UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
Some conservative Catholics like to dismiss almost any change in current Catholicism as “Protestant” and then point to the difficulties mainline Protestant denominations have faced trying to make the Gospels relevant to the real world of everyday Christians. Difficult yes, but clearly necessary and doable. These traditionalist Catholics then usually point to growth statistics in countries where Catholic bishops have, in effect, helped pump up birth rates by preventing accessible family planning and increased priests’ ordinations among impoverished young men with few other professional opportunities.
The criticism of Protestant reforms is mainly premised on an ignorance about what really happened and didn’t happen as a result of the Reformation, a subject few Catholics are taught. The artificially pumped statistics will deflate as family planning and educational choices are increasingly made available. This will continue to occur steadily in countries like the Philippines, where voters just approved accessible family planning despite strong Catholic hierarchical opposition. Inevitably, this trend will follow among Catholic populations in South and Latin America, Africa and Asia and has already started to happen.
For almost five centuries amidst European monarchical wars and rivalries, the Vatican has been able to postphone modernizing the papacy as Luther, Calvin and others fairly called for, given the clear conflicts between papal practices and Gospel mandates. The other European monarchs have been effectively gone for a century, the papal monarchy’s bubble has just burst and the mystical smoke is quickly dissipating. Reformation 2.0 is well underway and 117 senior celibates in red dresses cannot prevent it, as they are quickly finding out.
As Cardinals retreat behind Vatican walls, while Protestants, Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Barack Obama, appear increasingly as Luther’s and Calvin’s potential successors in helping to reform medieval Catholicism? The 2005 papal election Conclave followed the myopic media madness about Pope John Paul II’s funeral. The 2013 Conclave follows the pathetic Vatican escape of Joseph Ratzinger, now the first Shadow Pope, with Georgeous Georg, and the continuing media shock at the magnitude of the Vatican’s moral chaos. The scandals just keep on coming with no end in sight, one more troubling than the next.
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