My Bet ... Scola AND Some Thoughts on the Fundamental Problem & Why Scola Won't Fix IT

By Brian Coyne
The Catholica
March 10, 2013

http://www.catholica.com.au/forum/index.php?mode=entry&id=126933



Thanks for the link to Jerry Slevin's article. He offers sensible ideas BUT THE REALITY IS THAT NONE OF THEM WILL BE LISTENING TO JERRY SLEVIN (any more than they are likely to be listening to any of you or me). The fundamental problem is that they honestly do not think any wisdom is capable of coming from below them. They sincerely do believe that they alone are "guided by the Holy Spirit or the Almighty" and there is no way that culture will be changed.

Andrea Tornielli in Vatican Insider/La Stampa [LINK] has an article on the Archbishop of Milan, Angelo Scola, coming back into contention and, interestingly enough his odds with Paddy Power have shortened to now be the front runner. I now think the most likely outcome is that Scola will emerge as the next Pope in the coming week. He's not the candidate I would vote for but I think that is the most likely outcome. God help the Catholic Church though. The election of Scola virtually guarantees "more of the same" that has reduced Catholicism to this sad spectacle it has now become. The future will be further decline into irrelevance as any significant force in society.

The fundamental systemic problem...

The more I mull on this whole problem "what is wrong with Catholicism/why has it run off the rails so badly?" the more I come to the conclusion that at the heart of the problem is there are two fundamentally incompatible cultures in Catholicism today centred around the question of "Where does truth reside?"

Yesterday I drew attention to a post by David Shütz on his Sentire Cum Ecclesia blog [LINK]. "Sentire Cum Ecclesia" is Latin for "Thinking with the Church". David's entire mindset I think does accurately reflect the mindset at the very top of the institution — the mindset of these 115 men who will be closeted in the Vatican in a few days time to elect a new pope. They honestly and sincerely do believe right down at the very heart of their entire being that God is the source of all truth and he communicates this down through his Church (meaning essentially through its leaders) and this "truth" was written an awfully long time ago in Sacred Scripture and the "Traditions" of the Church and it does not change over time. Their role as leaders is to interpret these "eternal Divine truths" and communicate them to humankind — and to defend them at whatever cost it takes against anybody who has other interpretations.

That culture may have helped build a very powerful institution that once attracted the largest cohort of the world's population into its baptized and practising congregation when the vast majority of the people were uneducated and ignorant. The wheels have fallen off that worldview and culture today. Increasingly educated people see the priests, bishops, cardinals and even the pope himself as no more infallible than any other person in society. The clerical abuse crisis is some kind of "final reckoning" in the minds of many people where the shades have fallen from their eyes of the "fundamental flaw" in that entire concept of both "church structure" and "where truth resides".

I honestly believe that even if Jesus, the Holy Spirit and the Almighty himself put in a "personal appearance" to the likes of David or any of the 115 cardinal electors to say to them "your model is all wrong, you have to change your thinking, mindset and culture" they wouldn't even believe any of those three who make up the Holy Trinity.

The fundamental systemic problem comes down two totally incompatible understandings of (i) where truth resides; and (ii) how do we human beings access it?

These men who presently lead the Church would prefer, literally, to go to hell than change their fundamental beliefs in the answers to those two question. They will literally reduce the entire global Catholic Church structure to something as about as archeologically interesting as the great pyramids of Egypt, or the ruins of Mayan and Inca civilizations, than face changing that most fundamental of their beliefs.

So what does that culture compete against today? I said there are TWO fundamentally incompatible cultures. What I mean is there are two fundamentally incompatible mind views or paradigms to those two questions above (i) where truth resides; and (ii) how do we human beings access it?

I think it is probably true that the vast majority of people, even educated, thinking people, do not sit down and seriously think about the answers to fundamental questions like this. I do think that for a long period in history most people would have accepted the view that there was some place where "absolute truth" resided in the world — and it was most probably with some "college of experts" like a "Magisterium" or the "Pope". Their role/our role as "ordinary believers" was simply to listen to them and obey what they discerned their leaders believed "the truth" was.

My sense today is that has all changed — but, more particularly, amongst the more educated elites albeit that as "the college of cardinals and David Shütz" demonstrates there are still some highly educated people who still believe the old model. I'm not suggesting the people who have dropped that model have necessarily thought through some alternative and clearly articulated it for themselves. It is more the case of "I don't believe that anymore (for example just look at the behaviour of these men when it came to the abuse of little children)", without necessarily thinking through some alternative model as to how anyone finds "the truth" in life.

The newly emerging societal consensus...

That observation aside, I do think there is slowly emerging in human society an alternative to that view — perhaps atheists aside. This is what I perceive the emerging consensus to be amongst the sectors of the educated population who do spend time thinking about questions like the two above...

In answer to the first of the two questions I think there continues to be a consensus that this thing called "truth" does exist in the world. Where it resides though might be a different matter. In some concept of the Divine or God for those who continue to believe in a Creator-God and "Source of all Truth" perhaps or, for others, they might perceive it "resides in nature" — it is simply "part of the architecture or the wallpaper of our existence". The more contentious question, or conclusion, is to the second question: how do we human beings access it?

This, I believe, is where "the culture is changing". Collectively we no longer believe "truth" is the exclusive preserve of some elite — such as a pope or a magisterium or a conclave. This thing called "ultimate truth" resides ultimately in the Divine (for believers) or in Nature (for non believers) alone. It is communicated to, or accessible by, ALL human beings.

What is also recognised though is that there are many ways of interpreting this "truth" — and, as we all know, there are many people in society who believe, absolutely, that they alone are the only ones who know it, and there are many others whom most of us class as nutters who hear "voices in their heads" telling them what "the truth" is. There is though a recognition in intelligent people that we need some mechanism to discern what the truth is. This applies in the world of the sciences just as much as it applies in the world of theology or secular law. The sciences have come up with ways of deciding what "the truth" is about the scientific laws that describe how nature works. Similarly the secular law has, over a long period of time, developed ways of discerning legal truth. Neither of these "institutions" in society claim to have some "pope" though who is the "final arbiter", or who holds some "telepathic hot line" either to the Divine or to Mother Nature. The "truth" for any particular matter is arrived at via a long process of consensus of the entire educated and "expert" community who has a deep understanding of the issues under consideration. That is how the whole of human society arrives at a consensus, for example, that gravity attracts bodies to one another and it explains how we keep our two feet on the ground and don't drift away into space, or in the legal field, it arrives at a consensus about international standards in human rights.

If Catholicism is to become relevant in the world again it has to adopt a similar "culture" to that which has been adopted by these other important institutions in wider human society. None of us, even popes, are infallible. All of us struggle to discern what "truth" is. The best we human beings can do is to adopt consensus mechanisms — the Church itself calls this the "sensus fidelium" — by which we collectively determine what the truth is. Our answers will always be "provisional" and we have to be prepared to change our views as new information is revealed to us down through time. For example the classic laws of Physics (Newtonian Laws) were once believed to be absolute. But along came the insights of Quantum or Fundamental Physics early in the 20th Century and the scientific world learned that we had to change that view. The Newtonian Laws were only "absolute" within a particular "frame of reference". They weren't "universally absolute". All scientific law today is always considered relative to a "frame of reference". That's one of the critical insights of Einstein's observations in the General and Special Theories of Relativity. Benedict and his "curial clones", for example, DO NOT UNDERSTAND THAT evidenced by their constant "railing against relativity". Similarly we see in secular law how, down through time our standards change. Once capital punishment was acceptable in almost all societies. Today in many societies it is no longer acceptable. The way women, people of different sexual orientations, and people with physical and mental disabilities were once discriminated against has changed.

I don't believe there is anyone at the top of the Catholic institution today who is remotely capable — either in terms of intelligence or moral courage — to tackle changing the culture of where, institutionally, the Church believes (i) where truth resides; and (ii) how do we human beings access it?. Those are the questions that need to be confronted though if (a) the Church is to solve the clerical abuse crisis and (b) if it is to reclaim some place of respect in the eyes of humanity at large and again become a great force for good in human society.