Opinions and rants from central MN

Many religious ideas have little practical effect on people.  In the early days of the church there were great controversies about the nature of Jesus.  After all he died in a gruesome manner.  If he wasn’t successful when he was around what was he? Some of those arguments are still going on.  In the end, those kind of controversies don’t’ usually change how people act.  Unitarians do not have a fundamentally different morality than Trinitarians.  Some ideas have a practical effect but that effect is only a minor one.   Fasting during lent is a good example,  it only affects those who follow the rules and it doesn’t go to hard on those to follow them.  In the old days of no meat on Friday, one practical effect was that restaurants would offer fish dishes on Friday.  Other religions have similar ideas.  The black clothing the Chasidic men wear doesn’t do anything other than label the men as Chasidic Jews.

Other Catholic ideas do have practical effects.  The Catholic church’s stand on birth control a good example.   For practicing Catholics it almost guarantees larger families.  It is obvious from looking at the facts at hand that even otherwise good Catholics do not follow the church on contraception.  Catholic families are much smaller today than 50 years ago.   That would not be possible without artificial methods of contraception.  Despite that lack of obedience in this context from most Catholics, the church still publicly opposes birth control and talks and acts as if this rule is followed by Catholics.  It wouldn’t matter if it only affected Catholics, but it does affect others.  The Catholic church in the US has been active in suing the Obama administration’s health care law citing freedom of religion as allowing them not to pay for birth control or anything to do with abortion.  If the law had been written as a single payer law some of these suits would not be possible, but the law wasn’t written that way.   The Catholic church in the US once was heavily connected to issues of social justice.  The church publicly says that it is committed to universal healthcare (at least it says it is http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/other/229313-vatican-catholic-church-committed-to-universal-healthcare-coverage-%C2%A0).  In opposing the current health care law, the Catholic church has become,  perhaps unwittingly, a part of the Republican conservative opposition.  I might call this an aberration but I don’t think it is any more.  Catholics are very active in the Republican party.  There are 5 or 6 Catholic justices on the Supreme Court (depending on whether on counts Thomas or not), only one was appointed by a Democrat.  That would have been unconceivable 60 years ago.

One might ask what does that have to do with the pope?  Pope Francis is conservative, he has publicly opposed contraception, abortion, women priests, etc.  In his past speeches he is stressing orthodoxy particularly in areas of sex and procreation.  The efforts of the Catholic church as a whole against modern methods of contraception are harmful.  At a base level, over population is harmful, and church policy encourages overpopulation.  More than that, the idea that contraception is evil is old fashioned paternalism since it is women who usually pay the price for sexual sins.  They are the ones who get pregnant.  (I am ignoring sexually transmitted diseases for simplicity’s sake.)   In the old days when so many children never made it to adulthood, overpopulation was not a major societal issue.  Sanitation, antibiotics, vaccinations and a large supply of food have allowed most babies to survive to adulthood, so overpopulation is a real issue.  Even if we can feed those people the amount of damage to the rest of the animal and plant world is immense.  This is an odd policy for someone who took the name Francis.

Today CNN and the major tv networks showed complete coverage of the cardinals taking their oaths one by one at the start of the conclave.   My wife likes to watch the mid-day news and  was perturbed when it was pre-empted by the showing of this almost  meaningless ritual. I say almost meaningless because the networks did send their highly paid anchors to Rome, so they do need to justify that with something worthy of airtime.   The only truly newsworthy event is the actual voting and the smoke that announces the results to the world.  As a born but not practicing or believing Catholic I should know it by heart by now but I had to look it up.  White smoke means they have elected a pope, black smoke means no pope yet.

When I was a child the Catholic Church seemed to be experiencing a real renaissance.   The world was changing, particularly in the US, which had the wealthiest and most active Catholic population. The end of that war brought the suburbanization of America.  The church I went to as a child was a modern building, with a forward thinking pastor.   Catholics were no longer isolated in parishes based on their parents or grand-parents homeland.  The no longer lived in almost exclusively Catholic neighborhoods.  The post war generation was the first that was raised as truly American Catholics.  (Yes, the national parishes still existed but they were moribund.)   They were ready to act as adult Christians and not blindly follow the rulings of their religious leaders.  The Church too saw the need to change.  The War showed them the evils of anti-Semitism  and the need to truly wipe it out among Catholics. 

Changes were made and ulitmately those changes were far smaller than they appeared to be at the time.  The liturgy was now in the local language.  The priests abandoned the old vestments and faced the people in the pews. Nuns lost much of their headgear and in future years many gave up their habits for secular clothing.   

With the quick death of Pope John XXIII, who initiated the Vatican council, the promise of the council which was to open up the church was slowly abandoned.  The entire point of opening up the church was to restore a moral leadership to an institution whose jobs often seems to avoid moral leadership.  In the US during the 1960’s we saw nuns and priests protesting the war, we saw them involved in the civil rights marches.  The flurry of activity from priests and nuns, over time, became something of a novelty and something that has never propagated up to the hierarchy. 

Today we see an increasingly irrelevant papacy.  The church is moribund in Europe, its home.  Yes, there are the beautiful buildings but except for Ireland, Italy and Poland few come to pray in them.  Even in the US, the people no longer follow Vatican dictates (just look at birth rates among US catholics).   The late Pope John Paul II, only had influence because he had some moral power.  He was a Polish patriot and was actively supporting the struggle against Soviet domination in his home country.  Other than that can anyone think of any moral stand from a bishop or cardinal? Perhaps Catholicism will exist as Judaism exists for Jewish atheists, as a cultural remembrance.  I don’t think today’s educated Catholics need to be led by a bunch of old men.

I spent my youth as a member of the Catholic Church. I am no longer a believer but I still have a fondness for the residue of Catholicism that is left after all the belief has died out.  That is one reason that I rarely describe myself as an atheist.  Another is that I don’t agree with much of what the militant atheists do or say.   Having been Catholic is part of my identity and something that I cannot or would not wish away.  

So, I am saddened by the troubles of the Catholic church. The current pope has resigned. I think I understand why.   I have heard all sorts of rumors, but that basic reason is that he is simply old and ill. A century ago a man with his health troubles would already be dead.   When he was chosen he was already an old man.  Like John XXIII he was meant to be an interim pope, someone who is chosen when the various factions cannot make up their mind.  He was a man who would be around for a few years and die.   By that time the people with real power would have one or more candidates ready.  He is older than any of the other recent pope: Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul and John Paul II. He is older than any Pope in the 20th century. With modern medicine we can keep almost anyone alive for quite a long time, so elderly gentlemen like Ratzinger can survive past their sell by date.  There have been a lot of rumors about why the pope is stepping down and the scandals may have pushed Ratzinger over the edge but even without scandals he was  not up to it any more.

The sex scandals are killing the church.  They would have killed the church if the clergy was what the real church is.   This isn’t a new problem but for many years the official church ingored it because it was felt to be an American problem or an Irish problem. It is a problem that the hierarchy has made worse by not acknowledging it publicly and putting a stop to it. (No, I don’t think evil can be absolutely stopped but hiding it guarantees it won’t stop.)   The few actions the Vatican have made is this area have been nothing short of scandalous.   A few years ago Pope John Paul II gave Cardinal Bernard Law, a man who should have spent his last years in shame, a job within the Vatican. It sounded as if he was being wisked away into safe hiding.  I don’t know what Ratzinger has done about sexual issues but he has been almost scandalously obtuse towards anti-semitic clergy.   I can understand why he brought back the Tridentine mass, one could easily cleanse it of its anti-semitic parts.  I understand why he wanted to reconcile with people from the St Pius IX society but the way he did it was scandalous.  Given Ratzinger’s education and scholarship, I assume he was simply tone deaf to how this appeared to the outside world.

The recent pope wasn’t a bad man but he wasn’t hired to do anything he was hired to mark time.  Now that he is history, the church needs a reformer not an elderly caretaker. Given the nature of the kind of person who becomes a cardinal I don’t have much hope that the conclave will elect that kind of man.