stfuconservatives:
persephonemag:
Over the past months and years you have been making it pretty clear that you seem to not want women like me in your church. Lately you tell me that taking control of my reproductive system is wrong, that the women religious I hold in high regard for their work for the impoverished and ill are incapable of directing their own efforts to minister to Christ’s brothers and sisters, you advocate laws that deny rights to so many, and now you are launching an investigation into the Girl Scouts of America, a group that goes out of its way to be inclusive of girls of all walks of life, to see if they are somehow being “anti-Catholic.”
Shortened version: Catholic Church, your leadership is bad and you should feel bad.
-Jess
I applaud the sentiment, but it’s wrong. The Catholic Church is not a democracy and never has been. It’s a hierarchy, and the future of the Church’s hierarchy is in recruiting male priests from Africa, Latin and South America and Asia. The Catholic leadership does. not. care. about North American Catholics, except to force us to heed them. If they can’t, they will excommunicate us.
Benedict is a fascist, and he like JPII has installed lackeys all through the hierarchy. That’s how they covered up systemic rape of children for decades. They will never listen to the laity. We are sheep to be steered, almost literally, and have no right to question them.
Leaving the Church is the only option.
I disagree. The king cannot rule without the consent of the people to be ruled. There are 70 some odd million Catholics in the US. There are about 5,000 bishops worldwide. Catholicism is not the bishop’s alone to decide. The church can, and has, changed it’s stance about issues that the Catholic populace has made a big enough stink about. They could try and mass excommunicate everyone who stands up and disagrees with the bishops, but that won’t work these days the way it did in the middle ages. There are already Catholic institutions out there that operate without Vatican approval just fine. If we simultaneously refuse schism and refuse their authority as final about our own religious identity, what can they really do to us? Glare disapprovingly? I think I’ll live.