CT Blue

Having long since joined the ranks of the non-believers, I have no personal stake in any particular religious faith, but I must confess that, having had Catholicism pounded in to me at an early age, I still feel a bit of a preference for the old faith. Perhaps the way I feel is a bit like many ex-Republicans feel about the party that has forced their departure.

For it appears that the Catholic Church, like the Republicans,has decided that it’s future is in its base, and only in its base. The Church that requires each of its adherents to agree on the unknowable: the moment of the beginning of life, is not so exacting when it comes to unquestioned historical fact:

Pope Benedict XVI, reaching out to the far-right of the Roman Catholic Church, revoked the excommunications of four schismatic bishops on Saturday, including one whose comments denying the Holocaust have provoked outrage.

The decision provided fresh fuel for critics who charge that Benedict’s four-year-old papacy has increasingly moved in line with traditionalists who are hostile to the sweeping reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s that sought to create a more modern and open church.

A theologian who has grappled with the church’s diminished status in a secular world, Benedict has sought to foster a more ardent, if smaller, church over one with looser faith.

…

The four reinstated men are members of the Society of St. Pius X, which was founded by a French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, in 1970 as a protest against the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, also called Vatican II. Archbishop Lefebvre made the men bishops in unsanctioned consecrations in Switzerland in 1988, prompting the immediate excommunication of all five by Pope John Paul II.

Another “bishop” that the Pope has re-admitted to the faith believes that the event of 9/11 were masterminded by the federal government. It should be noted, too, that the Pope apparently reached out to these people; they did not come crawling back.

There is, I think, a parallel here with the Republican party. For years it catered to an ever shrinking base. Its successes masked the underlying dynamic of its shrinking appeal beyond the base. It took a while for the reality of the modern Republican party to shrink in for its old adherents, but when it did, they melted away, leaving it exposed as a regional party of dead enders. It will come back, but only when it finds a way to appeal beyond the crazy people to whom it has hitched its wagon.

The Catholic Church has been around a lot longer than the Republican party, but nothing lasts forever. After all, the religion of Zeus and Jove existed at least as long. It has nearly died in Europe, and it hangs on in America much like the Republican party hung on here in the Northeast for a while-by the willingness of its hereditary adherents to overlook its faults and excesses. But, as with the Republicans, the Church’s insistence on intolerance and rigidity in an increasingly tolerant America will eventually lead to its collapse. The Catholic Church is, in some ways, more vulnerable than the Republicans. Republicans can count on a financial base of support from their religious nuts and their corporate sponsors. The Church, having lost all secular power, and any influence in Europe, relies on American Catholics for its financial lifeline. Long before they formally leave the Church, they will start withdrawing financial support. A future Pope will have to decide whether dogma or money is more important. My own experience leads me predict that the financial issues will prevail. If not, then there will come a time, at least in this country, when American Catholics will decide that they have had enough, and Benedict, or his successor, will surely get the smaller, if more ardent, Church he is seeking.