The World, the Flesh, the Devil vs. the Church

   The Lenten attack on Benedict XVI and on his response to the horrific abuse of priestly office among criminal abusers & their abbettors obliges me to confess my faith.

   The Church is justified, wrote Chesterton, not because her children don't sin, but because they do. Anyone looking at these crimes & the cover-up who declines to recognize that those responsible for it labored to keep John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger in the dark is being dishonest and unjust.

   The main failure of the Vatican authorities over the past four decades has been to take a laissez-faire approach to the various national councils of bishops: the national councils, intended to express "collegiality", were in large part responsible for removing any personal authority from individual bishops. Anyone who was acting more pro-actively to eliminate sexual criminals would've been tasked with being overzealous & giving scandal; all it took was for a few criminals within the national structures to dawdle, delay & extenuate crimes. And those very same dawdlers & obfuscators stand at the root of the neglect of the various sacraments which would have led earlier to the uncovery & elimination of the problem.

   John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council to deal with problems that were real in the Church; but instead of a Council aimed at explicitly rejecting the remedies of the world, the bishops signed onto optimistic & concilatory statements that largely pleased the enemies of the faith. Instead of tenaciously holding to the faith that they had learned, the teaching authorities re-cast teaching in a less confrontational form, a form which still displeased those who wanted the Church & the faith to disappear entirely.

    As bishops' conferences and diocesan seminaries and religious orders abandoned their obligations for a kinder, gentler catholicism with a small 'c', the wolves, already present, began to prey more brazenly on the flocks. Laxity & absence of vigilance were the word of the day; instead of carrying out the commission to preach, baptize & convert, the authorities chose 'dialogue' and 'a common path' with those whose sole purpose is ending the Church under the successor St. Peter altogether.

  

   

    

The Catastrophe of Nature

  Global climate catastrophe is the most forceful example of the basic danger of having nothing but Nature, and human ability to manipulate Nature, to rely on, even in matters of this life. Unrestrained human appetites are bringing the house down around our ears. The builders & sellers of technology were going to raise human beings above all the sufferings of even our recent ancestors: collectively, we've knocked holes the very tent which has protected & sustained life, through runaway material progress.

   But instead of equating damaged physical nature with our damaged human nature, to show the former inevitably follows the latter, many who purport to hold normative Christian teaching concerning man's place in Nature & the effects of transgressing divine wisdom deny the very existence of the phenomenon that gives these teachings new force. Instead, the evidence that shows what damage has been done, and what further catastrophes are coming, are dismissed as delusions of a Nature-cult, of an alleged (and sometimes real) contemporary worship of planetary ecology. The climate-catastrophe deniers are devout believers in the very technological demi-paradise which they ought to hold in derision. To love God above all things ought to clarify how limited even the universe is: even the resources of all the galaxies combined are finite, not infinitely exploitable.