Christine i need to ask are you Proddy,Catholic or Orthodox,anyway thanks for the stimulating conversation before i go to Church

But then, the liberal version of the Gospel is so far from the mind of Christ and the Word of God I hardly know where to start.

Christine

With the understanding, of course, that they are read differently by millions of Orthodox and other Christians outside of Rome’s jurisdiction.

Christine

The vast majority have just given up (thinking about anything much). Young people today don’t know what those of us who experienced the excitement, the dynamism and hope that was unleashed in the Church following the Second Vatican Council are talking about. That “excitement, the dynamism and hope” is not something that is easily conveyed by words. Pell, Benedict and Co believe they can re-evangelise the Church by appealing to the appetites of a small minority in the youthful population — those the vast majority of young people classify as “odd balls”, “social misfits” or “nutters” but this side of hell freezing over they’re never going to be able to communicate with the societal mainstream.

The irony, as I and other writers/researchers keep suggesting, is that there is actually a tremendous amount of “spiritual vibrancy” in human civilisation at the moment. But the vast majority have turned elsewhere to find it. We see it in the rise of what I call “secular liturgies” — we see them at sporting events, the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics and Commonwealth Games, News Years Eve in Sydney, Australia Day celebrations in other States, and a “local dynamism” in liturgy in, say, Catholic schools (but not in parishes). Young people almost universally report in surveys of attitudes about Catholic schools that they “love the liturgies”. They can’t find anything equivalent when they leave school and in addition they find a lot of “old lifer language” that turns them off in their droves. We also see it in the extraordinary growth of published, commercial literature on what are broadly “spiritual” subjects and themes.

You, David, are an interesting character — and, if I may say so, something of an abberation. You’ve recently come wandering into Catholicism and seem magnetically attracted to a particular view or “culture” of Catholicism. It is the one shared by Benedict but it is not the one shared by the vast, vast majority who were brought up Catholic from the cradle. You seem to love a particular liturgical feel, a particular type of language (that many today find quaint), similarly for a certain type of (what do you call it?) “Christian manners”. I humbly submit, a lot of the rest of us have “moved on” from all of that. We no longer believe it leads to salvation, happiness or the peace ‘which surpasses all human understanding’ promised by Jesus Christ. We’ve given up waiting for priests or popes to provide even a semblance of leadership spiritually.

I think the stark choice the human family faces in regards to Catholicism today is between the picture broadly presented by the likes of yourself and the essayists in Joanna Bogle’s book and this search for what I label as “real Divine Truth” — what is the Spirit saying to me in my life today/how do I make the real meaningful and truthful moral choices in my life that really do lead to salvation and what Jesus Christ promised. We are disillusioned with the leadership who are unable to acknowledge the damage done by sexual abuse. We no longer believe God speaks down through some exclusive “hotline” to the Pope. He, and his predecessor were very fallible human beings driven by ego, wanting to please our mums (or the archetype models of perfection they planted in us along with their breast milk) and all the things that drive you and me. There is not “priesthood” of the “especially annointed by God”. Our Creator-God speaks not through any particular individual, including the Pope, but “through all of humanity”. The role of the priesthood — if it should survive into the future — has to be pastoral rather than dogmatic or as the “magic men” who confect Divine miracles on an altar. They have to become the facilitators of the world-wide conversation of what our Creator-God is saying “THROUGH ALL PEOPLE”. They have to re-envisage themselves as the ones who help us (the whole of humanity) discern what is of Divine Origin amidst the cacaphony thrown up by our own egos and our own fears and the white noise generated by technology and civilisation itself.

I genuinely feel sorry for people who think the likes of Joanna Bogle, Ann Widdencombe (did you see the online debate where she recently got trounced?) or by the thinking of men like Pope Benedict or your own local hero, Cardinal Pell. All they have to offer us is a “museum for the remnant”. They might have some short-term success still appealing to the under-educated masses in the Third World but if the long term trend in human civilisation is maintained within a few more decades the “vast masses in Asia” will have access to the same levels of affluence, secular education and social sophistication we take for granted in the First World and perhaps only a few generations after them the great masses of the poor and uneducated in Africa and South America will be experiencing or aspiring to it all as well. Where will the “great recruitment policies of Benedict and JPII” be then?

Cheers, Brian Coyne

I have found the evidence wanting.

Christine

I am just saying that you can often be blind to unkindness when you have general sympathy for the opinions expressed. This place is not imune to ‘unkindness’.

Brian operates by different standards. He has tried on many occasions to say what those standards are and I’ve had the of tiff with him about his ‘excesses’. But you know what your getting and you can take it or leave it.

Actually David, the “messiness” you discuss has nothing whatever to do with why the RCC is a whore rather than a mother let along mother church.

Nor do I delight in the description.

All church bodies, including my own, are full of messiness, and on any given day, I may be part of it.

So, that is not at all why I came to that conclusion, or reject the Catholic Church (to be distinguished from Catholics) as the catholic church, or even these days, as the Catholic Church.

I have made my case for why I came to that conclusion as much as I am going to on this blog.