ROME
Commonweal – Letter from Rome
By Robert Mickens
July 31, 2017
Some five years ago I was invited to speak at the City Club of Cleveland, Ohio.
“Since 1912, the City Club has served as one of the (United States’) oldest, non-partisan and continuously operating free speech forums,” says the organization’s website.
The topic of my talk was the Vatican implosion and, as a result, the long and gradual collapse of the Catholic Church’s monarchical structure of governance and ministry.
I argued that as the last absolute monarchy in the West (and most anywhere else in the world), the organization of the Roman Church has become an anachronism. It made sense when monarchies were a fundamental feature of human society. But no longer.
This outdated model of the Catholic Church’s structure no longer incarnates the reality of the lived experience of believers, the staggering majority of whom live in societies that are becoming more and more, and to varying degrees, participatory and representative democracies.
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.