MUSINGS OF A RECOVERING LIBERAL -- By Denis Donovan

Sunday, May 05, 2002, This is not another article in which we attempt to dissect what went wrong with the Catholic Church. There are enough of those already.

Furthermore, it is irrelevant and a total waste of time to attempt to analyze where things went awry and the Catholic priesthood became a breeding ground for some of the lowest representatives of humanity.

The fact is that it did.

What is significant and to WHAT I will devote the balance of today's column, is what can be done to salvage the remains of Jesus' Church and position it so that it may have more than a prayer of surviving the next hundred years or so.

The way it is headed, it most definitely does not.

Rather than using this catastrophe to drag the church kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, with a complete restructuring and rethinking in all matters from operations through dogma, what we are now served up weekly from pulpits across the world are the politics of damage control, of maintaining the status quo.

But this is not the best course of action. The time is here to trash the damage control, regardless of what the high-priced lawyers and PR flacks say and pick up the pieces and move forward a changed operation from top to bottom.

The matter of the pedophile priests is now in the hands of the world's police departments where it belongs and hopefully they will have the courage and the perseverance to do what needs to be done. These pedophile padres are criminals and should be treated the same as civilians who performed similar actions would be treated. No more, no less. That means investigations, trials and ultimately jail where they will undoubtedly be treated as child molesters most often are, violently and with derision.

Part of moving forward is to compensate the violated with appropriate financial packages, even if it necessitates selling off real estate and other holdings to pay for the settlements.

This is the least that the Church of Rome can do and what they would gladly do if they really had the best interest in making whole those damaged by their delegated representatives.

Additionally, they would call a worldwide conference of bishops, priests and cardinals that is open to the worlds press and in this conference take the steps necessary to either salvage or divide itself into smaller churches, which could then plot their own directions based on what works best for the needs of their own particular constituencies.

Maybe the solution is not so drastic and the situation can be fixed merely by moving the church into the 21st Century.

Defenders of the church say that the lack of vocations in our modern times forced the church to relax somewhat the standards for entering the priesthood. This easing of the standards allowed the twisted perverts to gain entrance and to make the church a base of operations.

This could easily be remedied simply by opening the priesthood up to women. Yes, give women the same powers and responsibilities their male counterparts currently enjoy.

In a reformed church, priests both male and female would be allowed to marry. In fact, it would be encouraged. The idea of forced celibacy as a way to honor God is suspect not only in its thinking but in the near impossibility of any normal, and I stress normal here, human being to keep that vow. We are sexual beings and sex is a gift given to us by God to, I feel, do more than just populate the planet. If population were its entire purpose, the act itself would be a lot more functional and not so damn pleasurable.

This being said, I do not feel that the celibacy issue is entirely the root of the problem here. If it were purely a matter of celibacy, then many of those victimized by the predator padres would be females, rather than exclusively a male club as it is.

It is also important to note here that this is not a gay issue as some of the more homophobic, conservative pundits are attempting to make it. Child molestation sickens gays as much as it does heterosexuals.

For the record, child molesters are a class unto themselves. Sex as they practice it is not about love or companionship or even adventure. It is about power, pure and simple, and the abuse of that power.

Moving on, in my redesign of the church, the minimum age to join the priesthood would be around forty-five, not twenty-something as it is now.

These older clergy, while they would have fewer career years to administer to the faithful, would bring to the job the type of life experience and wisdom that comes with having survived, out in the world, UNTIL the ripe old age of forty-something.

There is nothing so embarrassing and yes, insulting, as the sight of some kid padre, still wearing the remnants of teenage acne, attempting to console the inconsolable with words parroted from some seminary textbook.

No redesign of the church would be complete without a serious look at the dogma. It is here that significant and time-consuming work needs to be done.

Science and logic pervade all aspects of our life, why should religion not face the same scrutiny.

The binding element of Catholicism and common to most of the world's Christian religions today is that huge percentages of what they call doctrine and religious law have no scientific or logical basis and must be taken PURELY on faith. In the words of one biblical scholar, "Faith in things 'hoped for' with blind trust placed in the massive power of things 'not seen.'"

Basically, the bible says it is so, and so it is so.

This was okay a millennium or two ago when many of today's oldest religions were in their earliest stages, but not today.
How many among us would entrust our lives to the surgeon WHO operates with his hands guided by things "hoped for"? Or would live or work in a building designed and constructed utilizing engineering laws "not seen"?

Not many.

We want to know that the surgeon is experienced and has performed this operation hundreds of times before, with an almost godlike success rate before we would even conceive of allowing him or her to take a scalpel to us.

Similarly, with what we know today, should we blindly believe in any concept so mired in the past that it rejects all potential advances or contrary evidence, regardless of how reasoned they might be?

I think not!

When we shun critical thinking for faith-based thinking, which is what blind adherence to religion is, we essentially do that.

Sadly, if you study history, you will see that every advance in our planet's history can be directly attributed to what the church calls worldly, foolish, unspiritual, and earthly ways of thinking.

But it is the critical thinking of such reputable scientists and academics as Copernicus, Koepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, and Painen, among others, that HAS catapulted our society forward to advances in science, the arts, democracy in government and human rights barely, if ever, imagined in religious history.

And if we project ourselves forward from this moment in time, for what type of future can our children's children hope if we continue to institutionalize a habit of blindly following Biblical faith-based thinking at the expense of logic and science-based thinking?

The answer, as I see it, is that they will continue to struggle and suffer if their adherence to religions and religious practices causes them to violate the very foundations of that which provides health and well-being to the human psyche.

If allowed to continue onward without a major retooling, the Catholic Church will continue to vehemently oppose even the thought that one could survive apart from it's support and control.

They will do this by maligning their detractors and creating peer pressure so great that few will be willing or able to consider the contradictions and inconsistencies contained therein.

But there are chinks in the church's armor in the form of an overwhelming and ever-growing body of evidence which has emerged that severely questions many of the concepts that Catholicism and other Christian Religions have for so long attributed to Gods work.

This research is not limited to the backrooms where it is uttered in hushed whispers, but is everywhere.