Entry 5:

Dear Erik,

I'm not a Catholic, so I'm not the best person to respond to your questions about the irreducible core of Roman Catholicism. It seems that some aspects officially deemed essential, and seen as such by outsiders, are widely questioned by those who consider themselves good Catholics--papal infallibility, for instance. Can you be a Catholic and deny transubstantiation--the priest's mystic transformation of the bread and wine of the Mass into the actual body and blood of Christ? (For Protestants, the bread and wine are merely a commemoration of the Last Supper.) Can you disbelieve in heaven and hell, or saints, or the efficacy of relics, or miracles, or the virgin birth or the divinity of Christ? I wouldn't think so. But I'm sure the pews are filled with parishioners who take these and other beliefs with a grain of salt the way they dismiss church strictures against birth control, abortion, divorce, and homosexuality.

At least in the United States, a lot of Catholics are actually protestants without knowing it: They don't see the priest, much less the hierarchy, as mediating between them and God, they think they can interpret the Bible for themselves, and they don't see the sacraments as, well, sacramental. How could it be otherwise? People who are modern and democratically oriented and self-determining in every other area of their life are not going to accept authority and hierarchy in this one area alone. For example, once women can be doctors, lawyers, politicians, and even ministers and rabbis and theologians--including Catholic theologians--they're no more going to accept being denied the priesthood than they would accept being forbidden to be astronauts.

In your first post, you criticized Garry Wills' Papal Sin as a kind of grab bag of gripes, but for him the issues are all connected. His point is that the modern papacy, in its quest to maintain power and control, refuses to admit past error and injustice--whether it's the failure of Pius XII to speak out against the Holocaust or the failure of Paul VI to follow the recommendations of his own commission and permit Catholics to use contraception. Paul VI kept the ban, Wills argues, not because the case against contraception was unanswerable but simply because to abandon the ban would mean admitting the church had been wrong before. As one prominent birth control foe put it, if the church sent all those people to hell, it must keep maintaining that that is where they are.

As a brilliant and erudite intellectual, Wills is particularly pained by the falsifications of history and distortions of scripture that the papacy has used to justify its policies retroactively. Thus, for instance, the current pope explains that women cannot be priests because Christ was a man and chose men as his apostles. As an explanation, this leaves much to be desired: Christ was also a Jew, so must priests be Jewish, too? Anyway, Christ wasn't a priest, and neither were the apostles. This jerry-built, feeble argument is brought forward, Wills argues, because the real, historical reasons for the all-male priesthood are no longer respectable: 1) that women are inferior to men and therefore unworthy of ordination and 2) that women are ritually impure because of menstruation and must not be allowed to touch holy objects.

Wills argues that the church's clinging to outmoded and unjust practices and beliefs is an important cause of its current crisis----the shortage of religious vocations, he thinks, is directly related to the awkward position of priests today caught between a backwards hierarchy and a modern laity. That explanation had never occurred to me, but it makes sense: Who wants to spend his life avoiding telling divorced and remarried parishioners that church law insists they and their spouse live as celibate "brother and sister"? Who wants to preach that homosexuality is a grave moral defect when he knows perfectly well that the monsignor, a lovely man, is gay as a goose?

You mentioned apologies and said they puzzled you. The present pope has made almost a hundred--not as an individual, of course, and not as a group thinker either, but as the latest in an unbroken line of leadership that goes all the way back to St. Peter. He apologizes as the head of the church, as President Clinton apologizes on behalf of the U.S. government. What I don't like about these institutional apologies is that they aren't as apologetic as they seem. The pope's most recent statement about the various evils perpetrated by the church through the ages not only left rather vague what those evils were but was phrased so as to exempt the hierarchy: All of a sudden the church was a democracy, a community of believers with everybody equally implicated in wrongdoing--as if Irish farmers or Brooklyn schoolteachers decided what Pius XII should do about Hitler!

The second thing that's wrong with them is what's wrong with most apologies: They are basically a way to clear the moral books without doing anything different. Thus, President Clinton apologized for slavery but offered no reparations, even though the disadvantages of today's blacks derive from the slave past; he apologized for U.S. involvement in paramilitary death squad activity in El Salvador--and then sent over a billion dollars to Colombia to "fight drugs." In the same way, the pope expresses regret for the Holocaust--and then canonizes not one but several outspoken anti-Semites, permits a huge cross to go up at Auschwitz, and issues a statement that Catholicism is the only true religion and those who reject Christ are bound for hell! If the pope really wants to turn over a new leaf in the church's sorry record on Jews, he has to stop talking like that because "supersessionism"--the idea that Christianity completes and supersedes Judaism and is the true faith outside which salvation is impossible, as the Jews would realize if they weren't so willfully blind--is the root of the problem.

For starters, he could take down the cross that still stands towering over Auschwitz despite the protests of Jews around the world.

That's all for now, Erik, I've enjoyed this. As my (Protestant) grandmother used to say, see you in church,

Katha