WHY I AM A RENEGADE IRISH ROMAN CATHOLIC

WHY I AM A RENEGADE IRISH ROMAN CATHOLIC

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 11, 2009

The late eighteenth century clergyman John Newton once said, “Religion is the best armor in the world, but the worse cloak.” That has proven the case for me. I once wore my Irish Roman Catholicism like a bulletproof vest only to find it to be a porous garment of little protection. Goethe’s counsel was more germane. “True religion,” he noted, “teaches us to reverence what is under us, to recognize humility, poverty, wretchedness, suffering, and death, as things divine.” In my long life, I have found that divinity through experience.

To the casual observer the Roman Catholic Church, an institution that claims a 2,000-year heritage back to the time of Christ, there is an air of omniscience and confidence in the conduct of the affairs of the church, unshakeable, unimpeachable. Wasn’t the Roman Catholic Church the true church and the only true church established by Jesus Christ?

When I was a boy, the question was academic, even absurd, in the eyes of the average Catholic. Of course, it was the only true church, what a question!

The human fallibility of ecclesiastical thinking had not trickled down to my level. I was to believe papal encyclicals promulgated by His Holiness the Pope regarding doctrines of faith and morals without question. They were the irrefutable and absolute truth.

Yet, these edicts, I was to learn, were prepared like presidential proclamations, the work of many minds of researchers and writers at the behest of the pope, and with the bias of that cadre of priestly authority, and blessed by His Holiness. This will be of course denied although the power behind the words gives the words power or not.

In any case in my day, it was not necessary for the laity to bother its head about such things as theology, philosophy and history, as they were considered well beyond its purview. Papal encyclicals were carefully packaged for mass consumption no questions asked. The church had done the heavy lifting now the laity need only comply.

This was so because the authority and paternalism of the church hierarchy, which has evolved and solidified over the centuries, has never actually left the High Middle Ages.

Considering this is the twenty-first century, there is a time and intellectual warp that has failed to be bridged. If anything, it has widened, at least for this renegade Catholic. Spoon fed catechetical truisms are no longer intellectually congruent with or consistent with my life experiences. I sense that I'm not alone, as the laity needs more than pomp and circumstance.

Despite the reassurances of German sociologist Max Weber that Roman Catholicism is too bureaucratic and too massive to fail, it is becoming increasingly irrelevant, not only in my eyes but to many others according to such statistics as church attendance.

Basic considerations in post modern society, which seem beyond the radar of the Church are such considerations as:

(1) Full membership for women, including being allowed to become priests;

(2) Assuming a non-judgmental approach to homosexual Catholics;

(3) Supporting birth control and contraceptive education for all, not only Third World societies suffering from AIDS and unwanted births;

(4) Providing an alternative to abortion;

(5) Giving financial control and executive authority to the laity for the management of diocesan operations;

(6) Sponsoring presentation training so that priests become better speakers and communicators;

(7) Taking more draconian measures to ensure better handling of sexual and psychological misconduct of priests;

(8) Screening men more carefully who claim to have vocations to become priests;

(9) Allowing priests to marry;

(10) Discouraging men who prefer being celibate to enter the priesthood;

(11) Finding ways to preserve historic churches and schools instead of razing them to generate legal fees to defend wayward priests;

(12) Improving the cultural integration with Protestantism and Judaism;

(13) Extending a genuine hand to other religions such as Islamism, Hinduism and Buddhism;

(14) Finding ways to curb corruption and slander in the Church operations;

(15) Drawing in the reins on powerful subcultures within the church, which become a law unto themselves;

(16) Rejecting the shroud of secrecy as the modus operandi of church intrigue.

(17) Abrogating the dictum of papal infallibility.

This would be a start.

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Pope John XIII, who attempted to create a dialogue with other religions, took a step in the right direction with the Second Vatican Council (1962 – 1965).

He was succeeded by Pope Paul VI, who managed to undue most of the good John XIII had done. Then Paul VI added insult to injury with his “Humanae vitae” (“Of human life”) encyclical, which declared that every act of sexual intercourse within marriage must be open to the transmission of life. This alienated many practicing Catholics, who simply ignored the edict while still receiving Holy Communion.

His “Sacerdotalis caelibatus” (“Priestly celibacy”), reaffirming the tradition of obligatory celibacy for Roman Catholic priests, failed to diminish the mounting problems of priestly sexual conduct. These encyclicals were like pouring gasoline on an already raging fire.

The whims and fancies of popes throughout history have made Catholic dogma a patch quilt of incongruous pieces many of which, like the two mentioned here, are between the absurd and ridiculous.

The role of His Holiness has changed, as the world has changed, but the pomp and circumstance go on as if this medieval institution is impervious to modernism, and knows better than most what should be the morality of the time.

The result is that in the United States church attendance of Catholics, who once attended Sunday Mass every week, has dropped off precipitously from more than 80 percent to less than 50 percent in 2009.

The core beliefs, attitudes, habits and practices of Roman Catholicism are consistent with Christianity as practiced by other Christian faiths, but these consistencies have been obfuscated by a resolute determination by the Church to impose its will even if it is totally contrary to the needs, experiences or concerns of the man and woman in the pew.

Some forty years ago, I lost my faith on a green island in a black sea called South Africa. I was a young man with a wife and four small children, engaged in forming a new company for my American employer, in a climate of apartheid, or separate development of the races. It was so close to slavery, which I only knew through books, that I felt a combination of guilt and deja vu for the experience.

It was a time when the American Civil Rights Movement was underway, while Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Attorney General Robert Kennedy were being assassinated.

It was a time when American Olympic Champions of color at the Summer Olympics in Mexico raised their black gloves in defiance of the America Flag that symbolized their freedom and opportunity to achieve their greatness.

It was also a time when the "Chicago Seven" was disrupting the Democratic Nominating Convention, while similar shenanigans were going on in Miami at the Republic Convention.

It was 1968 and I was lost in my own wilderness thousands of miles away.

It was in that time warp that I tried to make sense of my life, career, religion and country, and turned to my Church to provide me with the rationale for coping, especially being in the bosom of hate and hostility that was South Africa at the time. Far away, my own country seemingly was having a nervous breakdown.

I am writing a novel (A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA) about that time and experience to leave some testimony of how I became estranged from my Church, and the struggle I have had in the subsequent years to find my way back to self-identity and purpose, but sadly, alone, without my Church. Stay tuned.

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