In the Closet of the Vatican

Heavens knows that hypocrisy is one of the hallmarks of the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church.  For centuries these supposedly celibate men, many seemingly bitter at the world while seeking power and perks for themselves, have preached a warped dogma on human sexuality and inflicted psychological damage on countless millions.  Now, a new book that appears to focus more on sensation than hard proof claims that 80% of the priests at the Vatican are gay.  The allegation, of course, will whip the far right elements in the Church into a frenzy and be cited as a justification for a witch hunt against gays while ignoring the heterosexual sexual escapades of non-celibate clerics. Personally, I view the Catholic Church as beyond repair and left it years ago after the sex abuse scandal exploded in Boston in early 2002. A column in the New York Times looks at the book, "In the Closet of the Vatican," and the coming circus it will likely ignite.  Here are some excerpts:

Marveling at the mysterious sanctum that his new book explores, the French journalist Frédéric Martel writes that “even in San Francisco’s Castro” there aren’t “quite as many gays.”

He’s talking about the Vatican. And he’s delivering a bombshell.

Although the book’s publishers have kept it under tight wraps, I obtained a copy in advance of its release next Thursday. It will come out in eight languages and 20 countries, under the title “Sodoma,” as in Sodom, in Western Europe and “In the Closet of the Vatican” in the United States, Britain and Canada.

It includes the claim that about 80 percent of the male Roman Catholic clergy who work at the Vatican, around the pope, are gay. It contends that the more showily homophobic a Vatican official is, the more likely he belongs to that crowd, and that the higher up the chain of command you go, the more gays you find. And not all of them are celibate. Not by a long shot.

Whatever Martel’s intent, “In the Closet of the Vatican” may be less a constructive reckoning than a stockpile of ammunition for militant right-wing Catholics who already itch to conduct a witch hunt for gay priests, many of whom are exemplary — and chaste — servants of the church. Those same Catholics oppose sensible and necessary reforms, and will point to the book’s revelations as proof that the church is already too permissive and has lost its dignity and its way. Although Martel himself is openly gay, he sensationalizes gayness by devoting his inquiry to Catholic officials who have had sex with men, not ones who have had sex with women. The promise of celibacy that priests make forbids all sexual partners, and what violates Catholic teaching isn’t just gay sex but sex outside marriage. In that context, Martel’s focus on homosexuality buys into the notion that it’s especially troubling and titillating. The sourcing of much of “In the Closet of the Vatican” is vague, and other Vatican experts told me that the 80 percent figure is neither knowable nor credible. “It’s not a scientifically based accusation — it’s an ideologically based one,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a columnist for The National Catholic Reporter who visits the Vatican frequently and has written several highly regarded books about the Roman Catholic hierarchy. “One of the problems is that Catholic bishops have never allowed any kind of research in this area. They don’t want to know how many gay priests there are.” Independent studies put the percentage of gay men among Catholic priests in the United States at 15 percent to 60 percent. It depicts different sexual subcultures, including clandestine meetings between Vatican officials and young heterosexual Muslim men in Rome who work as prostitutes. It names names, and while many belong to Vatican officials and other priests who are dead or whose sexual identities have come under public scrutiny before, Martel also lavishes considerable energy on the suggestion that Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, and other towering figures in the church are gay.

Perhaps the most vivid of the double lives under Martel’s gaze is that of Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo of Colombia, who died a little over a decade ago. According to the book, he prowled the ranks of seminarians and young priests for men to seduce and routinely hired male prostitutes, sometimes beating them up after sex. All the while he promoted the church’s teaching that all gay men are “objectively disordered” and embraced its ban on priests who are believed to have “deep-seated homosexual tendencies,” whether they act on them or not.

As David Clohessy, a longtime advocate for survivors of sexual abuse by priests, said to me on the phone a few days ago: “Many priests have a huge disincentive to report sexual misdeeds by colleagues. They know they’re vulnerable to being blackballed. It’s celibacy and the secretive, rigid, ancient all-male hierarchy that contributes to the cover-up and, therefore, more abuse.” Abuse has no sexual orientation, a fact made clear by many cases of priests having sex with girls and adult women, including nuns, whose victimization by priests was publicly acknowledged by Pope Francis for the first time early this month.

But that’s a crucial subtlety that’s too easily lost in the thicket of exclamation points in “In the Closet of the Vatican.” And more people will read the racy headlines about the book than the book itself. What they may take away is this: Catholic priests are twisted characters. And gay men are creatures of stealth and agents of deception who band together in eccentric societies with odd rituals.

I asked him if he worried about homophobes weaponizing the book. If they read it correctly, he answered, they’ll realize that rooting out gays would mean ridding the church of some of their heroes, who inveigh against homosexuality as a way of denying and camouflaging who they really are. The cardinals most accepting of gays, he said, are those who are probably straight.

Is an Overdue Reckoning Coming for the Catholic Church on Sexual Abuse?

For centuries the Roman Catholic Church has been allowed to be above the law, especially in nationals like Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Germany, but so too in America.  Politicians have deferred to Church prelates and law enforcement officials rarely dared take on the Catholic Church establishment.  This thankfully began to change in 2002 when the Boston Globe blew the lid off of the sex abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston.  Similar stories have since swept the globe, with the Church going into a free-fall in Ireland and major government investigations like that done in Australia that lead to the first criminal convictions against members of the hierarchy for their role in the cover up of crimes against children and youths.  Now, the U.S. Attorney's office in Philadelphia has announced it is launching an investigation of seven of the eight dioceses in Pennsylvania.  Meanwhile the Attorney General of the District of Columbia is launching an investigation of the Washington Archdiocese.  Since the Vatican and bishops and cardinals have failed to date to come clean and clean house, some are hoping that a long overdue reckoning is about to overtake the Church.   I was never abused by priests, but I know those who were.  The hypocrisy of the hierarchy has been stunning as has the indifference towards crimes against children and youth.  A piece in Rewire looks at what may be coming.  Here are excerpts:

I remember the moment when the gravity of the Catholic hierarchy’s long-term cover-up of rampant sexual abuse within the priestly ranks was driven home to me. It was in 2010, and I was conducting an interview for my book Good Catholics with the noted Catholic feminist theologian Mary Hunt. We were discussing her reflections regarding what had, at that point, been a decades-long adversarial relationship with the powers-that-be in the Catholic Church, dating from when Hunt was one of the leaders of an effort in the mid-1980s to assert the validity of a pro-choice position in the face of an increasingly authoritarian Vatican.

Hunt told me. “We thought we were dealing with people of good will.” But it’s what she said next that sent a chill down my spine. “What we didn’t know then was that we were up against criminal behavior—people participating in criminal behavior and ignoring criminal behavior.”

As last week’s move by the Justice Department to launch an investigation into the abuse of children and young adults by Catholic clergy (and the subsequent cover-up by bishops) makes clear, Hunt was prescient.

The news that former Washington Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had been serially abusing young men and seminarians for decades was eclipsed by the damning Pennsylvania grand jury report that detailed decades of abuse and cover-up in dioceses throughout the state. This in turn prompted the resignation of Cardinal Donald Wuerl as archbishop of Washington—Wuerl helped formulate the Church’s rules for preventing sexual abuse by priests—for his role in shuffling predator priests around the state when he was the head of the Pittsburgh diocese.

But the recently announced U.S. attorney’s investigation marks a major turning point and a potential moment of reckoning in the long-running and sordid sex abuse scandal that first burst into public view with the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” investigation in early 2002. The Justice Department investigation promises to fundamentally reshape the relationship between the U.S. Catholic Church and civil law enforcement authorities.

To date, no matter how messy the scandal became, civil authorities largely left the Church alone to clean up its own mess. While individual priests have been charged with crimes as the result of abuse, and culpable prelates like Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law were shuffled into retirement, the larger question of criminality on the part of the Church’s leadership has been off the table. It was, admittedly, an odd arrangement, with the U.S. government in effect deferring to the government of the Catholic Church, an arrangement neither codified in the Constitution nor available to any other religion.

But if this federal investigation does go forward—and it should be noted that it’s coming from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia, so it could be impeded by higher-ups in the Justice Department—it would be a landmark moment as the federal government usurps the authority that Vatican has long claimed to police its internal affairs.

And the nature of the investigation reported by the AP, which spans seven of the state’s eight dioceses, suggests just how deep such an inquiry could go. According to the Washington Post:

The subpoenas seek years of internal records, including any evidence of church personnel taking children across state lines for purposes of sexual abuse, any evidence of personnel sending sexual material about children electronically and any evidence that church officials reassigned suspected predators or used church resources to further or conceal such conduct.

[T]he prosecutors could be planning a racketeering case against Church leaders: “Human trafficking, child pornography, the Mann Act—any of these could be the underlying crimes for RICO.”

The leveling of criminal conspiracy charges against members of the Catholic hierarchy would be a stunning denouement for men who, until recently, regularly met with U.S. presidents and influenced public policy on everything from women’s access to contraception to the simmering argument about transgender identity. It would signal that after a century of acquiescence to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church as a separate political structure operating with impunity outside of the U.S. legal system, U.S. civil authorities no longer consider the Church above the law.

As Emma Green notes in The Atlantic, the scope of the investigation “will test the Catholic bishops’ stated resolve to give secular authorities full control and transparency in abuse investigations, as the moral and legal stakes of the crisis continue to grow.” This will be especially important if subpoenas seek the contents of so-called secret archives that may hold previously unreleased information about efforts to cover up the activities of abusive priests.

And despite pledges of transparency, there are indications that the Church will not surrender without a fight. Even as bishops in Pennsylvania promised to cooperate with civil authorities in the wake of the grand jury report, behind the scenes the church fought tooth-and-nail to derail a popular measure that would have created an exemption to the state’s statute of limitations for sexual abuse suits.

Now the question becomes: Will the public—both inside and outside of Pennsylvania—stand any longer for the extraordinary dispensation that has been granted for so long to an organization that has engaged in what may prove to be a decades-long criminal conspiracy?

I continue to urge Catholics sickened by the sex abuse cover ups to vote with their feet and walk away.  The Episcopal Church and Evangelical Lutheran Church offer good alternatives that are free from the thoroughly corrupt Catholic Church hierarchy. 

Catholic Theologians, Educators, and Lay Leaders Call for All U.S. Bishops to Resign

A group of 1,300 Catholic theologians, educators, parishioners, and lay leaders has released a statement on Clergy Sexual Abuse in the United States and are urging others to join in signing a petition (the petition can be signed here) demanding that ALL of the Catholic bishops in the United States resign.  Why the much stronger reaction than in the wake of the sex abuse bombshell in Boston in 2002?  Most likely because (i) most of the world now knows that the rampant sexual abuse of children and minors by Catholic clergy is a global problem, and (ii) the recently released grand jury report contains detailed information on the cover ups engaged in bishops - cover ups that involve abuse much more recent that what the Church would pretend only happened in the 1950's and 1960's. I have long maintained that only a thorough and complete house cleaning of bishops involved in cover ups would begin to scratch the surface of ending the toxic misrule of self-styled "princes of the Church." In addition, a jettisoning of the Church's 12th century dogma on human sexuality is needed.  (Well over a decade ago, the Dallas Morning News documented that roughly 2/3 of U.S. Bishops had been involved in cover ups, including Walter Sullivan, the former bishop of Richmond.) Will bishops listen to the demands of the petitioners?  I will not be holding my breath since most, I suspect, care more about power, position and perks of office far more than they care about the Gospel of Christ.  Here are highlights from the statement:

In Tuesday, August 14, 2018, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro released a comprehensive grand jury report documenting the sexual abuse of over 1,000 children by 301 priests across six Pennsylvania dioceses. The document chronicles, with nauseating clarity, seven decades of clergy sexual abuse and systematic cover-ups by bishops and others in positions of power. The report comes in the wake of last months’ revelations of decades of sexual predation by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and in the long shadow of the sexual abuse crisis in Boston and beyond.

The crimes detailed in the grand jury report evince a horror beyond expression. The report summarizes the situation thus: “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades.”

Today, we call on the Catholic Bishops of the United States to prayerfully and genuinely consider submitting to Pope Francis their collective resignation as a public act of repentance and lamentation before God and God’s People.

We urge them to follow the example of Chile’s thirty-four bishops, who resigned collectively in May of this year after revelations of widespread sexual abuse and corruption were brought to light. Through prudent discernment, Pope Francis ultimately accepted three of these thirty-four resignations. It should be noted that the active bishop-to-Catholic ratio is almost the same in Chile and the United States, and that the geographical scope of the crisis in this country appears to surpass that of Chile.

The catastrophic scale and historical magnitude of the abuse makes clear that this is not a case of “a few bad apples” but rather a radical systemic injustice manifested at every level of the Church. Systemic sin cannot be ended through individual goodwill. Its wounds are not healed through statements, internal investigations, or public relations campaigns but rather through collective accountability, transparency, and truth-telling. We are responsible for the house we live in, even if we did not build it ourselves. This is why we call on the U.S. Bishops to offer their resignations collectively, in recognition of the systemic nature of this evil.

If we are to say “never again” to this catastrophic epidemic of sexual violence within the Church, then structural change on a scale previously unimaginable is required. . . . . As a collective body, the bishops have given the faithful little indication that they recognize and take accountability for the breathtaking magnitude of the violence and deceit that has continued unabated under their leadership. Thus, we call on them to follow Christ’s example in offering to the people a willing abdication of earthly status. This is a public act of penance and sorrow, absent of which no genuine process of healing and reform can begin.

We, the undersigned, teach in Catholic schools, colleges, universities, and graduate programs. We work in parishes, retreat centers, and diocesan offices. We are parishioners, lay ecclesial ministers, liturgical musicians, catechists, pastoral care workers, youth and young adult ministers, chaplains, parish workers, community advocates, students, teachers, professors, librarians, and researchers. We are mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, sons and daughters, vowed religious. We are the baptized.

We stand in solidarity with the thousands of victims, named and unnamed, whom predatory priests, protected by the willing silence of many bishops, have raped, abused, brainwashed, traumatized, and dehumanized. We stand with those driven to alcoholism and drug addiction, to mental illness and suicide. We grieve with their families and communities.

We grieve in a different but no less profound way for our students, children, families, parents, grandparents, friends, neighbors, and all of those we love who have left or will leave the Church because they have found its leaders unworthy of trust.

Thus, we call on you, Bishops of the United States, to consider this humble and public act of penance on behalf of us all. Let it be the first of many steps toward justice, transparency, and conversion. Only then might the wrenching work of healing begin.

For those who are still Catholic I urge you to sign the petition.  The Church hierarchy will only act if confronted with overwhelming pressure. Beside signing the petition, consider (i) refraining from further financial support of the Church until real change and a house cleaning occurs - and tell you parish why you are doing so or (ii) simply walking away.  The Episcopal Church and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America provide wonderful alternatives with liturgical masses and without the utterly corrupt Church hierarchy.

Pew Research: U.S. Catholics Give Pope Francis Failing Grade on Sex Abuse Scandal

Pope Francis arriving in Chile where Church cover ups remain a hot button issue.

Many Catholics, especially in the United States, had hoped that Pope Francis would lead the Roman Catholic Church into the 21st century and mark a turning away from the reactionary policies of his predecessors, the far less than saintly John Paul II, and the "Nazi Pope", Benedict XVI.   Five years into Francis' reign, little has actually changes, especially in terms of addressing the still ongoing global sex abuse scandal - a scandal that will be further reignited once the Pennsylvania grand jury report is released.  The more or less forced resignation of Cardinal McCarrick for sex abuse - something reportedly known by many in the Church hierarchy - is adding fuel to the demands that a house-cleaning of implicated high clerics be undertaken.  Of the things fueling the exodus from the Catholic Church is the sex abuse scandal. Among the others are the Church's continued anti-gay agenda and its rejection of commonsense contraception policies.  A piece in Pew Research looks at the growing impatience with Francis' failure to clean house.  Here are excerpts:

The long-simmering Catholic Church sex abuse scandal has been back in the headlines following new allegations against Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., who resigned from the College of Cardinals last weekend. Pope Francis accepted the resignation — reportedly making McCarrick the first cardinal in church history to resign over allegations of sexual abuse. In addition, some church officials have been accused of having long known about at least some of the allegations against McCarrick.

Even before news stories about McCarrick came to light in recent weeks, U.S. Catholics were increasingly unhappy with the church’s handling of the sex abuse scandal. A January 2018 Pew Research Center survey found that just 45% of U.S. Catholics said Pope Francis is doing an “excellent” (13%) or “good” (33%) job addressing the crisis, down from 55% who said this in 2015, the last time the question was asked.

The survey also found that U.S. Catholics’ ratings of Pope Francis had become less positive on some other issues, including spreading the Catholic faith and standing up for traditional morals.

U.S. Catholics have long viewed addressing the sex abuse scandal as a particularly high priority. A survey conducted immediately after Francis’ 2013 election found that 70% said this should rank as “a top priority” for the new pope, compared with far fewer who said the same about standing up for traditional moral values (49%) and spreading the Catholic faith (39%).

Francis’ declining rating on the sex abuse scandal mirrors a pattern seen during the papacy of his immediate predecessor, Benedict XVI. By the time of Benedict’s retirement, in February 2013, just a third of American Catholics who were following the news of his resignation (33%) rated his handling of the issue as excellent or good – down from roughly half (49%) who held this view five years earlier.

Francis' problem, of course, is the entrench, power mad Vatican hierarchy which cares far more about money, power, perks of office and protecting the secrets of the many bishops and cardinals who aided and abetted predator priests or engaged in sexual misconduct themselves.

Catholic Cardinal in Australia to Stand Trial for Sex Abuse

Cardinal George Pell has been committed to stand trial on multiple
 charges related to historical sexual assault.
Photo: Jason South

While the Vatican dilly dallies, sheds crocodile tears, and fails to hold senior Catholic Church clerics responsible for the world wide sex abuse scandal wracking the Church - Australia, Guam, Pennsylvania and New York State are current centers of  the scandal - civil authorities are stepping in to fill the gap.  In Australia, civil authorities are being especially aggressive after a scathing report by a royal commission which, among other things, found the western rite requirement of priestly celibacy to be a significant factor in creating the priestly abuse phenomenon.  Now, Australian authorities are set to proceed with a criminal trial of Cardinal George Pell, the highest Catholic cleric in Australia and arguably the number two office holder after the Pope.  The Sydney Morning Herald looks at this one unheard of development.  Here are excerpts:

George Pell will be the most senior Catholic leader to face a jury after being committed to stand trial on multiple historic sexual assault charges.

In a decision that will ring loud through the Vatican and around the religious world, Australia's most senior Catholic and the man who a year ago oversaw management of the Vatican's finances was on Tuesday committed to stand trial on half the charges he faced, involving multiple accusers.

[M]agistrate Belinda Wallington . . . committed the 76-year-old on charges against multiple complainants, involving alleged sexual offending at a swimming pool in the 1970s in Ballarat, where the accused man was then working as a priest; and at St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne in 1990s, when he was the then Archbishop of Melbourne.

Asked to enter a plea, Cardinal Pell sat seated in a packed Melbourne Magistrates Court but said in a loud, clear voice: "Not guilty."

Magistrate Belinda Wallington said there was no evidence the two Ballarat accusers had colluded in their evidence.

Flanked by up to 40 police officers, Cardinal Pell arrived at the court in a white sedan just after 9am. He wore a dark coloured suit and white shirt.

The police separated the Cardinal’s path from the public as protesters arrived with laminated signs reading “every child deserves a safe and happy childhood”.

Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart released a statement saying he declined to make any comment about the decision to commit Cardinal Pell to face trial in the County Court.

 In addition, ABC News Australia has these highlights:

A number of onlookers applauded as the magistrate left the court room after delivering her 70-minute ruling.

Defence barrister Robert Richter QC said the most "vile" of the charges had been dismissed.

Cardinal Pell will face a directions hearing in the County Court tomorrow morning, when it's expected a date will be set for a trial before a jury. He is on bail and has already handed in his passport, the court heard. He is unable to leave Australia as a condition of his bail.

Today's ruling follows a month-long committal hearing in March.

Among the allegations, he is accused of sexual offending at Melbourne's St Patrick's Cathedral in the late 1990s when he was Archbishop of Melbourne.  Cardinal Pell is also accused of committing sexual offences at a Ballarat pool during the 1970s, when he was a priest in the area.

Ms Wallington told an earlier hearing she believed an accused person should be committed to stand trial unless there was a "fundamental defect" in the evidence.  "I think issues of credibility and reliability are matters for a jury, except where you get to a point where [a complainant's] credibility is effectively annihilated," she said.

As a child when I was indoctrinated by Catholic priests and nuns, I never imagined that a day would come when a "prince of the church" would be laid so low.  Sadly, given the Church hierarchy's arrogance and utter indifference to the lives of children and youths, not to mention the Vatican's refusal to punish the 1/3 or more of American bishops who protected predators, the Church's humiliation is deserved and long. long overdue.   

Debating the Crisis in Catholicism

As a former Catholic - 10 years as an altar boy (the first few when the mass was still in Latin), 4th Degree Knight of Columbus - from a family once strongly Catholic, I still watch from afar the unfolding drama of the Church wracked by a never ending sex abuse scandal (dioceses in New York and Pennsylvania are the center of the storm at the moment in America, but the problem remains global) and the effort of "conservatives" to cling to a 12th century understanding of sexuality.  Like many former Catholics, the only times I now darken a Catholic church door is for a wedding or a funeral.  The few in my family who are still churchgoers have now opted for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America ("ELCA") which offers a Catholic liturgy without all the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church.   Meanwhile, "conservatives" fling arrows at Pope Francis and decry efforts to bring the Church even remotely into the 21st century. Two articles look at the spectacle as highlighted by a new book by New York Times right wing columnist, Ross Douthat - who seemingly would bring back the Crusades and the public burning of heretics and gays if he could.  One is by Andrew Sullivan and somewhat more sympathetic to Douthat in New York Magazine and another in The Atlantic which takes Douthat to task.   Both face the reality that Catholicism and Christianity are in trouble in America.  First, highlights from Sullivan's piece: 

How does anyone remain a Christian in our current modern moment? The moral implosion of American Evangelicalism in the cult of Trump, the rise of casual anti-Christian bigotry in popular culture, the continuing sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, the emergence of a movement for Christian cultural retrenchment in the church (Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option), the revolution in gay rights in the West, and the slow slide of church attendance and religious observance seem to have conspired to bring the matter to a head. And in this fevered and often ill-tempered debate, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by much of Ross Douthat’s new book lambasting Pope Francis as a small-minded heretic. 

I certainly understand his fear that in the perilous shoals of liquid modernity, the ship of the Catholic Magisterium (the authoritative teaching of the church) could run aground. I also understand his grief at what was lost as the church revamped itself in the 1960s and 1970s — the liturgy, the enchantment, the unquestioned papal authority, the reverence, the silences and the darknesses, now wiped away into too many banal ceremonies, in churches lit as if they were a branch of Target. For Ross, as for me, the church in the 1970s seemed to be abandoning the sacred and the sublime for the mundane and the modern.

[B]ut where I have to differ with him [Douthat] is in his view that Pope Francis is somehow making all this much worse — that he is, through intemperance and recklessness, risking outright schism in the church in a way that hasn’t happened for centuries. By Douthat’s account, Francis is to the church what Donald Trump is to American democracy. He’s an existential threat.

How on earth could that be? For Ross, so much seems to come down to the Pope’s willingness to contemplate allowing divorced and remarried Catholics who want to be a part of the church to receive Communion . . . . Francis’s merely airing these questions — as well as the place of homosexuals in the church — represents to him a look into the abyss of doctrinal chaos. The fact that nothing has changed in official church teaching at all is scant comfort. The elaborate, intricate edifice of Catholicism, built and repaired for two millennia, unchanging and authoritative, is endangered. To Ross, Francis’s actions threaten to send the church drifting into a kind of lame “moral therapeutic deism” that has plagued the mainline Protestant denominations — or, more likely, precipitate full-on schism.

Where to start? First off, as Paul Baumann observes in Commonweal, the church has been, er, let us say, flexible about this rule for aeons, starting with the Gospels themselves. Yes, the Gospel of Mark has Jesus barring any divorce, period; but the Gospel of Matthew adds a caveat — with Jesus saying you can divorce if your partner commits adultery. So not quite as definitive. For centuries, moreover, there was no Catholic sacrament for marriage — it was entirely a secular thing, acknowledged by the church. The Orthodox churches — not just the Protestants — have long allowed for divorce. Catholicism itself, especially in America, hands out annulments that operate as de facto divorces like confetti.  . . . Indeed if the formal rules strictly applied, and communion was never allowed except after a full confession, virtually no Catholic in America would be participating in the Eucharist at all.

We’re talking here about caring for people whose marriages have failed and who want to come back to the church and its sacraments. That’s all. We’re not talking about a formal end to the existing doctrine against divorce. We’re not talking about a second marriage in church. We’re talking about pastoral adaptation to an individual’s position and sincerity in wishing to be reconciled with God. We’re talking about not rejecting people looking to follow Christ. And that means gay people as well, people who, despite so many pressures among their peers, despite widespread cultural taboos on being Christian and gay, insist on coming to the Lord’s table.

This stringency on sexual morality — combined with flexibility on so much else — is part of what has rendered the church toxic for so many, especially given its own recent, horrifying sexual standards. When you barely bat an eye at the rape of children and come down hard on someone who left a toxic marriage, you run the risk, to say the least, of seeming somewhat lacking in moral integrity.  . . . . is it really worth creating a schism over a pastoral attempt to include those beached by a bad or toxic marriage?

Is a modern Christianity even possible without the enchantment, mortality, fear, and ignorance of the past? And what we do with the fact that neither Benedict’s retrenchment nor Francis’s outreach seems successful in stopping the slow slide of institutional and cultural decline, and the emptying of the pews, especially among the young?

Part of me wants the simple certainties and mysteries of the past; part of me is profoundly grateful that the world has indelibly changed. Reimagining what faith can be in the context of modernity will not be easy. But exactly the wrong tack to take, it seems to me, is an ever-more intense and bitter internal fight over the legacy of the last 50 years in the Catholic Church.

To me, Douthat - like his evangelical counterparts - desperately needs two things: (i) others to look down upon and condemn, and (ii) a simple checklist that allows him to feel good about himself even if it requires being brain dead.

The second piece in The Atlantic is harsher, and deservedly so.  Here are excerpts:

Across every continent, in every country, Catholics “find themselves divided against one another,” writes the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in his new book, To Change the Church. On one side stand the orthodox, who see doctrine and tradition as the best antidote to a changing world. On the other stand the liberals, who yearn for a Church that focuses on pastoring rather than enforcing rigid rules. This “widening theological and moral gulf,” Douthat argues, is potentially “wider than the chasm that separated Catholicism from Orthodoxy, and later from Lutheranism and Calvinism.”

That’s a bold claim to make. After all, the schisms of East and West, Catholic and Protestant, were world-shaking, often bloody events. But in today’s Church—and specifically in this pope—Douthat sees the possibility that the Roman Catholic Church will once again break apart.

Ostensibly, his beef is with Pope Francis, whom Douthat paints as an unyielding and stubborn manager who has spent his five years in Rome failing the clean up the Vatican’s messes, hurling insults at conservative clerics, and pushing radical doctrinal changes without buy-in from major wings of the Catholic hierarchy.

His focus is almost always on one topic: the pope’s efforts to address issues related to family. Early in his papacy, Pope Francis convened two meetings of Catholic bishops, called synods. The pope seemed to feel that the Church had not figured out how to serve people whose lives don’t fit the Christian ideal, from single moms to same-sex couples to those who have been civilly divorced and remarried.

While many Church leaders welcomed this pastoral flexibility, others complained that it created ambiguity—“what is sin in Poland is good in Germany,” wrote four conservative cardinals in a letter to the pope—or even directly violated the teachings of the Church.

Douthat was, and is, in the latter camp. He began tossing the word “schism” around. He published a scathing Times column accusing the pope of being the “chief plotter” in the Vatican’s Renaissance-court-style politics. A large group of prominent liberal American clergy and theologians published a response letter, pointing out that Douthat does not have theological credentials, warning him of the seriousness of accusations of heresy, and arguing that his “view of Catholicism [is] unapologetically subject to a politically partisan narrative that has very little to do with what Catholicism really is.”

Francis’s solution is to embrace a flexible, ecumenical spirit, both within Catholicism and without: It’s no coincidence that he has put rapprochement with Roman Catholicism’s closest cousins, the Lutheran and Orthodox churches, high on his priority list over the last five years.

[U]nity matters in the Church—little c or big. Jesus calls on believers to be one flock in community together, and any loss of comity might be interpreted by some as evidence of human failure to make good on that vision. This pope will test whether it’s possible to maintain connectedness among communities of incredible diversity in a time of immense change—or whether the politics of the day inevitably lead to tribal fights among the faithful.

Personally, I believe the Church continues to do immense harm, and not only to the ever growing numbers of sex abuse victims.  Fear and self-hate are not positives and not something that will attract new adherents.  Throw in the hypocrisy and outright meanness of so many Christians , both Catholic and Protestant, and it is easy to see why 36% of those under 30 have walked away from Christianity.  What Douthat wants will only accelerate the exodus.  Francis, for all my criticisms of him, at least is trying to look for a solution. 

Catholic Church Hypocrisy on Church Sponsored Anti-LGBT Animus

One hears over and over about the supposed anti-Christian discrimination fostered by LGBT rights organizations and laws enacted to prevent anti-LGBT discrimination.  Anything that limits the ability of Christofascists and Catholic extremists to discriminate against gays - or other targets of hatred such as divorced Catholics, cohabitating unmarried couples, women using contraception, and, of course, non-Christians - is shrilly denounced as anti-Christian or anti-Catholic persecution.  Lost in the equation is that due to (in my view, improper) the tax-exempt status of churches, in reality all members of society are being forced to indirectly financially underwrite denominations that target them for hatred and discrimination.  This is NOT what the Founding Fathers contemplated when they drafted the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Indeed, it is precisely what they sought to avoid.  A piece in the Louisville Courier Journal takes to task  Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz for his blindness and hypocrisy on this issue.  Here are column excerpts:

I would like to point out in response to Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz in his recent essay published in Courier Journal that his institution and his faith do not need a “First Amendment Defense Act” to protect his ability or the ability of the Catholic Church in America to pass down their beliefs to the children. 

Not a single law in this country blocks them from doing so. And not a single person in this country can do that either. Within the Church institution, gay marriage can be forbidden and women’s reproductive choices curtailed. The Church can even work to protect pedophile priests from prosecution by moving them out of the country, as was reported in USA Today in February of 2016.

However, the Catholic Church uses government grants and tax dollars to do all of this, which means that my tax dollars are funding the Catholic Church’s internal theological prohibitions and practices. My right not to pay taxes to prop up religious beliefs, practices and opinions is violated every day. Now we see the lobbying hand is out for tax credits (vouchers) to help fund religious schools.

No, Kurtz, it is not your rights or your Church’s that are in jeopardy. The danger is that my and every taxpayer in this nation’s rights are being eroded, and this has been going on for a long time.

The major problem we all face is that the Church is not satisfied with just blocking civil rights within its walls. The Catholic Church funneled millions of tax-free dollars from dioceses, the Council of Bishops and offshoot Catholic groups like the Knights of Columbus to block gay marriage laws in various areas of the country before the Supreme Court finally ruled gay marriage as civil right. Catholic-owned hospitals, which receive millions in tax dollars, block non-Catholic women and men from receiving legal reproductive health care every day.

More than 60 percent of the budget of Catholic Charities comes from government grants. But the federal and state governments are not allowed to oversee how that money is spent. There are more than 200 tax exemption laws on the books that cover religious institutions. I’d say the Church in America is certainly experiencing government favoritism rather than discrimination.

Freedom to practice religion, to hold religious beliefs, and to pass them down to the next generation is alive and safe in this county. But "freedom of religion” does not mean that religious opinions are protected from scrutiny, doubt and even condemnation when offered in the public arena. It does not mean that bullying gays should be protected by some ridiculous “amendment’. 

It does not mean that legal medical procedures, treatments and medications should be withheld from people who do not share the same religious beliefs. It does not mean that the civil right to participate in marriage should be blocked. It does not mean that public businesses can discriminate against anyone who seeks their services or products. There is discrimination going on here, but Kurtz is not recognizing the source of it.

We should talk about the “dignity of every human being.” We should also talk about what that actually means. And, we should talk about the rampant religiously sponsored and government funded discrimination that takes place in this country every day. Is Kurtz ready for that dialogue?

 How do we fix the problem?  Tax churches and all church properties not directly and exclusively used for true charitable purposes.  If churches cannot survive without the forced subsidization from non-members, then they deserve to die.  As for the Catholic Church - which owns untold fortunes in art treasures and properties - if parishioners will not pay the bills, then sell of assets.  Just like everyone else.

The Catholic Church's Decline in Latin America

As regular readers know, I was raised Roman Catholic, served as an altar boy for roughly a decade and rose to the level of a 4th Degree Knight of Columbus.  All of that preceded my "coming out" but more importantly, the sex abuse scandal that has continued to shock decent moral people around the world since it first exploded on Boston.  Since then, no part of the world has been exempt from stories of years of abuse and many decades of deliberate cover ups by bishops, cardinals and, yes, popes. Unlike countless altar boys globally, I was never sexually molested back in the days when women only entered a parish sacristy to collect soiled altar linens or to return fresh ones. I understand how easy it was for predator priests to groom and select their victims.  What I do not understand is the refusal of the Church from the current Pope on down to punish those who aided and abetted predators.  No bishop or cardinal has been punished and when Cardinal Law who became the face of cardinals who were derelict in their duties to protect children and youths died at the Vatican during the past month, Pope Francis attended his funeral. Why?  Was he blind to the message that his presence sent to Catholics and former Catholics trying to grasp the magnitude of the evil done?    The Church can on occasion still do good - I attended the funeral mass of a long time client and the service was beautiful and brought comfort to the grieving family. But until the stain of the sex abuse scandal is directly faced and the guilty severely punished, the Church's moral authority will continue to wither.  A piece The Americas Quarterly looks at the Church's plummeting influence in Latin America, once a bastion of Catholicism.  Here are excerpts:

When Buenos Aires Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio was elected the first Latin American pope, he was expected to take the helm of a Roman Catholic Church severely weakened by sex abuse scandals and by a growing secularity, and strengthen its influence in the region.

Indeed, since March 2013, Pope Francis has prioritized Latin America. His first trip abroad, in July 2013, was to Rio de Janeiro. Although he has not yet returned to his native Argentina, he has visited nine Latin American countries, making six stops in the region during his 22 trips abroad.

Though there is a widespread perception that the pope has made progress with the faithful, there is also growing criticism of his wavering response to cases of sex and child abuse committed by members of the clergy. This was evident during his visit to Chile and Peru from Jan. 15 to 21, when he was greeted with far less enthusiasm than his predecessors – particularly in Chile.

This is, in part, because Chile itself has changed. It is a more developed and secular country. Unlike during Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1987, there is no oppressive dictatorship violating human rights, which made the pastoral visit by the leader of the Catholic Church far less salient in the national public debate. 

More than that, in recent years, Chile – and to a lesser extent and more recently Peru – has been shocked by revelations of sexual and child abuse committed by Catholic priests. Much of the papal visit was framed by the church’s limited official reaction to the scandal, and by the presence in all papal events of an active bishop who is accused of helping cover up the most notorious sex abuse cases.

The presence of the bishop of the city of Osorno, Juan Barros, 61, on the front lines of events and masses during the visit overshadowed the image of Francis for many Catholics, and marred his outreach and his message of repentance and reconciliation. . . . . Victims’ advocates demand his removal. Because Francis has not asked Barros to resign, many advocates allege that the Pope is not fully committed to combating what they call a culture of protecting abusers that still exists in the church.

Despite the two formal apologies issued by the Pope for the sex abuse scandals – he apologized in his first statement in Chile, then again a day later in a public meeting with members of the clergy – this impression was reinforced when, in an impromptu declaration, Francis asked for proof of the controversial bishop’s involvement in the sex abuse case. Though the pope later apologized to the victims for his words, among many Chileans the dominant perception is that the church has not fully realized the magnitude of the crisis and how its image has suffered. For too many Chileans, Francis’ apologies came too late, were not enough, and worse, they were undermined by his candid remarks and his inclusion of Barros.

It is true that Chileans were not keen on Francis’ visit even before Barros took center stage in the public activities. In two of the three public masses held in Chile, attendance was far lower than expected. Even the biggest mass held in Santiago in the pope’s second day in Chile, attendance was below the one registered when John Paul II came in 1987.

To be fair, comparing Francis’ visit to that of John Paul II in 1987, when the country was still under the rule of Augusto Pinochet, is unfair. Today Chile is a buoyant democracy, and among the most developed countries in Latin America. Poverty in 1987 was over 40 percent; today, it is less than 5 percent.  Chileans then were in great need of a pastor who could give them hope. Today, Chilean society is far more secular, with fewer economic needs. Despite high levels of inequality, Chileans are hopeful about the future.

The country has become increasingly secular. Among those who are religious, the Catholic Church has lost ground to protestants and evangelicals. . . . . Protestants and evangelicals account for 20 percent of the population, 2 percent declare allegiance to other religions and 18 percent declare to be non-believers, agnostic or atheist.

[T]he Catholic Church’s response to the allegations of sexual abuse and its organization of the visit – along with the unscripted comments by Pope Francis himself – will be remembered largely as a valuable missed opportunity to reach out to many Chileans who no longer see the Catholic Church as a part of their lives.

Add Chile to the list of countries like Ireland where the sex abuse scandal has left a one time bastion of the Church now a place where the Church holds no moral authority, and the Roman Catholic Church is rapidly headed towards becoming a largely black, Africa based church.  Francis - and others in the hierarchy remain oblivious to the reality that until severe punishments ate meted out to bishops and cardinals (and the Church's 12th century understanding of human sexuality changes), parishioners will continue to quietly drift away, many joining the ranks of the "Nones."

Report: Catholic Sexual Abuse Caused by Secrecy and Mandatory Celibacy

I have followed the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal since it first exploded in Boston in 2002.  The expose broken by the Boston Globe coincidentally coincided with my coming out and my efforts to shake off the religious brainwashing of my upbringing as a Roman Catholic were all things sexual were viewed as evil and sinful except in the context of conceiving children - something that helped to increase the rolls of the Catholic Church. It goes without saying that the participants were not supposed to enjoy the conception process. Having been raised Catholic and exposed to the Church's obsession with all things sexual as well as the mandatory celibacy requirement (which historically arose because the Church leadership did not like losing revenues to the families of married priests), I always believed that much of the sexual abuse scandal traced back to the celibacy and the Church's bizarre view of sexuality not to mention the obsession with secrecy among high clergy.  Now, a new Royal Commission report out of Australia (where the scandal has been exploding for more than two years) seems to confirm that celibacy has played a significant role in the widespread sexual abuse  by priests.  The report also notes the dis-ingenuousness of Church efforts to blame the sexual abuse on gay clergy.   The Guardian looks at the report findings:

Mandatory celibacy and a culture of secrecy created by popes and bishops are major factors in why such high rates of child abuse have occurred in the Catholic church, a comprehensive study has found.

The report, which looked at the findings of 26 royal commissions and other inquiries from Australia, Ireland, the UK, Canada and the Netherlands since 1985, found that while the endangerment of children in institutions has been considerably lowered in Australia, children remained at risk in Catholic parishes and schools and Catholic residential institutions in other countries across the world, especially in the developing world where there are more than 9,000 Catholic-run orphanages, including 2,600 in India.

The patriarchal nature of Catholic institutions meant that abuse went unchallenged and, while a small number of nuns were abusers, the report found the risk of offending was much higher in institutions where priests and religious brothers had minimal contact with women. The report estimated about 7% of clergy had abused children between about 1950 and 2000.

“Their contact with women in teacher training institutions would have been carefully proscribed and then they were appointed to male-only schools where they were in charge of young boys and adolescents,” the report said.

“And they were living in all-male religious communities. They had to make do with a sacralised image of a sexless Virgin Mary. It was a recipe for a psycho-spiritual disaster.”

A Catholic priest who assisted the child sexual abuse royal commission, Prof Des Cahill, says discovering he had lived and worked with paedophile priests was part of the reason he has devoted the past five years to analysing why child abuse has plagued the church.

On Wednesday the findings from Cahill and his theologian co-author, Dr Peter Wilkinson, were released in a report, Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: An Interpretive Review of the Literature and Public Inquiry Reports, published by the Centre for Global Research at RMIT University.

The findings explore why the Catholic church and its priests and religious brothers, more than any other religious denomination, have become synonymous with the historical sexual abuse of children.
 I began wondering: ‘Why did this happen?’,” Cahill told Guardian Australia. “I knew some of the priest perpetrators and I studied with them and I lived with one of them. And yet I was never aware while I was in the church. You have to understand, a priest offender is very secretive and doesn’t want to be found out.”

His and Wilkinson’s findings were made after examining reports from royal commissions, academic studies, police reports and church reports from around the world since 1985. Among the findings was that mandatory celibacy was and remains “the major precipitating risk factor for child sexual abuse” and that popes and bishops created a culture of secrecy, leading to a series of gross failures in transparency, accountability, openness and trust.

The issue of confession was also examined. Last month, Australia’s child sex abuse royal commission called for clergy who refused to report child sexual abuse to police because the information was received during a religious confession to face criminal charges.
 The recommendation prompted an angry response from the archbishop of the archdiocese of Melbourne, Denis Hart, who said he would risk going to jail rather than report allegations of child sexual abuse raised during confession, and that the sacredness of communication with God during confession should be above the law.
 The report states that “young and vulnerable Catholic children, especially boys, were in danger and at risk in the presence of psychosexually immature, psychosexually maldeveloped and sexually deprived and deeply frustrated male priests and male religious, particularly those who had not satisfactorily resolved their own sexual identity”.

“This was especially so if these priests and religious were confused or in denial about their homosexual orientation while training and operating in a profoundly homophobic Church environment,” the report found.

Courtin said that the evidence was “absolutely clear” that sexual crimes involving children and paedophilia “have nothing to do with homosexuality at all”.

And homosexuality is one of the reasons or excuses that the church has used for a long time and it’s wrong, inappropriate and inaccurate of them,” she said. “Paedophilia does not equate with homosexuality.” 

After several years of therapy, I finally resolved the psychological damage from my Catholic upbringing. I also left the Catholic Church and after a brief interlude as an Episcopalian, I remain technically a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America ("ELCA") which liturgically is like the Catholic Church liturgy prior to the break between Martin Luther and the Catholic Church and which does not have the self-perpetuating Church hierarchy of the Catholic Church ( ELCA bishops must be reviewed and reappointed and local pastors are not imposed by remote and out of touch bishops).

Meanwhile, The Atlantic is reporting on the child pornography charges against a member of the Vatican diplomatic corps in Washington, D.C. (note that the Vatican refused to waive diplomatic immunity which would have allowed prosecution):

The Holy See announced on Friday that a priest who is part of its diplomatic corps has been recalled to Rome following allegations that he violated child-pornography laws. The official had been accredited to serve in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Department of State notified Catholic Church leaders about the alleged crime through diplomatic channels. The Vatican has opened an investigation and is keeping the name of the accused priest confidential. The AP reported that the U.S. government requested that the official’s diplomatic immunity be lifted. The request was denied.

The moral bankruptcy at the Vatican continues despite Pope Francis' improved PR efforts.

Criminal Charges Against Cardinal George Pell Still a Possibility

Taking a brief break from political coverage, a piece in the Australian newspaper The Age brings back the reality that the Catholic Church hierarchy remains very much in favor of protecting sexual predator priests and throwing the victims of clergy sex abuse under the bus.  Personally, I would love to see Pell, the highest ranking member of the Catholic Church hierarchy in Australia, hit with criminal charges.  Here are story highlights:

Mr Ashton appeared on radio on Thursday morning responding to explosive allegations aired on ABC 7.30, as well as subsequent claims by Cardinal Pell of a "conspiracy" to pervert the course of justice.

Mr Ashton confirmed Cardinal Pell was the subject of an investigation by the Sano Taskforce that involved multiple allegations over a long period of time.

On Wednesday night, 7.30 aired detailed allegations made by former students of St Alipius primary school in Ballarat, who alleged Cardinal Pell would play with them in the swimming pool and molest them by touching their genitals under water. 

Mr Ashton said charges against the Cardinal were still a possibility and that detectives were waiting on an opinion from the Office of Public Prosecution on whether the inquiry should continue.

"It's been a long investigation ... there are a lot of leads that have to be followed up," he said.

Cardinal Pell has rejected the allegations, claiming that Victoria Police leaked the information to the ABC and compromised the judicial process.

The ABC obtained eight police statements from complainants, witnesses and family members who are reportedly helping the taskforce with its investigation. 

One complainant, Darren Mooney, spoke publicly: "He'd throw us off his shoulders ... he would grab you from – have his hands on your backside and then he'd push you off," Mr Mooney said.

Another alleged victim, Lyndon Monument, described the abuse as: "his hand touching your genitals and stuff on the outside of your bathers or shorts. And then that slowly became hand down the front of the pants or your bathers or whatever you call them."

[He would] grab you ... around the testes, around the anus ... very forceful around the anus," a third complainant,  Damian Dignan, told the program.

Other allegations aired on the program included:
·                      that Cardinal Pell would touch the genitals of children while swimming in a public pool in Ballarat in the late '70s.
·                      that he was naked in the change rooms on a regular basis in front of children.
·                      that he exposed himself to three young children in another change room, at the Torquay Surf Club in 1986 or 1987.
Cardinal Pell's office issued a furious statement and said he rejected all the allegations aired by the program.

Charges could still be laid against Cardinal George Pell over a string of allegations of child sex abuse going back decades, says Victoria Police chief commissioner Graham Ashton. 

Will Pope Francis Overrule The Haters in the Hierarchy?

The so-called synod on the Family at the Vatican continues to display open conflict between those who would moderate the Church's position on gays, divorced and remarried Catholics, and those who engage in cohabitation without marriage and those who want to maintain the rules of exclusion and denigration that are driving away Catholics in growing numbers in educated parts of the world.   The irony, of course is that by some estimates, 50% of the bitter old men in dresses at the Vatican are self-loathing closet cases who either (i) cannot let go on 12th century dogma, (ii) who want to keep others as miserable as they are themselves, or (iii) cannot overcome their own psycho-sexual dysfunctions.   The ultimate question, of course, is whether or not Pope Francis will use his imperial like authority to force change.  I would love to see change in the Church not because I would ever return to it, but instead so that fewer LGBT lives would be damaged or ruined by it.  The Washington Post looks at the ongoing infighting.  Here are highlights:

During a major summit of the Roman Catholic hierarchy that will end this weekend, a senior conservative bishop took the floor inside the Vatican’s assembly hall and promptly charged his liberal peers with doing the devil’s work.

The three-week gathering, known as a synod, has erupted into a theological slugfest over Pope Francis’s vision of a more-inclusive church, and it has displayed the most bitter and public infighting since the heady days of Catholic reform in the 1960s.

The pushback by traditionalists has been so strong that the chances of fast changes on contentious family issues — whether to offer Communion to divorced and remarried Catholics or to craft more-welcoming language for gays and lesbians — have substantially dimmed, if not died.

“Francis has the same problem that Obama had,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a senior analyst for the National Catholic Reporter. “He promised the world, but Congress wouldn’t let him deliver. If nothing much comes of this synod, I think people will give the pope a pass and blame the bishops for stopping change.”

The 270 senior church officials, from 122 countries, are scheduled to finish voting on a final document by Saturday. But Francis has the last say, with the power to accept the synod’s recommendations, go beyond them or withhold judgment to encourage further debate.

Using his powers to go beyond the synod’s recommendations could rouse the wrath of conservatives, some of whom already are openly questioning the trajectory of his papacy. But if the final recommendation of the synod falls short of liberals’ hopes, ­rubber-stamping it or encouraging more debate could generate disappointment among Francis’s fans worldwide. They may begin to view him as a revolutionary only in gestures and words, not on substance.

If he agrees fully with the synod’s recommendations, “there might be a collapse of his popularity in world public opinion, but there might also be an increase of his popularity among Catholics,” said Massimo Franco, author of “The Crisis of the Vatican Empire” and a columnist at the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.

Even by Vatican standards, the level of drama at the synod has been extraordinary.

Francis still has not openly stated if, when and how he would like to see church policies altered. But his calls for a more merciful and open church, his pastoral outreach toward divorced and gay Catholics, and his decision to allow wide-ranging discussion at the synod have inspired leading church liberals to press for change.

Of the many measures under debate here, two have emerged as the most polemic.

One is whether to grant divorced and remarried Catholics, who are committing adultery in the church’s view, access to Communion. The other is the question of whether to offer a warmer welcome to gays and lesbians, including cutting references to being gay as “intrinsically disordered” from church teachings.

The divide is not just a liberal-conservative split; it is also geographic, with prelates in Africa, for instance, denouncing the “Eurocentric” and “Western” fixation with issues such as gay rights.

The vehemence of the backlash has shocked even some moderate conservatives, and it has suggested the rise of a tea-party-like faction of bishops within the hierarchy.

“Some of them are talking now like this is Armageddon,” Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane, Australia, said in an interview with The Washington Post.

Some also have denounced the general sense of chauvinism hanging over the debates, in which only male clerics have voting rights.

Maureen Kelleher, an American nun serving in one of the non-voting roles at the synod, told the National Catholic Reporter that there were “times that I have felt the condescension so heavy, you could cut it with a knife.”

Speaking of women in general, she added: “I see a high level of non-acceptance of us as holding up half the sky.”

Ultimately, Francis' decision comes down to either killing reform and losing the West - which still bankrolls most of the Vatican's funds - and becoming an Africa centric church, or  embracing modernity and letting the Tea Party like faction to whine and shriek and at worse break away.   Either way, if I was Francis, I would be using a taster before I ate or drank anything.  There are few things more dangerous than angry, self-loathing closeted gays be they in the Church hierarchy or the Republican Party.