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Editor's preface: Quite independently of one another, a number of readers of Catholica have remarked to me in recent times that reading Catholica is almost the equivalent of undertaking a course of study at university level in religion, spirituality or theology. Perhaps nowhere will that apply more that with this special series we begin today written by Tom Lee. Over the coming Mondays we will be bringing you bite-sixed reflections of one to two-thousand words from this mammoth study Tom Lee has undertaken over the last 30 years. (Today's introduction by myself and Tom is a little longer than normal in order to give you a good overview of what this is all about before we begin exploring the actual history next week.)

Tom is an Australian, now semi-retired in Phoenix, Arizona, who has had an illustrious international career as an actor, writer, and broadcast commentator. He does not claim to be a professional theologian, nor an historian, but he undertook this study because, like many of the people who are attracted to what we're doing here at Catholica Australia, he was simply inquisitive about the history of Christianity and trying to better understand what he had been brought up to believe. In a sense, his book is a one-man journey seeking to better understand who Jesus was and what his own faith was about.

Join us for what is going to be an exciting and valuable journey. There'll be plenty of controversy too — this is not a series of reflections for those who see their religious faith principally as some attempt to prove they already know all the answers or who are trying to prove to God, themselves or everyone else what loyal or obedient little vegemites they are. This is a series for people who might want to engage the author in intelligent debate on the conclusions he has come to, or about the evidence he has uncovered. It's a series for people who are seriously engaged in trying to deepen and broaden their understanding of their own beliefs — and to better refine them in the manner that Tom Lee himself has endeavoured to do. It's a journey that might be characterised as an attempt to become better obedient to the ultimate truths about who Jesus is and what he was endeavouring to get us to believe.

Unfortunately we will not be able to bring you the entire book — even if we were to spread it out over the entire year — and we will not necessarily be presenting the excerpts in the chronological order in which Tom has written them. Rather, I will be attempting to pick up on the themes that over time have been major subjects of exploration on Catholica by other commentators and in our forums. For example Dr Ian Elmer has written much on Catholica about early Christianity and there are many places in Tom Lee's book where either himself, or other international "experts" Tom has turned to for answers might help us better understand some of the subjects Dr Elmer has explored with us. The same applies to perspectives that have been raised by Dr Andrew Kania who has a special interest in the Eastern branches of Catholicism. Parts of Tom Lee's manuscript will help broaden our understanding of the split in the Church between East and West and how it came about about. Similarly, Peregrinus, Professor Len Swidler, Tom McMahon and many other Catholica commentators have raised issues that intersect with some of the material in Tom Lee's study.

Today, to introduce the series — and the writer, Tom Lee — it is our pleasure to bring you Tom Lee's own introduction to his study. It explains better than I can who Tom Lee is and what he's been trying to achieve through this decade's-long study. Sit back and enjoy this series of reflections. This is adult faith exploration at its very best…

The Invention of Christianity and the Papacy
The first 500 years
by Tom Lee

Introduction…

Prince Lieven once said of the ballet Raymonda that he had enjoyed it all his life without having the faintest idea what it was all about and that is the attitude of many of my fellow Roman Catholics in regard to the dogmas of the Church. They have an unquestioning faith that enjoys the pomp and the ritual and the depth of genuine spiritual solace that they derive from it, and regard any questioning of what their forefathers believed and taught them to be true as disloyal. The vast majority of churchgoers know little about their religious traditions' history or theology or the fact that all of Christian dogma is merely imaginative speculation. There is no demonstrable proof that any of it is true. As the late Peter Levi, former Jesuit and Professor of Poetry at Oxford University pointed out: "The Church has painted itself into a corner by declaring as dogma things that man can never know and which God is quite unlikely to be worried about." Belief requires uncritical faith, which many nowadays regard as belief without justification.

The assurance that someone is motivated by religious conviction is not a reason to excuse their acts at all. Yet, despite a plethora of organized inhumanity perpetrated in the name of Christianity throughout the centuries, it has, by and large, been a positive civilizing influence, taming brutal tribesmen and warriors, inspiring great art and literature, architecture and music, as well as admirable works of charity, and more recently, enlightened calls for social justice and ecological responsibility, despite some bishop's egregious cover-ups of fiscal scandals and pedophile sex abuse by priests.

In the mid-1970s, the late Peter Levi, former Jesuit, and professor of Poetry at Oxford University, declared: "The Church has painted itself into a corner by declaring as dogma things that man can never know and which God is quite unlikely to be worried about." Tom Lee (pictured) describes his book as an "exploration of the turbulent history of the first five hundred years when those far-fetched and contentious doctrines were formulated".

Most of my generation of pre-Vatican II Catholics was brought up in a state of 'infantalized innocence'. For us, all conceptions were immaculate; Ingrid Bergman was a nun and suave Bing Crosby and genial Barry Fitzgerald typified priests. If one dared to ask leading questions, at age twelve or so, when the glands engaged, the hormones flowed and a childhood of simple physicality became a lifetime of sexuality, parents were likely to reply that it wasn't a fit subject for conversation. Tormented by libido and ignorance, we were kept miserably in the dark by our teachers and parents.

Despite adolescent angst, the De La Salle Brothers educated me in the good humanistic, liberal traditions of the Christian West. With unquestioning credence, I took the church's precepts for granted and was soon competitive in holiness and proud of my humility. Knowing how to discern, I could rightly "eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil" without danger or even guilt, thanks to regular confession and the Miraculous Medal dangling around my neck that guaranteed the Virgin Mary's intercession to save me from hellfire at the end of life, no matter how dissolute, as long as I called on her assistance.

Steeped in theology like a teabag…

The brothers taught, "The pope's spiritual authority is supreme and absolute, accountable to no one else — except the Lord." They did not mention that the Lord has no public venue in which to express any views to the contrary. In the words of Wilfrid Sheed we were "Steeped in theology like a teabag."

Encouraging a unanimity of gullibility, the brothers never attempted to explain how unverifiable theological presumptions from a simpler and much less scientifically savy age, had been accepted as dogma, or why the Catholic Church's theological certainty about the unprovable and unknowable was viewed as misguided and problematic by members of other churches and faiths.

As a consequence of the church's emphasis on doctrine, most Christians think God is three male individuals — three guys in the sky. I once heard a seminarian wonder aloud how the son felt up in heaven when his father sent him down to earth to die on the cross. Most Christians I know have not a glimmer of understanding of the mystery of myth. They imagine the Ground of Being, the Eternal Void, with a human mind and attitudes, with eyes and feet and hands. They confuse figurative language with objective factual reporting. Bedevilled by angels, every story in the Christian tradition — at least in the New Testament — is taken literally, as if a court reporter had witnessed the life of the Nazarene and taken it all down.

What's so special about the cheese makers?

In the Monty Python movie "The Life of Brian", a couple of people at the edge of the crowd strain to hear the beatitudes. When it gets to "Blessed are the peacemakers," one of them says, "I think it was 'Blessed are the cheese makers'," to which his friend replies, "What's so special about the cheese makers?"

That's a joke, but it has a serious point. In an age when there wasn't an instant video or phone recording of every speech and action, we are dependent on ancient hearsay. The Gospels were written in an attempt to control historical memory; indoctrination by supposedly historical example. For better or worse, the hearsay evidence became popular memory which embellished the facts.

Even as a child, I felt uncomfortable defending beliefs that defied the laws of nature. For me, doubt was the knot in faith's muscle. Why would God bend the laws he had put in place? There was no logical reason or explanation. In the words of John Updike: "All shades of the Christian religion derive from the same sketchy Gospel accounts of a charismatic miracle worker and a cosmic narrative wildly different from what science shows."

I felt that anti-religion polemicists were right to make people of faith embarrassed to admit what they believe, especially if they'd never questioned those beliefs — their lack of knowledge previously asserted without shame. I early concluded that even the most intelligent people who truly believe and unquestionably rely on religion, have a measurable degree of outright naïveté about them. The adults of my childhood practiced a bourgeois piety that had been roughed up by two devastatingly brutal world wars, punctuated by crippling economic depression. Fervid faith for many of my parent's generation had been replaced by lip-service — a cultural pretense, for the sake of the children. In the 1950s, faced with nuclear annihilation, as two blocks of nations glowered at each other across an iron curtain, they felt helpless before eternity.

Despite our age of almost universal education, Christian churches (largely run by a cabal of ostensibly moral and celibate men who appear obsessed with sexuality) have tried to instill the notion of loyalty, as they try to repress and intimidate rational argument and discussion about beliefs that stem from a time when the miraculous was believed to rub shoulders with the everyday, and the average person's experience and imagination were confined to their immediate environment.

Faith — boiled down to a fad, or even an addiction…

Dogmatic clergy continue to imprint on the credulous minds and imaginations of those they rule a far-fetched version of history that will justify the existing system; as poet Carolyn Forche describes it: "a catechism of atrophied faiths". They are secure in the belief that the will to believe is almost universal, but for many, faith is boiled down to a fad, or even an addiction.

Perhaps Lewis Carrol (Rev. Charles Dodgson) had it right when he has Alice say to the White Queen, "There's no use trying. One can't believe impossible things".

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

For me it was heartening when John F. Kennedy, speaking to the graduating class at Yale in 1962, said: "The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie ... deliberate, contrived, and dishonest ... but the myth ... persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic ... Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought".

Most of us, in the twenty-first century, faced with the necessity of growing up, refuse to lament the loss of innocence and resent many clerics' petty and decidedly un-Christian evaluations of others' personal relationships. We recognize that the loss of our protean innocence leads to a satisfying gain in self-knowledge. We share a kind of heretical predisposition. We rebel against an ideological tyranny that rejects this world in favor of an idealized afterlife, regardless of creed.

The eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being…

These winged words are said to have been written on the walls of an American university. I hope it was hard to scrub off:

And the Lord said to them: 'Who do you say that I am?' They replied: 'You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being; the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our inter-personal relationships.'

And the Lord said unto them: 'WHAT?'

For my own part I've always been curious about how such a vast, complicated and sumptuous organization as the Roman Catholic Church came to supersede the original isolated groups of simple believers in Jesus, who accepted the omnipotent sway of a Hebrew God, and lacked a celibate hierarchical priesthood and the vast body of esoteric dogma and canon law that now hedges around the faith. I have always been fascinated by history — not so much by what happened as by why and how it happened. The word Historia is Greek: it means enquiry.

I am from a generation (I was born in 1939 shortly before the election of Pope Pius XII and Hitler's subjugation of much of Europe) when the rituals and disciplines of the Church were beginning to be moderated. History remained my principal reading when I left school and became an actor and writer. When offered a role in a period play I studied the epoch concerned as a necessary preliminary to an understanding of the external forces shaping and affecting the character. I read the diaries and novels of the writers who lived at the time, rather than the works of academic historians with prejudices and ideas of their own. I believe you can't really understand a period unless you know how the people living at that time thought — what their beliefs and prejudices may have been. The historian is inevitably a voyeur. Like an actor he tries to think other people's thoughts and live other people's lives.

From early in my career I combined journalism (mostly of a critical or investigative kind) with my acting work, and toyed with the idea of a one-man show that would dissect Church history in a diverting way — an educational as well as amusing enterprise.

A history of the Papacy…

In the mid 60s I appeared in a production of The Hollow Crown, a show that consists of readings that entertainingly illustrate the history of the British monarchy. I planned to do the same for the Papacy..

Early in 1973 I joined a long-running London production, and stayed with it for three and a half years, affording me the time, during my mostly free days, to further my research, largely at the British Library, but also consulting many prominent historians who were very generous with their time and their inside knowledge of recent research. I'd been advised by the leading Australian classical actor of my youth, John Alden: "If ever you need to know anything about anything, always go to the most eminent person in the field and more often than not they'll be flattered to be asked". He was right.

Poster design to promote "O Papa".

During a brief vacation in 1974 I went to Rome and there met the late Frances Reilly, the dynamic and delightful director of the Vatican-owned Teatro Goldoni; at that time the English-speaking theatre in Rome. Frances informed me that she was looking for special attractions for the following year, which Pope Paul VI had designated Holy Year. She urged me to complete my script and premiere it at the Goldoni the following summer. The result was the one-man show "0 Papa!" utilizing letters and diaries to trace the history of the Papacy, from St. Peter to the present; playing twenty characters through the centuries that personify the changes and developments in the papal role.

The show enjoyed a good press and an extended run in Rome and I've subsequently performed it successfully at three venues in London, and in many theaters and churches, throughout Europe and America. The two-hour radio adaptation was recorded at the BBC in London for CBC (Canada) and I subsequently devised several more historical. dramatizations for them, and became a religious history pundit on BBC talk shows. Cardinal William Baum saw a performance of "0 Papa!" in London and invited me to perform for his Institute for the Arts in Washington DC and excerpts from those performances were seen on NBC television in 1976.

What if no questions are asked at all?

It has been accurately said that in philosophy it is important to give the right answers, but even more important to ask the right questions. But what if no questions are asked at all? I know many Catholics who, despite the vast changes in the Church during their own lifetime, have never questioned anything and who have no knowledge of the centuries of conflict that shaped the dogmas that they accept at their face value without much thought or understanding. Despite a rich heritage of alleged saintly miracles and apparitions, many also have an inexplicable aversion to anything metaphysical.

Most Protestant friends and acquaintances were also ignorant of the history, if a little more knowledgeable about the Bible. Many regarded the scriptures as the inerrant word of God. As Norman Mailer once famously said of Methodists, "not much taste for metaphor". Pollster George Gallup has dubbed the United States "a nation of biblical illiterates". Seventy-five percent of American Christians think the saying 'God helps those who help themselves' is from the Bible, and twelve percent of Americans are confident that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. It was this woeful ignorance, on the part of my Christian friends, that prompted me to write this book.

Very few Catholics know their way around the Bible. Scripture scholar Fr. Raymond Brown wrote that many statements in the documents of Vatican II were "biblically naïve," especially with respect to bishops as successors of the Twelve. Most Christians are totally ignorant of modern scholarly opinion about the history of the Gospels and the early Church, and many clergy are either ignorant themselves or seem to be engaged in a conspiracy of silence; content to assist their flocks to continue in ignorance of what must be, on any estimate, a vitally important body of information for contemporary Christianity.

Scientific knowledge and scholarly research changes the canvas…

The extent to which our knowledge of the facts of history have increased during the past half-century has been extraordinary; and the greater part of it is due to improved scientific techniques, such as carbon-dating and DNA testing allied to forensic archaeology, scanning electron microscopy, X-radiography, and X-ray fluorescence, which are not likely in the future to prove erroneous.

The first of the Dead Sea Scrolls was found in the late 1940s in the Judaean Desert, soon followed by the Nag Hamadi cache of Gnostic texts in Egypt. The study of these ancient libraries of hundreds of texts, both scrolls and fragments, has dispelled much of the accumulated dust and rubble that obscured our understanding of the biblical texts, and how we look at the development of Judaism after the Babylonian exile, 537 BCE up to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. They dramatically increase our knowledge of the religious thought in the pre-Christian period before and during which Jesus and his earliest disciples lived, preached and prayed; deepening our understanding of the essentially Jewish movement led by Jesus that later flourished as the early Christian community.

Semantics…

Semantics, the study of meaning in language, has also made great strides so that we have a far better idea of the original meaning of the Bible documents, both Old and New Testament; in many instances considerably distanced from long accepted interpretations. There is evidence that many sections were re-written with different emphasis from century to century, blurring the border between what was considered true and what was fiction. For the writers, the urge to embellish with supernatural coloring appears to have been irresistible.

In addition the work of The Jesus Seminar since its inception in 1985 under its late founder, Robert Funk, has come to many startling conclusions that cannot be ignored. The distinguished members, most of them clerics, have examined thoroughly the historicity of the words and deeds of Jesus as reported in the gospels and have published their findings, challenging our prior assumptions, and exposing the contradictions, confusions and interpolations that honeycomb the original evidence

The actual teaching of Jesus ends up as Catholic historian Paul Johnson acknowledged in his History of Christianity, "a series of glimpses, a collection of insights, rather than a code of doctrine". It is essentially a code of ethics, with no dogmatic imperatives. The Jesus of the Gospels demonstrates that kindness is not a weakness, and has more tenderness for moral outcasts than for moral hypocrites.

However, it has been proven convincingly and demonstrably that the Gospels were not written as history, but as allegorical accounts put together in a montage of extracts from the Old Testament, creative paraphrases, in an attempt, many years after the event, to make sense of who Jesus was and had been, as memory gave way to invention. They were written in a sequence that fitted with complimentary readings from the Old Testament liturgical cycle, to be read over the period of a lunar year of 51 Sabbaths in the Christian synagogues. Christianity is, in television terms, a spin-off from Judaism.

The Old Testament was, and still is for liturgical purposes, written on scrolls that are unrolled in the synagogue and read in the same sequence year by year, from Sabbath to Sabbath, with the only major added readings being for midweek services and high holy days.

The Gospels were written to be read aloud. They compliment and supplement the Old Testament readings and imaginatively draw the parallel between Jesus and the ancient prophets and the history and mythology of the Jewish faith. A prime example is Isaiah 5:1-7 paired with Matthew 21:33-43. Both talk of the vine that produced bad fruit. The Gospel parable was certainly written to mirror its 700-year-old predecessor. Each account castigates the bad stewards among the chosen people.

The Bible — far too important to be taken literally…

The Biblical writers did not recognize that embellishing a story was quite the same thing as departing from the truth. The great Protestant theologian H. Richard Niebuhr wrote that the Bible (like all great religious texts) is far too important to be taken literally.

Commenting on Biblical legends, metaphor and miracles, Rabbi Lionel Blue said to me: "The miracle of Moses crossing of the Red Sea was not the parting of the waters, but that the first Jew, with a wall of water each side of him walked through". He also pointed out that the original Hebrew speaks of a Sea of Reeds, not the Red Sea.

Eric Auerbach in the first chapter of his "Mimesis" (1946) notes that in the world of Exodus, God appears to forget that He is the object of a monotheistic cult. He competes with Pharaoh as an equal. His first commandment declares Him to be a jealous god. A footnote to "Who is like You among the gods, O LORD," admits, "Hebrew writers had no difficulty in conceding the existence of other deities, though always stipulating their absolute inferiority to the God of Israel." Yahweh is used like a name of God when in fact the Hebrew means "I am," underlining the impossibility of naming or describing God.

The name Adam does not refer to an individual man. It is a generic term in Aramaic meaning Human Kind and is used in an allegorical and figurative manner in Genesis. As Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin declared: "Man is evolution become aware of itself".

The genesis of the Ten Commandments…

Violence, lust, deception, murder, incest and vengeance are the subjects of the Book of Genesis. These stories describe a people, and a God, struggling in a pre-literate and superstitious world before the invention of systematic rules — a primal place predating our notions of fairness, honesty and basic rights. It is where we are shown the need for a formal legal system that culminated in the Ten Commandments (actually a distillation of 613 precepts, 365 of them negative) and a deep cultural belief in justice, much of it borrowed from Egypt, Babylon and Sumer.

In a period when spiritual revolt against the Roman Empire led to civil unrest and hardened dogmatic ritual amongst the Jews, the Gospels portray a Jesus who brought to the mix a call for compassion in judgment, especially of the poor and downtrodden. He seems to have regarded the spirit of the law to be more important than the letter. The Jesus of the Gospels was not yet the Christ; turning him into a deity was the work of later Christian theologizing.

All of the classical religious beliefs emerged in a pre-scientific era, before the application of reasoned investigation. Biblical criticism in the Western world has only been freed from ecclesiastical and legal sanctions in the past century. Koranic criticism is virtually absent in Islamic countries, mainly because of the very real threat of retribution from dogmatic literalists.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam claim that God intervened in history, speaking to Moses and the prophets, raised Jesus from death, and/or communicated through the Angel Gabriel with Muhammad. The so-called sacred books that arose from these alleged encounters with the divine illustrate the metaphysical yearnings of the ancient nomadic and agricultural communities that spawned them, and express the narrow moral precepts of the people of that time. Initially transmitted orally, the written versions we have now are second or third-hand sources from decades after the legends they relate; some of them promising. another world beyond this vale of tears and written by passionate propagandists. Their messages of salvation have proven attractive and convincing to countless generations.

As the first gospel, Mark, was not written until after 70 CE, we cannot know what is fact or fiction in these often contradictory documents. We are doomed to view the gospels through the smoked glass of the intervening four decades, during which the spirit of myth interposed to make them evolve out of all recognition, especially when Gentiles joined the faith and brought with them ready made religious myths, such as the birth of a demigod from a virgin impregnated by a god.

Most scripture fails as history…

In the words of Joan Partipilo: "Jesus didn't shape Western civilization, his followers did. And they used him to justify everything they did, no matter how good or bad. If it wasn't Jesus, it would have been some other deity, and the overall actions of Western civilization's leaders throughout history probably wouldn't have been much different." The Gospel stories were greatly enhanced over time in much the same way that supermarket tabloids ignore fact for spin. Thus, most scripture fails as history because its real purpose is as propaganda designed to promote piety and orthodoxy.

Many physicists are honest about the limits of the known, and almost revel in the uncertainties that underlie their work — including the possibility that some day it may all be proven wrong. A scientist formulates a hypothesis, and then does experiments, and if the results support the hypothesis it becomes a theory. Science is based on evidence, not a dubiously claimed authority or supposed revelation. Unlike science, there is no reasonable explanation for most religious dogma. Theologians plunge on blindly spouting their received doctrines, walking a tightrope between the mythic and the mundane, unwilling to concede that even one tad of the Christian fairy tale may be wrong, or that Christ could have just been a man — a very good man whom people loved and identified with, because he had enough human frailty to convey how hard it is to be a good man.

The astronomer Carl Sagan once said, "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science or technology". He meant that we are unfamiliar with the principles on which the technology around us works. Just like theology, there is an enormous gap between the knowledge of the promoters and the knowledge of the users. In regard to our essential technologies, we typically don't want to be bothered with adjusting it, monitoring it, repairing it, or knowing about its inner workings. With theology, we don't want the brain-strain.

No one should be expected to believe incredible things with no evidence…

Should the clergy and believers boldly reject the opinion of the scholars and carry on as before, confident that a God who called Himself the Truth will justify them in his own good time? There must be many clergy who have consciences that trouble them on this point. I have met many, both Catholic and Protestant, who acknowledge that no one should be expected to believe incredible things with no evidence. Some priests I've met, having lost faith, continue in the priesthood because that's the only job they know how to do. Their disillusion is masked by an outward show of feigned piety, whose moral implications are significant.

How far is anyone justified in sacrificing intellectual integrity in order to avoid upsetting those members of the faithful who are happy with old, but erroneous, views? Intellectual integrity should bite on consciences deeper than apparently it does. A non-critical, blindly conservative attitude to scholarship in the long run does deep damage to the Church. Reading the story of an institution you've known well all your life, but only superficially, is like suddenly being given a guided tour of a town you have previously glimpsed only from the window of a train passing through.

While attempting to be as accurate and objective as possible, I've not been blind to the prejudices at work in the history books from earlier centuries. Many were propaganda documents, every bit as bad atrocities as those invented between their covers. As the late, great Catholic journalist Patrick O'Donovan observed in London's Catholic Herald: "The monks were appalling reporters and tended to write what they thought ought to be true".

Much Catholic dogma was … firmly postulated, if not finally defined, by the end of the fifth century…

Much Catholic dogma was, despite occasional caveats, firmly postulated, if not finally defined, by the end of the fifth century, in spite of St. Paul's warning "now we see as though through a glass darkly..." The works of the Popes of Rome, for good or ill, have been an important factor in European history for almost two thousand years, and in considerable measure they have influenced the cultural and political evolution of the whole world since the fifteenth century. They were often neither as heroic nor as wicked as they were portrayed in chronicles by their contemporaries, especially during the first five centuries covered by this book.

For many Catholics the Pope of their youth remains the Pope, and thus it is with me. Pius XII, shortly before his death in 1958 declared: "The Church has nothing to gain by the spreading of vain legends, nothing to lose by the manifestation of historical truth". His successors have, by and large, advanced this notion, but have not always struck a responsive chord with aged pastors reared in the days of rose-tinted glasses, when the Church could do no wrong. One priest from my youth declared: "If your parish priest says black is white, it is!" He'd just denounced as "an anti-clerical" the president of the Holy Name Society, with whom he'd had a minor disagreement. He was arrogantly confident that no one would accept the word of a layperson over that of an ordained priest. Mgr. Talbot in England famously defined the laity's duties as "to hunt, pray and pay". As Mgr. Alan J. Placa rightly said: "Too many churchmen try to imitate Perry Mason rather than Jesus Christ".

Contemporary scandal and its effect…

Many of those stalwarts have been badly shaken by recent sexual and fiscal scandals in the church as the tawdry secrets, corruption, and the moral squalor of the self-interested attempts by the hierarchy to thwart justice became public knowledge, and long-suppressed but aggressive silence exploded into bitter denunciations.

For many, the revelations of sexual abuse of children negated all the constraints imposed by the church in sexual matters. The fact that church officials had denied something was suddenly all the more reason to believe it. The victims ultimately became pawns not only to child molesters, but also to those defenders of the faith whose job should have been to protect the faithful. Their stubborn insiderishness was the price they paid for standing still, and for not standing up. A corrosive distrust was generated, and the resentment provoked by the hierarchy's arrogance and lawyerly cant was the greatest threat to faith and trust. As the U.S. Army/Marine Corp Counterinsurgency Field Manual says simply: "Lose moral legitimacy; lose the war".

Many Catholics simply walked away, convinced that the Church was spiritually extinct; their departure reducing greatly the power and income of the diocesan chanceries involved, while casting a pall of suspicion over the innocent, faithful and virtuous clerics, who remain in the majority.

The bishop's often reprehensible reactions to the charges eroded their power and undermined their legitimacy, thus contributing to the demoralization of many of the faithful. Numerous bishops have been rightly accused of callousness, hauteur and malice, peevishness, cynicism and impatience with the victims, and complicity, duplicity and culpable ignorance in their handling of the abusers. It was seen and experienced as a great betrayal. One can only hope the hierarchy has learned that facing realities is much better than ignoring and denying them.

The business of "staying in business"…

Many bishops now find it difficult to acknowledge that the outside world is openly indifferent to their mission; the hierarchy themselves have lost sight of everything except the debilitating business of staying in business.

Raised as a Catholic, comedian Bill Maher wrote in Salon.com, commenting on the $2 billion payout by the US Catholic Church to sexual abuse victims: "It's a business — and not just a business, really, the greatest business in the world, in that, like all religions, it's selling an invisible product. It doesn't really get easier than that, unless you count Edgar Bergen, a ventriloquist on the RADIO."

The National Catholic Reporter, that rare religious publication utilizing independent reporting free of hierarchical interference as the heart of its mission, in an editorial about the 2005 U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops agreed: "More deliberately than ever they are turning inward to problems of no interest to the wider world and of little interest to most of the faithful from whom they continue to grow distant".

Of the 2006 conference, NCR editorialized:

"The bishops aren't terribly persuasive or clear when they talk about sex ... It's either be open to having kids or married sex is no more significant than an encounter with a prostitute. ... It is difficult to figure how to approach these documents. They are products of some realm so removed from the real lives of the faithful one has to wonder why any group of busy men administering a church would bother. Bishops, pestered by the abuse scandal that they've avoided looking full in the face, find it easier to try to order other's lives."

Religion and Theology…

Not so, however, the clerical scholars, working away in libraries and archives. All whom I've approached for help or enlightenment in the course of writing this book have gone out of their way to be helpful, evincing nothing but interest and a genuine desire to aid my enquiries.

The former Dominican theologian Jacques Pohier believes the academic teaching of theology can now be seen as a largely superfluous pastime that may well drag believers down like the heavy armor of knights at Agincourt. Paul Young has coined a new word for it, theodrivel. As avowed atheist Sam Harris has asserted in his book The End of Faith, "Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." Catholic theologian Ute Ranke Heinemann (Putting Away Childish Things: HarperCollins 1994) agrees: "Often enough theologians see nonsense as the tea leaves that they are supposed to read in order to divine the will of God".

Religion, of course, does not begin and end with theology. Even in a brief account, its caring social aspects deserve a rounded consideration. But the fact is, for a multiplicity of people, religion has had its time. Whether one believes or not that a Jewish reformer named Jesus established a Church with a visible elected leader, perpetuating his mission through the centuries, one cannot help but be intrigued by the continuing influence of those men who through the centuries have believed themselves to be fulfilling such a role.

For many people, a universe without a creative intelligence behind it has no interest. But, as Mahatma Ghandhi wrote in 1925: "Every formula of every religion has, in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal justice if it is to ask for universal assent. Error can claim no exemption even if it is supported by the scriptures of the world."

Some people may feel that, in places, I have been over flippant, but, though I realize that one can give pain and do damage with a couple of paragraphs designed to tickle the funny-bone as well as conveying truth, I believe that people who are offended by the Truth generally deserve to be. If I have put the cat among the pigeons, it is, I believe, for the good of the pigeons.

ARTICLE NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at The Introduction
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INTRO | PART 1.1 | PART 1.2 | PART 1.3 | PART 1.4 | PART 1.5 | PART 1.6
PART 2.1 | PART 2.2 | PART 2.3 | PART 2.4 | PART 4.0
PART 5.1 | PART 5.2 | PART 5.3 | PART 5.4 | PART 5.5 | PART 6.2 | PART 6.3 | PART 7.1
PART 31.1 | PART 31.2 | PART 31.3 | PART 31.4
Acknowledgements | Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Readers may also find valuable background in the short list of acknowledgements Tom Lee has written and which we append HERE as a pdf documenet.
PHOTO CREDIT: The image of the Rising Sun used in the headline and footer graphics graphics was taken by Ines Mad. Linz, Austria and sourced through stock.xchng

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©2008 Tom Lee (Star Concepts LLC) 15633 N. 17* Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85023-3409

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