PulpLit.net

The Catholic Dost Protest

"I've stopped going to church. I just couldn't. I'd think about what they did, how they covered it up....what is he gonna do? I don't pray to him, I pray to God. Can he send me to hell? No. What's he gonna do?"

-a parishioner, in response to the scandal surrounding Cardinal Bernard Law and the Catholic Church.

Actually, technically he could. Excommunication may not have been used for a couple of hundred years, but technically it is well within the Cardinals power to send someone to hell by denying them communion. Of course, the holy Eucharist is the contentious point that has divided the grand-daddy of Christian faiths from its offspring. The foundation of the Church of England, the formation of the Protestant faith, and Henry V's famous begging at the feet of the Papacy are all related to the denial (or attempted denial) of that rite. If you can?t get your daily bread, you're going to have a pretty tough time practicing your Catholicism and getting into Heaven. Recognizing that a priest has the power to condemn you to Hell is part of what it means to be Catholic - or at least, it used to be.

In this day and age of Olestra, botox skin treatments, and Easter/Christmas Catholics, it's easy to forget that. The recent scandal over the sexual abuse of minors by priests has exposed a disturbing rift between Catholicism and the common man, and I don't just mean the non-prosecution of priests for alleged crimes. More and more Catholics are sounding like Protestants, proclaiming direct access to God and trying to effectively cut out the middle man.

Before you start saying that I'm just a good Catholic boy whipping myself into a righteous frenzy with my rosary, let me just say that I'm not really a Catholic. I grew up Catholic, sure, but as of late I've drifted somewhat far from the religious core. If you ask, I may say I'm culturally Catholic, by which I mean my entire family on both sides is Catholic and I don't argue about it at Thanksgiving. I realize I'm running the risk of damnation in my irreligiousness. Of course, I'm not praying to Allah five times a day either, so I run that risk as well.

But I at least know what I'm supposed to believe if I were a practicing Catholic. This whole populist movement in Boston - where the faithful are asking themselves why they are administered their sacred rites by a group of individuals who they did not elect, whose decisions are not publicly justified, and whose decision-making process is largely opaque - smacks of a disturbing trend toward democracy in the last bastion of centralized religious force. If more Catholics start thinking like the parishioner in this interview, we'll end up in quite a fix if there is a Second Coming. It really won?t matter if you?re a Catholic or a Protestant. Christ won't be able to tell the difference.