The Catholic Church has grown into a powerful institution by exploiting
human frailty. Sigmund Freud speaks of the ‘immense power, which
overwhelms Reason and Science’1 to describe the belief in a ‘Divine
Being’. Karl Marx famously suggested that ‘religion was the opium of
the masses’. As a purveyor of religion and religious services the Catholic
Church fulfils a deep human need.2 To some, religion explains the world;
for others, it helps them to survive in the world. Religion is adept at
exploiting human anxiety, human weaknesses and the centrality of the
non-rational in human life. Religions thrive in the fertile soil of general
uncertainty, man’s existential anxieties and his fear of death. Most people
are especially prone to religious experiences during periods of low self-
esteem and when they feel helpless.3 Indeed, people who feel vulnerable
or anxious are more likely to seek shelter or emotional relief through
the irrational. Into this morass religions enter and offer varied answers,
but most importantly they offer certainty. To the unsure and susceptible,
religions offer clear-cut answers and solutions. There are individuals who
are more easily roused in situations of group excitement and some of the
religious rituals have the effect of bringing about hyper-suggestibility, a
state in which certain people are more open to external influences.
The Catholic Church offers her members a structured path to guide
them to lead a virtuous life which the Church promises will land them
in heaven. This, no doubt, has helped many Catholics who are grateful to
the Church for being their moral beacon and for aiding them in coping
with the difficulties of life. And yet, the soothing reassurance of religious
authority comes with a risk tag attached to it. The preceding chapters have
demonstrated the Catholic Church to have been morally wrong both in
principle and in practice; to have and to exert a malignant influence; and
to have caused great harm. In many aspects the very opposite of what the
Church claims as her role in this world.
Should the Church have preached hatred of Jews, passed laws which
closed various professions to them, had them locked up in ghettos and
acted to systematically denigrate them? Should the Church prohibit
the teaching of theories she does not approve of and should she have
forbidden books, have them burned and their authors, printers and
owners punished? Should the Church have run an inquisition and
torture operation? Should she have enforced conversions? Should the
Church have sent armies to conquer and kill? Should she have licensed
colonial forays, permitted slavery and slave trading and even owned
slaves herself? Should the Church have made ‘unethical’ investments,
laundered illegal funds, including Nazi money and gold, and cooperated
with the Mafia in her financial dealings? Should the Church have covered
up sexual abuse by her clergy? Should she have attempted to blackmail
victims of her clergy into silence? The answer to all the above is clear and
yet time after time the Church made the wrong decision. She chose to act
often illegally and always immorally. She continues to do so.
New York’s former archbishop, Cardinal John J. O’Connor, in a homily
he gave in 1998, suggested that corrupt clergy was not a reason to discard
the Catholic Church. He accepted that the Church had ‘experienced
corruption … [and] has at times demonstrated great arrogance through
its bishops and priests and even through its popes’.4 And yet, the Cardinal
maintained that Catholics had no right to say ‘enough is enough’; they
had no right to say that they believed in Christ, in Christian values and
that the institution of the Church was too corrupt and must go.
Catholics, the Cardinal added, must continue in total adherence to
the institution. It is Christ’s Church and if one believes in Christ one has
to believe in and respect the Catholic Church, regardless of the fact that
‘there have been so many sins in the Church, so much weakness in the
Church, there have been so many corrupt popes in the Church, corrupt
bishops, corrupt priests, corrupt Catholic lay persons’.
According to the Church’s script the world needs Christ, Christ’s only
representative is the Catholic Church, and ‘outside the Church there is no
salvation’.5 This notion of exclusivity has been softened in recent years
but not abandoned. The Catechism allows for the possibility that ‘Those
who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ
or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart …
– those too may achieve eternal salvation.’ This, however, does not bring
an end to her evangelism, as ‘the Church still has the obligation and also
the sacred right to evangelize all men’.6 In an encyclical issued in 1975,
Pope Paul VI confirmed the Church’s claim that ‘our religion effectively
establishes with God an authentic and living relationship which the
other religions do not succeed in doing, even though they have, as it
were, their arms stretched out towards heaven’.7
The nature of religious organisations is that they promote what they
believe to be God-given teaching and consequently cannot compromise.
They do not have the authority to be flexible with the word of God. To
this rigidity, the Catholic Church has added difficulty by giving the force
of Tradition the same status as the written word.8 In fact, the Church has
added layer upon layer of rigidity, which make it very difficult for her
to respond to an ever-changing world and ever-developing civilisation.
By considering herself but a trusted guardian and not the author of her
teaching, the Church leaves herself very little room for manoeuvre. Instead
of being a source of values, the Church is a source of interpretation of a
fixed set of God-given unchangeable texts. She does not make do with
a claim that whatever Jesus is meant to have said and done corresponds
with values which she considers worthy. She defines the words and the
deeds as true and a set of early Christian interpretations as binding.
Innumerable bulls and encyclicals which are based on quotations from
the New Testament, sermons and writings of early Christian Church
Fathers as well as later important Church figures such as St Augustine and
Thomas Aquinas were issued by popes throughout the Church’s history
and were the basis of much of the suffering which the Church inflicted
upon her members, her clergy and the rest of society. The Church finds
it virtually impossible to rescind rulings made in the past. A Church
document from 1815 makes this quite clear, as the then secretary of state,
Cardinal Consalvi, stated ‘it is equally repugnant to him to make any
express, public innovations, different from what the large majority of
his Holy predecessors, albeit in other times and circumstances, believed
appropriate for the good of the Church and the state’.9 This rigidity
causes, for example, the Church’s moral blindness as she is unable, when
hundreds of thousands are contracting AIDS due to unsafe sex, to set
the truly important value of conserving life above her anti-contraception
dogma.
Democracy has established separation of powers: organising and
balancing the legal powers of the executive, the legislative and the
juridical branches of government and creating independent control
bodies to prevent misuse of power. Above all, the need to be regularly
approved by the electorate in democratic elections is a significant control
mechanism. The Catholic Church is undemocratic and lacks any such
mechanisms. It is a non-hereditary monarchy-like structure, in which
the pope, its head, is elected for a life tenure by a forum of cardinals, all
of whom were made cardinals by previous popes. Cardinals and bishops
are created by popes and bishops, in turn, nominate priests. Members
of the Church have no vote, power or say in these appointments. As the
Church is not accountable to her members, she has never developed any
mechanisms for openness. This lack of transparency regularly comes to
the fore when Church scandals can no longer be kept out of the public
domain. Corruption and money laundering by the Vatican Bank in the
1970s and 1980s, which caused the Vatican to lose hundreds of millions
of dollars, is a case in point. Similarly, questions raised as a result of ...