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CounterPunch
December
13, 2002
Hail Mary, Pass
the Dutchie:
Rebranding
the US Catholic Church
by ANTHONY GANCARSKI
This much is obvious; the Catholic Church in the
US is set to hear its own Last Rites. Scripted by an indifferent
corporate media, hustled along by a federal government with every
plausible interest in strangling the Vatican into irrelevance,
the Church very well might be done even without the recent sex
scandals. The priests are old and getting older. The seminaries
are closing, never to reopen. The phrase "lapsed Catholic"
has been used as a self-descriptor by millions of disaffected
folks with liberal-arts educations. And as of 2000 less than
400 men were studying to be Jesuit priests. All that adds up
to the Holy See losing a major revenue force.
And this is as it should be. The American
Mass is a tedious affair, stripped of any spirituality through
its reliance on a curiously secular ritualism. Stand, sit down,
kneel. Sing along with the book. Maybe if you're lucky we'll
bring an acoustic guitar into the church for the choral numbers.
That is, if you don't threaten to bash the toothless pedant behind
the altar over the head with it.
It is no surprise that the priesthood
sex scandals proceeded as they did. In the heart of this Babylon
we call home, the predominant image of a Catholic clergyman is
not that of a saintly figure but of that of a self-engendered
eunuch. Pat Buchanan and others believe that Vatican II was an
unmitigated disaster for the Church; they are likely right, in
the sense that the Church exposed itself to public scrutiny when
it embraced ecumenism and eschewed time-honored traditions that
seemed to be profitable enough for Rome. To them, one might argue,
the post Vatican II church suffers a "branding problem".
I would be inclined to agree that the
operative paradigm is as simple as "Old Coke V. New Coke",
except that the problems in the Catholic Church cannot be rectified
through simply reverting to discarded practices. There has to
be a reinvention of the US Church for it to have any chance of
remaining financially viable to the Vatican. And for the church
to reinvent itself, it has to dedicate itself institutionally
to the honorable work of directly challenging the US government.
For that challenge to work, there has
to be a shift in the way the Church relates to its members. Though
one appreciates the value of tradition, the fact is that the
Catholic Church has a commitment to internal democracy worthy
of the Trilateral Commission, and it is hard to miss the connection
between the stifled intellectual climate and the dying institution.
Most symbolic of the current malaise in the US church is the
communion wafer itself. A dry saucer, cardboard in taste and
texture, denuded of any mystery. The Church might consider co-opting
a Rastafarian position and adopting marijuana as a sacrament.
Catholics could cling to that subliminal state of elevation,
and perhaps come to understand why Christ overturned the tables
in the temple and devoted so much action to exposing "strong
central government" as a base fraud. By understanding those
mysteries and others, perhaps the Catholic Church as a whole
can finally live up to the radicalism and the commitment to enlightenment
embodied by Christ Himself.
Anthony Gancarski makes his base in Spokane, Washington. Emails
are accepted at Anthony.Gancarski@attbi.com.
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