As per usual, the Vatican is incapable of any real self-reflection

Um, Smash, let's look at the points on this thread.
--Dwindling church attendance: Fact.
--No women priests allowed: Fact.
--No married priests: Fact, except for married Protestant pastors who convert and become priests.
--Very few young priests being developed in the U.S.: Fact.
--Priests being brought in from other countries: Fact.
--The Vatican writing off the U.S.: Fact.
--Rollbacks from Vatican II: Fact.
--The church not being very forthright with the pedophile priest issue: Fact.
--All priests being pedophiles: Not a fact, and I don't think that's being said here.

So where's the bigotry?

 

Poor persecuted Catholics.

 

The Catholic Church had a choice a few decades ago: Either come after the pedos with the fires of hell itself (in the past they've been real good at this sort of thing), feed them straight to the criminal authorities, cooperate enthusiastically with prosecutions, and rip this shit OUT of the church for the most part -- or cover up.

They made their choice, so now they get to live with that. Or die, as their active-parishoner rolls indicate.

What really ripped it for me was a decade or so ago, when I happened to be in a group talking it over with a monsignor. Of course his game plan was deny, deny, deny, whine about the media conspiracy, and intimated we were sinful for even speaking about it in public.

When I suggested the Church should come after the perps with all guns blazing, he got pretty fired up about it. "You people know nothing," he said. "It will never happen. If the Church did that, do you know what would happen? Half, two-thirds of the priests in the U.S. would quit within weeks. There would be nobody left to say mass" (this with a great air of righteous indignation).

Everyone was just shocked.

I said, "You know what you just said?"

He said, "Well, you know what I mean."

I said, "Yeah, I guess I do."

Walked out. Slammed the door.

 

Smasher: A few words on this from someone who just spent way too many stressful hours cranking out pages ... and happens to still be a practicing Catholic.

I think a lot of the "bigotry" you're talking about is genuine grief from former (and current) Catholics who have been driven from the pews by some combination of (1) the clergy sex abuse scandal, (2) the increasing turnback of Vatican II initiatives, and (3) life situations that no longer conform with an increasingly stringent and conservative Church hierarchy in both Rome and the U.S.

Most of us have had a moment where this combination of unfortunate truths about the Church has driven us away from it. For me, it was a old-school priest in the mid-1990s, bellowing how "If you're pro-choice you're not Catholic." My wife and I stood up and left, in the middle of his homily (over the years, I've realized most other parishioners were too asleep to notice our li'l protest ).

But we came back, because there is a comfort in the rituals of the Mass, and (not to get too preachy here) a real "presence" in the sacrament of Communion. At least there is for me, and that overcomes all the efforts of incompetent and devious men who have tried to destroy what Jesus and his followers built.

For all the newsroom and comedian jokes about pervert priests, there are so many clergy, religious women and just regular old Catholics who have been inspired to help others. That's also what keeps me going.

OK, rant over. Good night.

 

Starman's post, for one. Hell, I'm Jewish and sometimes it gets bad enough around here that it bothers me a little.

 

Lapsed Catholic here. While my education has been entirely public school (including college) oriented, I have an interest in Catholic education and what Starman mentioned earlier about being taught evolution caught my attention.

Long after prosecuting Galileo, the Church did eventually produce some cutting-edge science educators. The first person to propose the theory of the expansion of the universe was a Belgian priest named Georges Lemaitre. Lemaitre, who taught at the University of Louvain, published his work in 1927, two years before Hubble's work on the same topic.

 

Dooley gunning for SportsJournalists.com understatement of the year.

 

Re: Why don't MORE Catholics leave? If you're not Catholic, it's understandably difficult to figure out why even lapsed Catholics still identify with the faith (after all, they call themselves "lapsed Catholics"). I know it was difficult for me to figure out, for a long time, why my wife, who seemed to dislike everything about the Catholic church, didn't leave, and even wanted to send our kids to Catholic school.

What I learned, especially living in a very Catholic part of a very Catholic city, is that leaving the church also means leaving a whole culture and support system built around you. It's not quite officially getting shunned, but for my wife, much of what prevented her from leaving is the issues it could cause with her family, and also the support system we had built as a result of our kids being in Catholic school. It appeared most everyone in our neighborhood sent their kids to Catholic schools, and the social order was based a lot on what Catholic school you went to growing up, or even what school your parents or grandparents went to. Now, mind you, we barely went to Mass. But it was a lot easier to go along to get along. (By the way, I was baptized Catholic, and confirmed Episcopalian, so I had no loyalties.)

Finally, though, the breaking point came when my oldest daughter was getting to the age where we would have to explain why her role would be so limited in the church. How could we as parents foster our daughters' independence in a structure that told girls they weren't good enough to lead a church? First, we pulled our kids out of Catholic school and into public school (a very big step for my wife, who went to Catholic school through elementary and high school). Then, we finally left for good and joined a UCC church -- with a female pastor. (It was quite an adjustment going from a church that was hierarchical to one that is congregational. You mean WE can fire the pastor anytime we want?)

The funny thing about the whole experience was learning that, first, not "everybody" sent their kids to Catholic school. We noticed a lot of kids besides ours at the bus stops, and they weren't all Irish Catholic kids named McSomething or O'Other -- without moving, our kids had gone from lily-white school to one where the announcement come home in English, Spanish and Arabic.

Also, we learned there were many other parents who wanted to do (and some of whom did) the same thing we did. Even when we first pulled our kids out of Catholic school, we had parents pull us aside and whisper to us, like we were all part of the French Underground, "How did you do it?" We've also noticed a precipitous slide in Catholic school attendance after we left. There are schools that even 10 years ago were filled to the brim that are now struggling, some of it having to do with demographic changes in the area, some of it having to do with the cost of school, but some of it having to do with people leaving the church.

I'm never going to begrudge anyone what choice they make in their faith. If the Catholic faith is what leads them to their faith and inner peace, that's great. There are still a lot of Catholics doing great work in their communities, including parishes who contribute people to help with the homeless shelter our church runs. But I'll also say that in my experience there are plenty of Catholics who may not have officially left the church, but in mind and spirit, they're gone.

 

Tough shit.

The Catholic Church could have taken powerful steps to root out the predators; instead they chose to cover it up.

So they get to own it.

 

That's a great post, Bob.

 

Well, this was part of a pre-marriage conference, so my then-wife-to-be and I talked it over later with a few people we knew from the group.

The main defense for Father Fuddyduddy was, "He wasn't saying that one-half to two-thirds of all priests are pedophiles."

I said, "No, but he was saying that many were afraid enough of possible investigations they would quit."

They said, "That's not the same as being found guilty in a court of law."

I said, "No it isn't. You want to send kids to a school or church where the adult authority would rather quit than be subject to the possibility of child abuse investigations?"

After a few more volleys, I said, "You know, if 20 or so years ago the Church had started coming after predators with all guns firing, a lot of them would have quit in the years since. So what? Is that supposed to be a bad thing?"

 

I know one current seminarian and one recently ordained priest who is roughly my age (28). I went to college in lower Michigan with both, though, both of them are Yoopers like me (which probably says something given the overall per capita prevalence of religiosity in rural as opposed to urban settings).

One factor that hasn't been mentioned is the college element - when I started at CMU, the Catholic campus ministry was known for progressivism and I think even had a woman in a major leadership role. By the time I left, the Diocese had basically demanded it tighten up and start churning out priests. Wonder how that's going.

It's not just Catholics, though. In our conference of the United Methodist Church, the ratio of retirements to ordinations last year was something like 5-to-1 or more.