CSotD: The Loose Canon
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If God were a computer, undoubtedly, He'd blow up the world, because that would be the "answer." — Phil Ochs
Well, God isn't a computer and so there are other, more nuanced and compassionate answers to the problems of the world, but, so far, as Rob Rogers suggests, the most promising pontiff since John XXIII is giving the wrong answers, according to Vatican spokesmen, whose most frequent public statements seem to begin "What His Holiness meant to say …" and whose private statements must surely include a lot of "Who elected this guy?"
For non-Catholics, this emerging pattern of papal statements followed by Vatican non-retraction-retractions must seem confusing. For this recovering Catholic, they're not only confusing but triggering some theological PTSD, because I was present for much of the dismantling of John XXIII's Vatican II reforms.
For those too young or too non-Catholic to get it, just think of Vatican II as a sort of spiritual Obamacare, passed with great optimism and promise and then defunded and amended and criticized into irrelevance and dysfunction by conservative defenders of the status quo ante, with ponderous, learned explanations about what it actually meant and why it couldn't work and why it wasn't actually the solution to a problem that never actually existed.
Much of Vatican II's extended period of localized implementation happened while I was in college on a sort of Roman Catholic Rumspringa, which meant that, on visits home, I could readily cover my lack of attendance and, consequently, my ignorance of how the mass had changed, by saying, "Ah, that's not how we're doing it at school."
It also led to a great conversation one day at the campus snack bar, where a young nun I knew was buying three boxes of animal crackers. I said something about how much she liked animal crackers and she said, "Oh, no, they're for a children's mass this afternoon."
I must have looked horror-stricken, because she paused a moment before bursting into laughter, "No, no, for afterwards. For snacks."
One never knew in those days.
I lived down the hall from the emerging core of the Catholic evangelical movement, where the Great Leap Forward involved holding your hands in the air and occasionally speaking in tongues, as well as occasionally praying aloud for your roommate's conversion.
Their fervour and spirit filled our little chapel each Sunday to the point where many of the other residents of our dorm left to make room for it.
That said, the absurdities of liturgical excess were matched by some strong demands of ethical consistency from another local Christian/Catholic group, who allied themselves with the Berrigans and were not only responsible for some of the more compelling and well-grounded speakers at anti-war demonstrations but several of whom went beyond speeches and chose to serve time for their pacifism.
By then, however Pope John was gone and Pope Paul VI had begun the task of reclaiming the Church, with his major contribution coming in 1968 with Humanae Vitae, in which he rejected the recommendation of a John XXIII-appointed commission that some form of birth control be approved and took a firm stance along the old battle line.
It wasn't so long after that a militant form of conservatives arose within the Church and began the effort to have their moral teachings enshrined in civil law.
And so the reformation ended. I got up and walked out one day on a sermon in which the priest explained that the passages of Acts in which it was stated that early Christians shared their possessions — and an accompanying Gospel reading about rich men and eyes of needles — was speaking, not of material goods, but in praise of "poverty of spirit."
And I suppose it's not as offensive to hear the Vatican attempting to claw back the off-message statements of this compassionate prelate as it is to hear a conservative priest attempting to explain what Jesus really meant.
A few thoughts:
1. Ex-Catholics and militant atheists as a whole need to separate their personal pain from their powers of reasoning. You cannot argue logically and fairly from a position of personal pain.
Or, to put it another way, while I sympathize with the fact that you were hurt by a nun or priest to the point where it colors your thinking about religion and the Church, would you excuse someone whose thinking on civil rights was similarly colored by his having been mugged by a black man?
2. The Roman Catholic Church has the right to determine its own beliefs, and your right to demand adherence to social justice ends on the steps of the state house. If they're not pressing for their private beliefs to be civil law, they can decide that unicorns exist on Mars and that all dogs go to heaven. You don't like the menu, don't eat at the restaurant.
And, by the way, the pope isn't infallible on everything, and rarely asserts his power to be so, which is quite strictly defined. The last time a pope asserted his infallibility was 1950, when Pius XII declared the absolute literal truth of the Assumption of Mary, body and soul, into heaven.
Beliefs about reproduction fall under a broader range of authoritative teachings, which good Catholics are similarly not free to reject, but not because of the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility. Rather, it's based on the ancient doctrine of "Our House of God, our rules.
3. Yes, it seems strange for the College of Cardinals to elect a pope whom they are not prepared to stand behind.
4. I'm trying to believe in your message of Christian reform, Francis old chum, but you gotta work with me here, man. Or, as Stuart Carlson put it:
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