More devastating than the Reformation? (Main Forum)

by James, Australia, Sunday, October 07, 2012, 21:19 (255 days ago)

Mauricio García Villegas is a Colombian lawyer with a doctorate in Political Science from the Catholic University of Louvain. He is also a regular columnist with El Espectador newspaper. His article this Sunday touches on a number of matters that are being discussed here on Catholica. This translation of his article is published here with his permission.

Independent Catholics
Mauricio García Villegas,El Espectador, Colombia 6 October 2012
http://www.elespectador.com/opinion/columna-379623-catolicos-independientes

Nicholas Boileau, a 17th century French writer, said that every Protestant was a Pope when he had a Bible in his hands. That sentence reflects very well the Lutheran ideal of freeing believers from ecclesiastical hierarchies, and reducing the religious experience to God, the Scriptures and Grace.

However, as the centuries went by, many Protestants regressed by falling into the clutches of earthly authority, turning their pastors into authorities as axiomatic as the Roman Pontiff himself. Many Christian Churches are today made up of submissive believers, governed by a Pastor/Prophet who believes he knows the path to salvation as if he had already trod it.

I have the impression that the Catholic Church has produced an inverse phenomenon. The Vatican has never abandoned its pretension of knowing the details of the path to salvation, but the great bulk of believers started to make up their own minds about how they were going to follow that path.

That happened above all with the publication of the encyclical, Humanae Vitae of Paul VI (1968) in which he condemned abortion and the anti-contraceptive pill. From that time on, for the first time in the history of the Church, a great many Catholics (above all, Catholic mothers) started to take charge of their sexual lives, convinced that they were doing nothing wrong, and that their faith and its grace remained intact despite disobeying the Pope and his bishops. And so, paradoxically, while many Protestants were enmeshing themselves with religious bosses, many Catholics were freeing themselves from them.

I say this because I'm sure that the outcome of today's debates over abortion, the gay family, illegal drug taking and euthanasia, depend a lot on the relationship between believers and their Church hierarchies. When debating these subjects, believers not only have to take a position as citizens of the State, but as believers they also have to take into account the Church authorities.

And in both situations, they will not always obey what the religious heads tell them to do. Many (above all, Catholics) will make up their own minds on the basis of what their conscience and faith tell them, and that has been happening now for many years.

It is easy to understand the enormous concern that the withdrawal of believers is causing to ecclesiastical authorities. The conservative reaction of the Vatican today is a response to that disaffection of Catholics (a political phenomenon perhaps more devastating than the Protestant schism itself).

Part of that conservative strategy is to turn certain sexual matters, like intercourse and conception, the moral details of which are not clearly defined in the Bible or in the doctrines of the Church fathers, into matters of absolute and obligatory obedience.

Many Catholics see this manoeuvre (not to mention moral blackmail) in a kindly light and they understand the difficult situation that the Vatican (with all its pomp) and its power during millennia, has in accepting the weakening of its authority.

For that reason, perhaps, they are not rebelling against their spiritual bosses, and they understand their tribulations with neighbourly love. But despite that, they will not follow their directions when their conscience tells them otherwise.

And so it is that these independent Catholics don't want to become Popes in their own destiny, as Boileua says, but they certainly want to keep a certain distance from Rome, above all, in social and political matters that they consider to be critical to improving the society in which they live.