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Is It
Just Me, or Do Things Feel Really Depressed Right Now,
Following the Day of the Four Popes?
By William D. Lindsey
Bilgrimage
April 29,
2014
http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2014/04/is-ii-just-me-or-do-things-feel-really.html
The dual canonization is an attempt to please the traditional
Catholic base while luring back some among the millions of who
have left the church in what was once Christendom’s
western bastion.
Jacoby had previously
explained the point about "luring back some among the
millions who have left the church in what was once
Christendom's western bastion" by noting,
It is no accident that during John Paul’s conservative
papacy — when the church refused to reconsider sexual
prohibitions applying to the laity but covered up sexual abuse
of children by priests — millions of practicing Catholics
decamped in the United States and Western Europe. According to
a Pew poll
conducted in 2009, more than one out of five native-born
Americans raised in the church no longer consider themselves
Catholics.
And so as she notes that
the dual canonization is being sold by media spin-doctors as an
adroit way for Pope Francis to heal the divisions in the church
and bring back many who have strayed, she observes:
It is difficult to imagine, though, that Catholics who no longer
consider themselves Catholics are likely to return to a church
that still condemns divorce, artificial birth control, in vitro
fertilization, abortion for any reason and gay unions. Moreover,
if the church continues to require priestly celibacy and refuses
to consider the ordination of women (Francis has already
reiterated his support for the latter policy), there will
continue to be a severe priest shortage.
Jacoby directly engages
(and counters) the meme of centrists in the Catholic media and
academy right now — that the dual canonizations will heal
a badly divided (and deeply demoralized, if we're talking
about the developed sectors of the world) church. She points out
that what the canonizations are designed to do, instead, is to
play to the minimally educated, docile masses of Catholics in
the developing parts of the world, while implicitly writing off
the disobedient and educated Catholics of the developed nations,
who had taken Vatican II at its word when it told us to live our
lives of faithful witness to the gospels within the modern
world:
In this
environment, how can the canonizations of two such different men
heal the deep spiritual and intellectual divide within a church
that, increasingly, must rely on the poor and poorly educated,
in Africa and some parts of Asia, for new converts?
One need
not be an atheist to be stunned by the anachronism of
attributing nature-defying miracles to prayers directed through
saints. Educated men and women of most faiths, Catholicism
included, now believe pretty much what Enlightenment deists
did—that alleviating human suffering depends on the
exercise of human reason, not on supernatural intervention
deemed miraculous.
And so, if I'm right that not a few Catholics now seem to be
strongly depressed about what has just taken place in Rome,
surely that depression has a lot to do with the sense that
we've witnessed an empty show that will only further the
divisions within our church, not heal them. It is, in fact, designed
to further the divisions in the church, since its loud and clear
message to educated Catholics of the developed parts of the
globe who reject magisterial teaching on matters like
contraception and homosexuality is that they have no place in
the Catholic communion, except insofar as they keep their mouths
shut.
They have no real place, that is to say. Even worse,
the message that the canonization of John Paul II has given to
survivors of childhood clerical sexual abuse and to those who
care about survivors of such abuse, to women, and to gay
Catholics is one of downright disdain: it's a redoubled
message of not counting and not being included — one that
can only harm the entire church insofar as those who remain in
the church and think about these matters recognize that it's
impossible to sustain the claim that a church is catholic when
it writes off challenging constituencies within the whole body
of Christ.
At National Catholic Reporter, Tony
Magliano maintains that what ties John XXIII and John Paul II
together (in addition to their having been popes, and ordained
members of the church, and white European men) is that both were
voices for the voiceless. I'd like to suggest that this
claim is going to fall on deaf ears — and outraged ones
— when we turn our attention to the voiceless community of
abuse survivors in the church. Or to women. Or to gay folks. Or
to the many theologians silenced by John Paul and his orthodoxy
watchdog Cardinal Ratzinger.
This old disreputable
Catholic game of claiming that the church's magisterium
speaks on behalf of the poor and marginalized even as the
leaders of the church trample on abuse survivors, women, and gay
folks is an increasingly expensive game for the church to play,
it seems to me. It's an expensive game to play in a world in
which — at least, in the developed parts of the globe
— more and more people have access to important
information about the abuse crisis, about women's issues and
women's rights, and about gay issues and gay rights. And in
which more and more people see the response of the leaders of
the church to these parts of the body of Christ as anything but
holy . . . .
One can claim that the
canonizations that took place in Rome this past weekend will
heal the church only if one writes off not merely abuse
survivors and those who care about them, uppity women, and
mouthy gays, but Catholics throughout the developed world,
insofar as they inform themselves about these people and these
issues and come to conclusions at variance from the positions
promoted by the hierarchy. And insofar as they no longer buy
into a medieval understanding of sainthood and the miraculous.
And insofar as they question whether the clerical system as
it's currently configured and the current configuration of
the papacy have much at all to do with the gospels and the mind
of Christ for the church.
That seems to me a very
high price to pay for "unity" and "healing."
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