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	Religious Thoughts at Easter By Janice Kennedy Ottawa Citizen April 4, 2010 http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/Religious+thoughts+Easter/2761640/story.html CANADA -- Tub-thumping has never held much appeal for me. When people start preaching religion as if they have a lock on the truth, I tune out. Life is tough, the world dangerous. Intuitively, we rely on what works for us, culturally and philosophically. For some, that means a belief in God and a choice of organized religion; for others, less formal belief and a path of personal spirituality; for others still, agnosticism or atheism, with a robust dose of humanism. Whatever gets you through the night. For that reason, I dislike the arrogance implicit in triumphal personal parades of religious affiliation across the pages of a secular newspaper, a medium whose readers are all different denominations, as well as none at all. So I hope you'll forgive me the personal transgression I am about to commit. Since it's Easter Sunday (which I celebrate), a day built on the symbolism of hope and renewal, I'm looking for some small latitude as I venture into that thorny territory where the religious intersects with the secular. So here's the difficult question. Why are so many Catholics still in the church? Why do so many -- I refer to people of good faith who are shocked and disgusted by both the sexual-abuse scandals involving priests and their church's appalling responses to them -- still call themselves Catholic (albeit with increasing discomfort)? As an ancient global force for good starts looking more like a rotting behemoth dying from the inside out, how can people continue to identify with it? I speak only for myself, of course, but I believe there must be countless other Catholics the world over who think along at least some of the same lines. Despite the plummeting numbers, I'm still in it -- we're still in it -- because it retains its timeless potential for good. We still call ourselves Catholic because the abusive priests -- along with the Pope, the politically hand-picked cardinals, the ambitious bishops, the whole creaking ecclesiastical apparatus in Rome and around the world -- are not the Catholic Church. We are. In all our messy, hopeful diversity, we the people are the church, even if our institutional leaders and reps usually see us as an afterthought. It's not that we don't care about the scandal -- yes, it's really a massive single entity -- or how badly our leadership has handled it. We do. We are pained and shamed by it. The latest Vatican initiative (shoot the messenger, an attack on media reporting of terrible church decisions past as some kind of conspiracy) is just the latest misguided response, scooped up eagerly by uncritical acolytes around the world hoping, like Rome, to distract global attention from the real issues. (And did the Pope really refer publicly to abuse claims as "petty gossip?" Seriously?) As they mount their soapboxes, denouncing those who would peer into the darker corners of the church's past, they fling around counter-accusations in a routine by now familiar. It's not just Catholic priests, they complain, who are pedophiles. Other religious ministers have committed the same sins. Pedophilia also exists in the secular world. No, married and female priests won't solve anything. Anyway, it's all the fault of liberals. What they overlook, to their own shame, is the nature of this particular abuse -- criminal exploitation carried out by men dedicated to God, men representing a transcendent morality and a church built on it, men whom every Catholic man, woman and especially child should have been able to trust without reservation. And what they conveniently ignore is the sheer volume of the scandal, an overwhelming criminal catalogue that dwarfs anything remotely equivalent in any other institution. What they ignore is the fundamentally systemic nature of it, something that only wilful blindness could mask, given the revelations across Canada, the United States, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Brazil, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand -- well, pick a country. Any country. What the wilfully blind Catholics refuse to consider, precisely like their stagnating heroes in Rome, is that their church needs renewal at its core. It needs the rot at its centre excised, replaced by new ways of doing the timeless things -- new ways that would more closely resemble the spirit of the original church, back before it created authoritarian hierarchies, labyrinthine cultures of secrecy and an ironic sense of welcome founded on exclusion. Of course, reform won't happen until Rome realizes that all possibilities have to be on the discussion table, no matter how unsavoury to the conservative mind -- and that all Catholics, even liberals, have to be invited to participate in the renewal process. So I'm not holding my breath. But because it's Easter, I'm allowing myself a whiff of hope, since there remains so much that is fine in this church I've known all my life. I call myself Catholic, still, because of all the profoundly good people I know, including priests, who are still Catholic; because of Catholic initiatives worldwide to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, comfort the marginalized; because of courageous workers, lay and clerical, who have defied dictators in the name of social justice; because, in spite of all the terrible things done in its name, all the mismanagement, all the good souls who have left it, rightly disgusted -- it remains what I know and, yes, love. And because it still has the capacity to get people through the night. Janice Kennedy writes here on Sundays. Contact: 4janicekennedy@gmail.com
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