The Church - good, bad and ugly

I read this in the Sunday Times today and was really impressed with Ignatius’ view. He just hit the nail on the head. The parts I have bolded are the good things the pope John Paul II has done. The red/bold parts are the ones that are so ugly about the church and as you can see, the ugly seems to outweigh the good. What good is being part of a Church where you are oppressed? I wonder if the Vatican ever wonder why people are leaving the Church, or even if they really care.

Sometimes people ask why I'm still in a Church that is so oppressive? I have given it alot of thought and I thing Ignatius stated it in a great way some of us reject the teachings outwardly and other inwardly. I'm the ones that reject the Church inwardly. I love my God and I know God loves me. I go and worship him with my community but I do reject some of the Church teachings. As Cannon law has stated, that a person can reject a teaching of the Church if he, guided by the Spirit, learns the truth about something (very badly parapharsed).

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A Plea to the next pope
By Ignatius Low
(Taken from The Sunday Times April 17, 2005)

Someone remarked to me that other day that with a name like mine I should be “eminently qualified” to write about Pope John Paul II.

Well, if being qualified simply means being Catholic, then she is probably right.

I know if only a handful of other guys name “Ignatius” and they are all, without exception, Catholics born and bred. Who else would name themselves after the Spanish saint Ignatius de Loyola, who found the Jesuit order of priests in the 1500s?

Indeed, to the outside world, the name is obscure and extremely difficult to pronounce and spell. To this day, when asked for my name by Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf cashiers, I agonise for a moment before muttering “David”, so as not to hold up the queue behind me.

Despite life’s little inconveniences, I am still proud of the name my parents gave me in the zeal of their conversion to Catholicism in the 1960s.

But I have also stopped practising my religion for almost a decade now. So, I think my name is just about the only thing left that’s “Catholic” about me.

Until the Pope died, that is.

I was holidaying in Tokyo when it happened and rationally speaking, I really shouldn’t have cared.

Yet in the days and hours reading up to the Pope’s death, I found myself glued to the television set in my service apartment, never tiring of the endless updates about this health on CNN and BBC.

My Catholic upbringing came back to me in a flash of nostalgia.

I remembered, for example, kneeling to pray the rosary twice a week and constantly wishing that I could sit down instead. I remembered singing hymns with my younger sister as my dad played the guitar, and feeling rather intimidated by a group of bash girls at my weekly Sunday school class.

I found I could still recall enough of the meanings of strange words like “catechism”, “Eucharist” and “transubstantiation” to explain them excitedly to my Buddhist travelling companion. And I could expertly answer his questions about the difference between “mortal” and “venial” sins, and the significance of the Virgin Mary to the Church.

Buried somewhere deep within me, I realised, is a good Catholic boy. It’s just the on a day-to-day level, most people don’t see it – net even me.

This is arguable the most serious problem Pope John Paul II left the Catholic Church to deal with after his death.

Like me, millions of Catholics around the world have quietly fallen away from the faith. And like me, they seem perfectly comfortable with what they have done.

Of course, religion is a very personal issue and everyone has his own reasons for turning his back on it.

But if there is a general root cause to be found, I would point to the growing disconnect between the Catholic dogma and today’s realities.

For those who don’t already know, the Catholic Church is strongly against divorce, abortion and contraception.

It still refuses to ordain women as priests and regards homosexuality as a “new ideology of evil”.

And it sees all these issues in stark black and white.

Two years ago, a nine-year-old Nicaraguan girl became pregnant after she was raped. Fearing that she would not survive childbirth, her parents sent her for an abortion.

The Catholic Church intervened and nearly stopped the procedure, but the girl’s parents insisted. After the abortion, the whole family was promptly excommunicated from the Church.

There are many mare such moral dilemmas that the Church seems to take an unreasonably hard stand on. It won’t, for example, allow a HIV-positive husband to use condoms to protect his HIV-negative wife. Nor will it grant an abused wife a divorce from a violent husband.

As a result, you will often find that Catholics tend to harbour two views on life’s moral dilemmas.

There is the “Catholic” view which they are suppose to hold, and then there is their own view – which is softer and will admit to exceptions and special circumstances.

Okay, this probably doesn’t stop the average churchgoer from going to Mass every Sunday.

But it deducts from a sense of belonging to a religion whose structure and rituals already make it seem so far away.

The principle does not just apply to religion. If someone does not quite agree with the fundamental ethos of his club, company or even country, can he truly identify himself with it?

And so when push comes to shove, is there something stronger than habit, obligation or sheer inertia that makes him stay?

In his 26 years as Pope, John Paul II did many great things. He helped to bridge the gap between the Church and Islam, and speed up the fall of communism. He also used the mass media in a very effective way to get the Church’s message out globally.

But John Paul II also chose to harden the Church’s conservative stance in livewire moral issues, and throughout this reign, the Church has shown a refusal to engage the population on them.

This is something which this generation of young Catholics have become used to as we grew up. Sadly, it’s also something many of us have come to reject – whether inwardly or outwardly.

The world waits in bated breath is the Catholic Church chooses John Paul II’s successor this week.

Whoever he is, he need to talk to the silent millions around the world, who like me are Catholic, but only really in name.