Crash go the Steeples:
I ran into a Lebanese friend of mine at a comic book convention the other day. He has taken to attending a Unitarian Universalist Church downtown on Sundays with his girlfriend. His voice has even taken on that eager one-functioning-nostril honk that is the unmistakable sign of a man eager to move up the religious food chain in the Commonwealth.
There is a lot of dice rolling going on these days when it comes to revealed religion.
Scenes like the above are being enacted all over the Bay State even as I write this with every Mullah, Witch Doctor, or Lutheran rubbing their hands in anticipation.
Massachusetts, that final redoubt of Irish Catholic Puritanism is now governed by a feckless Mormon-itself a religion whose infrastructure resembles the corporate hierarchy at Papa Ginos.
When it comes to God everyone is on the make these days nagged by the knowledge that the Almighty may be immutable but his churches are investments-to be worried over like Genuity's common stock.
And lately the Dioceses of Boston is looking less like Augustine's City of God and more like the House of Enron.
And indeed why not? The R.C.C. (Roman Catholic Church) is falling to none too picturesque ruins. An appetite among the clergy for little boys and long term cover-ups has turned this thing of splendor into a loser on a bad streak.
It wasn't always like this.
Once this was a Viceregal Dioceses run like a empire and presided over by autocratic cardinals who could make em' and break em' 24-7. Now the whole shebang is reduced to a gothic bunker on Commonwealth Ave in Brighton, under siege by attorneys and process servers.
I've long theorized that the Former Cardinal Law, kept many of those tainted priests on the job simply because he had no adequate source of replacement clerics. The dirty truth to the R.C.C. is that vocations have been plunging over the last twenty years. "Saint John's Seminary" in Brighton (which abuts the Cardinal's residence) ordained a bare FIVE priests in 2002.
Yes that is right FIVE!
The average age of a Roman Catholic priest goes up one year, every year. This is an actuarial nightmare in the making. At their normal rate of depletion the church will simply run out of clergy within the next twenty years.
Faced with this looming disaster what did Cardinal Law do?
Did he demand an audience with the Pope to hash out a new policy?
No.
Did he convene a conference to look at the decline in vocations in a critical and objective fashion?
No.
Did he dig down deep and call for reconsideration of the harsh rules of celibacy that constrict the priesthood?
No.
And we sure as hell know he didn't propose to ordain women!
No...No to it all.
Law kept the same gang of chicken hawks on the job because they were all he had to work with.
And if the laity won't come forward to volunteer for holy orders in sufficient numbers then it's THEIR fault he had to make due with predatory sex offenders as his Ministers of the Gospel.
In short, I wonder if the Cardinal didn't conceal a kind of "anti-laitical" attitude through out this whole affair?
***
The funny thing about the local clergy-sex abuse scandal was the relative detachment of the liberals. The loudest and most insistent voices for Law's deposition as Cardinal turned out to be the Parish Council types, deeply conservative churchgoers who provide the diocesan volunteer and fundraising base.
Times are tough even for a non-practicing catholic such as myself... and if that is the case think of how bad it must be for the true blue believers.
Eventually the scandal grew to such proportions that the laws of the commonwealth AND Fox News 25 came a-knockin'!
But still Cardinal Law stonewalled' em.
Finally, a bare fifty eight priests through-out the Bay State signed a letter expressing no confidence in the Cardinal's leadership and POOF Bernard Law was gone.
The situation has to be beyond hope when even famously rigid Pope John Paul asks for your resignation.
The rumor around town has been another critical letter was circulating that had even more clerical signatures on it.
***
Now a bare ninety days after Law left town on the last helicopter out a few ultra-hardliners are whining that those fifty eight priests who went on record as asking for Law's resignation were suspicious malcontents.
George Weigel a conservative catholic columnist syndicated in "The Pilot" (the Boston Dioceses' weekly newspaper) has blasted this timorous act of resistance in no uncertain terms. Reverend Richard John Neuhaus in an article in the radical reactionary journal "First Things" has hissed the fifty-eight are part of a "subculture of infidelity".
The Pilot has been a lackluster weekly since the 80's when Cardinal Law took time out of his busy schedule to purge all the talented writers and editors. Instead, the usual toadies and sycophants were given good paying jobs on the Diocesan dime so it's to be expected that they would indulge one last blast on behalf of their former patron.
"First Things" on the other hand is an ultra-rightical chic intellectual journal of impeccably weird credentials. It is probably best known for publishing in 1996 Chuck Colson's musings over whether it was time for American Conservatives to take up arms and overthrow the U.S. Government.
It's also an article of faith among the few remaining irreconcilables in the laity that somehow a nasty cabal of homosexuals from with priesthood ousted Law and are only laying low until good times come around again. In myself have heard this imbecilic nonsense from persons of otherwise normal critical intelligence.
George Wiegel in particular being a nationally syndicated columnist remains profoundly ignorant of the antipathy Cardinal Law's behavior stirred up among local catholics of all persuasions.
Frankly, George and the Reverend Rich need to take a horse sized chill-pill. They can sit and pout and screech for the appointment of a new reactionary Cardinal who'll fire the fifty eight dissenters toot sweet. And if that somehow happens I guarantee you parishes will be closed and the local supply of clergy will be strained past the breaking point. All George, The Reverend Rich, and this notional Cardinal will have accomplished is making the laity even more sullen and angry than they are now. Remember the Dioceses doesn't have a warehouse full of priests it can deploy to fill those gaps.
Naw... them days is over.
Alas George and the Rev's petulance is a last spasm from the much harried ultra conservative wing of the faith. They had their champion, Bernard Cardinal Law, and he turned out to be a world class brute and a jackass.
The problems facing the church are much graver and more pressing than some wild hunt for dissenting prelates.
Meanwhile as George and Rich complain as the vocational crisis and the sex abuse scandal get worse and worse every day.
In the end there may be nothing left to fight over.
My white haired old mother has a saying "not to decide, is to decide".
As long as Rome elects to do nothing about the aging and declining clerical population then they are in effect opting for extinction.
That formulation alone should frame the looming debate between Rome and it's Flock.
Because someday soon all those catholic believers for lack of clergy could end up in other sects, cults, and churches. What will the Reverend Rich and George Wiegel do then?
Full immersion baptism in goose creek?
Or revive the People's Temple?
Who can say?
:)