He reads Cerebus so you don't have to
Dave-watch — “Monthly update on Dave Sim’s slow, sad slide into madness.”
Although the Catholic Church appears to the women and women-with-penises to be holding out against their best efforts (this can, I think, be attributed to the fact that —as was the case with colleges and universities—feminism accepts only total capitulation. Not for too little is Zero Tolerance a catchphrase of feminist origin: to women and women-with-penises there is only one way, their way and their way is absolute) the fact remain that its evisceration is far advanced. For all intents and purposes the Catholic Church is now a secular feminist social engineering bastion, like the universities and colleges.
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Bah, I wrote a substantial reply to this a couple of days ago and foolishly sent it to bit-heaven before posting it. Let's see if I can re-create it.
Dave Sim isn't worth commenting on. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, is in the midst of a real crisis brought on by the same fundamental problem that did in the Soviet Union: a culture of mistrust and secrecy.
There's an insightful article in this week's Newsweek, written by a former seminary student, about two mindsets that exist within the Catholic Church today. He calls them the "secularists" -- those who see the Church as part of the community and want to stay involved in the everyday lives of the parishoners -- and the "refugees" -- those who see the Church as isolated from society, and who join it specifically to stay out of touch with the rest of the world.
My experience of other Christian denominations isn't too deep, but I don't know of any other branch of Christianity that considers its spiritual leaders to be isolated from the community. Part of the reason that Catholicism has been losing worshipers while evangelical Protestantism has been gaining them, I think, is the perception that Protestant ministers are much more in touch with the experiences and feelings of their community than are their Catholic counterparts.
Of course, there are exceptions within the system. I consider myself to have had a relatively positive experience with Catholicism, despite disagreeing with much of the theology. After reading the above article, I recognize that most of the priests and lay leaders in my hometown church and high school leaned towards the secularist side. When I think of other ex-Catholics' stories of priests who seemed to me completely out of touch, I recognize the refugee mindset.
The current Pope, John Paul II, has spent his entire time in that office trying to stand between the two intellectual camps. As one of the most populist Popes in recent history, and the most widely travelled Pope ever, he clearly understands the value of staying in touch with the common people and using the Church as a force for good in their lives. On the other hand, since most of the Church political heirarchy is firmly within the refugee camp, he has had to make some concessions to them. Thus, we have on the one hand a Pope who condemned the abuses of communism in the 80's and the abuses of capitalism in the 90's and who apologized for the Crusades and for the persecution of Galileo. On the other hand, he refuses to budge on the Church's hopelessly outdated stance on gender and sexual issues.
Faced with a choice between progressivism and reactionism in the Catholic Church, the current Pope tried to go in both directions and ended up going nowhere. Which direction the next Pope takes will determine whether the Church regains its lost respect, or slowly but inevitably slides into irrelevance.
Posted by Jimcat on June 27 2003 11:30