I’m not a catholic, but I disagree with CNN and all these people saying that the church needs modernize and reform.
If you want a religion to be appealing, the last thing you want to do is demistify it. The Catholic Church did this in the 60’s in what people call Vatican 2.0 and it has been a disaster. Things were much better when the priests only spoke Latin at masses and nobody had any idea what they were talking about. They basically took away the curtain from the Wizard of Oz and people lost their crazy sense of idolation. Reality TV has since taken over for that.
Religions work, from a business perspective, when you’ve foster a pretty nutty strong right wing belief in your dogma. Look at the religions kicking ass at the moment: Islam, Mormanism, Evangelic protestants. What do they have in common with them? Not liberalizing. Radicalizing. Catholicism needs to get people to get their crazy on. The only place where I see them doing that well still is in S. America. I wasn’t surprised at all by this choice. S. America is the most christian place I’ve ever seen.
Go Buddhist. No one says you have to worship a certain person, do a certain thing on a certain day, or gives you a list to follow or condemn you to a bad place of eternal torture.
Find your inner peace, and be in harmony with life as it is.
I think CT has a point, I think to some extent religions retain their power by being inaccessible, furthermore, a vibrant institution needs the support of lots of young believers. If they wanted to be accessible…that fight happened a few hundred years ago.
If you believe that the gospel is Truth, then you shouldn’t try to modernize it, unless you somehow believe that Truth changes upon the American Left’s whims. Then again, to be fair, I don’t get the Catholic Church’s obsession with contraception at all, I understand their opposition, but to fixate on this to the detriment of everything else seems ridiculous.
Well, I think encouraging contreception in your religious community is a terrible idea because life is a numbers game. The Catholic Church used to have 2 billion catholics and it is shrinking. You want MORE not LESS.
Islam is growing. Mormons are growing. Both are all about having lots of kids and even have polygamy in their religious doctrines although Mormons are separating themselves from this. That’s smart.
What Catholics should do is encourage contreception in other religious communities.
Very droll, but I don’t think they’ll be able to breed themselves a bigger congregation. Maybe modernizing and embracing the now would actually attract members from developed nations. Or go with the whole dogmatic sky wizard approach and rule Africa.
Why not? Hindus, Muslims, and Mormons are doing a great job at just that. The problem with the Cathlics is that they don’t radicalize people enough anymore. They don’t make people tremble before their power.
I was at the Vatican this weekend, actually, and I got to say that it’s an impressively large and imposing place. A fewhundred years ago you would have looked at this and been in awe of it: it’s power, its size, its greatness. You’d want to join and be a part of it.
Now people just laugh at them.
Try and make a joke about an Islamic group? See what happens. These guys BELIEVE. I mean BELIEVE BELIEVE. As in, happily blow up their own family in order to prove a point and defend their beliefs BELIEVE.
You don’t get that level of devotion by throwing out all your rules, liberalizing, and electing a gay, black female Pope just because CNN and Anderson Upthepooper told you to do so. You get that by encouraing right wing nuttiness like Opus Dei, Evangelicals or Jihadis.
Ironically, despite its reputation, the Catholic Church is very liberal on every single issue, except for marriage and abortion. In everything else it sides with the Left.
^ Which is why, I postulate, that its dying. They need to attract the right wing crazie and zealots, not try to impress Anderson Cooper and the rest of the people who don’t believe in relgion and never will, with how left wing, diverse, and inclusive they are.
radicalizing cannot be the official policy obviously, so it is difficult to execute when you have a central figure such as the pope - too much political risk. radicalization can be achieved by decentralizing the power in the catholic church and giving more freedom to priests and bishops, which is in the opposite direction of the historical trends in the church it seems
John Paul I (the guy directly before John Paul II) died after a month in office. But to be fair, Benedict was pope for almost eight years. If he was President of the US, he would have been forced to retire.
This church thing is like the ultimate fraternity. It’s a club of white men who accessorize with weird symbols and practice archaic rituals. I’m sure there is a strict heirarchy of members - probably with the oldest people being more senior. Maybe it’s just proper to them to not have a younger guy leapfrog the old guys.
I’m not advocating for a 35 year old. More along the lines of a 60 year old who can stay a generation like John Paul II did. Having a transitory Pope is not the ideal situation.
It is if you are the old guard and you want to essentially punt the ball rather than do anything to change it.
The situation sounds a bit like the end of the Soviet Union. The soviet premier just kept getting older and older and older as the old school revolutionary bolsheviks wanted to have one of their guy in power. Meanwhile the SU just got worse and worse and headed towards collapse.
Finally, when they couldn’t find anyone old enough to be part of that group after Brezhnev died, it made way for reformers like Gorbachev. And poof, COLLAPSE!
Eyeballing it, it looks like most popes have ruled for about 10 years. If you want rotation in power, that’s not such a bad precedent to have. The challenge is that old people tend not to have new ideas (or rather, the ones that do, have been weeded out by the time they are old). So you will tend to have more continuity than change. But Catholicism seems to be fairly comfortable with continuity.
Well, you have to look at the pool of candidates. There are only 5 current Cardinals who are in their 50’s, and two of them are 59. There are only 38 Cardinals in their 60’s, and nearly half of them are 68 or 69. Start eliminating guys for whatever reasons they eliminate guys, and that doesn’t really leave many “young” candidates.
The people who elect the pope have different ideologies though. They will elect a pope who shares those politics. So even if they rotate among 75-year-old popes, things will still change. Pretty sure not all power is concentrated in the pope either - the other guys still have influence. Just like Obama is the President, but it’s not like he can do whatever he wants.
Did some reading up on the dude last night. I’ll recant my previous statement, I don’t think it’s a huge step backwards. I didn’t know he was a jesuit. As far as Catholics go, they’re good guys…very smart. I also like the guy’s style. Very humble.
I’ll never really agree with their policies so everything they preach seems radical to me. But as far as catholics go this guy seems pretty cool.
I found this while looking up a reference to Pope Joan - a supposedly female pope that was tossed out. The wikipedia entry has a medieval drawing of her with a monk who looks suspiciously like a peeping Tom (or possibly a Doubting Thomas).
Interestingly, priests have had to be celibate for less than 1/2 of of the Catholic Church’s history. The celibacy rules were primarily instituted to ensure that priests could not have legitimate children and thus be tempted to pass church property and offices to their children. It actually had little to do with attitudes about sex-as-sin, though of course that helped.
EDIT: Wow, priestly celibacy has a much longer history… it seems that before the 10th century, priests were prohibited from marrying through various decrees but often these were simply ignored (pretty much the same before as afterwards): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerical_celibacy
Yeah, its always for economic reasons and not for “religious” reasons that wacky rules get drawn up. Remember the debate I had with the Indians on this forum where I suggested that Indians are vegitarians because it made economic sense to be veg and not because of some ancient religious decree? But after the rules have been around a 1000 years nobody really understands the original intention of the rule.
Now the whole celibacy thing makes perfect sense to me. Its perfectly logical. You get no hereditary rule in the church and they are not incentiviized to squander church property in order to benefit their family.