The Gates of Hell Have Prevailed

My good friend and fellow blogger John Tierney has made several posts regarding the wounds the Catholic Church has inflicted upon the children entrusted to it--and, by extension, upon what's left of its reputation and treasure.  Take a look.

There are two questions here:   Does the Church deserve to survive, and will it survive?  The short answer to the first question is no.  Any institution that violates the trust, health and safety of society's most vulnerable members, and the faith and funds of the parents who entrusted them, has no business getting a second chance.  If it were solely up to me, I would dissolve the entire corrupt institution tomorrow, saving only its better buildings and converting them (pun intended) to some more honorable use.  The Sistine Chapel as a theatre, anyone?  Or even a disco?

But I think it will survive, albeit in a shrunken form, nourished by the weight of its role in human history and the need of people to believe, along with their need to have their beliefs structured in some sort of system.  If that happens, I think that a total re-thinking of its views on sex and gender is the only way to avoid a repeat of the current disaster at some point.

George Will once wrote that, when one comments on a news story that has a bearing on one's personal life, one has an obligation to disclose that fact.  Sadly, I agree with him.  I have had close relationships with a number of people who, I have reason to believe, were almost certainly abused by the Catholic clergy, and I have seen first-hand the damage that this has done not only in their lives, but in mine as well.

It is catastophes of this sort that lead me to disbelieve in religion, even as I affirm my own personal belief in God.  I went through a very heavy fundamentalist phase in my early adulthood, and came out of it believing that the goal of fundamentalism is not so much to honor or worship God as it is to try and capture Him (Her, It, or Them) for purely self-interested reasons.  This is why I prefer to worship God on my own, loosely gripping Him by the hand of faith, rather than be gripped by one or more churches that, sadly, have lost their way ... if they ever had it at all.

If you want to feel better about this mess, put not your trust in the princes of Catholicism.  Reach out to their victims, and help bind their wounds.  That's the only way to make God visible in the first place.