Can Nightcrawler Say A Red Mass On Mars? – An Investigation

This editorial comes to us from Robert Secundus, Private X-Investigator and amateur-angelologist-for-hire

Part I. Introduction

I have borne witness to wonders.

I have seen Polaris’ half -Magneto wedding gown.

I have seen exploding communion wafers and many mutants shout loudly about their immunity to AIDS.

I have seen an Iceman made of piss.

Why have these horrors entered my life?

Because of a very good conspiracy theory and a very good tweet:

We know the X-Men are going to live on Mars

We also know there is a red Nightcrawler in PoX

Nightcrawler was a Priest and was able to perform all rites and ceremonies that comes with it

Therefore, this July we could see a Red Mass For Mars

Thanks @JHickman

— Xavier Files (@XavierFiles) May 27, 2019

When I read this, I was moved by– something– whether from above or below, it is beyond my ken to guess.

But I knew that I had to find out:

Could Nightcrawler actually say a red mass on Mars?

And that is what led me to Holy War [Ed. note:Uncanny X-Men #423-424 ] [Ed. note:], to The Draco [Ed. note:Uncanny X-Men #428-434]. [Ed. note:And also to the issues that were between those two, because, I mean, was I going to let a gap of like seven issues of Uncanny on Marvel Unlimited read “unread”? ]

The answers I found shocked me to my core. [Ed. note:OK so actually, I don’t have “clear answers” so much as “a twisted reading of the text that technically allows the answer I wanted all along.” But STILL. THAT TWISTED READING. WILL SHOCK YOU. ]

I’m going to share them with you soon, but first, we need to set some groundwork.

Part II: Some Theology, Some Canon Law

           You can probably afford to skim this section until the “SUMMARY OF IMPORTANT THINGS GOING FORWARD”. I’m trying to be thorough so that:

1. Anyone who knows absolutely nothing about this subject can get all the info they need.
2. All my cards are on the table and lined up as clearly as possible.

So before anything else we need to establish a few key terms and theological ideas in the Catholic Church. For our purposes [Ed. note:Important note here that I don’t necessarily endorse all the ideas/ dogmas/ whatnot in these texts; your friendly neighborhood theological investigator here is a latae sententiae excommunicant, but one that knows his way around an encyclical ] we’ll be relying on the current Catechism, the Code of Canon Law, and a few other online resources that summarize things nicely. [Ed. note:I also rang up a canon lawyer I know to double check some things, but for obvious reasons I won’t be citing her in an article that, given its topic, might be read by both rabid X-Fans and radtrad Catholics. ]

Before we get to such complicated concepts as “priests” and “masses,” I’m going to take a step back and define the even more basic terms in the above paragraph; after reading Holy War, I will never again assume that any human being has any knowledge whatsoever of Catholicism, Christianity, Religion, the fundamental principles of logic and causality, etc etc.

Catholicism:

a. The system, faith, and practice of the Catholic Church; adherence to the Catholic Church.

b. Usually of the Roman Catholic Church.

Oxford University Press

Further explanation for a: There are three major branches of Christianity (with a few additional recent branches that are difficult to categorize and won’t be discussed here): The Protestants, the Orthodox, and the Catholics. There are a lot of theological differences both between those groups and within those groups, most of which aren’t really relevant to our discussion of Holy War; [Ed. note:For those looking for some sweet sweet filioque content: alas, I must disappoint you] the single most important difference (at least, for this investigation) is each group’s Claims About Hierarchy. Essentially, Catholics claim that Jesus picked out 12 bishops and within those bishops one pope, and that there is a direct line of succession from those 12 to the bishops and pope of the present day Catholic church; if you step away from the hierarchy, there is a greater chance that the Roman Catholic church will see any sacramental [Ed. note:explained shortly] stuff you get up to to be invalid. The other two groups reject with those hierarchical claims either in part or in their entirety.

Further explanation for b: whooo boy. Well. OK. So you know how the Chuck Austen run coincides with the Morrison run? And the X-Men are essentially split up into multiple teams, that are all doing their own thing, but still all X-Men? And within those teams there might be different, uh, lets say approaches to X-Content, and different leaders, and Cyclops is on one of those teams, and he is both the leader of that team and of the X-Men as a whole? Well.

• Teams of X-men :: Rites of the Catholic Church
• Morrison’s Team :: the Roman Catholic Church
• Cyclops :: The Pope [Ed. note:NAILED. IT.]

The Catechism:

A catechism is

An elementary treatise for instruction in the principles of the Christian religion.

Oxford University Press

When people today talk about the Catechism of the Catholic Church, they mean a catechism that the Catholic Church published in 1992 and which sums up the basics of Catholic doctrine. It can be anti-user friendly, especially to people unfamiliar with academic theological language, but it’s a decent summary of the basics.

Canon Law:

The Catholic church is a religion founded on a set of theological beliefs, but it’s also an international institution with its own internal regulations and laws. The current code was promulgated in 1983, with only minor changes since. It governs the behavior of bishops, priests, nuns, etc, but also ordinary, lay Catholics; for example, if you are a Catholic who wants to have your marriage annulled in the eyes of that Church, Canon Law dictates that process. [Ed. note:Or if, for example, an entirely fictional example, mind you, that has nothing to do with the investigator, if you are a layperson who drunkenly shouted in the streets of Rome “THE BOOK OF ENOCH WAS RIGHT! MILTON WAS RIGHT! ANGELS ARE HORNY!”, Canon Law declares you excommunicated from the Church, EVEN IF ENOCH IS QUOTED IN THE BIBLE AND HORNY ANGELS IS THE MOST SENSIBLE READING FOR GENESIS 6 ]

Sacrament:

A sacrament is […] an outward sign of inward grace that […] bears its [the grace’s] image […] and is its [again, the grace’s] cause.

Peter Lombard

Basically, something physical/material/external depicts and causes something spiritual/intangible/spiritual. That’s a pretty broad definition; essentially, it means that there’s quite a lot that can be described as “sacramental,” but the Catholic Church recognizes seven of these as the big boys, the special fellas; there are three of Initiation (Baptism, Confirmation, The Eucharist), two of Healing (Penance, Extreme Unction), and two of “the mission of the faithful”, which essentially means two sacraments of Vocation (Holy Orders, Marriage). [Ed. note:CCC 1210, 1211]

Mass:

A Catholic mass is the liturgical celebration of the sacrament of the Eucharist, which is where Catholics line up and drink the blood of their God.

OK, OK, a less dramatic definition, from the Catechism:

At the Last Supper, on the night he was betrayed, our Savior instituted the Eucharistic sacrifice of his Body and Blood. This he did in order to perpetuate the sacrifice of the cross throughout the ages until he should come again, and so to entrust to his beloved Spouse, the Church, a memorial of his death and resurrection: a sacrament of love, a sign of unity, a bond of charity, a Paschal banquet ‘in which Christ is consumed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us.

CCC 1323

At this point I should probably say something about the “transubstantiation” and unpack Catholic conceptions of the Eucharist vs Protestant conceptions, how Catholics believe that the bread and wine is literally transformed into the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus, as opposed to consubstantiation, but I don’t want to get into the mess of talking about a thing’s “accidents” vs its “substance,” and WE ARE SEVERAL HUNDRED WORDS INTO THIS AND I HAVE ONLY MENTIONED THE PISS-ICEMAN THING ONCE, HOW DID THAT GET INTO A MARVEL COMIC?!

A couple additional details from the Code of Canon Law:

The eucharistic celebration is the action of Christ himself and the Church. In it, Christ the Lord, through the ministry of the priest, offers himself, substantially present under the species of bread and wine, to God the Father and gives himself as spiritual food to the faithful united with his offering.

Can.  899 §1.

So you need a priest present to celebrate a mass, but that language of through the priest’s ministry is important; it’s the difference between Merlin casting a spell and Merlin at the end of CS Lewis’ Space Trilogy. [Ed. note:Spoiler warning for CS Lewis’ weirdest book, I guess, where Merlin shows up in the 20th century and then after hanging out with a loosely fictionalized JRR Tolkien for a bit, experience space angels acting through him for The Lord ]

Priesthood:

Catechism Stuff:

Holy Orders is the sacrament through which the mission entrusted by Christ to his apostles continues to be exercised in the Church until the end of time: thus it is the sacrament of apostolic ministry.

CCC 1536

The ministerial priesthood has the task not only of representing Christ – Head of the Church – before the assembly of the faithful, but also of acting in the name of the whole Church when presenting to God the prayer of the Church, and above all when offering the Eucharistic sacrifice.

CCC 1552

As in the case of Baptism and Confirmation this share in Christ’s office is granted once for all. The sacrament of Holy Orders, like the other two, confers an indelible spiritual character and cannot be repeated or conferred temporarily.

CCC 1582

Essentially:

Priesthood is a sacrament for giving folks the job of doing Jesusy stuff in general and celebrating the mass in particular.

The most important detail for us is that Sacraments of vocation are considered permanent (thus the “indelible mark”):

Once validly received, sacred ordination never becomes invalid.

Can. 290

The canon goes on to talk about how in certain cases the validly ordained minister may “lose the clerical state”, that is, may be a validly ordained priest who no longer is regarded by canon law to have the right to legally act as a priest.

Validity Vs Licity:

This brings us, finally, to an important distinction. Sacraments can be said/performed validly (which means: The Catholic Church thinks they actually happened), invalidly (The Catholic Church thinks they did not actually happen; someone tried, but like, an ingredient was missing), licitly (The Catholic Church gave you a big thumbs up to do a sacrament), and illicitly (The Catholic Church gave you no such thumbs up ). [Ed. note:It’s also important to note that usually when Canon Law says “X can’t do Y Sacramental Thing,” what it means is “X can’t do Y sacramental thing LICITLY.” If it means “X can’t do Y Sacramental Thing VALIDLY,” which is to say “X can’t do Y thing at all”, it will use the word “invalid” somewhere; see Canon 10 ]

Canons 900-911 lay out the basic requirements for a licitly said mass; basically 900 is the only one important for our purposes; it notes that if a priest is impeded by Canon Law (that is, if he has lost his clerical state), his mass would be said illicitly. The requirements for a validly said mass are pretty much just a validly ordained celebrant. When I began to investigate, I wondered if the place of celebration of the mass mattered; would Fr. Nightcrawler being outside of his diocese and, indeed, on another planet, matter? But actually no, there’s no obstacle there, and Can. 932 allows licit celebration on Mars even if there is no church or chapel constructed.

Now, the requirements for a valid ordination are looser than you’d think. Canons 1010-1023 lay out the requirements for validity and licity; 1012 is the most important for our purposes. For a valid ordination you need a consecrated bishop. Again, that’s pretty much it. If the bishop is excommunicated, the ordination is still valid (though without the approval of the pope, it would be illicit). When I emailed a canon lawyer about Fr. Nightcrawler, she  mentioned 1382 as providing further evidence that, essentially, once you’ve got a consecrated Bishop, no matter what else is goin’ on, you’re good. This stuff has been put to the legal test recently; some excommunicated bishops kept on ordaining priests, and those ordinations are officially considered valid. [Ed. note:WEIRDLY, marriages are NOT considered valid in that same group! See here for more info.]

Summary Of Important Things Going Forward:

So if Kurt was ever validly ordained a priest, even though he left the priesthood he would be able to illicitly, but validly, say a Red Mass on Mars. But we all know he was never really a priest. It was all an illusion. Austen retconned all that in Holy War.

Right?

RIGHT????

Part III: An Analysis of Holy War (Or: What This Section Presupposes is, MAYBE HE DIDN’T?)

Before Austen

This CBR Article does a great job of summarizing the pre-Austen appearances of Fr. Nightcrawler. I’m just going to point out a couple of things and expand on a couple:

1. Nightcrawler is interacting with the X-Men and the broader world throughout his training for the priesthood. We see him on panel both before the ordination, as a postulant, [Ed. note:Think priest in training] and after (though we don’t see the ordination itself; possibly because the pitch was already in for something like Austen’s retcon, or possibly because of a slip up between writers, not realizing that Claremont hadn’t written Nightcrawler as ordained).
2. In the 2002 Nightcrawler miniseries [Ed. note:by Chris Kipiniak and Matt Smith], Kurt tries to solve some Big Societal Problems surrounding his parish; specifically, he tries to fight human traffickers and defend abused undocumented immigrants. We see a lot of his mentor-priest, Fr. Whitney, and the series explores the tension between them as Kurt tries (and somewhat succeeds, somewhat fails) to solve the aforementioned big problems. While Fr. Whitney is, broadly, Kurt’s superior and mentor, he treats Kurt like a peer, and is willing to offer Kurt guidance, to debate with him, and to be vulnerable around him given whatever particular situation they are in at the time.
3. In Joe Casey’s Uncanny X-Men run, Nightcrawler is now an ordained priest. He has an encounter with the Church of Humanity in issue #400, where it’s revealed they’re some kind of bizarre, neo-pagan cult that worships the confluence of science and magic; they were founded by a man who, when he was a young child, was traumatized by his parents’ summoning of an extradimensional monster, some kind of mutated Beast. [Ed. note:Which is, yes, HEAVILY implied to be an alternate reality Beast aka Hank McCoy] So now that that boy is a grown up cult leader, he hopes to get revenge on all mutants? This satanic pontiff, a bizarre, frightening being with undefined powers, leaves Nightcrawler unconscious, with the message that he has taken something from him. The Church then flees their stronghold in Montana. In the remaining issues of the run, Kurt undergoes several crises of vocation– he’s not sure that he’s meant to be a priest, a leader, or an X-Man. In the final few issues, he has an encounter with a junkie Cardinal who gets high with other folks on MGH in the basement of his cathedral; the Cardinal is then executed by the Church of Humanity.
4. In the 2004 Nightcrawler Miniseries, by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Darick Robertson, when Kurt has entered a coma after an attack, he briefly dreams of trying to seek out his one-time mentor-priest, the one revealed to be an agent of the Church of Humanity in Holy War, for guidance. He goes to an ordinary Church, with other parishioners, to find him.

Now, the big problem with writing on Holy War is that it’s the least coherent arc in what is widely considered to be the worst run on Uncanny. The Draco is stupid, but you don’t have to work that hard to make it make sense within itself and within continuity more broadly.

You have to work very hard at both of those things with Holy War.

So, my first goal: make Holy War  make sense as a story, both within itself and within the context described above, while still avoiding contradicting the text itself.

This is impossible to do reasonably, but hopefully my unreasonable interpretations of the text will be found compelling.

Holy War: A Summary

The X-Men wake up one day to find a bunch of their students crucified on their lawn.

Both Kurt, who narrates this issue, and Chuck Austen, in his plotting/dialogue, alternate between arguing that all religion should be abolished and cracking jokes while the X-Men take the corpses of their students down from the torture devices.

Angel, who has healing blood now, tries to bring the corpses back from the dead; alas, this does not work for anyone except Jubilee. [Ed. note:Who would later become a vampire, natch. ]

Havok, using truly galaxy brain logic, figures out that the Church of Humanity are behind this.

Kurt blurts out that he is a priest, which shocks a lot of people? Even though he’s been a priest throughout the previous run. He claims that everyone was at his ordination, but they were not. He’s also left the priesthood.

The X-Men travel to his parish to hunt for clues.

Underneath the parish is an evil mutant experimentation torture dungeon.

Kurt’s priest buddy was there.

While dying he has the time to both rail against organized religion and call Kurt a mutie in a vague attempt to display both empathy and racism at the same time.

He also reveals part of the plot; the Church of Humanity brainwashed Kurt, but their brainwashing was no match for Kurt’s horniness. [Ed. note: I cannot stress this enough, Austen insists over and over again that Kurt’s deep desire to bone down is why he left the priesthood and how he broke the Church of Humanity’s psychic control over him. ]

The X-Men leave, and you know how the Church of Humanity fled Montana at the end of their last story? Well Austen decides… they just didn’t? They decided not to. They stayed at the secret layer that is no longer secret. Austen could have had the priest just reveal a different location in the same amount of space, but it’s like he wanted to make this as intentionally stupid as he could.

In Montana, the pontiff outlines their scheme: they used a psychic mutant to show Kurt an ordination. They were then going to get Kurt bumped up the Roman hierarchy and eventually elected Pope, at which point they would cause his image inducer to fail and reveal that the pope was actually a satan-lookin’ anti-christ.

The X-Men show up, fight illusions, shut down the illusions, rescue an imprisoned priest (who repeats the previous information to the X-men), and learn that the Church of Humanity has *also* been dosing communion wafers with explosives of some kind.

So, the GRAND PLAN, in its full glory:

• Step 1: The revelation of Kurt the Anti-Christ, destroying the Roman Catholic Church, throwing the world into chaos.
• Step 2: The explosion of Catholics throughout the world, creating the appearance of a Rapture, causing further mass panic and leading to a belief that the End Times have come.
• Step 3: The Church of Humanity seizes power.

The X-Men win by… punching everyone?

The place goes up in flames and the pontiff dies, but not before it is revealed that she is… a woman. Austen feels the need to have characters comment on how attractive she is.

The arc ends with further revelations about that woman’s traumatized past; to summarize, she was abused in the Church, and wanted revenge on the Church, and this arc is gross and bad.

Yelling At Chuck Austen

OK, we have to take a second to just acknowledge EVERYTHING WRONG WITH THE ABOVE, because it’s Holy War, and nothing written about Holy War can just gloss over how awful it is.

1. Conflicts With Reality

CATHOLICS DON’T BELIEVE IN THE RAPTURE. (At least, not that rapture). [Ed. note:What is normally called “the Rapture,” the doctrine held by some Evangelical Christians, is more accurately called Pre-tribulational Premillennialism; if you’ve seen Left Behind, you know what the deal is. The End times kick off with Good Christian Folk disappearing, and then the Anti-Christ reigns for a while before Christ comes back and kicks his ass. Catholics still believe in an end times, in a second coming, and in a “rapture” of a sort, in the Saved ascending to heaven– but that rapture happens at the end of all time, not the beginning of the apocalypse (see CCC 675-682). That might sound like a trivial difference, but it’s the difference chronologically between “any day now this thing will happen” and “this thing will literally only happen at the end of all time”; it’s also the difference between “if you believe x, you Jesus will reward you by saving you from this suffering” and “nope, you will suffer, no matter how righteous you are.”  ]

2. Conflicts With Continuity

Did Austen even read Casey’s work? The dude who worked on the book right before him? Did he read the Icons series which developed major characters in this story? Did he just glimpse some artwork and go “well, those dudes have priest robes on, so I know exactly what their deal is. No need to read the story they’re in” ? The Church of Humanity we see before and the one we see here have almost nothing in common. Also, did Austen not know Kurt’s use of the image-inducer had shifted a long time ago? We see Nightcrawler as a postulant and a priest several times, and he often wears the collar with no image inducer. THE PLAN WOULDN’T WORK.

3. Conflicts With Itself

IF THE POINT IS TO SHOW THAT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IS EVIL, WHY WOULD YOU RAPTURE SPECIFICALLY ONLY CATHOLICS, WHICH WOULD THEORETICALLY PROVE THAT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH HAPPENED TO BE THE RIGHT ONE???

WHY DO THEY HATE MUTANTS?? IN CASEY’S RUN THEY WERE FOUNDED SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE OF THE PONTIFF’S BACKSTORY AND ASSOCIATION WITH MUTANTS; HERE THEY HAVE NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH HER.

4. Sheer Stupidity

WHY DID THE BAD GUYS STAY IN THEIR LAIR THAT THE HEROES FOUND? WHY DID THE BAD GUYS ATTACK THE MANSION? WHY THE POPE JOAN TWIST? WHY IS THE PLAN TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD SO CONVOLUTED AND TERRIBLE??? DAN BROWN WRITES BETTER THAN THIS.

5. Actually Offensive Garbage

I’m not going to get super into this one, because it’s depressing, but, good Lord, Austen is trying to do something somewhat admirable here– write, essentially, his own version of Doubt— but it fails from literally the first page to literally the last. This comic opens with Nightcrawler opining that organized religion has killed more people than cancer, and that we “at least try to cure cancer”– implying that Nightcrawler (NIGHTCRAWLER) thinks that all organized religion needs to be eliminated. It also opens with Nightcrawler and others cracking jokes in front of the crucified corpses of their students. It concludes by trying to make this comic about exploding communion wafers into a poignant reflection on sexual trauma. YIKES. AUSTEN. HOW ARE YOU THE SAME GUY WHO DID EXCELLENT WORK ON STEVEN UNIVERSE.

Alright. Enough of that.

Making It Work

So. We need to reconcile Holy War not only with what surrounded it, not only with itself, but with common sense, and with, to a small degree, something resembling reality. We need to find ways to interpret the text such that everything works, but without utterly destroying that text.

First of all, let’s look at the Church of Humanity’s history in Casey’s Run and in Holy War. The backstory of the pontiff and the Church is given to Wolverine at snikt-point by a captured member of the Church. He could be lying– but then it’s weird that he tells such a convoluted story and Wolverine buys it. Maybe though he’s been lied to— maybe this is the story the pontiff tells her followers about her past. This helps explain the anti-mutant stuff too; she might not have had reason to hate mutants, but maybe by setting herself up as an anti-mutant messiah figure, she was able to manipulate regressives into joining her cult, the way that various alt-right thought-leaders today use the various prejudices of more conservative religious types to lure them away from mainstream religious practice to more radical groups.

That last bit helps us make better sense of the plot in Holy War itself and The Church of Humanity as an organization. Chuck Austen, I think (and it’s hard to ever really know, because so much of his run is unclear, so much is convoluted), wants the Church of Humanity to be about a couple dozen fellas who hang out in one Church in Montana, have a teleporter, a communion-bomb-machine, and a few lobotomized mutants, most importantly one psychic. [Ed. note:Said psychic is a bald person in a wheelchair; he might be a clone of Xavier? Or maybe the fact that he looks exactly like Xavier is just a coincidence? WHO KNOWS. ]With these scant resources they will take over the world. They have one building in New York with a lab under it that is disguised as a random Church no one goes to.

How are they not only going to move Nightcrawler up the ranks to pope, but also replace every communion wafer in every Catholic parish in the world with bombs if they’re group is just like 30 morons and a psychic in Montana? On a minor note, how did they create a fake Catholic parish without the local diocese noticing? [Ed. note:When groups set up alternate-parishes or alternate-communities in a Catholic diocese, the diocese tends to notice quickly and get very angry. ]

The best solution: the Church of Humanity operates like alt-right (or, alternatively, like ultra-traditionalist) groups [Ed. note:I’m not going to name any of these groups, because they tend to be search-happy; if you google “ultra-traditionalist catholics,” or “sedevacantists,” or “Catholic Cults,” or “catholics that reject Vatican II,” you’ll find your way to a few of them. Also, I should note that this isn’t anachronistic; a lotta these groups were fully formed by 2004. ]within the Catholic church. Sometimes these groups are excommunicated, sometimes they have strange, irregular canonical statuses, and sometimes, while they themselves are excommunicated, they have strong supporters/ sympathizers within the Church, priests and bishops who profess the same beliefs but do not openly join these groups. [Ed. note:To learn more about these sympathizers, just google the names associated with Pope Francis controversies. ]

So the formal sect is that small group in Montana– but, since the conspiracy requires a lot more resources to even have a shot at working, the Church of Humanity really includes hundreds, even thousands of sympathizers in the Catholic Church throughout the world. This is the kind of thing you’d expect the Mutant Metaphor to produce in the Marvel Universe; just as to many the Catholic Church has seemed to grow (slightly) more liberal in the past century, and as a result has produced a set of reactionaries hoping to subvert the most recent Ecumenical Council and the most recent popes, so too would we expect a set of reactionary, anti-mutant Catholics in the 616.

Given that, we can make another move– the Catholic church didn’t crack down on a random fake parish pretending to be a Catholic parish when it was in fact staffed by a cult because it was in fact a Catholic parish, staffed by an ordained, Catholic priest who secretly worked with the Church of Humanity. This also helps smooth things over with the Icons miniseries, where it seems like both Fr. Whitney and his parish are part of the local community.

We can even reconcile the weird rapture nonsense. One of the major points of theological difference between Catholics and conservative Evangelical Christians in the past century concerns evolution. [Ed. note:Bear with me here. By the end of the next paragraph ALL WILL BE MADE CLEAR.] Humani Generis, a 1950 encyclical promulgated by Pope Pius XII, permits Catholic belief in evolution. This was the first formal statement on the matter, and with each subsequent pope support for evolution has only grown. Conservative Evangelical Christians, broadly speaking, reject evolution and favor literalist interpretations of Genesis.

The groups we’re talking about, no matter their ultimate canonical relationship with the Catholic church, all agree on basically one thing: things went wrong with the Second Vatican Council; everything after that is garbage, everything before that is Good Shit. So rejecting the documents produced there/the thought developed/the practices instituted is thought to be the path to a proper renewal of The Church. They also tend to reject evolution– even though Humani Generis predates VII, even though Pius XII is a dude they tend to like, even though Catholicism, traditional or otherwise, does not require literal readings of Genesis. These groups just sometimes absorb Conservative Evangelical theology, especially when that theology relates to American Culture Wars stuff.

So.

We can say that a similar weird absorption has happened here. Swap out Evolution for The Rapture– suddenly the theology of Austen’s Church of Humanity is a little less bizarre.

Bringing This Together For Nightcrawler

Nightcrawler was manipulated by a “Traditionalist” Catholic cult that was either in part or in full schism with the Roman Catholic Church, but which, in either case, still had operatives throughout the Church. This cult, because of its acceptance of some conservative Evangelical Christian ideas, aimed to cause a Rapture, and also aimed to take over the Catholic church by having Nightcrawler elected pope and then revealed to be demonic.

There’s just one panel we have to deal with:

If we take this and the previous revelation that the X-Men did not in fact attend an ordination, then we can determine, I think pretty clearly, that Austen wants us to believe the ordination just never happened. That’s how people read this story; that’s why I launched into this whole monster in the first place.

People do try to fake ordinations. They get caught. The more successful ones have gone uncaught for a few years– but those folks faked their documents in a pre-internet age, and moved across the world, and kept a low profile for their con. In 2004, plotting for a priest to become a bishop and eventually pope? That’s going to require hoodwinking a massive, sprawling bureaucracy spread across the world. Yes, the Church of Humanity has a psychic. But what’s easier– just having a sympathetic Bishop do an actual ordination, and sending off your recruit to an actual parish, letting the Church take care of its records on its own– or taking your psychic across the world to slowly convince the entire bureaucracy that you did this thing?

The story makes far more sense, given their entire plan, for Nightcrawler to have been ordained by and have worked with bishops and priests involved with the Church of Humanity than for everything to have been an illusion. So how do we reconcile this far more sensible story with Austen’s word balloons?

1. The ceremony was indeed illusory– in that the X-Men weren’t there. The psychic was used to start cutting the X-Men off from Kurt’s life, to simulate their presence so that he would think he was still in contact and they would think he wanted distance in his new vocation.
2. The Church of Humanity, because they’re racists, believe that mutants can’t receive sacraments validly. In the eyes of the Catholic Church, Kurt was ordained, but in the eyes of the Church of Humanity, he was not.

Part IV: In Conclusion

Even though Kurt Wagner left the priesthood,

Even though the Church of Humanity used illusions in his ordination,

Even if the Church of Humanity was a schismatic cult and its members excommunicated,

Even though Mars is beyond the jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of New York,

According to Canon Law and my own EXCELLENT butchering of Chuck Austen’s story,

NIGHTCRAWLER CAN SAY A RED MASS ON MARS [Ed. note:if that actually is Nightcrawler and is Mars in the Hickman previews but THOU SHALT NOT DOUBT THIS]

Very Good Conspiracy Theories aside, this mangling of Austen does a lot of other good work too:

1. It respects the material that came before. It allows for the situation Claremont established to be really real; Nightcrawler did actually spend time working as a postulant and as a priest in New York. It allows for the vocational crisis in Casey’s run to actually affect the characters arc; Nightcrawler isn’t out of the priesthood because he was hoodwinked. He had a genuine crisis and resolved that crisis by choosing to leave. If we accept this interpretation, then after the Church of Humanity business, Nightcrawler had the option to go back– but he actively chose not to, because his uncertainty had resolved into this certainty: he belonged with the X-Men.
2. It opens up the character for the future. Nightcrawler, the religious man who struggles with his faith, who thought the seminary was the solution to his problems, but then who actively chose to leave, to pursue another path, to leave his vocation thwarted– there are far more stories to tell about that Nightcrawler than Nightcrawler, the guy who got whammied into a cassock for a hot minute. It adds nuance and conflict to a religious character that is all too often treated with simplicity; it makes him like so many of us, who find religion at times a comfort and at times a torment, who’ve sought answers in devotion, even in a vocation, and found nothing there, who may still believe, but struggle with that belief. It makes him even more of himself: a character who, for his devilish appearance, is all too human.

Today we laughed at some memes, talked about some theology, some Canon law, reviewed some really mixed X-men arcs, and one of the most notorious stories Marvel has ever published; then we did our best to smoosh them all together, before looking at the (I think, positive) results of our smush.

But almost certainly none of the above really matters; almost certainly the Nightcrawler character is going to remain a character who was never really a priest going forward, and almost certainly we’re going to get wonderful new stories about that character.

But I don’t think this exercise was a waste of time. [Ed. note:At least, of mine; I’m going to argue it wasn’t a waste of yours, gentle reader, either. ]

I love Nightcrawler. He has been one of my favorite characters in fiction since long before I cared about the X-men. And now, after this incredibly silly investigation, after reading the very worst stories about the character ever told, and not just reading them, but thinking about them hard, picking them apart, deconstructing and reconstructing them– well, I love the Nightcrawler I ended up witheven more than the Nightcrawler I knew before. And no, Marvel’s not planning on publishing stories about that Nightcrawler; Hickman’s not going to have that Nightcrawler say a mass. [Ed. note:THOUGH HE MAY HAVE HIM ON MARS! THAT still could happen, people ]But every time I read a new story about him now, I will be reading about that Nightcrawler, because that character that I sketched and considered and investigated and rewrote in this document– that character will still be in my head.