When computers fight back
I woke up this morning and promptly lost my eudora settings. Grrrrr. I can’t remember what font I was using and more importantly, the passwords to two of my email accounts.
Re., my thought below about Catholicism. I was interested to hear from Catholics and former Catholics who disagreed with the nun who left the church but still considered herself a Catholic nun. As far as I know, Catholicism is unique in that there’s a hierarchy that define the religion for everyone else. Can you be Catholic if you step outside that hierarchy? What makes a person Catholic?
I confronted similar issues when I was exploring Judaism and realizing that I could never be a “proper” Jew. What makes a person Jewish? Reform Judaism is not considered “real” Judaism by all Orthodox and many Conservative Jews because Reform Jews don’t follow many of the laws. In the Reform movement keeping kosher is a personal choice; wearing a yarmulke is a personal choice; and women are on the same footing as men. For example, women can be part of the 13-”man” minyan. (Some Conservative congregations — if not all — allow this, too.) And there are no family purity laws (and I encourage you to click that link, it’s fascinating).
According to the book Liberal Judaism at Home (and here Liberal means Reform), the decisions over what laws to follow ultimately fall to the individual Jew:
The major difficult with the criterion we have mentioned, his own sense of spiritual values, arrived at by diligent study of tradition — is that it obviously sets each Liberal Jew as his own jduge of what he will or will not do.To the traditional Jew that is nothing less than a severe transgression of halachah, the law. It is God who established the Torah and its mitzvot, commandments. Anyone who would dare set any mitzvah, commandment, aside is one who would cut at the roots of the God-given religion.
Then what can the Liberal Jew use as his final criterion, to help his knowledge of tradition and his understanding of Liberal Judaism in the task of deciding just where he gits in the infinite spectrum of Jewish observance? The answer must be a sense of kedushah, of holiness, of that which will help sanctify his life, to make it truly meaningful. By this must he live, and it will help give his life that inner meaning by which we seek fulfillment.
And this, my friends, is how I managed to justify my decision not to give my son(s) a bris. It wouldn’t seem holy to me.
Maybe there needs to be a “Reform” Catholicism? Would that be possible?
Personally I think there already is a reform Catholicism…the vatican just refuses to believe it. Esp in the USA, most Catholics use birth control…a big sin. I know plenty of catholics who lived together before marriage - and thus had premartial sex. I think sometimes that us American Catholics are too damn lazy to build our own churches & organization. We’ll just fight the big nasty crippled old Pope instead. (yes, that was laced with sarcasm)
If there is a movement for a reform catholicsm, I think the church as we know it would crumble. And I’ll be there to watch.
Again, I think it varies a lot culturally. Here in Australia we have less and less priests ( there is a *very* slight upward trend now, but we were at absolute rock bottom ) As church communities, we are frequently being encouraged to take the church into our own hands because the average age of our current priests is (I think) 60. The dioceses are running conferences with basic DIY Catholicism as their main theme and it’s already happening in a lot of smaller communities. I grew up in a parish made up of small villages all about 30 miles from the nearest larger centre (and by small villages, I mean 150 people) We haven’t had a priest at home for more than 15 years now, and the parish continues to thrive with regular communion services, eucharistic ministry, and Mass only every four to six weeks. It’s a very democratic, non-hierachical church locally and there’s plenty of active discussion about the faith. I think this is the way Catholicism will increasingly move in Australia.
I don’t see the church as a monumental edifice, but rather as an evolving, enormous mass of people (something like a fifth of the world’s population identify as Catholic). The white Western part of the structure is in crisis, and I think we are at an evolutionary point where we are changing form. The long history of the church also means that what appears as dogma today is not necessarily historically supported. Married priests, for example, were the norm until mediaeval times and the rules about priestly celibacy mostly derive from issues about church property. The central role played by priests is also a relatively recent development - until the Renaissance, most village communities operated the way my home parish does, with rare visits from travelling priests.
These possibilities for change are perhaps harder to grasp in countries where Protestant Christianity is the domninant form. Church structure appears monolithic and unchangeable, but it ain’t necessarily so.
Genj, this is so interesting. And hopeful. I hope that any yearning Catholics who drop by find some inspiration in your post!