I woke up in the middle of the night, from another dream in which I was organising a funeral. I had to take the claws off the corpse. The corpse was an old man - very important, some sort of leader. He had hands which ended in cylindrical claws which grew out of flesh covered with grey parrot down... at the base of the claws was a white band of dry skin? and I had to pull the claws out. I had taken hold of the first claw when I was woken by a lamp falling down. I had the impression that beneath the claws were gold claws. I wish I could illustrate this dream... but nothing remotely available in Google images!
When I woke up I began thinking furiously about the Catholic church. At the time I had a very forceful, cogent argument about it that kept me awake for sometime. The gist of it is that the Jewish religion had rather ossified by the time of Jesus - his attack on the Pharisees making yokes for other men's necks always strikes me as being full of relevance for religious people today. To some extent the Jews had become ossified because of their opposition to the "modern world" - i.e the Graeco-Roman world that they were identifying themselves against. Christianity, with its inclusion of gentiles moved out into that world and made converts. Judaism stayed small although there have of course been many reforms in the faith since then - many of them necessitated by the Diaspora and the Sack of Jerusalem in 75 AD - which arguably, might not have happened if the Jews had been a bit less ossified. ("a stiff-necked people" God's words, not mine!).
The Catholic church, by getting into the business of politics and ruling things, became a dominant world power for a while - it is now in decline in Europe and the "Western World". It proclaims that it is some sort of unchanging force, and many people believe this, because they are not aware of how much it has changed. It has a mechanism which allows a pope to select cardinals, and he will select cardinals of his own stripe, ensuring a conservative legacy for decades - rather like the Supreme Court in the US - except that the US Supreme Court doesn't elect the president.
As a result of this conservatism it is under critique from the world, the intelligent media, and others are asking it to reform. Conservative Catholics are saying "no, why? We like it like this!" and after all, the media's critique is hardly equivalent to Jesus - but I am beginning to wonder whether the church will eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. I am sure Benedict is a good man - on the evidence of what S says about him, but he is not in a position to do much about it now. Then again, one has to keep asking, what was he up to all those years in the Propaganda Fide ? How did the growing weight of evidence about child abuse simply get ignored for such a long time? Must we blame JP2 for all this? He was in charge, did they keep it from him? - but if he knew, why the hell have they beatified him? Oh, I forgot, he single-handedly freed Poland from Communism. It seems to me quite difficult to make the case that Benedict was good without implying that JP2 was not... or vice versa. But probably this is only because I have a very simplistic understanding of the church's bureaucracy and how it works, or fails to. Perhaps neither of them had any idea..... but I'm afraid that's hard to believe.
When I woke up I began thinking furiously about the Catholic church. At the time I had a very forceful, cogent argument about it that kept me awake for sometime. The gist of it is that the Jewish religion had rather ossified by the time of Jesus - his attack on the Pharisees making yokes for other men's necks always strikes me as being full of relevance for religious people today. To some extent the Jews had become ossified because of their opposition to the "modern world" - i.e the Graeco-Roman world that they were identifying themselves against. Christianity, with its inclusion of gentiles moved out into that world and made converts. Judaism stayed small although there have of course been many reforms in the faith since then - many of them necessitated by the Diaspora and the Sack of Jerusalem in 75 AD - which arguably, might not have happened if the Jews had been a bit less ossified. ("a stiff-necked people" God's words, not mine!).
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| St. Stephen - who told some Jews that they were "stiff-necked" - echoing God's words to Moses, about the same sort of people! |
The Catholic church, by getting into the business of politics and ruling things, became a dominant world power for a while - it is now in decline in Europe and the "Western World". It proclaims that it is some sort of unchanging force, and many people believe this, because they are not aware of how much it has changed. It has a mechanism which allows a pope to select cardinals, and he will select cardinals of his own stripe, ensuring a conservative legacy for decades - rather like the Supreme Court in the US - except that the US Supreme Court doesn't elect the president.
As a result of this conservatism it is under critique from the world, the intelligent media, and others are asking it to reform. Conservative Catholics are saying "no, why? We like it like this!" and after all, the media's critique is hardly equivalent to Jesus - but I am beginning to wonder whether the church will eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. I am sure Benedict is a good man - on the evidence of what S says about him, but he is not in a position to do much about it now. Then again, one has to keep asking, what was he up to all those years in the Propaganda Fide ? How did the growing weight of evidence about child abuse simply get ignored for such a long time? Must we blame JP2 for all this? He was in charge, did they keep it from him? - but if he knew, why the hell have they beatified him? Oh, I forgot, he single-handedly freed Poland from Communism. It seems to me quite difficult to make the case that Benedict was good without implying that JP2 was not... or vice versa. But probably this is only because I have a very simplistic understanding of the church's bureaucracy and how it works, or fails to. Perhaps neither of them had any idea..... but I'm afraid that's hard to believe.
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