Labels. Everything in this world seems to have some sort of a label. And I’m not talking the kind of labels on your aspirin bottles. I mean the kind that just recently got a priest in a bit of a tiff with some other members of the Catholic Church because he felt that things should be a little different than they are today.

By the way, he was a black priest, if it makes a difference. And to a lot of people, I’m sure it does. But why? Why can’t the man simply be a priest who felt that some members of the church are not being fairly represented? I don’t know why. I wish I did.

Why can’t we all just be people? Instead we have these goofy labels: I’m white, I’m black, I’m a woman, I’m a man, I’m a minor, I’m middle class, I’m upper class and the list goes on and on. Remember when people would say, “Hey, baby, what’s your sign?” Pretty ridiculous,isn’t it? Now it’s questions like “Are you pro-choice or pro-life?” Well, maybe I’m not either one of those choices. I didn’t realize that I had to be classified.

But if I must, let’s say that I’m a pro-choice right-to-lifer who really believes that a woman should be able to make her own decisions, but that maybe there’s a better alternative … but, still, it’s not up to me. What category does that place me in?

So, anyway, we have a person who feels that many people who share very similar beliefs about religion should be able to practice that religion within the facets of the church without being looked upon as horrid dissenters. At least that’s how I see it.

It sounds vague, doesn’t it, without the labels? We don’t know if this is a man or a woman, what race the person is, what occupation, and so on. But we still have the basic idea. We know what’s going on, and we could come to a fairly logical, reasonable decision about the issue.

To clarify some of the details, we could say that the person instigating the changes in the church is a priest, and from there most would assume that the priest is a man (because we all know that women have no place being ordained as high members of the church…).

But the labeling doesn’t stop there. We soon learn that the priest is not only a man but that he is black, as well as are the members of his “new” church. Aha! This changes the story immensely, doesn’t it?

According to the members of this new church, the Catholic church is racist, not to mention sexist and traditionalist. More labels, no? This is getting pretty messy. Not only are blacks feeling that they are being discriminated against in the church that they were so strongly urged to believe in, but so are women and homosexuals. And these people who have spoken out against the Catholic church are called Protestants. They aren’t called people who believe in God but in a different way than some other people.

Why?

I am not an authority on the doings of the church, but it seems to me that God wouldn’t have invented women and homosexuals and then forbid them to worship in the church. Especially a god who is supposed to love us all. I don’t think that God is prejudiced. I don’t think He would discriminate.

I always thought that part of Catholicism meant that you loved your brothers. I also was under the assumption that we were all brothers, so to speak. Even women could be brothers with the rest of the human race. But who knows? I can’t be sure about this. Religion is, at the risk of offending some people, a very open-ended thing. It’s very hard to define.

We all have our own definitions for such abstract matters, but I was thinking that maybe we could all be allowed to believe what was in our hearts without being labeled as Catholics or Protestants or atheists or whatever. Is that such a bad idea? I think it could work out okay. It would be just like how the Pilgrims intended the New World to be. I mean, wasn’t it all supposed to be about religious freedom?