Random Thoughts

Taking the Church in for repairs

Growing up Catholic, you pick up on a lot of odd things -- things which eventually make their way into funny plays like “Nunsense“ or films such as “Sister Act.“
In Catechism class, I learned that people who never had a chance to become Christians, such as New Guinea tribesmen, would end up as formless beings in a foggy place called Limbo in the afterlife. I learned that if you told a venial sin -- minor boo-boos such as thinking bad thoughts about your parents -- you could work it off with a jail term in Purgatory if you died before you made it to confession. I learned that there were invisible saints fluttering around -- demigods really -- who might do favors for you if you communicated with them via the ESP of prayer. One of them even gets a kick out of receiving thank-you notes in the want ads, if you can believe that.
Some of those beliefs have stuck with me. I still believe in my Guardian Angel and have been pulled out of a few life-threatening jams by her through the years. I wear a St. Christopher medal I found in a Detroit gutter some 20 years ago, and I believe that God or some heavenly power arranged for me to meet my wife.
But I believe in the sense of a recovering Catholic, because by the age of 14 or so, it seemed obvious to me that this was a church that still had a foot in the 13th century and needed some serious housecleaning of ideas from the Middle Ages which no longer made much sense.
It‘s sad that it has taken hundreds of cases of sexual abuse to move the Roman Catholic Church towards reforming itself. You can‘t help but wonder how the Church will survive, given that it was on the brink of bankruptcy a few years ago. How will it pay billions in legal settlements and regain the trust of young believers?
Perhaps those reforms will come in the way of letting priests marry. If you believe Catholic writers such as Umberto Eco (“The Name of the Rose“), celibacy is an ascetic tradition which has mostly been winked at for hundreds of years. How does celibacy stand a chance in a consumer society where self-denial is virtually unheard of? Obviously, it hasn‘t been going over very well in dioceses such as Boston.

FAMILY PLANNING
This being the eve of Earth Day, the “Easter“ of the environmental movement, it seems a fitting time to request that the Catholic Church also reform its ideas on family planning.
It‘s estimated that there will be between 10 billion and 14 billion people on earth by 2050, most of them impoverished and fighting for resources such as drinking water. Are you in favor of global warming? Black water? AIDS? Crime? Terrorism? Nuclear threats? If those things seem bad now, wait until there are twice as many people and half as many resources.
Yet the Catholic Church is still encouraging people in the poorest countries of the world to have children willy-nilly without a thought for the plagues, starvation, ignorance and warlords which haunt places which have too many people and not enough rice to go around. (And by the way, none of those newly-minted people are welcome in Vatican City, a country with the most heavily guarded border in the world.)
At the Vatican‘s website, www.vatican.va, you can find policies listed in the Sacrament of Matrimony which made perfect sense in 300 A.D. Hundreds of years ago, it was a good idea to encourage large families because Christians were in a turf war with the Roman Empire and then with the pagan hordes of Europe and the Asian steppes. Pumping out babies has never been about spirituality: more people meant more political power and wealth for the Church.
These days, Catholics in developed countries are ignoring church doctrine to be fruitful and multiply. When the Pope speaks out against birth control, most Catholics yawn. Petoskey author John Rohe notes that Italy, the most Catholic country in the world, also has the lowest replacement birth rate in the world.
The Catholic Church is alarmed that fertility rates are below replacement levels in 51 of the world‘s developed countries. Why? This should be cause for celebration that the starving masses in Sudan and Afghanistan will one day get their act together too and have fewer children. A reformed, environmentally-aware Church could follow the will of its own believers and put the brakes on population growth in less enlightened parts of the world such as Latin America.
For years, groups such as Zero Population Growth have urged families to have just one or two children so that one day the earth will stabilize with a population of 2 billion people. With our technology, such a world would be a paradise. What will a world with 14 billion people be?
I hope the Church makes it. I‘ve known kind and thoughtful nuns, priests and brothers who were sincere, beautiful people who gave of themselves to help others. But for the Church‘s sake, and that of the human race, it‘s time to get in step with this millennium and not the one of 1,000 years ago.
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