 · Original Sin, and the doctrine of women's guilt and inferiority.
The first line Colonial American children learned to read. Still believed and practiced today. Catholic dogma maintains that when we were in the womb, we were stained with a deadly sin that we inherited from the disobedience of Adam and Eve (but mostly Eve who tempted Adam). And that makes us all deserve to go to hell when we die. Jesus of Nazareth never heard of this. The idea of Original Sin only came 400 years later, from St. Augustine of Hippo.
There is only one way out of the nightmare of existence, according to the Church, and that is to be baptized into an organization run by celibate men. And if someone refuses to be baptized, they will suffer everlasting torment in the belly of Mother Earth when they die. It took me a long time to see the insidious pattern hidden in plain sight, at the core of the Catholic dogma: fertile women and fruitful Mother Earth are the beginning and end, the alpha and omega, of all suffering and death in the eyes of the churchmen. Warm, moist, juicy springs of life are occasions of sin. What is barren, sterile, virginal and celibate is celebrated by the Church as the sole source of grace.
Your Holiness, I suspect that you incline away from this warped view embedded in our catholic tradition, but I also understand that the burden of your office prevents you from saying so in public. The Church is in the business of selling a solution (salvation) to a problem the church created (Original Sin). And this manifests itself especially every spring when the parish priest reminds children, born of women, "You are dirt, and to dirt you will return." How dare celibates hurl that charge to parents who, individually and together, pay prices to raise children the clergy could never imagine.
The trouble with such a dark view of life is that we end up living in fear, depression and anxiety. The solution to that has often been that we find people not like us that we can blame for our unhappiness.
Ironically, the contemporaries who heard Yeshua bar-Josip tell stories often found relief and healing from their stress and anxieties from those stories. It's long past time to shuck all the barnacles that got attached over the centuries.
The teachings of Jesus, recounted in the gospels, rebut many of the doctrines propagated by the church now in his name. He treated women as equals, as when he upbraided Martha for choosing to do doing women's work in the kitchen after dinner, rather than joining her sister Mary and the men in the front room to hear the rabbi instruct. (Luke: 10)
He referred to the Lord God of Israel as abba: pappa, daddy. The Church refers to Him as Lord God Almighty. So it's no surprise then that in front of all-might, we become God-fearing. The very opposite of Jesus' greeting: shalom, peace; a greeting that seems to have affected numerous healings.
It is said that the prospect of being executed the next day focuses the mind wonderfully. And so in his last gathering with his followers, he summarized thirty months of teaching in a 30-minute discourse:
 · You can never be cut off from abba, pappa, any more than you can cut yourself off from existence. Existence is not an optional activity. You are bound as closely to the universal One as vine is to branch, wave to water, dancer to dance.
 · Take comfort in that reality, and so work to achieve a calm and composed approach to life; peace of mind and soul. Thus, the blessing: peace be with you.
 · And manifest that composed frame of mind and heart by acts of loving kindness and boundless compassion to all others, including oneself: love one another. (From John's Gospel account of the Last Supper.)
I know you could never agree to such a simplification, at least not publicly in your current job. But I do sense you would agree that it was a great tragedy when this sweet, simple notion - be calm, be kind - eventually fell into the hands of the Roman Curia and became this convoluted miasma of Graeco-Roman gobbledygook: hypostatic union; transubstantiation; trinitarian dogma.
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