Martin LeFevre: The Last Pope? Part Two

The church that Jesus supposedly formed by telling his disciple Peter, “thou art Peter, and upon this rock I build my church,” is rife with pedophiliac priests, cover-up cardinals, and a pusillanimous pope.

I wonder what Jesus would say if he were here today, watching the wretched status quo of the church formed in his name unravel?

I don’t know, but priests molesting children, and cardinals and popes covering it up are the last straws. The Roman Catholic Church has lost whatever claim it had to spirituality and moral leadership. It is finished.

The Catholic Church may stumble on for some decades, but as a shell of the shell it once was, and a shill for the gullible, in Africa and elsewhere. So what is the meaning of the dead end of a 2000-year institution and tradition for the West, and the world?

The Catholic Church is the most organized of organized religions. Because of that fact it’s been the most wealthy and powerful of Christian religions.

The continuity of popes for 2000 years, with some hiccups along the way, is the supposed rock upon which Catholicism is built. Of course papal succession is actually the iron chain of an institution that has had little to do with spirituality, an institution grown encrusted by tradition, corruption, and time.

Why does anyone think that this altar to wealth and power and control, the Roman Catholic Church, has anything to do with spirituality anymore?

I mark the moment I ceased being a Catholic in the 7th grade, well before I made the conscious decision to leave the Church. It was the year John F. Kennedy was killed, and our class had a young nun who displayed such grace and compassion that day that it remains with me to this one.

At that time that Mass was in Latin, and we went every morning before school. We also went on Sundays, it being a mortal sin to miss that day, at a time when mortal sin meant hellfire forever. Not that there was any difference to 7th graders. We didn’t have any more choice in going to Mass before classes than we did on Sundays.

Catholics in those days had even stranger ideas than they do now. You couldn’t take communion—the wafer that became, through the priest’s blessing, the literal “body of Christ,” if you had eaten that day. So parents sent their kids off to school on empty stomachs, and the nuns marched us off to church. Then they marched us back to the cafeteria after we took communion at the end of the Mass.

I served Mass on the morning in question with a boy in my class. The girls lined up on his side to take communion while I stood on the other side of the priest, with the boys. Our job was to hold a golden plate under the chins of the recipients to catch the precious wafer should one fall.

My friend, unbeknownst to me, was flirting with the girls in his line. A couple hours later, while walking down the hall with another friend who looked something like the boy I served Mass with, Sister Clementia, the terror of the school and teacher of the poor bastards in the other 7th grade class, accosted us.

She began beating my friend about the head and face, screaming something about the Mass that morning. It took me some seconds to figure out that she was smacking this kid because she thought he was the one I served Mass with, the altar boy who was committing the more than mortal sin of flirting with the girls during communion.

When I finally got through to Sister Clementia, she said nothing. She simply turned on her heels and walked away. I sometimes wonder how that experience scarred my friend, whether it taught him well or poorly about the inherent unfairness of life. But it was nothing next to what an unknown number of priests around the world have done to the spirits of untold thousands of boys and girls.

Many people say that you can’t judge the entire Church by a few bad apples of priests and nuns. A few bad apples my ass. The institution of the Roman Catholic Church is what gave pedophiliacs the means and opportunity (maybe even the motive) to prey on children, and then moved them from one parish to another when parents found out what their trusted spiritual advisor, the man who supposedly stood in for Jesus, did to their children.

If the Catholic Church was a secular institution, it would be sued out of existence, stripped of its property, money, and material goods, the proceeds given to the thousands upon thousands of children and adults that it allowed to be violated. That wouldn’t heal the wounds, but perhaps it would give the victims the time and impetus to find forgiveness in their hearts, which was, ironically, the central precept of Jesus’ teachings.

As it is we have the spectacle of a dour and decaying Pope Benedict the Sixteenth chastising Irish bishops for half a century of covering up child abuse by the priests in that country. This despite the fact that in 2001 Vatican Cardinal Ratzinger, in the office of the Inquisitor, instructed all bishops worldwide to report all cases of abuse to his office, and keep church investigations secret, under threat of excommunication.

Ratzinger has stooped so low as to cite Jesus' teaching asking those without sin to cast the first stone toward an adulterer. "While acknowledging her sin, he does not condemn her, but urges her to sin no more," Benedict blithely told English-speaking pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square.

Given that the issue is pedophilia by the Church’s male-only club of priests (15,000 allegations in Ireland alone), that is an egregious example of sexism by this anachronistic pope.

More to the point, Jesus was speaking to individuals, not about institutions. He was telling people not to judge others, not issuing a pass for institutions, much less supposedly Christ’s church on earth, to rationalize evil. Indeed, religious institutions that enabled and covered-up wrongdoing received Jesus’ fury, as in the Temple in Jerusalem.

The entire edifice of Christianity is built on the falsehood that Jesus succeeded in his mission. But Jesus failed, and the Roman Catholic Church is proof of it.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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