Pope Francis came out and directly addressed the Church's current crisis, the one where some seminaries became gay bathhouses at the behest of bishops and cardinals who used them to draft some talent, if you know what I mean.
First, bishops need to get close to the laity.
“The bishop cannot remain distant from the people; he cannot have attitudes that take him away from them… He doesn’t try to find refuge with the powerful or elite. No. The ‘elites’ criticize bishops, while the people has an attitude of love towards the bishop. This is almost a special unction that confirms the bishop in his vocation.”Hmm. Lots of love between us. That sounds good. What's next?
Hide things from us. Lies of omission.
“In these times, it seems like the 'Great Accuser' has been unchained and is attacking bishops. True, we are all sinners, we bishops. He tries to uncover the sins, so they are visible in order to scandalize the people."Yep, that's the way to heal things. Conceal your sins from the 'people.'
Look, bonehead, we don't care if you drink too much, play the ponies with some coin skimmed from the Diocesan Appeal or download pr0n in your bedrooms. What bugs us is when you turn the seminaries into San Francisco during Pride Week. Then we need to know what's happening or we'll start to distrust you. And by start to distrust you I mean despise you from the depths of our hearts.
What an idiot. The sooner this guy leaves the papacy, the better.
And who can blame you for playing the ponies?
Yes, that's the problem. The church higher-ups have been in the habit of keeping secrets from the lay members and the parish-level priests for a long time. Centuries. That's the way they think it is supposed to be. The shepherd doesn't have to explain anything to the sheep or the sheep-dogs.
ReplyDeleteWhich brings us to a problem: assuming the current pope is gone (and there appears to be no legal way to do that other than waiting for him to die or resign of his own free will), he'll just be replaced, in a conclave held in complete secrecy, by some other old cardinal who has spend his whole career immersed in this same secretive culture. And they will continue keeping their crimes, both petty and major, secret "for the good of the Church" (and, only coincidentally I'm sure, to their own benefit as well).
This is not something that will be fixed by getting rid of one man, or even getting rid of a bunch of them. This will only be fixed if the church itself is restructured to stop thinking that keeping secrets is always a virtue, and to actually understand that they need to be at least minimally answerable to their lay members.
I'm just finishing a book called "The Dictator Pope." Needless to say, it skewers Francis six ways to Sunday, but that aside, it shows how each pontiff brings his own style and personality to the job, the Curia and the Vatican.
ReplyDeleteYou make a deeper point, perhaps without meaning to do so. What I'd like to ask the bishop is this: How can you mislead us and call yourself a Catholic? The whole thing is completely in opposition to everything the dude is supposed to represent.
Like I said in the post, I fully expect him to drink, swear and lie to his tailor, but at some level, you have to have integrity and some of these guys have none. Whatever you want to say about the evil corporations, I think it's pretty unusual to see this level of scumbaggery.
I worked at one place where the CFO embezzled from the retirement fund. Believe me, when he was discovered, no one covered for him. They may have been carrying on an affair with the secretary, but they took care of the company.
As for your broader point, that the secrecy is going to continue, I'd have to agree, but with a shrug. The Vatican and the Curia are weird things. As long as they don't distort the Catechism, which is the synthesis of 2000 years of philosophy and genius, they can skulk through the corridors in red robes, whispering to each other all day long for all I care.
ReplyDeleteThe corruption ebbs and flows and maybe the next Chief Dude will clean things out a bit and we'll get an ebb for a while.
Oddly, I'm reminded of the classification system for the military.
ReplyDeleteSpecifically, that classifying stuff to avoid embarrassment is specifically not allowed...only to prevent harm.