Get thee to hell, Prime Minister

Yesterday the Archbishop of Calgary said that the Holy See might want to think about excommunicating Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin. Sounds almost quaint, especially coming from a continent built, in large part, on individualising and decentralizing [freeing] the religious experience.

Paul Martin, clearly a man of intelligence and integrity, will not be swayed by this overreach of ecclesiastical power for a myriad reasons.

First, it's never the Pope who does the excommunicating, but whomever the ranking local official is. Also, the thing about religion and its dogma is that its open to interpretation, which is why we currently have so many schisms in protestant churches like the Episcopalians and Anglicans. Similarly, the Catholic Church is not without its dissenters [see: almost every priest in every Jesuit University in America]. Knowing this and knowing the rules of excommunication, the Archbishop of Martin's diocese has remained quiet on the issue [which would be significant], making the Archbishop of Calgary's suggestion seem all the more flailing and flaccid a gesture. It further shows just how divided the Church is on this issue. Even if sympathizers to the 'Homosexual Agenda' within the clergy remain silent, in not acting, their voice is heard.

Thing is, even if he were to be excommunicated, Mr. Martin, a deeply religious man [who, for deeply religious reasons, no longer wants homosexuals given second class status in his country, a lesson to other deeply religious world leaders] would understand the act as a human detente against progressivism, not God's fury. He knows this on account of the following:

Events that made Excommunication Meaningless:
The Gutenberg Press -- For a long time reading wasn't that important because there wasn't much to read, and everything to read was mostly cloistered in some monastery somewhere. Monasteries are where all the churchies hang out. Thus, pretty much the only people who could read were priests, so theirs was the power to shape God's word as they saw fit. Gutenberg essentially gave book-lernin' to the masses, making reading [and eventually, learning to read] a cost-effective pass-time. When people started reading, they realized that none of the bullshit preacherman had been preaching for 1400 years was actually in the bible.
The Protestant Reformation -- Proved there was another game in town. Partial credit goes to the Great Schism for parting with Rome, but, as the Eastern Church and the Western maintained a sharp line of demarcation, Rome's power remained mostly absolute until Erasmus and Gutenberg's great equalizer lay the foundation for Zwigli and Luther. [Still, old habits die hard in Renaissance Europe, Luther was a rabid anti-Semite, making the break with Rome incomplete]
Vatican II -- Rome really shot themselves in the foot this time. By the 1970's most everyone knew how to read, diminishing the preacherman's monopoly as the conduit to God. However, also by the 1970's, almost everyone had forgotten how to read [or speak] Latin, the arbitrarily chosen holy language. So Vatican II rolls around and all these people, empowered by the ability to read and whatnot, complain further about their access to the almighty, and that their sacraments and worship should be in a language lay people can understand. Rome relents and localizes the holy liturgy. Everyone realizes that the dude in the hat isn't saying any kind of mystic or incomprehensible incantations, he's just repeating himself like 50 times and calling it a day.

. . . And so it came to be, in those days, that even the deeply religious understood excommunication was not a spiritual mandate from Almighty God, nay, but the political flailings of ineffectual men who long for the days of Crusades and Inquisitions.

[Archbishop Frederick Henry also served as the Calgary Stampede's Rodeo Princess for 2002]