The Hastening Decline of Modern Catholicism

With a farewell speech that contained searing attacks on capitalism, Marxism, birth control, sex, drugs and “lax morals,” Pope Benedict XVI has deeply underscored his church’s irrelevancy to Latin American Catholics and proved how out of touch he is with God’s movement in modern times.

By all accounts Joseph Ratzinger was and is a highly intelligent man as well as a devout one. He is not the only intelligent person on this planet to assume that God and evolution are somehow mutually exclusive, or that life will somehow alter its rush into the future because he says it must. He is, however, the head of one of the most rapidly declining churchs on this planet; one would assume a man of such vaunted intellect was capable of piecing together the pattern of Catholicism’s decline in conjunction with God’s continuing revelation on this planet and the universe around us. Sadly, B16’s devotion (to the traditions of his church, not to God necessarily) seems to have hindered his ability to reason clearly.

A reasonable person could find logic in the pope’s grudges against Marxism and capitalism. In his speech, he blamed Marxism for “the painful destruction of the human spirit” in the economic and ecological destruction such regimes left behind. Also, it is true that unchecked capitalism is “giving rise to a worrying degradation of personal dignity through drugs, alcohol and the deceptive illusions of happiness.” However, in a continent where the abjectly poor outnumber the well-off by overwhelming margins, it would seem to me that there were more comforting, hopeful messages to offer than scathing attacks (reminiscent of his “attack dog” days under John Paul II) against abstract politico-economic forces. The underlying message of B16’s papacy may well be that unwavering love of God must form the basis of any endeavor, but he himself certainly did not demonstrate this with either words or actions during his carefully guarded interactions with Latin American Catholics.

Then, as if he needed to prove further just how out-of-touch he is with the world as God is living it, he created for the indigenous populations (out of whole cloth) a “silent longing” for Christianity and the conquistadors who brought it, then praised the conquerors for coming “to make their cultures fruitful, purifying them.” You don’t have to be a member of any of the indigenous rights groups to feel at least a little stunned disbelief at the overwhelming arrogance of such a statement, uttered right there in the presence of the descendents of those who suffered most from disease, mass murders, enslavement, and disbursal of culture (just like the norteamericanos did to their own indigenous population, granted).

Turn-out for the pope’s final mass — at Brazil’s most popular religious shrine, in the most Catholic of all the Latin Amercan countries — was low, a mere 150,000, and if that wasn’t enough of a wake-up call for the Vatican, I don’t know what would be. What remains to be seen is if the Vatican’s leaders have the forward-looking vision that can bring their Church back to come kind of relevancy in the modern world, or whether their inability to adapt with the times will allow Catholicism to go the way of other ancient religions the world over.

Hat tip: The Los Angeles Times.