FOLLY OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

FOLLY OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 10, 2008

“The Christian religion on the whole seems to have some kinship with folly, while it has none at all with wisdom. If you want proof of this, observe first that children, old people, women, and fools take more delight than anyone else in holy and religious things; and that they are therefore ever nearest the altars, led no doubt solely by instinct.”

Desiderius Erasmus (1466 – 1536), The Praise of Folly (Hendricks House 1946), p. 127.


Writer Comment:

(Reference: “Perplexing Dilemma.” This piece looked at the prudence of a community wise in forestalling the flooding waters of the Mississippi River, but foolish in not preserving its ancient landmarks.)

I do not profess knowing the history of Clinton, Iowa's Catholic churches since I knew nothing of them until starting to St. Mary's school in third grade.

You made reference to a number of matters to which I hold some knowledge. For example, Mount St. Clare Academy was merged with St. Mary's to become Mater Dei High School the year my son, who was going to Mount St. Clare Academy, was to be a senior. He finished instead at Clinton High School, a good choice at the time. Mount St. Clare College is now Ashford University and flourishing.

Sacred Heart is not on the chopping block as you suggest. St. Ireneaus has been defrocked as a church. St. Patrick's church has indeed been razed, and the site sold. The city council would not approve the site for lower income housing as suggested by the church.

I have been a contributor to the new church, which will replace all these old churches, and will celebrate when it is opened. I have not, nor will I contribute a single dime for costly repairs to run down buildings.

Take care, God bless.

George

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Dr. Fisher Responds:

George,

Thanks for your reflections. Artifacts of history are worth preserving. They are palpable evidence of a community's character.

The American Catholic Church, in this case the Archdiocese of Davenport, Iowa, has dangled, drifted, and declined going along to get along and now is deep in its own dodo.

Catholics have left the Church in droves across the nation because of its failure to maintain the church as a living, breathing, and relevant institution. I have written elsewhere:

"The Vatican is some forty hectares of property and the most powerful state on earth. It is an absolutist medieval monarchy, a throne bolstered by a religion that has become little more than a show of televised papal visits, but bottom line, a business."

Nor am I a historian but have read deeply on Roman Catholicism as it has permeated my most formative years. Like it or not, I am a Catholic thinker and Catholic writer. It is my limitations and the boundaries of my perspective.

I see the elephant of life from this lone vantage point. The Roman Church has had a polka dot history, often losing its way, and seldom rises far above the baser instincts of the human experience.

Stated another way, the Church has seldom allowed its spiritual calling to get in the way of its material aspirations.

It is for that reason I share little of your optimism that Church properties in Clinton will survive the selling block. Church authorities are primarily bean counters.

Only today I read that the Vatican ran $13 million in the red in 2007, blaming it on the weak American dollar against the Euro.

That may not seem like startling news, but it is. The church has usually had a comfortable cash flow. What is the shortfall -- the tourist business? You would think we were discussing Disney World.

That is the state of religion in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular. Wasn't it Jesus that tossed the moneychangers out of the temple?

It is apparent that the Church agrees with you that these artifacts "are run down buildings too costly to maintain," failing to see beyond the material boundaries.

Imagine an institution with scores of structures of impressive architecture well over a hundred years old in a small community such as Clinton being treated as so much worn out brick and mortar. This would never happen in Europe.

But as Vance Packard wrote in The Waste Makers (1964):

"Americans cannot stand anything that has a little age on it, homes, furniture, cars, homes, or other people, places or things."

We build our lives on disposable income and disposable possessions, and disposable relationships, but never more so than now. Impermanence has become a lifestyle.

My beat is the complex organization. I am physician to that territory, and I have seen the many sins the church has committed that has literally cut the spirit out of the Church, and with it the devotion of tens of millions of souls.

Ashford University may be quite successful, but it is no longer a Catholic institution sustaining the Catholic culture to which many have benefited. It has created its own secular culture and that is a protean factor to its success.

The culture of Mount St. Clare was disposed of as a real estate deal, which is my point.

When the Bishop of Davenport dissolved St. Mary’s and Mount St. Clare, and arbitrarily created a synthetic hybrid of the two, he did what we say in OD, “the clash of cultures has killed them both.”

St. Mary’s and Mount St. Clare were two different cultures with two different teaching orders (Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Sisters of St. Francis), both Catholic orders, but with widely different histories, values and traditions.

Corporate America does this all the time with the same results as Mater Dei. The school has become essentially a vestige of the imagination.

The European-American Catholic Church is mainly dead, so the Church has turned to Africa, again to South America, and South East Asia to take up the slack, areas rich in population but poor in filthy lucre as Freud might put it.

Garry Wills, once a Jesuit, and now a Northwestern University adjunct professor, and prolific author, wrote in his book, PAPAL SIN: Structures of Deceit (Doubleday 2000):

"The truth, we are told, will make us free. It is time to free Catholics, lay as well as clerical, from the structures of deceit that are our subtler modern form of papal sin . . . These are the quiet sins of intellectual betrayal."

This book inspired me to write CORPORATE SIN: Leaderless Leaders & Dissonant Workers (AuthorHouse 2000).

Most recently, I wrote a long piece DANGLING, DRIFTING, DECLINING, And COLLAPSING: The New American Frontier? (Peripatetic Philosopher July 9, 2008). In that piece, I outlined my experiences that mirrored our times, structures not unlike the Church, which have become incongruent with the times and their function.

Be always well,

Jim