Jesus' true disciples

The hierarchy of the Catholic Church is a paternalistic and misogynistic medieval institution that believes it is infallible and all-powerful. It exists in the alternate universe of the fabulously wealthy and self-deluded that has little to do with the real world that the rest of us live in. The hierarchy shows no understanding of or empathy for the lives and struggles of real people.

There is, however, a segment of the Catholic Church that stands with common people and that spends every day on the front line struggling right along with them. That would be Catholic nuns. These women, with their devotion to being living examples of the gospel of Jesus, have earned the admiration even of people like myself who view the Catholic Church as an anachronism.

It would stand to reason then that these same nuns would not be in the good graces of the hierarchy of a church which views women, in general, with a jaundiced eye, the instigators of sin in the world. In recent years, American nuns especially have been repeatedly investigated and rebuked for their insufficient espousal of the official church doctrine on contraception and abortion. Apparently, the poor nuns have been too busy actually working in the real world of women's health concerns to spend time on what are essentially phony and very politicized issues. So now they have been sternly rebuked by the Pope and he has instructed the bishops of the church to essentially take over and dismantle the organization to which 80% of American nuns belong.  Because, you see, the Pope and the bishops have such a wonderful track record of interpreting and living the principles propounded by Jesus. (See history of pederasty, pedophilia, abuse of power by priests, bishops, and, yes, popes.) 

The Church's total tone-deafness and obliviousness to the real work that the nuns do and the fact that they are just about the only Catholics who haven't been tainted by recent scandals have raised cries of outrage from many both inside and outside of Catholicworld. Over the weekend, both Maureen Dowd and Nicholas Kristof used their columns to defend nuns and to excoriate the Church hierarchy, and they are only two of many.

A church that refuses to acknowledge the equality of the sexes, that insists that its priests cannot marry and that those priests can never, ever be female, a church that will not accept the value that contraception can bring to an over-populated and underfed world, a church which continues to cover up its history of abuse of children and to protect the abusers, a church which accepts the protection of government but refuses to help pay the bills is not an institution that deserves our respect. It is, I believe, a dying institution, though no doubt its final demise will be long in coming. I do hope, though, that the best elements of this otherwise out-of-touch medieval anachronism will survive. I hope that we will always have nuns who embody the philosophy of Jesus and bring comfort to a hurting world.

The church of man

The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws on Thursday making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests, but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia. - New York Times story

A lot of the reading I've been doing this summer has been set in the Middle Ages, particularly in the 12th century and 14th - 15th centuries. One of the things that has struck me about all of the books I have read is the attitude toward women during these periods. That attitude could be pretty well summed up by saying that the prevailing opinion seems to have been that women were less than zero. The average woman had no power and was completely at the mercy of men. If she was lucky enough to have a man who valued and respected her, she was lucky indeed, but if she lost him, she lost everything.

With attitudes like that, I guess it should be no surprise to us that an institution of the Middle Ages like the Catholic Church would still retain such a view of women. They are less than nothing and have no place in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Women should sit down, shut up, and not worry their sinful little heads about what their church does.

It is a culture such as this that has led this institution to declare that to ordain women as priests would be equal to pedophilia, heresy, apostasy and schism. So, let us be completely clear: In the eyes of these men who run this institution, having a woman as a priest would be EXACTLY THE SAME as having a male priest who repeatedly rapes children!

The arc of history may bend toward justice and enlightenment, but on some days it seems to bend very slowly indeed.

It is ironic that the Catholic Church continues to lose candidates for the priesthood and scours its membership looking for them and trying to recruit them. At the same time, their congregations in this country and apparently in most western countries are overwhelmingly in favor of allowing women to be priests. The New York Times story I referred to cites a poll released in May that showed 59 percent of American Catholics favored ordaining women. Of course, the hierarchy of this church will retort that it doesn't kowtow to public opinion in making its policies. It adheres to its ancient traditions.

Those traditions were set at the same time that people were being burned at the stake for heresy. I expect if the Catholic Church were entirely free of restraints in the world today, it would embrace that tradition as well. It would make just about as much sense as their attitudes toward women and women's issues.