UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
by Bill Tammeus on Jul. 11, 2012 A small c catholic
Like the oblivious frog sitting in the pot of water that’s slowly coming to a boil, we often find it almost impossible to discern even historic changes while they’re happening.
And sometimes when we guess at seismic shifts that may be occurring, we’re embarrassingly wrong: Thomas Watson, IBM chairman in 1943, is (maybe falsely) reported to have said then: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
So I acknowledge I could be way off-base here. But from my Protestant, outside-Catholicism perspective, it looks as if the current hierarchical institutional expression of the Catholic church is dying and will be essentially gone in a few generations — certainly in the U.S. Whether another form of the church will survive is unknowable.
As educator Richard Giannone correctly notes in his new memoir, Hidden, “The history of Christianity as an organization has been a history of disagreeable confrontations with new forces at work in era after era. The church (his reference is to the Catholic church) is either unable, or unwilling, or scared to deal with the evolving society in which it lives and claims, often loudly, to serve.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.