Why catholicism is bad

Just by celebrating the Mass, I helped enforce the unjust exclusion of women from equal membership in the Church. I valued the community life I shared with fellow priests, but I also sensed the crippling loneliness that could result from a life that lacked the deep personal intimacy other human beings enjoy. My relationship with God was so tied up with being a priest that I feared a total loss of faith if I left.

That very fear revealed a denigration of the laity and illustrated the essential problem. If I had stayed a priest, I see now, my faith, such as it was, would have been corrupted. Still, the fact that Vatican II had occurred at all, against such great odds, was enough to validate a hope, half a century later, that the Church could survive the contemporary moral collapse of its leadership.

That was the hope kindled by the arrival, in , of the pope from Argentina. Pope Francis seemed to me, in the beginning, like a rescuer. He cradled and kissed the blistering feet of a Muslim inmate in a Roman prison and made a pilgrimage to the U. He opened the door to Cuba and shut down the ancient Catholic impulse to convert the Jews. He has argued that religion is not a zero-sum enterprise in which the truth of one faith comes at the expense of the truth of others.

The pope began as a man of science, which scrambles the old assumptions about the clash between religious belief and rational inquiry. The chemist turned Jesuit is presumably familiar with the principle of paradigm shift—the overturning through new evidence of the prevailing scientific framework. Settled ideas are forever on the way to being unsettled. So too with religion. But he holds to the fundamentals loosely. In his book The Name of God Is Mercy , Francis explores the connection between specifically religious ideas and the concerns that all human beings share.

But today such longing for transcendence exists beyond categories of theism and atheism. Francis somehow gestured toward that horizon with innate eloquence.

He offered less a message that explains than an invitation to explore. He has been attacked by proponents of unfettered free-market capitalism and by bigots who despise his appreciation of Islam. Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, has attacked Francis for his criticism of nationalist populism and Francis draws fire in some circles as the embodiment of anti-Trump conviction.

But inside the Church, the fiercest opposition has come from defenders of clericalism—the spine of male power and the bulwark against any loosening of the sexual mores that protect it. Among the broader community of Catholics, the wedge issue has been the question of readmitting the divorced and remarried to the sacrament of Communion. The issue has sorely divided the hierarchy, and Francis has sided with those who would change the rule.

When the Catholic imagination, swayed by Augustine, demonized the sexual restlessness built into the human condition, self-denial was put forward as the way to happiness. The argument within the Church hierarchy on divorce and remarriage has amounted to an overdue attempt to catch up with the vast population of Catholic laypeople who have already changed their minds on the subject—including many divorced and remarried people who simply refuse to be excommunicated, no matter what the bishops say.

Foreshadowing these events was a letter addressed to the pope—and later leaked—by 13 cardinals ahead of a synod in , warning against any change on the question of divorce and remarriage. Critics such as these worry that a shift in Church discipline on this single question will pave the way—even if Francis and his allies do not quite see it—to a host of other changes regarding matters of sexuality, gender, and indeed the entire Catholic worldview.

On this, the conservatives are right. All of which, again, points a finger at the priesthood itself and its theological underpinnings. That is the crux of the matter. For years, I refused to cede my faith to the corruptions of the institutional Church, but Vatican bureaucrats and self-serving inquisitors are not the issue now.

The priests are. My body knew last summer, as the revelations in Ireland provoked a visceral collapse of faith. In Africa, once AIDS became common, priests began coercing nuns into becoming sexual servants, because, as virgins, they would likely not carry the HIV virus.

It was reportedly common for such priests to sponsor abortions when the nuns became pregnant. In April, a bishop was charged with the rape and illegal confinement of a nun, whom he allegedly assaulted regularly over two years, in the southern state of Kerala.

The bishop has denied the charges. The nun said she reported the bishop to the police only after appealing to Church authorities repeatedly—and being ignored. In February, a Washington Post report suggested that early in his pontificate, Francis learned about the systematic priestly abuse of institutionalized deaf children in Argentina , decades ago.

The abuse had originally been brought to light not by Church officials but by civil authorities. The deaf victims reported that they were discouraged from learning sign language, but that one hand sign often used by the abusive priests was the forefinger to the lips: Silence. As for McCarrick, the cardinal was found guilty by a Vatican tribunal of abusing minors and was punished by being stripped of his clerical standing. In truth, this supposedly humiliating punishment meant only that McCarrick would now share the secular status of every other unordained person on the planet.

At the meeting, the bishops dutifully employed watchwords such as transparency and repentance , yet they established no new structures of prevention and accountability. An edict promulgated in March makes reporting allegations of abuse mandatory, but it applies only to officials of the Vatican city-state and its diplomats, and the reporting is not to civil authorities but to other Vatican officials. Worse, he deflected the specifically Catholic nature of this horror by noting that child abuse and sexual malfeasance happen everywhere, as if the crimes of Catholic clergy are not so bad.

Coming like a punctuation mark the day after the Vatican gathering adjourned was a full report from Australia on the matter of Cardinal George Pell. In the Americas and Africa; in Europe, Asia, and Australia—wherever there were Catholic priests, there were children being preyed upon and tossed aside.

Were it not for crusading journalists and lawyers, the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests would still be hidden, and rampant. A power structure that is accountable only to itself will always end up abusing the powerless. A priest did this. That is the decisive recognition. The abuse of minors occurs in many settings, yes, but such violation by a priest exists in a different order, and not simply because of its global magnitude. This symbol of Christ has come to stand for something profoundly wicked.

But the institutional corruption of clericalism transcends that concern, and anguish should be reserved for the victims of priests. Their suffering must be the permanent measure of our responses. Read: Catholics are desperate for tangible reforms on clergy sex abuse. While a relatively small number of priests are pedophiles, it is by now clear that a far larger number have looked the other way. In part, that may be because many priests have themselves found it impossible to keep their vows of celibacy, whether intermittently or consistently.

Such men are profoundly compromised. Gay or straight, many sexually active priests uphold a structure of secret unfaithfulness, a conspiracy of imperfection that inevitably undercuts their moral grit. That such hubristic claptrap came from blatantly imperfect men did nothing to lighten the load of the admonition. I know from my own experience how priests are primed to feel secretly unworthy. Whatever its cause, a guilt-ridden clerical subculture of moral deficiency has made all priests party to a quiet dissembling about the deep disorder of their own condition.

That subculture has licensed, protected, and enabled those malevolent men of the cloth who are prepared to exploit the young. The very priesthood is toxic, and I see now that my own service was, too. The habit of looking away was general enough to have taken hold in me back then. When I was the chaplain at Boston University, my campus-ministry colleague, the chaplain at Boston State College, was a priest named Paul Shanley, whom most of us saw as a hero for his work as a rescuer of runaways.

In fact, he was a rapacious abuser of runaways and others who, after being exposed by The Boston Globe , served 12 years in prison. It haunts me that I was blind to his predation, and therefore complicit in a culture of willed ignorance and denial. Insidiously, willed ignorance encompasses not just clerics but a vast population of the faithful. Catholics in general have perfected the art of looking the other way.

He denounces the clerical culture in which abuse has found its niche but does nothing to dismantle it. In his responses, he embodies that culture. In April he published, in a Bavarian periodical, a diatribe that was extraordinary as much for its vanity as for its ignorance.

Benedict blamed sex abuse by priests on the moral laxity of the s, the godlessness of contemporary culture, the existence of homosexual cliques in seminaries—and the way his own writings have been ignored. But alas, the pope emeritus and his allies may not have real cause for worry. That an otherwise revolutionary pope like Francis demonstrates personally the indestructibility of clericalism is the revelation. He has failed to bring laypeople into positions of real power.

Equality for women as officeholders in the Church has been resisted precisely because it, like an end to priestly celibacy, would bring with it a broad transformation of the entire Catholic ethos: Yes to female sexual autonomy; yes to love and pleasure, not just reproduction, as a purpose of sex; yes to married clergy; yes to contraception; and, indeed, yes to full acceptance of homosexuals.

No to male dominance; no to the sovereign authority of clerics; no to double standards. The model of potential transformation for this or any pope remains the radical post-Holocaust revision of Catholic teachings about Jews—the high point of Vatican II. The habit of Catholic or Christian anti-Judaism is not fully broken, but its theological justification has been expunged.

Under the assertive leadership of a pope, profound change can occur, and it can occur quickly. This is what must happen now. One priest in Boston allegedly raped or molested children as church officials moved him from parish to parish over decades.

In the end, a total of members of the clergy were publicly accused of child sex abuse in Boston alone. As if to underscore that the problem goes far beyond a single wayward prelate, the revelations about McCarrick, which broke in mid-July, were quickly followed by the release of an exhaustive 1,page grand jury report that identified 1, cases of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of more than Catholic priests in the single state of Pennsylvania where I live with my wife and children.

Other states are apparently preparing similar reports of their own. Here is a summary from The Washington Post of a tiny sliver of what one will find in the report's squalid and scummy pages:. In Erie, a 7-year-old boy was sexually abused by a priest who then told him he should go to confession and confess his "sins" to that same priest. Another boy was repeatedly raped from ages 13 to 15 by a priest who bore down so hard on the boy's back that it caused severe spine injuries.

He became addicted to painkillers and later died of an overdose. One victim in Pittsburgh was forced to pose naked as Christ on the cross while priests photographed him with a Polaroid camera. Priests gave the boy and others gold cross necklaces to mark them as being "groomed" for abuse. The most common response among church watchers to this utterly sordid display has been to render moral judgment and then assimilate the facts — priests abused kids; bishops covered up for it — into pre-existing ideological storylines.

So conservatives blame a culture of homosexuality in the church that needs to be rooted out once and for all in favor of a stricter adherence to long-standing teachings about human sexuality.

Liberals, for their part, think the problem is a culture of clericalism and hypocrisy bred by cruel, sexually stultifying rules that need to be reformed in the direction of tolerance and acceptance. Both sides have a point, but both sides utterly fail to grasp the gravity of what's happening right before our eyes. Church attendance has been in sharp decline for a lot longer than 16 years. The number of young Catholics choosing to become priests and nuns has been shrinking even faster.

According to polls, an astonishing 98 percent of Catholics in the U. Catholic women are just as likely as non-Catholic women to have an abortion, while Catholics as a whole are more likely than the average American to support same-sex marriage. And now this tsunami of scandal? A decade and a half after Cardinal Law resigned in disgrace only to be given a compensatory luxurious sinecure at the Vatican? Does anyone seriously believe those pews won't be far, far emptier a decade from now, once the remaining parishioners absorb the reality that a church hierarchy that gets off on wagging its crooked little finger at the behavior of lay Catholics behaves behind closed doors as if it considers those impossibly stringent teachings to be a colossal joke?

The core of the church's problem isn't personal immorality, or institutional corruption, or hypocrisy. The core of the problem is ugliness. People too often fail to appreciate the role of beauty in religion. We point to revelatory experiences — a supposed eruption of the divine into the realm of the profane or an apparition that communicates a personal message of salvation.

Or we highlight a vision of moral righteousness or purity that draws us toward a life of piety. But there is also the beautiful — in the sense of seemliness, order, and proportion, but also elevation, nobility, and exaltation. My friend Rod Dreher writes movingly about how he was originally drawn toward Christianity by a visit as a young man to Chartres Cathedral in France, one of the most stunning religious structures ever built. Standing before and within this astonishing monument to God, Dreher for the first time felt the presence of the divine in the world and in his life.

A priest friend once had a very difficult time with his religious community. It almost drove him to leave. But instead, he told us, he realized that he had to get back to basics. The basics, he said, were prayer and fasting, Scripture and the sacraments. We turn to the Church because we are both followers of Jesus and members of a community, a communion.

Paul talked about. Subscribe now! Greg Erlandson is the president and editor-in-chief of Catholic News Service. Allen, Jr. Search for:. Greg Erlandson Intersections. Pope Francis celebrates Mass marking the feast of Pentecost in St.

Peter's Basilica at the Vatican in Harris February 1,