Independent Catholics? (Main Forum)

by James, Australia, Sunday, June 10, 2012, 18:06 (346 days ago) @ Enda

Thanks, Enda. I know you were responding to me when you wrote some of the above in the earlier string. Now that you have repeated it, maybe I can clarify my own thinking, which, like many things, is personal and does not reflect in any way on the correctness or otherwise of those who have a different viewpoint.

John Burnheim’s issue with the Church (he has left it), “its claim to be the means by which the Creator of the Universe was communicating with and guiding his creatures.” For him it seems important to know where the truth is coming from.
I don’t care about this as an issue. I am basically an intuitive person. I didn’t choose to be but I am. From my childhood I have come across things in Catholicism that I didn’t believe. They seemed stupid or nonsense or irrelevant. What was important though was the question, “Does this make my life meaningful?”

I mentioned earlier that my position was pretty close to Burnheim's, and it is a conclusion I reached long before I read his autobiography. In fact, that was the conclusion I was reaching in the seminary, and it certainly became more of a conviction after leaving. And with each bit of festering of the cover up scandal, of the HIV/AIDs and condoms issue, of the Church's complete inconsistency on life issues, it becomes even stronger.

The central claim of the Catholic Church is that God communicated with his creatures by means of "inspired" books written between 5,000 and 2,000 years ago. Then for some odd reason, He stopped inspiring books, and the odd reason was, according to Catholic dogma, because He founded a Church. Henceforth the message that the Creator wanted to get through to his creatures would be communicated not through some dusty prophet or evangelist, but through his representatives on earth, the successors to the Apostles, the bishops, and especially through the Pope and Church Councils of bishops.

Now, the Protestant Reformation came along, and because of the appalling behaviour of the Popes and the Roman hierarchy, they were faced with this problem too. How could the Creator of the Universe be telling people that they could buy their way into heaven with indulgences etc. etc? So they ditched the idea of Magisterium and Tradition. The word of God could only be found in the Bible. But that had its own problems: how odd of God to stop writing. In addition there were all these problems of things being lost in translation because Jesus, his Son, spoke Aramaic, a not that widespread dialect in one corner of the Roman Empire. It made much more sense to have some continuous inspiration through the Church, even if that simply meant clarifying what the Sacred Scriptures meant.

Now, according to Catholic dogma, you could still have a bad Pope - Alexander VI with his wife and four children is usually quoted, despite the fact that he was one of the few Popes who seemed to exhibit "family values", even though he was as corrupt as so many others in buying the papacy. But when looking through human history, it is very hard to see what sort of divine hand was involved in Innocent III's genocide of the Albigensians, or Innocent VIII's Inquisition. And even today, the policy of cover up of the sexual abuse of children by clergy, headed by the current Pope and his curial colleagues. Now that is not just a question of a "bad Pope" in the Alexander VI sense of not being able to keep the "fomes peccati" in check. It was policy directed right from the top, in the same way as the two "Innocents", directed their policies, which these days would have them in front of the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

So, while one might quibble or go cafeteria and choose which Christian doctrines you want to accept, Burnheim's question, to my mind goes right to the very essence of Catholicism, and is not simply a question of "where the truth comes from".

A related question is whether or not the Church's ritual and liturgy makes any difference to human behaviour. And again, I can only go back to my seminary experience. I have to answer that with a resounding negative, and again, that view has only been confirmed by the pedophile scandals - priests, after all, practice these devotions and liturgies more than most.

But I agree with you that the real issue is whether or not acceptance of some parts of the Catholic menu, including its rituals, make life meaningful. And if the answer to that is yes, then obviously you have to do what you have to do. But in my case, the answer is that it doesn't, and they don't.