by Charles P. Pierce (11 July 2010)
The institutional church is in disarray. The sexual-abuse scandal that had its ground zero here in Boston has now exploded internationally, most notably in Ireland, where the Roman Catholic Church was as close to an established state religion as it was anywhere in the world since the Reformation. The current pope, Benedict XVI, behaved as dubiously in these matters when he was the archbishop of Munich as Cardinal Bernard Law behaved here. Once, the scandal was treated as an American problem – the Vatican having had issues with the American experiment going back at least to Pope Pius IX, who included many of the American concepts vital to a secular democracy in his Syllabus of Errors in 1864, when American democracy was in enough trouble at home – so it was roundly dismissed by various Vatican functionaries as the creation of liberal freethinkers and scandal-happy US newspapers, including this one. Not any longer. Cases have detonated in Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and several other countries. Church attendance in the United States is down.A survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, released in April 2009, found that one in 10 US adults has left the Catholic Church after having been raised Catholic – with Catholicism having had the largest net loss in members of all the major religious groups in the United States. About half of those who departed and now identify themselves as “unaffiliated” left the church because of its views on abortion, homosexuality, and birth control. (In 2009, the American Religious Identification Survey by Hartford’s Trinity College found that, between 1990 and 2008, the percentage of people in Massachusetts who identified themselves as Catholic dropped to 39 percent from 54 percent.) The sexual-abuse scandal, then, erupted within a church that already was struggling with serious demographic pressures. The scandal placed the doubts of much of the laity into sharp relief. Many Catholics are out of patience with intramural church solutions that seem to do little more than push the cases down the road and keep in place the sclerotic institutional structure and the paranoid mania for secrecy that allowed the corruption to flourish in the first place.
And that structure existed not only in the opulence of the Vatican itself, but also in the minds of millions of Catholics, like myself. It still exists in the former. It has no influence in the latter, not for me, nor for many others like me. The institutional Catholic Church, for me, has no concrete form, no physical structure, no hierarchy except that of ideas. Even my attendance at Mass is largely contemplative, the priest presiding in a supervisory capacity, his authority dependent wholly on the primacy of my individual conscience. For it’s not really about celibacy, or female priests. It’s about the source of the authority exercised by a hierarchical priesthood based in Rome.
None of this is really new. As Illinois-based historian and author Garry Wills has pointed out, relentlessly, Catholics fought to define the church’s authority within themselves even back in the earliest days of the church, before it attached itself to imperial Rome and, subsequently, to thousands of years worth of European power politics. And the spiritual authority – and authoritarianism – of the hierarchy, up to and including the papacy, was diminishing in the minds of millions of Catholics long before the sexual-abuse crisis brought that issue to a conspicuous boil. “The hierarchy,” says Richard McBrien, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and an outspoken critic of the institutional church, “is largely irrelevant to any intelligent, educated Catholic.”
In the church of my youth, with the priests reciting incomprehensible Latin, their backs to the people, walled off by an altar rail and two millenniums’ worth of imperial design, the purple always came out at Advent and at Lent. It was the color of penance, we were told. And so it is, and penitence begins within, in one mind and one soul and in what the nuns used to call an informed conscience. That’s where my Catholicism is now. It is a penitential faith. That’s where you can look for it. It is possible, I have come to realize, that I’ve grown up to become an anti-Catholic Catholic.
Sources include:
http://www.charlespierce.com/aboutPage
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/07/11/what_i_believe
http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/writer-charles-pierce-remaining-catholic-amid-chaos
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14368b.htm
http://religions.pewforum.org/
http://livinginliminality.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/aris_report_2008.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Wills
http://www.richardmcbrien.com/
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