Why should Churches Listen to the Secular Masses?

A letter to the editor in today's Calgary Sun led me to Licia Corbella's article on the reaction of many to the selection of Joseph Ratzinger as the new Pope.

In her column, Ms. Corbella made a few arguments, and raised a question that I think actually warrants a bit of consideration. I'll come to the question a bit later on. First, I want to address a few of Ms. Corbella's points about the R/C Church's theology, and in particular areas where the Church is substantially out of step with knowledge the world possesses today.

Argues Ms. Corbella:

These "progressives" are clearly not very deep thinkers. They actually try to make the illogical argument that the reason for the AIDS epidemic in Africa is because Pope John Paul II didn't sanction the use of condoms.

Wrong, Ms. Corbella. The problem is not that the Church is not in the business of distributing condoms. The problem is that the Church(es) run a lot of the hospitals in Africa. They dictate to their physicians that they cannot instruct their patients in the use of condoms. There are several problems with this. First of all, it is the Church sticking its nose into Medical Treatment administered by a physician. The second point is that regardless of whether or not you condone extra-marital sex, it happens. Once someone is infected with HIV, the question is not about their behaviour's morality, but rather how does one take steps to ensure that the infection is not spread further by that person. Recognize the very human failings that we all suffer from, and give the patient the tools to protect those that they are closest to.

In case they didn't notice, he also didn't sanction sex outside of marriage and having more than one sexual partner, which if adhered to would make the use of condoms unnecessary and the spread of AIDs impossible. Yet few appear to be following those edicts, so what makes anyone think they'd follow the condom edict?

Second piece of false logic. AIDS is spread by more than mere sexual contact. Condoms are one part of the issue. Dirty needles from drug use, certain simian species carry the virus in Africa, adding a number of not fully understood vectors of infection to the mix. So what happens? Someone who otherwise follows every edict of the church gets infected by accident, and infects their family. Eventually, they die, and the wife remarries. She's infected, and further spreads the infection. Sorry, Licia, but there is much more to the spread of AIDS than simply acting "morally" by following the Vatican's edicts.

Frankly I don't give a damn about the morality of extra-marital sex. That is not the objective. The objective is to do whatever can be done to contain the most lethal virus to hit humanity in centuries. Why? So the damn thing doesn't get a further chance to mutate and become an airborne pandemic or worse. The clergy is free to make whatever pronouncements they like from the pulpit - that's just fine. To assume that those edicts are sufficient to contain something like HIV is so simple-minded I can scarcely believe anyone would be so naive.

Further reasoning goes like this:

"We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one's own ego and one's own desires," the 78-year-old said.

The new pope nailed it. As the belief in absolutes diminishes, our society stumbles. People increasingly think that you determine what is right by what FEELS good. Only problem is, for Clifford Olson, that means raping children and driving nails into their skulls. For others, it's shooting drugs into their veins, and for others its stealing your car.

Again, Ms. Corbella's logic is flawed. The claim here is essentially that relativism demands lawlessness. This is incorrect. Most people that argue from a relativistic perspective do not accept anarchy as an option. Instead, they ask whether or not a given action causes harm to others. There is no question that Clifford Olson caused a great deal of harm to others, and few would argue that he should be allowed to do his thing unfettered. On the other hand, how quick would the Church be to apologize for someone getting beaten to death when the defendant argues that his priest told him that such people are evil? If the response to the "pedophile priests" cases in the last few years is any clue, the church might think about an apology long after the victims and their relatives are long dead. Since the Church has claimed that homosexual acts (and by inference for many, homosexuals) are evil, it is not inconceivable that some nut bar will decide that they are being told to excise evil from the world around them. I won't argue that the church is in fact culpable in such an instance any more than I can argue that relativism is responsible for Clifford Olson's acts.

Getting to her opening question:

"So, what's it to you?" I asked. "Why should the Catholic church listen to the likes of you?"

Quite a bit. My argument is that by ignoring the knowledge gained in the last few hundred years, the Church is in fact making decisions and policy that are indeed quite harmful to others outside of the Roman Catholic faith. In other words, regardless of their perceived role as "shepherds" of the people, the Church has entered into areas such as running hospitals. By doing so, and then dictating standards of medical practice to the doctors based not on medical science but on theology they are in fact doing much more than acting as moral shepherds to the people.

Adapting to knowledge gained is not "bending with the trends", it is a recognition that our understanding of the world around us is changing and growing, and with it our grasp on the subtleties of the human condition. For the Church to continue to act as if we live in a world identical to the era in which Scripture was originally written is equivalent to an ostrich putting its head in the sand. If the Churches do not learn to adapt, then they will simply calcify and become more and more irrelevant to the world.

So - why should the Church listen to the masses beyond their clergy? It seems pretty simple to me - like Darwin's model suggests - adapt, or die. Of all Churches, the Roman Catholic Church is uniquely positioned to know that, and to be able to learn from its own past. Sadly, in the last 50 years or so, the "conservatives" have taken over the upper echelons of the Church and appear bound and determined to avoid any meaningful change. The secular world is not ignorant, nor is it blindly relativistic. We understand things about humanity today that were not even conceived of 2000+ years ago when the Scriptures were written. It is the height of idiocy to assume that one can only interpret the scripture without considering the secular reality of the world.

This isn't about condoms, gay rights, women's lib or anything else - it's about whether or not the secular world is going to embrace the church or continue to shun it as an irrelevant artifact of an era long past. A living artifact perhaps, but an artifact nontheless.