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ARTICLE
NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at Part 31.3 In this third extract from the concluding section to his manuscript, Tom Lee is looking for positive alternatives… The
Future of Christianity and the Papacy Two of the biggest challenges… Two of the biggest challenges facing religion today come from the story science tells us about human origins, about our interdependence and about the universe's evolution. Speaking of the effects of global warming, Hungarian philosopher Ervin Laszlo wrote: "We are the first generation in history to be able to decide if we will be the last generation in history or the first generation in a new phase in history." Because of havoc wreaked on the environment, humans are now an endangered species. The Church needs to face-up to the modern controversies about nature or nurture in relation to spirituality, as well as homosexuality, the majority of married folks' open revolt against the church's ban on birth control, and the vast number of young people living together without benefit of nuptials, while gays demand wedlock's legal protections and benefits. There is increasing pressure for married clergy and female priests to ease priestly shortfall and parish closures. Then there's the new bogey of stem-cell research. But theologians seem hide-bound by ancient conceptions, and unwilling to listen to the scientists.
I am heartened by the fact that Pope Benedict XVI has urged the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to pursue dialogue with science and philosophy: "Serious evangelizing efforts cannot ignore the questions that arise from daily scientific discoveries and philosophical discussions". One can only hope that Benedict and his cohorts are willing to heed and accept the answers. However, sometimes the church's attempts to undo years of hairsplitting with even more hairsplitting have become deservedly subject to ridicule. Recent proclamations about the possible permissible use of condoms by married couples where one of them has AIDS are a case in point. The clerics seem to have forgotten that HIV is not the only sexually transmitted disease that puts a sexual partner in jeopardy. Sex is treated as a necessary evil, and humans can only do it for reproduction, like animals. I can agree with the late Irish comedian Dave Allen: "Those who don't play the game shouldn't make the rules". He also said, "The Catholic Church offers women the choice between perpetual chastity or perpetual pregnancy". He'd have agreed with a feisty old nun working with the poorest of the poor in Egypt who opined: "If the Pope could get pregnant, you could buy condoms at the bus stop". When a priest in Holland officiated at the wedding of another priest, and they were both defrocked as a result, Dave Allen commented: "I don't see why priests can't marry each other if they want to". Pope John Paul II did little to reassure the married faithful who pray and pay when he beatified a married couple who were extolled for staying together without having sex, as if that were a plus. One Catholic columnist commented, "Have you ever seen a statue of St. Joseph that looked happy?" Is it any wonder that French philosopher Denis de Rougemont analyzed romantic love as a Catholic heresy? In the mid-70s, long before priest sex scandals appeared in the news, I was doing a lot of research in clerical libraries around the world and got to know a number of gay priests in England, in America and in Rome — none of them, as far as I know, pedophiles. One middle-aged priest lived half the week with his lover of thirty years, a Judge Advocate in the U.S. Army. A younger parish priest admitted that he spent many nights at gay bars seeking sex with anonymous strangers. When I queried how he squared this with his conscience and parish duties, he said, "I know no other profession, and I enjoy being a priest. I think I do it well." His flock seemed to agree with him. I performed my one-man show "0 Papa!" at his church following Saturday evening mass, but the pastor excused himself from attending the performance, saying it was his "night at the Baths".
Pope Paul VI, along with many other redundant hierarchical luxuries, retired the eight-foot Capa Magna — the shot-silk clerical train with an ermine cloak that used to be a part of official court dress for Cardinals. But when I got to the States, one cardinal, a Paul VI appointee, was being skewered in the gossip columns. I will not repeat the names: "Cardinal whosa-me-bob appeared at such-and-such poor black parish today in his eight foot train, accompanied by Monsignor So-and-so, the perennial bridesmaid". Shortly afterward the cardinal was summoned to Rome and appointed Prefect of a Vatican Secretariat, where he remained in relative obscurity for some years, until his retirement. At a performance of the opera Nabucco at the Roman amphitheatre in Pompeii I met a flamboyant Abbot in full habit. He could have outdone any Drag Queen with his effeminate voice and hand gestures — but the worldly-wise Italians accepted him with a smile, a wink and a shrug. Double standard regarding married clergy… I've also met a number of married former priests — good men, scholarly men, who would at the drop of a hat return to active duty in the Church, if the Vatican would take the hint and make celibacy an optional extra. I feel their pain when I see convert Anglican and Lutheran pastors accepted into the Catholic priesthood complete with wife and children, their marital status intact. The Eastern Uniate churches and the Orthodox have a mostly married clergy. Surely, with the dwindling number of active clergy and more and more threatened parish closures (almost 30 percent in the U.S.), the Vatican needs to quickly reassess the current loony doublestandard, that denies access to the Mass and the Eucharist to so many. Distressing too has been the devastating pedophile priest sex scandal in the Catholic Church, the bishop's disgraceful abuse of authority and trust with their attempts at cover-up and the subsequent huge payouts to victims. It became obvious that Catholicism is largely a cash business. In the words of former NCR editor, Arthur Jones, "There are very few bishops in this country (the U.S.A.) who can cast the first stone about anything". Journalist Marco Politi of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica once remarked that the best training he received for covering the Vatican was covering the Cold War era Kremlin. Both involved secret cultures with their own languages and customs, impenetrable bureaucracies and both were fiercely protective of information. Catholics have been abruptly awakened to the fact that some church leaders are unethical and incompetent, and membership in the church, if they take it seriously, means far more than showing up on Sunday and keeping the collection baskets full. When the people in the pews are not allowed to question the actions of the people in the pulpits, the result is a secret society and the secrets eventually overshadow all the good that the organization has accomplished. In the words of former priest Tom McMahon, "People are no longer tolerant or fooled". Positive alternatives… Praiseworthy indeed is the work of evangelical Ole Anthony founder and president of the Trinity Foundation, a religious community in East Dallas that functions as a soup kitchen, a rehab center, a Christian publishing house, and a private detective firm. Five members are licensed private-eyes investigating and exposing the fraud of televangelists bilking the gullible.
Over the past fifteen years, Anthony has waged a guerilla war against televangelism — "a multibilliondollar industry," as he describes it, "untaxed and unregulated, that preys on the elderly and the desperate". After the wave of televangelist scandals, both fiscal and sexual, in the early nineties, the US federal Communications Commission considered a truth-inadvertising clause for religious solicitations. If a televangelist declared, on the air, that he had cured a donor's cancer or tripled his bank account, that claim would have to be verifiable. Anthony made three trips to Washington to lobby for the change, and was told that it was certain to pass. Then, in 1994, Bush Republicans won control of the Congress, thanks in great part to the religious right, and the measure was quietly shelved. Anthony believes the preaching of achievable worldly success by televangelists in their mega-churches is antithetical to everything we've been taught began with that humble birth in Bethlehem. We have to remember that Jesus turned religious and civil presumptions on their heads. Anthony would also like to see an end to the destructive political habit of appeasing the forces of the hysterical religious right. There's an old saying: "Pay heed to those who seek God, but watch out for those who say they've found him". Or as one comedian put it, "God wants spiritual fruits, not religious nuts". Facing a dwindling circulation, the Protestant journal Zion's Herald recently revamped itself to, become The Progressive Christian, serving up a forum where no voice purports to speak God's last word. Instead, the magazine stresses the importance of questioning and debating as faithful Christian exercises. Recovering a sense of Christian "community"…
In France, the Community of Taizé, founded by Swiss Protestant Brother Roger Shultz in 1940, when Nazism seemed unstoppable, has become the soul of the ecumenical movement. The heart of the complex is the Church of Reconciliation, where Protestants, Catholics, Anglicans and Orthodox come together three times a day for prayer, led by an ecumenical community of some 100 brothers (both Protestants and Catholics) in simple white habits. When the original community outgrew their first makeshift chapel, they turned to the local Catholic pastor to ask if they could use the small village church, and permission was granted. Not long after, however, Catholic authorities got cold feet and rescinded the gesture, certain that Protestant and Catholic monks praying together in a Catholic church was too far ahead of its time. The local pastor appealed to the papal nuncio in France, knowing his reputation as a flexible and kindly man. In a gesture that anticipated the ecumenical opening of the Second Vatican Council, the nuncio ordered that the village church be returned to the brothers. That nuncio was Archbishop Angelo Roncalli, who shortly thereafter became Pope John XXIII. Taizé doesn't work for Christian unity, it assumes it, thereby giving visitors a tangible experience of how full, visible unity among Christians looks and feels. In the modern world, apart from monastics, few apart from Mennonites, Catholic Workers and Agape members live in community, following the Gospel as literally as did the early church members described in Acts. They pool their salaries and come together each evening for prayer and a shared meal, each family taking time to cook and clean the common kitchen. Contrast this with normal Catholic experience. There is little community in Catholic parishes except for a perfunctory kiss of peace exchanged between strangers. Most can't flee Sunday Mass fast enough. For most it's an obligation, not a communal experience. There are no communal meals. As someone once put it, "If you were accused of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict?" I have been privileged to know, for nearly fifty years, a skilled healer and seer. He has been dispensing psychic warnings and healing people and animals for most of his 78 years. He does not invoke Jesus or God — he calls on a "Higher Power" to assist him, to use him as a channel, a conduit, to heal those in need. He does not charge for this as he gives no guarantees that "the Force will be with him". I know two sane and sensible people who have seen the seer and spoken to him, one of them several hundred miles away, at a time when the seer was physically with me, what is called bi-location. I have been privy to many of his predictions, including 9/11 two weeks before it happened. These are qualities that have been attributed to many Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist saints. My saint is a non-denominational minister. He was baptized Catholic, but was so badly beaten by nuns, who thought him to be a little smart-aleck (he was only six at the time), he was transferred to an Anglican school and became a leading chorister. My sage is skeptical of most religious dogmas but acknowledges all those people of whatever faith who truly practice the Golden Rule. Dante's view of heaven and hell has vanished and no one can either prove or disprove the existence of heaven or hell in any form. Many of us tacitly accept what some pagan philosophers of late antiquity were saying. Their teaching, in a nutshell, is that our souls, not our bodies, are immortal. Everyone will ultimately be saved. All attempts to define life after death are, at best, imaginative approximations of what some people hope may happen. Any study of the development of Christian dogma will confront the reader with the fact that what the church tells the world it should believe today is, in many instances, opposed to what the church taught people to believe yesterday. As Irish comedian Dave Allen asserted: "In the Catholic Church everything is forbidden until it's made compulsory".  ARTICLE
NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at Part 31.3 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 you to the original source of the image.
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 |
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