ARTICLE NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at Part 31.1
PREVIOUS | NEXT
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

Initially to readers there will seem an enormous discontinuity between what we have been reading so far in the excerpts from Tom Lee's manuscript and what we will be looking at over the next four or five weeks. For the purpose of our serialisation of his work we have catapulted you right through to the post script to his study of the First 500 Years of Christianity — which is seeking to explore why Christianity and Catholicism developed in the ways that it did. In this final post-script to his work he's looking to the future prospects for Christianity and Catholicism. Readers will find the essay fascinating in its own right but as it unfolds we also hope that some value might be derived from gaining an insight into what motivated his mammoth study in the first place. We will be returning to explore selected excerpts from key incidents in the first 500 year history that was so crucial in forming the character of Catholicism and Christianity as we know it today. Hopefully, the insights gained from this end part of his study will make the reading of those earlier sections we will be looking at in due course all the more pleasureable and useful.
For the benefit of readers and scholars who might be accessing this serialisation I have also today uploaded the full bibliography Tom Lee has provided for his work as a pdf file. It can be found at: www.catholica.com.au/specials/first500/First500Bibliography.pdf

The Future of Christianity and the Papacy
21st Century Projections Part 31.1
by Tom Lee
The character of Catholicism, demographic and cultural shifts, impacts forced by changes in
scientific knowledge and insight…

A monarchial or feudal system…

Pope John Paul II was manifestly a pastor rather than a monarch, though the monarchial manner often distorted his role. The papacy remained a dictatorship and enforcement of dogma a one-eyed priority. The pope's workload was lightened slightly by decentralization and reorganization at the Vatican, but many consider that much more needs to be done before the Papacy's role as a barrier to Christian unity is likely to fade away.

The late Catholic psychic Jean Dixon, who famously predicted the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and tried to prevent it, believed that the Papacy would soon be replaced by a Senate of bishops.

Lack of accountability is one of the downsides of what writer Fr. Donald Cozzens has termed "the last feudal system" in existence, a hierarchical church that responds to crises in ways consistent with monarchy. Monarchs don't disclose secrets damaging to the regime. In the case of the church, leaders have acted, at all costs, to protect the reputation of the institution and its clerical culture.

Many bishops claim that they are exercising authority when they are at heart authoritarian. As Eugene Cullen Kennedy pointed out: "Authority comes from the Latin word augere, which means 'to increase', 'to create', or 'to make able to grow'. Authoritarianism is a corruption of the same root and means 'to control'."

A constitution for the Church — buried…

Pope Paul VI, desiring greater democracy and accountability in the Church, called for and set up a commission to develop a constitution for the church (Lex Fundamentalis Ecclesiae). It was shelved and buried by the curia, it is believed, with the tacit approval of Pope John Paul II.

Competition and comparison with other religions…

As the Christians slowly cuddle up to each other, in India and Eastern Asia, nature-worship has held its own, despite a minority of sophisticated Hindu, Buddhist and other believers, and these two regions together house much more than half the human race. Some Christians complain about neo-pagan traditions, termed New Age, that have encroached upon Christianity, forgetting that originally pagan tradition did not encroach on Christianity: it was the other way around. Our Christian ancestors took what they wanted from pagan traditions and suppressed the faiths that had sustained many for millennia.

Islam is making far greater inroads than Christianity in the African nations. Many in the West assume that the basic law of the Quran on criminal issues is an eye-for-an-eye. What they don't realize is that people who quote the Quran never go to the rest of the verse that says: "but forgiveness is better." In other places the Prophet makes clear, the only time the use of force is allowed is for self-defense, and even in self­defense sometimes it's better to be the victim than the perpetrator of violence.

Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi told a Hindu man who had killed a Muslim boy that the way out of hell for him was to take in a Muslim child and raise him as a Muslim.

Sadly, in India there is mounting Hindu extremism, principally toward Muslims, but also towards Christians. The starkest evidence came in late February and March 2002 in the prosperous western Indian state of Gujarat. In a region internationally famous for its business communities, Hindu mobs lynched more than two thousand Muslims and left more than two hundred thousand homeless. But India is a democracy with the third-largest Muslim population in the world. It does not bode well for the future.

The Roman Catholic Church has adopted a human face, has revamped its liturgy to include the faithful, and local customs where appropriate. It too seems to be making great strides in Africa in the early part of the twenty-first century, bolstered by its educational and charity work, where both Catholics and Protestants failed dismally in the nineteenth and early twentieth century — largely because Christianity soon proved itself, despite its doctrines, to be a racial religion linked to colonialism, which Islam rarely was; nor, however austere, did Islam manifest that dire denial of the flesh that makes Christianity so unattractive to most non­Europeans, enforcing a restraint on license rather than the release of love.

The fact that a belief might be useful is not an argument that it is true, and ultimately European and American opinions and decisions may prove irrelevant to the future of the Catholic Church. According to NCR, in 2000 there were 1.1 billion Catholics in the world, with 380 million in Europe and North America, and almost 800 million in the global south. The center of gravity of the Christian world is now in Central Africa, with more than a third of a billion Christians on that continent. And roughly half of the Catholics in the world today live in Latin America alone. Given demographic and religious trends, this population realignment in global Christianity will continue. By 2025, only one Catholic in five in the world will be a non-Hispanic Caucasian.

Population growth explains some, but not all, of this expansion. The last half-century has also witnessed a striking wave of adult conversions to Christianity, especially in Africa. Between 1970 and 1985, to take just one index, some 4,500 people per day were opting out of Christian churches in Europe and North America. Over the same period, there were 16,500 conversions to Christianity a day in Africa, yielding an annual growth of some six million new African Christians. In Roman Catholicism, more than half of all adult baptisms in the world, generally considered the most reliable indications of conversions, are in Africa alone.

China — now the third-largest Christian nation on earth…

One of the most remarkable bursts of energy is in China's Pentecostal Christian population. In 1949, when the Communists took control of the country, there were 900,000 Protestants. In 2007, the Center for the Study of Global Christianity claims there are 111 million Christians in China, roughly 90 percent Protestant and mostly Pentecostal. That makes China the third-largest Christian country on earth, following only the United States and Brazil. But, as John L. Allen stated in NCR: "Curiously, this booming 'soul market' seems largely to have bypassed the Catholic Church. In 1949, there were 3.3 million Catholics. The most common estimate today is 12 million. Over that time, China's population increased by a factor of four, which means that Catholicism has done little more than keep pace. A half-century ago, Chinese Protestantism was three and a half times smaller than Catholicism; today, it is at least three and a half times larger."

Africa and Asia — home to myriad new forms of Christianity…

The new growth in Africa and Asia, and to some extent in Latin America, is riot merely replicating pre­existing European patterns of faith and practice. Instead, it's creating myriad new forms of Christianity as the faith mingles with indigenous customs and concepts. Experts have described this as the most important cultural transformation in Christianity since the period of Hellenization launched by St. Paul, so that the "upside down church" of the future will be driven increasingly by the experience and priorities of the South, and is likely to take scant interest in matters that have set the Catholic agenda in the West for more than a century.

British columnist Katherine Whitehorn, writing in The Observer about faith in the 70s, observed: "Establishing a uniform Christianity, sort of EEC standard brand, would do away with exactly that variety which is an old religion's strength. And to line up honest Protestants behind some of the things the Catholic Church has in its history would be as unfair as blaming the Pope for the failings of Ian Paisley."

When Pope John Paul II proposed visiting Ireland, Rev. Ian Paisley's follower's spray-painted signs all over the north proclaiming "No Pope Here!" Some Catholic wits scribbled underneath, "Lucky old Pope!"

A Jesuit friend of mine was once visiting the isle of Aran, off the west coast of Ireland, and he asked a young girl why it was that people seemed so happy and contented. "Oh," she said, forgetting for the moment his profession; "there's no policeman, no doctor and no priest, so there's nobody here to bother us at all."

The decline in the Western World…

Many people in the West are now without religion and indifferent to its claims and blandishments, so that when the London department store Selfridges mounted a diorama of Jesus' nativity in a window, a chronic victim of the secularized society opined: "How commercial can they get? They're even dragging religion into Christmas."

In France, only eight percent of Catholics attend Mass at least once a week, and more than fifty percent say they never go to church at all. In the Netherlands, the proportion of the population with no religious affiliation at all has gone from twenty-three percent to fifty-nine percent in a single generation, prompting Andrew Greeley to observe that "the Dutch may have become a pagan people almost overnight."

In a similar vein, vocations to the priesthood and religious life have plummeted. Fertility rates have also declined, with the lowest rates in human history currently being recorded in the traditional Catholic strongholds of Italy and Spain. Moreover, the church has scant influence in public life, as symbolized by the unwillingness of the European Union so much as to mention God in the preamble to its draft constitutional document.

Rabbi Richard Hirsh has written: "Perhaps the problem with the legacy of Abraham is that all three monotheistic faiths have yet to come to terms with the historical development of their own traditions. If we could see all sacred scriptures as a common record of the universal human search for meaning and not as the revealed word of God, we would recognize that for millenniums we have been reading meaning into these texts instead of getting understanding out of them."

Nature or nurture — the "religious gene"?

Just as with homosexuality, scientists are now trying to discover whether spirituality is the result of nature or nurture. Is there a spiritual gene that hot­wires some of us for faith, while leaving others indifferent? Biologist Dean Hamer says: "My findings are agnostic on the existence of God. Just knowing what brain chemicals are involved in acknowledging that is not going to change the fact."

Charles Darwin

In his book Moral Minds, Marc Hauser, a psychologist at Harvard, uses evidence from advancing research on animal and human behavior to suggest that humans have an inborn moral faculty, parts of which they share with animals. If Darwinian theory is sound, morality in humans results in part from evolutionary processes, and when they act as moral beings humans are displaying capacities they have in common with some other animals.

As Darwin wrote: "Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed or nearly as well developed, as in man."

Morality does not require religion. William O'Connor has concluded: "If someone's faith is beneficial, in that it gives meaning to life, then there is no need to abandon it, even if that faith might be false. It might be true that life has no meaning other than what we seek to give it, but that knowledge might be actually harmful to some who need to believe that life has an inherent purpose and goal. Faith, in itself, may well be a survival mechanism brought about by the natural selection process of evolution. Deity based religions are probably false as there does seem to be a logical inconsistency amongst the various attributes usually assigned to a deity."

In an investigative article in Time magazine, Jeffrey Kluger wrote: "Clearly it seemed, the degree to which we observe rituals such as attending services is mostly the stuff of environment and culture. Whether we're drawn to God in the first place is hardwired into our genes. ... God is a concept that appears in cultures all over the globe, regardless of how geographically isolated they are. When tribes living in remote areas come up with a concept of God as readily as nations living shoulder to shoulder, it's a fairly strong indication that the idea is preloaded in the genome rather than picked up on the fly. If that's the case, it's an equally strong indication that there are good reasons it's there."

Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin believed that man was still evolving, both physically and spiritually. The Church prevented him from publishing during his lifetime, but as soon as his scientific friends published his works after his death, the Church rushed to claim him. Recent scientific studies have proven that Teilhard was correct. Researchers of the human genome have concluded that human genes have been reshaped by natural selection in the past 5,000 to 15,000 years.

Charles Darwin, in the last paragraph of The Origin of the Species says: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." As Adam Gopnik commented in a New Yorker review: "He (Darwin) knew that he was right, and that his being right meant that much else people wanted to believe was wrong. Design was just chance plus time, greed not a sin from the Devil but an inheritance from monkeys."

Some sections of the church had a hard time digesting a second revolution in evolutionary thought, when the monk, Gregor Mendel's demonstrable theory of engineered hybrid genetics was fused with Darwin's theory, the so-called Modern Synthesis, in the nineteen thirties and forties. Decades after Mendel proposed the idea of genes, biologists didn't know what they were made of. Now we know they are pieces of nucleic acids (DNA or RNA), with known physical-chemical characteristics.

The language in which God created life…

The language in which God created life!

Genetic scientist Francis Collins' trailblazing work identifying genetic defects that predispose to cystic fibrosis and other diseases led to his succeeding double­helix discoverer James Watson as head of the 2,400 scientists, multi-nation project to map all 3.1 billion biochemical letters that constitute the human blueprint. Collins and his private-sector competitor Craig Venter credit their complementary genome work with uncovering "the language in which God created life."

Although Collins does not believe God is rationally provable, he thinks that natural phenomena — such as the development of conditions favoring life on earth in the face of incredible odds — point toward the divine. He is an evangelical Christian.

For thousands of years, natural phenomena — lightning, the changing of the seasons, the nature of sun and moon — were explained by saying God (or Zeus or Odin) did it, only to have that explanation fall away as science provided a more satisfactory answer.

The night sky reveals, in the words of John F.X. Harriott, writing in the English Catholic publication The Tablet: "the canopy of stars: stars upon stars, galaxies upon galaxies, stretching out beyond the limits of comprehension, probed now to the edge of the universe by radio-telescopes and yielding up a million secrets to insistent, inquisitive man, yet still imposing the ultimate, tantalizing question — Why? and Whence? And the more the microscope and telescope reveal the simple laws which underpin all life, the more the central mystery of the why and wherefore clamors for an answer."

According to the best of our current knowledge, our world is an entirely natural, physical place that does not depend on any supernatural powers. Yet, British astronomer and space scientist Sir John Houghton believes that God is the intelligence behind the universe, the sum of all, and we can only learn about him from his creation. God is another dimension, and we can approach him through another dimension in us, a mental construct.

Houghton quotes Einstein who said: "The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it appears to be comprehensible." His scientific descendents have developed something called "String Theory". In 1995 five versions of this were united into "M-theory", which requires a total of eleven dimensions — almost as incomprehensible as Christian dogma, and rejected by some physicists as a new version of medieval theology. But the scientific community seeks to discover the truth about the physical world, not made-up stories, and the arrogance of those who think they've figured it all out is matched only by the arrogance of the religious zealots who think the same.

ARTICLE NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at Part 31.1
PREVIOUS | NEXT
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

PHOTO CREDITS: The "Earth Rising" image we are using for this segment of the serialisation of Tom Lee's book has been adapted from a NASA photograph taken by the Apollo 8 Astronauts of the Earth Rising over the Lunar landscape. The original image can be found at: www.nasa.gov/lb/vision/earth/features/bm_gallery_4_prt.htm Clicking on the other images will take your to the original source of the image.

Tom Lee 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.

What are your thoughts on this commentary? You can contribute to the discussion in our forum.

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

[Index of this series]