The Catholic church asks us to submit to the powers that be in return for the life of the world to come.
Isn’t that convenient? Everywhere you look and over many centuries, with some honorable exceptions, the Church has been on the side of the Establishment. It has shrugged when horrendous acts have been perpetrated against ordinary people. It was anti-establishment until the day that it became the state religion, when set about with relish to persecute its competitors.
This Pope has only recently insisted on nuns stopping “good works” and has made them instead support the bishops in their political interventions, their persecution of homosexuals and their attacks on women who make rational decisions about whether or not to have babies. Note that the perpetrators of this stuff are all men who enjoy an easy, comfortable life, but mostly enjoy their power and the opportunity to control others.
Power is the acid that eats away at a man’s soul.
This is not the church which Jesus Christ started ( if indeed He actually meant to ‘start a church’)
He gave people back their power, especially women who He treated with respect, unlike the men of the time, who actually ‘thanked God they were not born a woman’.
He encouraged love to be shown by help and understanding; respect for and help for the poor and disadvantaged, and an absence of judgmental and prejudiced attitudes towards those different from ourselves. He also warned that anyone who harmed a child deserved to have a mill stone put round their neck and dropped into the sea. (an oblique reference to the abuse scandal)
I just wonder how some church members and church leaders are going to explain
themselves when they finally meet the person they purport to be following?
I am sad that people judge the true followers of Jesus by the mess made by some
power hungry, prestige seeking, people.
A very nice comment, thank you. I wish others were as open-minded, science-aware and tolerant as you are. If they were, we would all be Christians and this blog would be unnecessary.
The un-Jesus-like seeking of power and control is bad enough for a religious institution. To me, perhaps the most horrible aspect of the institutional hypocrisy, whether in the Catholic Church (or any other) or in the American government, is the lack of accountability for crimes. From this failure, no system can recover without radical reform– “radical” in the sense of “root.”