All (Bad) Pope News All the Time: Implications for Protestants

Judging by the press coverage, you would think that the Roman Catholic Church was selecting the king-emperor-president-premier of the whole world. Which it is not. In fact, as Frank Bruni points out in last week’s Sunday New York Times, the new pope won’t even hold much sway over most Catholics in North America.

Still, as Bruni points out in a memorable phrase, right now it’s “all pope all the time, a tsunami of papal coverage.” Bruni believes this is because the media loves the clear-cut drama of transitions. But, the truth is, even if the new pope is not the king of the whole world, he will have significant influence over many of the 1.2 billion people in the world that are Catholic—Western Catholics notwithstanding.

So what are Protestants—and maybe Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists—to make of this? What does this wall-to-wall coverage mean for us, and them? Especially the wall-to-wall coverage of scandal and intrigue in the Roman Catholic Church? Rumors of prostitutes, blackmail, secret gay lobbies and cover-ups in the hierarchy? Cardinals like Roger Mahony, who made a career out of covering up sexual assaults by priests sitting in the conclave to select a new pope? Billions of dollars in payouts to victims of sexual assaults? Many of those victims children? An out-of-control Vatican Bank that no one seems to be able to rein in, at least so far? The butler didn’t do it.

Well, perhaps most importantly, this sort of news coverage makes all religious institutions look bad. That is because the eruption of scandal and intrigue from the Catholic Church, like the ash and lava of any volcanic eruption, rains down on the whole religious landscape, indiscriminately.

But before Protestants and people of other faiths bemoan this as an undeserved fate they ought also take a peek at their own dirty laundry. Here in Canada we’re not that far removed from the Residential School scandal, for example. Thousands of First Nations children forcibly removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools, where far too many of them died with no good explanation. But thousands of children were also assaulted, and nearly all of them emotionally scarred while being robbed of their culture, language, families, and religion. Who was the guilty? Well, the Canadian government, of course, shares a lot of the blame. But so do the major Protestant denominations besides the Roman Catholic Church in Canada. But that’s not all.

Google “pastor (or imam or rabbi) charged sex Canada,” limit the search to just the past year, and you’ll come up with hundreds of press stories of not only Roman Catholic but Protestant pastors who have used their positions of power and authority to assault, dehumanize, diminish, and abuse parishioners.

Of course, such stories don’t tell the whole truth about the church, or even the main story about the church. That makes the tsunami of negative coverage doubly galling. Mostly, churches—including the Roman Catholic Church—do great things. The health care system in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, countless orphanages and schools for the poor, Catholic and Protestant social service agencies, billions in charitable giving and millions of hours in voluntarism flows from the church and other religious communities every year. It’s wonderful, compassionate, glorious stuff. We need churches and synagogues and temples to keep it up.

But even if we know it isn’t the whole story, the flood of news coverage about the underbelly of the Roman Catholic Church will continue unabated. And for us in churches, it hurts all the more because the stories are too often true. It will undoubtedly lead to tidal waves of skepticism about, and rejection of, all religious institutions. And people who do so will, at least in part, only be doing what the Bible suggests they do. They will be judging the tree by its fruit.

Our institutional Christian response? Well we’ve heard all these suggestions before: more transparency, police checks, safety policies, reparations, and so on. I’m for all of it and more of it. Bring it on.

But really, what more can Christians who love the community, the prayer, the care, the preached morality, the social justice witness, and the God of the church do? Not much but clean up the wreckage and rebuild. There are no shortcuts back to business if you live in Fukushima or Pompeii.

The news coverage of Rome’s underbelly and the selection of a new pope coincide with the Season of Lent. In my church, Lawrence Park Community Church in Toronto, and all around the world, we’re singing one version or another of the “Kyrie Eleison.” That’s a Greek phrase that means, “Lord, have mercy.”

We sure need it. And not just because of that tsunami of negative press coverage.

Cardinal Ouellet the Next Pope? I Hope Not.

            Pope Benedict XVI has resigned. The Canadian press is full of speculation that Quebec’s Cardinal Marc Ouellet might be his successor.

            But the next pope is going to face momentous challenges. This is especially so if the Roman Catholic Church chooses another pope in the traditionalist mold of Pope Benedict, which Ouellet, by all accounts, certainly is.

            In the wake of Benedict’s resignation, the challenges facing the Roman Catholic Church are also getting a lot of press coverage. For example, two weeks ago courts forced the publication of thousands of pages of secret files from the archdiocese of Los Angeles. The files concerned decades of child abuse by clergy. Two or three days after the forced release of the papers, in a show of hard-heartedness, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles admitted that it had nevertheless still withheld key documents. These were mostly related to Cardinal Roger Mahony’s role in the cover-ups. As usual, while the Roman Catholic hierarchy has sometimes been long on apology, it remains terribly short on action that looks and feels like true repentance.

            Another issue the next pope will face is the growing divide between people sitting in the pews in the West and those in the “Global South,” countries like The Philippines, Nigeria, and Brazil. A number of religious experts point out that the “energy” in the Roman Catholic Church today mostly comes from the South.

            Perhaps. But these churches are not without their own issues. When I visited Brazil, fifteen years ago, a bishop had just written a book about the dangers of putting the Bible in the hands of the laity. This attitude might explain why Evangelicalism is growing exponentially in Brazil. But Catholics in the South also do and believe what they want. When I lived in Manila, The Philippines, I was always amazed at how many vendors sold traditional (and absolutely unsafe) herbs and concoctions to induce abortion in the courtyard of the main cathedral. Meanwhile, the Filipino hierarchy was working hard against government plans to begin birth-control education. In my travels through Africa I’ve often heard about and seen Catholics mix traditional religious practices and Catholicism.

            But there are surely even more serious issues simmering under the surface in the Global South. The abuse scandals that have exploded in the secular West are waiting to do the same in the South. The difference is that for now, in the South, the cultures are generally more conservative, more accepting of authority, and less able to make use of the courts and public advocacy to get their stories out. Does foot dragging and resistance on the part of the Catholic Church in the West not hint at a similar, and surely more successful strategy in the South? Are we to believe that powerful, politically well-connected leaders in the Global South are not keeping their dirty laundry under wraps?

            Another oft-mentioned challenge is that the Roman Catholic Church is a shadow of what it used to be, at least in the West. In Quebec (as in Ireland, or Spain or even Italy), for example, after putting up with generations of cultural and even political control by the church over every aspect of Quebecers’ lives the Quiet Revolution of the sixties ushered in an era where it is now hard to find anyone who goes to church anymore, even when Ouellet was the Archbishop there. Were it not for immigration by Catholics (and priests) from the Global South to Canada and the United States, most Catholic churches would probably have to be shuttered.

            Even more difficult for the next pope is that fact that Catholics who still go to church don’t buy what it teaches. Survey after survey shows that when it comes to birth control, or homosexuality, or women as priests, or immaculate conceptions, Catholics believe what they want and not what they’re told.

            But one further challenge faces the Roman Catholic Church, a challenge that ties all these others together. The Roman Catholic Church is hierarchical and male-dominated, thus coercive, secretive, and preoccupied with power and political structures to maintain that power. Some of this preoccupation is almost laughable.  Robes that clergy wear have more to do with the clothing of officials in the collapsing Roman Empire over 1600 years ago than anything in the Bible. Such robes, of course, put power on display (albeit in a rather comical way). The ongoing resurrection of Latin, the language the pope used for his resignation speech, reminds the laity that what the clergy says is for the clergy first. The laity has no say about who their priests will be, or whether doctrines should be re-examined or changed. But the concentration of power in the hands of a few older men is nowhere as frightening and coercive as it is when it is used to assault children and then protect its own, the perpetrators.

            So remind me—why is it that in Ontario we think the Catholic Church ought to run a school system on the public dime?

            Of course, Protestant Churches have their own issues—including their own abuse scandals. For that matter, the Canadian government, armed forces, police forces, and even the Boy Scouts also all have had their own well-publicized scandals surrounding abuse of power. Male dominated, secretive, old-boy cultures that preserve power in the higher ranks are a common thread that runs through most of these scandals. Still, it isn’t the case that such scandal means that the church, or the armed forces, or the Boy Scouts ought to be disbanded either. Organizations can and must change.

            What is more, the Catholic Church has other, more hopeful and grace-filled stories to tell as well. Pope John XXIII, who called Vatican II, was a bright light of renewal—even if the church since then has tried to put him and his council out of mind. Many Catholic saints gave their lives for the sake of the poor and marginalized. My favorite is Father Damien, who ministered to Hawaii’s lepers until he himself died of the disease. I’m grateful for towering Catholic scholars like Canadians Marshall McLuhan and Charles Taylor. Where most religious conservatives are anti-science, at least when it comes to things like climate change and evolution, the Catholic Church has learned a lot since the days of Galileo. It now leads the way in showing that faith and science don’t need to be at war.

            So, in the end, if there is a God, I’m pretty sure he or she will find a way to help steer the Catholic Church beyond the whirlpool of its present problems and on to what Margaret Avison beautifully describes as “more ample, further waters.”

            Still, that coercive, hierarchical, male-dominated structure that is especially well designed to protect its own at great cost to innocent children has to go.

            Which also means that if he is all that he is advertised, a doctrinaire traditionalist like Marc Ouellet most-certainly should not be given the helm.