Sucks About Your Thousand Year Old Megachurch

Here's a take hot enough to burn whatever's left of that building to the ground. The Catholic Church is a child-rapist-enabling blight on society, and I don't give a fuck about one of their buildings burning down.

Unless it was arson, because it's not cool to burn stuff down just because it's a symbol of centuries of tyranny and darkness. I don't support arson. But ask yourself, what if you were a boy from Senegal who was sexually abused by a Parisian Catholic priest in the 90's? Would you want to burn down a symbol of the Catholic church? I bet you fucking would.

Did a twitter search yesterday for Michael Mouree, who back in 1950 gave my all-time favorite sermon in Notre-Dame Cathedral on Easter Sunday. Like most great speeches, he had help from his friends, in this case Serge Berna (who actually wrote the thing), Ghislain Desnoyers de Marbaix, and Jean Rullier. Here's the text in full, though I think by the end he was drowned out by the screaming (not unlike The Beatles).

    Today, Easter day of the Holy Year,
    Here, under the emblem of Notre-Dame of Paris,
    I accuse the universal Catholic Church of the lethal diversion of our living strength toward an empty heaven,
    I accuse the Catholic Church of swindling,
    I accuse the Catholic Church of infecting the world with its funereal morality,
    Of being the running sore on the decomposed body of the West.
    Verily I say unto you: God is dead,
    We vomit the agonizing insipidity of your prayers,
    For your prayers have been the greasy smoke over the battlefields of our Europe.
    Go forth then into the tragic and exalting desert of a world where God is dead,
    And till this earth anew with your bare hands,
    With your PROUD hands,
    With your unpraying hands.
    Today Easter day of the Holy Year,
    Here under the emblem of Notre-Dame of Paris,
    We proclaim the death of the Christ-god, so that Man may live at last.

Now there's a hot take. See, Mouree and his friends weren't actual priests. They were members of a group of bohemian artists who called themselves Lettrists, which later evolved into the Situationist International, which...just go read Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces. They dressed up as priests and hijacked the service.

They were arrested of course. And, as you can imagine, it was a big deal, with people having all kinds of opinions. Mourre was held for a while, eventually released, and many years later repented and became (I shit you not, life is nothing if not hilarious) an actual priest.

But, you know, if 1000 years from now the Wal-Mart-sized Jesus World, or whatever the fuck the church is called out by the highway, I hope nobody sheds any tears. Like Notre-Dame, it's a symbol of arrogance, wealth, and is an abomination that flies in the face of everything Jesus taught. The Notre-Dame cathedral is a symbol of power, and as such, I shed no tears for its destruction. And I feel nothing but pity for the ones who do.