www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel09.html
It means many different things in your man's comic novel, like ''Houth Castle and Environs'' (a reference to an island and a castle in Dublin Bay). However, some interpreters of Jimmy Joyce say it also means ''Here Comes Everyone'' and stands for the Catholic Church with which you, man, had a lifelong love/hate relationship. In its better moments, it is comprehensive, absorbing language, cultures, customs, religions -- anything that it finds useful in its work. Hence the saying, ''Once a Catholic, always a Catholic,'' is based on solid psychological and cultural grounds. Give the church the first half-dozen years of your life and it will fill you with images and metaphors and stories that are so wonderful you'll never escape them, no matter how hard you try. As Lent and Good Friday turn into Easter amid splendid rituals of fire and water and oil, it might be worthwhile to reflect on how difficult it is to leave the church even if you try. Some Catholics want to exclude all those who disagree with them. However, canon law specifies only two ways of getting out: You must either formally renounce the faith or join another religion. Short of that, you might not be a ''good'' Catholic or a Catholic in ''good standing'' or a ''practicing'' Catholic (a category that canon law does not know). And it's best to leave to God to judge who is good and who is not. Hence it has been the genius of Catholicism (in its better moments, at least) to extend the borders out as far as possible and make them as porous as possible. A more recent development, while not absolutely new, is fascinating. Groups have appeared in the church (including Mel Gibson and his father) who have dispensed with the rest of us -- like the fundamentalist authors of the Apocalypse novels exclude Catholics and Jews from God's mercy. They write me nasty e-mails saying that they are ''orthodox'' Catholics or ''real'' Catholics, by which they mean that they reject the Second Vatican Council. While they are perfectly within their rights as humans and Americans to choose any religion they want, they can't do what they say they are doing. Its resolutions were voted by the overwhelming majority of the Catholic bishops of the world and approved by the pope. If you can reject one of them, then you can reject all of them. Some of them say that there hasn't been a valid pope since Pius XII died. But if you can arbitrarily dismiss any pope you don't like, where will it stop? If you cancel papal elections and ecumenical councils, have you not gone forth from the community? In the old days at the seminary, we would have said ''sapit heresim'': It smells of heresy. However, the boundaries are still porous, still comprehensive even for these new heretics. Other less radical Catholics in effect reject the council, including some cardinals in the Vatican, some bishops, and some of the younger, cassock- and biretta-wearing priests. But if the Holy Spirit did abandon the pope and the universal episcopate, have not the gates of hell already prevailed against the church? In fact, as I argue in my study ''Old Wine in New Wineskins,'' the council made only a few moderate changes in the church. However, these changes disproved the argument that the church could not change, would not change, should not change. Hence the council destabilized the church structures that had persisted since the French Revolution. The leadership of the church did not know and mostly still does not know what to do about the confusion. Sometimes it looks to me like they've lost their faith in the Holy Spirit.
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