The original note, as written at the time
What if the Catholic Church, or religious organisations, to ensure the survival of the monopoly over the human mind, continuously stir up unrest, corruption and inequality? This way the message from God shall always be relevant and no matter what happens people shall always listen to what the church has to say. I don’t think the nature of religion has changed from the time of the pharisees during Jesus’ time. The core motive is the same: power of the mind and will.
Ongoing development
My uncle kept the books, and the books were the only thing in that building that never lied.
He showed me once, when I was twelve and he was drunk enough to want an audience. There was a column for the poor, and a column for the unrest, and the two columns were the same column with different headings. This much given out, this much burnt. This much to the widows, this much to the boys who would make the widows. The arithmetic was so clean that he laughed while he explained it.
I thought he was being cynical in the way drunks are cynical, exaggerating for the pleasure of the confession. It was years before I understood he was reading me a ledger.
Because a church that is only needed when things are good is a church that becomes furniture. But a church that is needed when the market has been burned — that is a church with a queue at the door. And a queue at the door is what all of it is for. Not the burning. The queue.
He had a phrase for the months that ran well: a quiet month. A quiet month was a month when nobody stirred anything, and the takings fell, and the bishop wrote letters about the youth. A quiet month was a bad month. I remember the way he underlined it, in the way a man underlines something he does not want to have understood.
The first month I understood, I was nineteen and the second month I was not sure about anything any more. That is the shape it takes. You are handed a small fact and you cannot put it down, and you carry it around for months before you can bear to look at the whole of it.
What I cannot forgive is not the arrangement. Men with power make arrangements. What I cannot forgive is the way the arrangement gets a language, and the language is sincere, and the priests who speak it believe it. My uncle believed it. He told me, once, that he had done more for the poor than any of his sermons, in a way, if you counted it. He said it kindly. He was trying to explain something to a boy he loved, and what he was explaining was that a wolf can be funded by the flock and call it shepherding.
I left the second month. I still go back for the second month. That is the other thing nobody tells you — once you understand the mechanism, you cannot simply leave it, because the mechanism is in the building where your mother is buried, and it is in the mouth of every person you grew up with, and every Sunday it is spoken, sincerely, in a language you still love.