The Roman Catholic Church has to change, particularly in America. It needs to allow women to become priests and it needs to allow priests to marry. Up until 1139 priests were allowed to marry. The idea behind it was to separate priests from a sinful world. The hypocrisy there was that priests were, and still are, sinful themselves. They are human, they screw up, the have to go to confession. At the time it was meant to insure the morality of the priesthood.
That worked up until the mid-20th Century when those men entering the priesthood declined. And the decline continues. There are places in America where churches have no priest permanently assigned, the duties being taken over by a deacon or by a priest who travels from one parish to another.
The American Catholic Church is so arrogant that when Poland offered to send priests to cover parishes in American they were declined! Maybe they were embarrassed that the word would get out that most Sunday masses in America are only lightly attended.
This brings me to my issue with the Church. I am a divorced Catholic and have been so since 1988. Because I am now remarried I cannot receive communion, central to the Catholic service. Curiously, I have been told by more than one priest that were I to stand in front of him to receive communion, and he knowing I was divorced and remarried, he would not deny me. I mention that because there appears to be a large group of priests who believe the prohibition is ridiculous.
There is a remedy according to Rome. A divorced Catholic must petition the Pope to have his marriage annulled. Now understand, an annulment, according to Catholicism, means no marriage occurred in the first place. I have three beautiful children by my first wife. I refuse to insult them, or my former wife, by getting an annulment. But I want my church back.
I firmly believe that were Jesus to come back just to visit the Pope and his college of cardinals, he would have some very harsh words for them. I think they need to read that part of the Bible which speaks of the shepherd who leaves 99 sheep in search of the mission one.
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New Pope But Same Old Church!
The Roman Catholic Church is the elder statesman of all Christian churches. Prior to the “church of Rome,” as it is sometimes referred to as, there was the Church of Turkey. Early Christendom was kept alive there before moving to Greece and then to Rome. Like every family, there were differences in beliefs even in those early days. The Eastern rite churches, Greek and Russian among others, broke from the newly formed Holy Roman Church with its Pope.
In those days, priests of either rite married and had children. In 1139 the Roman church decided celibacy was a more proper route for its priests. This position was reaffirmed by the “Council of Trent” in 1563. But by 1563 the Roman Catholic church was under fire. It had for centuries maintained its own army and fought wars, mostly within the Italian provinces but also with Spain and France. And the power of the Pope had at least twice been challenged, first by King Henry VIII and then by one of its own bishops, Martin Luther. Each in turn formed new Christian churches, Henry the Church of England, and Luther the Lutherans. The Roman Catholic Church dug in its heels proclaiming the infallibility of the Pope and by extension, his decisions. The infallibility remains and is referred to as “ex cathedra.” This means whatever pronouncements the Pope makes takes on the power of church law. Popes have been extraordinarily careful in their pronouncements.
In 1965, during the 2nd Vatican Council, several changes were made by Pope Pius XII and his successor, Pope Paul VI. No longer would the mass be given in Latin but in the native language of the attendees of the mass. Other lesser changes were also made but people looked at this as a new beginning for the church. Unfortunately, and predictably, that was a far as any pope wanted to go. The College of Cardinals, those in charge of electing a pope, has stayed very conservative in its general beliefs and ensured those beliefs would remain by electing very conservative popes. Cardinals elect popes and popes raise bishops to the rank of cardinal. It is a very self-serving process that insures a continued conservative control. As an aside, by Catholic law, any Catholic man can be elected pope, he need not be an ordained priest but that has not happened since the earliest of days.
We now have the relatively new Pope Francis. He is the first pope elected who was not born in Europe and because of that many of the faithful thought, hoped, this signaled a new order. Francis is viewed as being a pope of the people. That is, his closeness to the poor of Argentina, where he was a cardinal, allowed him to be viewed as something other than the regal previous popes. But in truth, that is mostly hype rather than reality.
Pope Francis has reached out to gay and divorced Catholics, inviting them to return to the church. It was hoped that he would speak ex cathedra and at the very least embrace gay love as equal to any other but he has not. It was hoped that he would do away with the prohibition of divorced Catholics who have remarried from receiving communion, but he has not. I asked a priest why I, a divorced and remarried Catholic, would want to attend church services and not receive communion. A politic man, he had not good answer and side-stepped the question. I do not blame him, he is, after all, answerable to the Pope.
The Roman Catholic mass, and I believe Episcopalian and Lutheran services as well, are centered around the reception of holy communion. What is going on is like having a cake and ice cream party and inviting people to join in on all the festivities but not the cake and ice cream. It is pure silliness.
The Roman Catholic church is stuck in the 16th Century and staunchly refuses to move forward. Most church laws are founded on Biblical teachings. In the 16th Century, when most people could not read and were extremely poorly educated, that worked. But the intervening 500 years have seen the education of most Catholics far beyond just the ability to read. Educated Catholics have learned to think for themselves and that does not sit well with Roman Catholic leadership.
Even 500 years ago, however, certain beliefs of the Catholic church were challenged by enlightened men, Copernicus, Galileo, and Michelangelo. The Popes of those days could not imagine that the earth was not the center of the universe and declared heresy any who said otherwise.
Today, scholars are at odds over not just the meaning contained within the four gospels of the Bible, but their validity. You see, each of the four gospels, it is known, is an almalgem of early writings with unknown, or at best, questionable authors. And those are just the four accepted gospels. In truth, there are dozens of gospels. There are the gospels of Matthias, Mary, Thomas, Truth, Judas, Peter, and Phillip, to name a few. Many of these gospels are fragmentary at best and of debatable origin. Still, this shows the difficulty in determining the authenticity of what is written. I mention this because the four accepted gospels are referred to as the word of God when in fact they are the words of men. I am not trying to demean the gospels but simply put some perspective on them. I believe the most honest depiction of the gospels would be to refer to them as being divinely inspired.
The New Testament Bible we have today was translated from the ancient Greek. Theologians are wont to explain the construction of each. The four seldom are in complete agreement about any particular event and sometimes are in obvious disagreement. Therefore, to base an entire large religion on these texts is of questionable decision. One of the places all four gospels are in total agreement is where Jesus teaches that prime of following him is faith, not just in belief but in works. He taught basics of humility, kindness, honesty, empathy, suffrage, and acceptance as being more important than position, money and even man-made law. The Catholic Church, however, has chosen to not follow all of His beliefs. Jesus accepted all who came but the Roman Catholic church picks and choses who it will accept. How is that following the most basic teachings of Jesus? I suggest it is contrary.
The Roman Catholic Church has things backwards. It tells its membership to do what it wants rather than serving them as it should. That is, the church says, “here, come do this for your church!” Instead, it should be saying, “how can we better serve you?” The reason is does not and cannot ask that last question is because it would be required to allow priests to marry, women to become priests, gays to marry, and remarried Catholics full participation in the mass. These conservative old men, who Francis leads, simply cannot imagine such a situation becoming a reality. But it is a reality they need to embrace or they will be burying the very church they claim to defend. The percentage of participation by those born into the Roman Catholic church is falling world-wide and will continue unless changes are made.
Can the Roman Catholic Church Be Dragged Out of the 12th Century?
I was brought up in the Roman Catholic Church. It was a curious upbringing because my mother was the Catholic but my father was a Unitarian. It was the odd confluence of an extremely conservative church, Catholic, with an extremely liberal church, Unitarian. And in those days, the 1950s and 1960s, marriage of Catholics to non-Catholics was discouraged, to say the least. My parents were married in 1946 in the Rectory of St. Michael’s Church in North Andover Massachusetts. Church weddings of that sort were prohibited in those days. My mother saw to it that I was in church every Sunday and in Sunday school immediately following. As I got older I was required to attend religious classes once a week after school. First communion and confirmation were a given and something we all actually looked forward to.
In the early 1960s Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI oversaw certain transformations in the Catholic Church. Prior to then the Catholic mass was said entirely in Latin. Latin was removed in favor of the language spoken locally. The American Catholic Church embraced the idea of bringing folk music into its services. It seemed the Catholic Church was embracing the idea of change and was becoming a friendlier and less feared church than it had been. In the years since the church also embraced the idea of having deacons, lay people who passed out communion, and lay people who assisted in performing the mass. Also, most nuns’ habits gave way to ordinary clothing.
Unfortunately, since the death of Pope Paul VI, the Roman Catholic Church seems to have reverted to its extremely conservative ways. In doing so it has once again turned its back on the needs of Catholics word-wide. The church seems to be in total denial of its responsibility to its membership.
The Archdiocese of Boston, one of the largest diocese by membership in the country, has such difficulty in attracting young men to its seminary that it usually graduates and ordains new priests in numbers less than 10. I suspect the reason for this is simple, the church still requires a lifetime promise of celibacy by its priests. This is contrary to every human predilection known. And of courses, priests cannot marry. Some years ago I had a good friend who was a priest who had just entered his 40s. He could no longer deny his attraction to women and observe his vow of celibacy. He was an excellent priest but found it necessary to leave the priesthood as he found the requirements imposed upon him to be untenable. I think this is a very common occurance.
Along this same line, I had to travel to Oklahoma City for business about 15 years ago. My stays out there became extended and encompassed weekends. I visited one of the 3 Catholic Churches there where I found an aging priest. He told me he could not retire because there was no one to replace him even though he was in his late 70s. I also found out that there are many small cities in the plains states that have Catholic Churches but no priest assigned. They are served by traveling priests.
The obvious solution to this problem seems simple enough, allow priests to marry. But for reasons which defy logic, the very conservative College of Cardinals steadfastly refuses to even consider such a change. Here is their logic as presented on catholic.com: “Theologically, it may be pointed out that priests serve in the place of Christ and therefore, their ministry specially configures them to Christ. As is clear from Scripture, Christ was not married (except in a mystical sense, to the Church). By remaining celibate and devoting themselves to the service of the Church, priests more closely model, configure themselves to, and consecrate themselves to Christ.” But this was a change the Roman Church made in 1139. The Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, and others, never adopted this belief.
Pope Francis recently reminded, and reaffirmed, that divorced Catholics who had remarried and not gotten an annulment of their first marriage, are “living in sin” and therefore cannot receive communion! I believe the Catholic Church is the only major church in the world which prohibits its member from remarrying without getting an annulment. I once asked a priest about an annulment and he explained that in essence it is a declaration that an actual marriage never existed. For me to have pursued, and received, such a declaration would have been essentially perpetrating a huge fraud. I was married to that woman for 14 years and had 3 children by her. Of course it was a marriage! But the Catholic Church states it wants me to still attend mass but I just cannot take part in the most important part of the service. This is like inviting me to a birthday party but telling me I cannot have any cake and ice cream. The concept is absolutely absurd!
Next we have birth control and abortion. I absolutely understand the church’s stand on abortion, it is entirely contrary to its most basic beliefs. And while I absolute agree with the prohibition regardless of circumstance, I also believe it to be an entirely personal moral dilemma and that each woman needs to make a decision based on her on conscience and without the intrusion of outside influence. It is a discussion between her and the God of her understanding.
But other forms of birth control are an entirely different matter. The use of condoms and contraception are a modern day necessity. For a married Catholic to follow the church’s teachings exactly, they would need to go contrary to the basic and loving desires, forgoing all sexual contact out of fear of pregnancy. This is an absolutely absurd idea and prohibition.
Finally is the church’s stance towards gay people. Their stance is easy to understand in the light of what the Bible says. I have two problems with that however. First, all the various versions of the New Testament today are translations from ancient Greek. But the problem is that Jesus Christ spoke in the Aramaic language, not Greek. This means at the very least there was a translation made. But was that translation from an oral tradition or the written word? No one knows. But we do know that Aramaic had about 5000 words total. Now compare that with the over 1 million words in the English language today to get a feel for the problem. Noted writer, Dr. Isaac Asimov, related how the word for young girl and virgin in Aramaic are the exact same word. It is my belief that the first person relating the story of the birth of Jesus was referring to Mary as a young girl because we believe she was likely as young as 12 when she married the much older Joseph. That she was a virgin was a more important concept to 10th century Rome than 1st Century Palestine, Turkey, and Greece. The mysticism surrounding a virgin birth was more valuable to Dark Age church leaders than explaining a sexual congress between Mary and Joseph. By the 12th century the Catholic Church was all about putting even the mention of sexuality into the closet. What does all this have to do with being gay? Simple, it is my belief that large portions of the New Testament are both incomplete and incorrect translations. The Gnostic Gospels sheds some light on this with its Gospel of Mary, something the Roman Church has chosen to distance itself from. But more to the point, it could mean the admonition of one man laying with another may have originally been a prohibition of adult men bedding boys, something which happened frequently in those days, particularly in traveling merchants. That gay men existed at the time of Jesus is undeniable. But so did pedophilia and I believe Jesus saw that as a much more serious problem than man’s inability to understand gay love. One is an abuse of power, position, and children, while the other is a different sort of love. I do not understand love between same sex individuals but I do accept it. It just as real as any other sort of love and that is all I need to know.
To be fair, the Roman Catholic Church is not alone in favoring certain absolutes of human behavior. Evangelical and other conservative Christian churches in the world espouse many of the same tenants. But it is a requirement of any church to tend to the needs of its followers. The Roman Catholic Church is absolutely failing in this respect and that is likely the primary reason it has seen church attendance plummet and parishes closes even though the number of people who identify themselves as Catholic rises.
The Roman Catholic desperately needs to make itself more attractive to all its members, not just those who adhere to its rigid tenants. I suspect that if all those Catholics who regularly attend church today were to suddenly stop attending church because they violate one or more of these basic tenants, Catholic Churches worldwide would become empty. The Catholic Church does not lack for theologians, both lay and ministerial, who desperately want the changes I have mentioned. But as long as a very small and very conservative group of Cardinals are allowed to continue as they have, church attendance and membership will continue to fall. But worse, the church will continue to ignore many of the most basic teachings of Jesus Christ.
You Didn't Ask But..... 