Catholicism today is fast becoming just one amongst the thirty thousand or so churches that make a claim to be led by Jesus Christ. It is fast-losing any claim to primacy amongst the Christian churches. Catholica Editor, Brian Coyne, today explores what has gone wrong and what needs to be done if the institutional Catholic Church is to legitimately reclaim some sense of primacy amongst the Christian churches.

What is the defining objective of Catholicism?

In a week's time we'll reach the milestone of four years since we published the first public edition of Catholica. I confess I am tired to almost the point of exhaustion. The forces in the human psyche that the institutional Church and civilisation face at times seem overwhelming. The quest for psychological security and certitude drive human beings in the most bizarre directions.

The current edition of National Catholic Reporter (NCR) carries a perceptive commentary by Eugene Cullen Kennedy. He compares the collapse of the institutional Catholic Church to the collapse of the Government in France under the assault of Hitler. The point he makes is that the collapse was not so much brought about by any superiority on the part of Hitler but by the internal moral collapse of the French leadership and bureaucracy.

Here's a sample of what Professor Kennedy had to say:

Read the full commentary by Eugene Cullen Kennedy at: ncronline.org

The ordinary people, however, felt what was happening and [the journalist Eric] Sevareid was soon chronicling the hordes of families who strapped mattresses onto their cars and clogged the roads leading south out of Paris. These men and women, he observed, understood what was occurring but the generals never did. "The bearded old senators," he wrote, "sat three hours at lunch, as they had always done, chatting with their mistresses while their country was perishing."

Everywhere the official apparatus of government functioned as if nothing unusual had taken place. Petty officials insisted on carrying out routines that Sevareid compared to the spasms of the newly dead. Censors carefully examined the scripts — the regulations must be obeyed - that he would broadcast from cities in which air raid sirens wailed and the building trembled from the bombing. Everyone would carry on as usual in this case study of a collapsing government living on the fumes of long gone glory. Still, its marshals and generals donned their uniforms and pinned on their sashes and medals to hold military reviews and to welcome the war correspondents with bands and receptions, a final costume party for men who reassured themselves by exercising the last fine grains of power in their finely gloved hands. Their new leader, Philippe Petain, was a white haired octogenarian who had been a hero a generation before at Verdun.

This parallels the activity that alternately astounds and enrages Catholics who understand what their bishop/generals do not — that the hierarchical structures of the church are buckling under the lightning strikes of modern times. Ordinary people get this but many leaders continue to reassure themselves that nothing has changed and that the true way into the future is the one that leads back into a supposedly glorious past. They don their robes, pin on their sashes and perform liturgies, such as the operatic cappa magna all-in-Latin celebration of a lost world held at the National Shrine in Washington a few months ago. Their leader is a white haired octogenarian who had been a hero a generation before at Vatican II.

Sevareid describes standing in line "while an aged bureaucrat with walrus mustaches went through his accustomed motions and with painful slowness duly inscribed the pertinent facts with green ink in a soiled ledger." This incident symbolized what was happening. "The French bureaucracy, which was helping to strangle the country, never released its grip for an instant." The bureaucracy kept the country together long after the Germans had made an end run and a mockery of the Maginot Line whose fixed armor pill boxes were designed by men who did not understand the mobility of modern warfare.

So, too, the Vatican bureaucracy is the first and last line of defense for the hierarchical model of the church. It always made people stand in line, of course, for any permissions they sought and it treated with cobwebbed methods the assault of the sex abuse scandal on its badly breached defenses. It now deals with that, like the mustachioed bureaucrat peering at his ledger in 1940, unaware that by their passivity these bureaucrats are strangling the institutional church to death. Their careers, of course, depend on their not relaxing their grip for an instant.

The "bureacrats are strangling the institutional church to death"...

Our Church is dying before our very eyes. Who is killing it? Society at large? Or internal disease and a bureacratic mentality like the one Eugene Cullen Kennedy describes in wartime France?

Watch the interview at: www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2964929.htm

Last night on television across Australia we were treated to a riveting conversation between two women, ABC journalist and Lateline presenter, Leigh Sales, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the acclaimed former Muslim author and human rights activist. The message Ayaan Hirsi Ali presents to the world might be summed up as the threat posed by religious fundamentalism. Her experience is with Islamic fundamentalism but as I have long argued, fundamentalism is only a couple of clicks less advanced in most of the other great religious systems, including Catholicism.

To me the twin forces of bureaucratic inertia and fundamentalism are the critical forces that are killing the Church today right across the Western world. Both forces "pack a punch" that are more powerful than the forces that fire the sun that gives life to our planet.

I ask myself constantly: what drives me? What drives you — the people attracted to Catholica and the exploration we are engaged in? At heart I think it is a quest for truth. But not a quest for certitude as in the sense that drives the fundamentalists to seek "truth" in man-made laws and authority figures but "The truth" — the insights that are found in the Divine mind alone.

Religion is not some "game" of liturgical dress-ups. Nor is it some game of running around trying to "prove" that our religion has some superior "set of moral laws" to all the other religions that are out there. It is a quest to ourselves, individually arrive at the correct moral responses to the nitty-gritty decisions we have to make in our lives. Sometimes those responses are difficult to discern. Take the case of two big stories in the headlines at the moment: the case of the whistleblowers who have broadcast "secret papers" on the internet [See, for example: Fairfax Media Coverage]. Many people have had to make moral decisions along the way that have led to the release of those documents — from the original people who had access to the papers to the various journalists along the way who have had to make decisions about their publication. As I have argued in the past: sometimes the correct moral response is to be a whistleblower; at other times the correct moral response is to keep quiet. Very often the moral decision involved in far from clear-cut and the individual moral response that is required has to be carefully discerned and nuanced.

See the program overview at: http://www.abc.net.au/4corners

On the Four Corners program last night we were given insight into the massive and wholesale use of rape as a weapon of terrorism and war in the Congo right at this very moment. We might think that all very remote from us. But very often we "civilised people" revert to "hunting in packs" like the soldiers who are inflicting this terrible blight on their own people. We might not be "raping women" but do we have the strength of moral character to stand up against a pack when some "mob behaviour" becomes immoral and an abuse of the rights of another sector of the society in which we live?

Religion is supposed to be the Estate in society that guides people to better moral behaviour through the individuals being able to make better individual decisions. We do not simply "follow the mob" — the sort of "mob behaviour" that crucified Jesus Christ. We are not simply driven by lizard brain instincts. We are called to a higher level of discernment in our moral behaviours.

Catholicism often claims for itself a "primacy" amongst the Christian churches. It has largely lost that "primacy" today. If it is to be reclaimed that is not going to occur by any claims to Apostolic Succession, nor any claims that we have superior insight into some set of Divine Laws than any other group of people or religion on earth. It is only going to come from a superiority, recognised by others and conferred by others, because we have a superior insight into the "Way of thinking, feeling and acting" modelled by Jesus Christ. This is not achieved by pretending we have superior liturgies, superior costumery, superior assets in magnificent architectural monuments scattered throughout the world. It is only going to come from an institution and organisation that demonstrates unambiguously that he shows each individual how to make correct moral choices in the nitty-gritty decision they have to make in their lives. It is not about standing on street corners protesting about abortion. It is about demonstrating that when you are faced with an unexpected pregnancy in your family you know how to guide the persons caught up in the dilemmas posed by that situation how to make the correct decisions that lead them to spiritual equilibrium. It is about guiding people to take the necessary decision so that "unwanted pregnancies" do not occur in the first place. Our Church has self-evidently been failing on a massive scale in the Western world no different morally to the sort of moral horror that was portrayed in the Congo documentary program on Four Corners last night. Children have been raped in our Church and, for too long, we all turned a blind eye.

Where are the bishops, the priests, the moral leaders who will cease playing their bureaucratic games, who will cease this constant appeasement of the fundamentalist mindset within our midst, and who will show genuine spiritual leadership in guiding people in how to use their own consciences to make intelligent moral decisions in their lives? We don't want Mass-sayers anymore. We want and need mature women and men who are moral guides who can show us how to think, feel and act in "the Way" modelled for us by Jesus Christ. Jesus was not some wimp trying to prove what a nice, mummy's boy, social conformist he was. He was a leader showing people how to break all the rules in order to arrive at the moral truth about the situations they found themselves in. He models for us how to find the moral truth about the situations we find ourselves in today. We need spiritual leaders today who are prepared to stand up and show us how to do that. The liturgical games have to end. The power games have to end. The bureaucratic games have to end. Fundamentalism has to be consigned to the scrapheap in all religions. The 'goody-two shoes games of social conformity' have to end. None of those things ultimately lead us to "The truth" that resides in the Divine alone.

LINKS:

ABC Lateline interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali: www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2964929.htm
Lateline on iView (the whole Lateline program incl. the interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali): www.abc.net.au/iview/#/view/607789
Four Corners (with links to iView): www.abc.net.au/4corners/
Fairfax Media coverage of the Wikileaks of US Secret Papers: www.smh.com.au

IMAGE CREDITS:
The images used in this commentary have been sourced from the websites they are linked to.

Brian Coyne, 27 Jul 2010

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©2010Brian Coyne

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