The papacy of Karol Wojtyla is over. He was beloved and controversial and opened his heart to the world while lobbying tirelessly for peace. It’s hard for me to reconcile his apparently genuine embrace of the core Christian belief of love for one another, with his regressive leadership of the Church.
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The exclusion of women and those touched by women, married men, from the priesthood, has no valid historical basis and the revered men of today's Church who cling to those exclusive policies will sound silly when scholars of the future read and listen to their sad arguments.
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Today on “This Week” George Stephanopoulos interviewed Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, and it was clear they had previously agreed to discuss only the Pope. Law spoke eloquently about John Paul’s love for his fellow humans, most particularly the disenfranchised, the poor, the old and the young. He spoke without a trace of irony or awareness of his own hypocrisy, given his personal failure to protect his parishioners, particularly the young, but including their families and future families, from his own priests, and his decisions to, in fact, protect his priests from discovery and rightful prosecution under the law, endangering hundreds more, if not thousands, over many, many years. It’s hard enough to reconcile his not being in jail for conspiracy to commit child abuse and concealing criminal activity, but it’s inconceivable to witness Bernard Law’s still holding a position of leadership in the Catholic Church.
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Later on the show, George Will said something enormously insightful that I think touches on the core flaw in Catholicism. He said, and I’m paraphrasing, that in the modern democracies (presumably including the United States), authority flows upwards from the people, and that the Church’s structure is, by definition, at odds with modern society because in Catholicism, authority flows downwards, from the Pope.
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I believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with the concept of Papal Infallibility, that it constitutes an embrace of the idea that any human can always be right and flies in the face of what I believe God has given us as an imperative, to get up every day of our lives and look for how we are wrong so that we can continue to learn and grow.
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I say in my blog header that I intend to discuss “bad Catholic experiences” but haven’t found the courage or the strength to address those issues here, and I will not start today. I will only say that I believe that the hierarchy and power structure of the Catholic Church resembles a dysfunctional family in which power flows from a controlling leader who is always right and can never be challenged, and the governing emotion is shame, where victims are reviled and attacked as the source of the guilt and no one ever admits making a mistake or sincerely apologizes.
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To remain (or become) relevant, the Church will have to change, and choosing change, admitting that change is needed, requires a willingness, even a desire to embrace and correct our mistakes. The Church is made of humans, people who are fallible by God's design. Its leaders need to accept that and move forward.
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