Must Read–A Fork in the Road
The following must-read essay was written by Dr. James Jenkins, a clinical psychologist from the San Francisco Bay area.
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A Fork in the Road
Wednesday, 21 October 2009, I learned from the NY Times of the announcement in Rome by William Cardinal Levada, the Vatican’s chief doctrinal watchdog, that the Roman Catholic Church was taking steps to ease the way, more likely grease the skids, for conservative, reactionary Anglican bishops and priests to be fully accepted into the Catholic communion.
There are continuing reports out of the Vatican that there is a lot of “inside-Roman-baseball” that underlies much of this story. Apparently, both Anglicans and Roman officials charged with shepherding “ecumenical dialogue” were caught off-guard and surprised by this audacious announcement emanating from Levada’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Holy Office of the Inquisition).
My own speculation is that this whole incident demonstrates the preference of Benedict XVI’s papacy for exercising his absolute power through his most favored bureaucracy, staffed and stacked with his most trusted operatives, which he fashioned to his own will over two decades as its leader before becoming pope. We have to presume that Benedict is no fan of collegiality.
For me personally, this moment seems more like the reflection poet Robert Frost offers in his poem, “The Road Not Taken.” Spiritually, religiously, and culturally, “Two roads diverged in a wood…”
After years of revelations of the exploitation of children by sexually rapacious clerics, and the moral betrayal of supposed shepherd-bishops, shell-shocked Catholics are now treated to the spectacle of Vatican politicians, Benedict chief among them, of trying to cherry-pick the low hanging fruit off the Anglican branch of the vine.
I can almost hear the Anglicans, and their fellow American Episcopalians, heaving a giant sigh of relief that finally someone is willing to take their embarrassing problems off their hands.
How politically opportunistic! This is so rich, so Vatican! The Vatican apparently hopes to cannibalize Anglican misogynistic and homophobic misfits in order to prop up their own dead-end ideology and failed pastoral leadership of the past forty years? Where is the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in that?
Is this political ploy the fruit of Benedict’s chosen strategy to reclaim the spiritual heart of an alienated Western Europe and North America? These democratic societies are the very ones the Vatican considers in the throes of “moral relativism” and, by the Vatican’s repeated words and actions over the years, have wished again and again consigned to the historical ash heap.
This comes in the context of other Vatican shenanigans. The Vatican is now in the midst of an “investigation” of American religious women, who after making decisive contributions to the cultural and economic development of Catholics in the United States, are now aging and dwindling in numbers.
There are not a few of us Catholics who smell a clerical rat. I suspect that the true motivation for this investigation of American Catholic sisters is not to fathom the decline of religious life in American society. On the contrary, the Vatican seems to more likely to positioning themselves to pick the carcass of the sisters, who have limited but substantial financial and property holdings, in these days of diminishing and depleted church treasuries.
I’m sorry, but I can’t think of any other motive for the clerics but power and greed. They want to be the beneficiaries when these American nuns are no longer able to offer any dissent, or cause trouble by educating the Catholic masses about their individual dignity and independent moral conscience – not highly valued principle by our Vatican clerical overlords.
I digress.
Let those who want to cling to Roman ways and traditions, continue to do so. I have to admit that I consider this choice a dead-end. The signs of the times are all around us, and have been for a long time: The clerical dominated Catholic Church is passing away.
The child sexual abuse scandal ripped away any pretense of a healthy, vibrant community led by their celibate priests. Laid bare was the morally bankrupt and corrupt leadership of bishops and priests complicit in the rape and sodomy of children. The full scope of the clerics’ financial chicanery and fraud has been assiduously repressed and has yet to be fully disclosed.
In a shocking reversal of the gospel, our shepherds now aided and abetted the wolves preying on the most vulnerable of the sheep, our children. The betrayal, the shame, the humiliation will be with Catholics for many, many decades.
Millions of Americans no longer are even willing to call themselves Catholic, let alone attend or even associate with the church. Priests, most of whom are our friends and confessors, are dying off with fewer and fewer quality replacements. Parishes and schools are being sold off, many times to easy the financial hit from over $2 billion in settlements from the sex abuse scandal.
The appropriate response of American Catholics, who seek a reformed and renewed Christian community, rooted in our own cultural and historical traditions, should be to declare our American Catholic Independence.
We American Catholics should throw off “Old World,” Vatican religious and spiritual hegemony. Like the ancient Eastern or Oriental rites of the church, we should establish our own American Catholic Rite and be done with it.
The Roman rite can remain a home for those who still cling to that clerical worldview. An all male celibate, hierarchical priesthood will most likely continue. The church over the centuries has always managed to suffer on and endure. The Vatican and pope could still function as a unifying force for Christianity maybe without the stifling need for absolute control. But this time, just maybe, in a more humble manifestation.
This new rite would reflect American democratic traditions and individual freedoms, our unique indigenous culture. The new American rite could be a church where the PEOPLE DECIDE about our liturgy and prayer, how we manage and administer our resources, whom we ordain, how we designate our leadership. Anything less, it shouldn’t survive.
The American rite will only give expression to a distinct cultural identity and spiritual integrity. It will be uniquely suited to pass on in the American cultural context the values of the gospel, the practice of the Beatitudes and corporal works of mercy, the singular vision of Jesus as the Prince of Peace.
Taking a page out of the Vatican playbook, American Catholics should ask the Episcopalians for help and assistance in establishing and organizing our new rite. Most American Catholics would be surprised to learn how much the Episcopalians, while not perfect, already model the church we seek. We will need guidance in forming our governance, selecting men and women for our priesthood, and establishing a new pastoral identity.
I am presuming that the Roman church will not be very generous in sharing the resources and infrastructure of the present American church with this new endeavor of a new American rite. With some striking out to find their own way, the clerics most likely will be hurt and feel abandoned especially when so many indicators foretell a bleak future.
Yet, we will need places to meet for worship and prayer, places to educate and form our children. American Catholics, if we are to survive let alone endure, will have to begin from scratch.
Like the traveler in Frost’s poem, American Catholics have a decision which path to pursue: Do we stay with the Romans stuck in an alienating reality? Or, do we strike out on our own fulfilling the best promise of Vatican II.
An inexorable evolution toward a Peoples’ Church has already begun. The evidence has been with us for a very long time. It may take us decades, whole lifetimes, but we must begin this journey now. We must help this new Light burn brighter. Frost’s ending stanza can only give us hope:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
12 Responses to “Must Read–A Fork in the Road”
October 24, 2009 at 2:37 am
A Road Less Traveled
I seek the truth and cannot find it
I hear the words and don’t believe
Who am I, here…to be so blinded
My fall from grace has transformed me
Wanting my strength and cannot have it
I’ve cursed the dark and lighted day
How shall I be the one You still love
Remembering our parted way
Just as You came alone one morning
Will You still recognize the boy
Wishing that I could have touched You
Passing unnoticed…a broken toy
Thomas
October 24, 2009 at 4:00 am
Thomas,
Truth (God) is infinite, then why does RCC try & make truth finite?
Deep with in our own souls is endless & knows no boundaries
but man made rules to harness & control breaks the spirit……why?……….
only for an elite group?……..why?…………..
what or how did the first Christians start or make their church?
Is it anything like the churches of today?
Is faith in religion more important that faith in God?
October 25, 2009 at 4:15 am
The first Christians believed in a God who would be their’s and a Christ who they would follow. They were the Church and they met among nature, in caves, along rivers, and in the home. They did not have to give explanation…they knew who they were and they knew the stories that were important enough to guide them in their lives. They did not have cannons, nor dogmas, nor laws—they were one family and called each other brother or sister…to those who were not yet one of them, they called them friend. What they held in common was elevated into a religion…and yes, they wanted to know more about God and His Son and the message. They kept the old law since many were Jewish and too…they kept rules which allowed them to know each other for who they were—followers of Christ. Nothing is more important than faith in God…nothing that comes out of the earth…nothing that comes out of the sky…and nothing which comes out of Rome.
Everything that we have read above is true. When we attain a Union of American Catholic Churches that reaches out to Christians and nonChristians and lives the gospel message of love, forgiveness, and inclusion…then we can say that we are the children of Vatican II—The Modern Church! The Church like everything else is supposed to move forward through time.
The American laity need to do everything that they can do now to protect the church women who we commonly call nuns from a hierarchy which will use guilt and dominance in order to prosper once again from the backs of women.
If the RCC were more addicted to God instead of money…how different our world would be.
October 25, 2009 at 8:51 am
That tiny little piece of scripture that has been used & abused for centuries to control women of this church should be eradicated! The way that the bible is written, and the way that it is interpreted is double standards, and the “men’ of this RCC chain of command know it.
( they take that submissive piece of scripture & run the gamut with it)
Such a imbalance in nature causes a imbalance in power.
RCC Inc. interpret & preach scripture to use for mass control to benefit for themselves not to benefit as a whole community.
They are higher up on the “spiritual ladder”, one could only surmise what kind of power is given to those whom everyone is kneeling or bowing to in lieu of Christ. What a head trip!
RCC claims its roots stem from Judaism, but Judaism doesn’t have this kind of imbalance in “gender power”.
does it?
Judaism “allows” women to have or aspire to a higher dignity such as Women Rabbi’s,
Where did the Christians run a foul on this one? & why?
It’s too bad all of the American women both laity & nuns can’t tell the Vatican hier-ranking officials to
to GO P_SS OFFFFFFFF!
and take the “I” out of this chauvinistic deem of a Christian team.
October 25, 2009 at 5:37 pm
The Christian hierarchy ran afoul when they discounted and suppressed the deconesses within their church. Their names live on through history as ordained and apostles even if they are somehow excluded from the Church which they helped to build. This is discrimination at it’s highest level to place blinders on those who follow Christ. But, why claim this nonsense as being the will of God, when it is merely the will of men who seek power and control?
Rome should not be the persecutor of its’s own. In former days, it persecuted Christians. Now, she bounds and gags herself, cuts off her people, and commits a suicide that will give no peace. The blood and memory of the saints has been desecrated. Those who abuse the children of God have maligned St. Francis, St. Anthony, St. Don Bosco, St. Francis de Sales, St. Dominic Savio, St. Vincent de Paul, St. Alphonse Ligouri, St. Bernard, St. Ignatius, and many more. The very saints held in esteem by the Church have tasted the shame of their progeny’s sin.
Yes, the fork in the road has widened…so now, we must choose…and, we must choose wisely for God…which path on this road He has called us to take.
“I” is a good letter when it stands for INDEPENDENCE! Have some tea…it might refresh the memory!
October 27, 2009 at 2:59 am
There are many and their names have been suppressed just like the role of the deaconness in the Church. Rome has the Year of the Priest and these good women get no recognition. Here is one that you might want to read up on. She was a friend of St. Paul, a virgin, a proto-martyr, an ascetic, a teacher, a bride of Christ, a saint of God, and one noted to be an “Equal to the Apostles”. If it does not advance their cause…the RCC trvializes and erases some very important things from our rich history. And so, God does not forget His friends—look her up!
St. Thekla is her name!
October 27, 2009 at 3:09 pm
It isn’t God who is biased. It is the men of God who think that they are the absolute authority and that they speak for God who are biased. They are closed minded and self-serving…mind you, not all of them. They render the greatest harm to the Church and Christianity when they oppose equality of all human beings. Everything that is Christian is a part of our heritage. Everything that is Jewish is a part of Christ—he was Jewish, and not Christian…if we follow Christ…they too (the Jews) are a part of our heritage.
October 28, 2009 at 12:35 am
The music and songs of heaven are not like ours. When God created the heavens and the earth and all of that within them, is the only time that He sang. He is waiting for all of those sparks that belong to Him to return…so that He will once again have something marvelous to sing about. What He expects in the meantime is that we nurture and love one another and take care of the earth.
October 28, 2009 at 2:22 am
We are authorized by God Himself to love and to forgive each other. If one withholds their gifts, they have abandoned God who gives the same gifts back to us. When one kills the people of God by cutting them off from the others, one murders God. This is called deicide. If the world truly loved God, they would never exclude…they would find a way to get along.
And on that note…pray for peace in the world and in the Church!
October 30, 2009 at 8:41 pm
That is pretty negative thinking that the Vatican is investigating Religious orders with the intention of
positioning themselves to “pickup the carcass of the sisters, who have limited but substantial financial and property holdings, in these days of diminishing and depleted church treasuries”. That is pretty negative
thinking!
October 30, 2009 at 9:27 pm
BRAVO!!! I have been saying for over a decade that in order to survive, the American Catholic church needs to secede from the Vatican. When I heard the news that Benedict had become pope, I became physically ill because I knew what he would do to the church. I have not been a member since being raped almost nightly for two years by a vowed, religious sister, but still know that until something is done about the old boys’ club needing to control everyone by their corrupt power, the Catholic church here will not thrive. They’ve gone after innocent children and vulnerable adults, they’ve covered up and lied about it, they’re attacking (oh, I’m sorry, they just care about the “quality of life of religious sisters) religious women, and now they’re bringing in the priests from another denomination to boost their numbers. What’s left? Animal sacrifice?
October 30, 2009 at 11:33 pm
Beautifully Written!!!!!!!!