking a bit much. So instead: coloring book. Yep, that oughtta do it.) But it does bring up a rather fascinating question: Is the very existence of this weird little book another odd but undeniable sign (there are many others) that something a bit more spiritually rich, more karmically grand is at hand? A raised awareness? A deeper spiritual awakening? Is this the church essentially telegraphing its own imminent demise? Maybe a little? It's a slightly mushy notion I carry over to the bizarre parallel universe of conservative Christian megachurches, those giant ultra-bland heavily shellacked stadium-size fluorescent nightmare warehouses that are still flourishing, more or less, simply because many of them are now dramatically diluting the fire-and-brimstone religion stuff, muting all that thorny theology and eschatology and even the right-wing intolerance (or, rather, carefully burying it, to be fed to you slowly, bit by bit, especially around election time) and replacing it with something resembling, well, a giant, cheesy self-help seminar. With skits. And dance numbers. And a food court. And day care. And an iPod lounge. Self-esteem building exercises. "How to be a winner." "God has a plan for you." Only $29.95. Every week. Forever. From what I read, this seems to be the modern megachurchly direction: minimize the dogma and melodrama and speaking in tongues, maximum the perkiness and nondenominationalism and piles of happy sanitized self-help schmaltz. In Jesus' name, naturally. And best of all, your kids won't have to avoid these pastors because, by and large, they're not really pastors at all. They're CEOs, businessmen and salesmen and lifelong hucksters, and you can rest assured most have never really studied deep theology or been to any sort of seminary in the first place. Great. It's true. Most megachurch leaders these days are, apparently, merely serious business pros, have had no real religious education at all, no intellectual experience studying the world's various belief systems or the deeper issues of soul and faith and meaning, save for that "Selling Jesus to the Masses on DVD" weekend seminar at Harvard Business School Extension. Again, I wonder: Is it possible to see this bizarre phenomenon as, like those Catholic anti-predator coloring books, a peculiar sign of positive change, another cryptic indicator that the Grand Shift is readying itself? In other words, as old churchly structures break down and any new "churches" are forced to dilute and open wider and try to at least pretend to be more inclusive and less intolerant in order to draw a wary crowd, could this be some of the cosmic groundwork for a much more potent, long-awaited spiritual upheaval the mystics have hinted at for millennia? Sure, sure, megachurches are all about sterile group-think and slick salesmanship and savvy business sense and have almost zero to do with profound, messy questions of spirit. And, sure, weird anti-pedophile coloring books are, on one level, just another sad commentary on modern life. But they both also seem to indicate ... well, I'm not exactly sure what. Movement. A shift. Awkward, peculiar, clumsy, unconscious, but still ... movement. The question is, toward what? E-mail at mmorford@sfgate.com
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