Is the Catholic Church losing its grip?

Understanding church-think

When he was here, the pope called for the protection of the natural environment. That call came about 40 years after atheists and agnostics ratcheted up the then low profile green movement into world prominence. Why this discovery of the environmental peril by the pope at five minutes to midnight? Why will we have to wait for the next pope to admit that having lots of children is not good for the environment either?

The fact is that the church has no genuine interest in the natural environment nor animal welfare nor prison reform nor any other enlightened movement. Concessions are made only when the back is to the wall. There is a disinterest in our trying to make this a better world. (A distinction has to be made here between the conservative bishops and those priests with their feet on the ground and who often act on their own initiative.)

The belief is that there is an afterlife - and it lasts for eternity. Relative to eternity, the time we spend on this Earth is nothing. This world only exists for us to prepare for the next. Many thousands of Catholics over the centuries have spent their adult lives in monasteries and convents where almost every waking moment was devoted to getting to Heaven. Much of the pre-Protestant Reformation thinking lives on.

However, the disinterest in quality of life could not possibly be total. The medieval teaching that misery was good for your soul, won’t wash today. The faithful, on the whole, do not want to live lives of sacrifice while their non-Catholic neighbours are enjoying life.

As Jesus was worldly enough to expect people to help each other, for centuries the church has shown some interest in our physical and emotional needs rather than simply our spiritual needs. Today’s examples are the St Vincent de Paul Society and the establishing of hospitals (which are now receiving funding from the public).

The visible charity work can be a distraction. The non-religious should be aware of what the real agenda of the church is: the church is here to assist us in passing the tests we need to qualify for Heaven.

The changing church is a weakening church

The strength of the Catholic Church was that it was unchanging. This is what separated it from the Protestant churches. It was the rock shaped by God Himself. There is a core which is untouchable. Outside of the untouchable core, change can occur - but only after everything is done to avoid it. The bishops know that the more the change, the less credibility the church has, and the weaker its grip on the faithful becomes.

We observed an example of a conceded change last week at the World Youth Day celebrations. By tapping into the potential of crowd dynamics, the Catholic Church has taken a page out of the Pentecostal’s book. There was music which sounded nothing like hymns and there was the waving of national flags. The overlay of the traditional trappings of the church looked out of place. It was obvious to old Catholics that the church was losing its grip.

The plummeting number of priests is a terminal illness

In 1950, daily Mass had good attendance and the churches were nearly full to hear Sunday Mass. There were two million Catholic priests in the world. By 2000, many churches were not even opening on Sundays. As the speed of the fall is accelerating, the church will have become unrecognisable well before 2050.

At the foundation of the church is a priest in every parish. When ordained, it is believed that the priest receives mystical powers to change bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ at Mass. He can also anoint the dying and hear confession. Even if its very survival is at stake, the church will not select members from the congregation to administer these three sacraments.

Pedophilia has done irreparable damage

In the minds of many, the title of “Catholic priest” is now synonymous with “pedophile”. Benedict XV1 has inherited a problem bigger than any since the Protestant Reformation - and it is just as irreparable.

At the very beginning, somebody told the story that the birth of Jesus was a virgin birth ((immaculate conception). This was not only biologically impossible, but the necessity to have the mother of Jesus not engaging in the sex act, defined sexual feelings to be essentially grubby.

The vow of celibacy was also a vow to resist sexual feelings. Forbidding anything naturally appealing simply makes it more tempting. The Catholic Church created a life of serious psychological stress for its priests - and unbearable stress leads to aberrant behaviour.

So, the victim of abuse is not the only victim. Twenty or 30 years of begging God’s forgiveness after every sexual feeling creates an unhappy neurotic.

In the very week before the pope arrived, Cardinal George Pell was trying to explain to the nation why he had botched the handling of an investigation of an allegation of sexual abuse by a priest. Why the apparent cover-up? It was because God’s church was in danger.

Decisions by bishops to forgive sexual aberrations, which the public at large regard as unforgivable, are being made under conditions few executives would ever be placed under. Priests are highly educated men, who after having their basic living expenses met, are left with little more than pocket money. The shortage of such people has long passed the critical stage.

Now, to keep the working priest on and to avoid paying out compensation, requires a devaluing of the allegation against him. It is then that the plan can jump the rails. Victims do not like to have their trauma dismissed as imaginary. And, neither does the media.

The offending priest under the public spotlight recently was an old and respected friend of my in-laws. If the effect that he had on my in-laws is any measure of the man, then over the many years since his ordination, the good feelings that he generated in his parishioners would have been immense. Now he is ruined.

Increasing isolation regarding contraception is a terminal illness

The church’s steadfast opposition to any artificial aid to contraception is aggravating the suffering in developing countries due to both overpopulation and the spread of AIDS.

The firm stance the church is taking is that if a society does not care if men and women have sexual relations outside of marriage, and does not care if an unwanted fetus is destroyed, then that society has adopted a lower level of civilisation than one which does care.

There can be no doubt that the church has made a reasonable judgment. What it fails to recognise is that no society is capable of living at that higher level. Its total focus is on respecting the rules rather than on minimising the damage when the rules are inevitably broken.

There may be sympathetic priests on the ground, but only the pope can make policy changes, and his hands are tied on this ruling. Thus, the church is doomed to become increasingly at odds with, not only non-Catholics, but much of its own flock over this issue.

The money running out is a terminal illness

Even before the damage to the image of priests, Christianity has become less relevant in modern life causing donations and bequests to drop off dramatically. If this was not bad enough, the billions of dollars paid out as compensation for the thousands of victims of pedophilia has been a major financial setback for the Vatican.

Properties peripheral to the core of operations are being sold off to meet the essential running costs of that core. Some have very fine buildings on them. The church is now burning the decks to keep the ship’s boiler going. In the meanwhile, we must prevent those in government with their hands on our money from handing it over to the church. This does no more than prolong the church’s death agony.

A rapidly increasing proportion of the faithful live in the developing world, and are dirt poor. The ministry of these people will cost more than will be received from them. Several European countries which were once classed as Catholic in 1900 have become neutral to any religion as they have become more educated and prosperous.

To build a great edifice upon a fantasy is a fatal mistake

If evolution is true, then there can be no soul as our species evolved from a microbe at such a gradual rate that there was no definitive moment in time when a fully formed soul, which could be rewarded or punished in an afterlife, could have suddenly jumped in.

The church’s teaching is that faith and the scientific evidence supporting evolution are not in conflict. The theologians who went through the intellectual gymnastics required to come to that conclusion, can only be pitied.

The pedophile priest problem, the contraception problem and the abortion problem are the penalties paid for insisting that humankind is a special creation and not just another species of animal which reproduces sexually.

Increasing will be the number of ordinary people who become aware of the advances in molecular biology providing yet more compelling evidence supporting the evolution concept. There will ultimately be an endpoint to the church’s untenable position - and it will probably be well before 2050.

Conclusion

There are too many things going wrong at the same time for the church to survive. Its cathedrals are among the West’s most magnificent artistic achievements - and they will remain to be its headstone.

Footnotes

1. Now that the “pilgrims” have gone home, we need to ask some questions about the $100 million which was generously donated towards the World Youth Day celebrations on our behalf.

2. Every taxpayer has a stake in the fate of property which has been tax-free for many years. The church has only a limited moral right to sell such property outright to pay for the damage done by criminal priests.