While the news media is slamming the Catholic Church once again, this time provoked by the disgrace and defrocking of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, and the Pope's call to purge the church of the evils now laid bare to public view, we should remember that there is a yet more sensitive issue than the molestation of children by priests, and the illicit fornication that has long taken place between ordained priests and nuns. This is all atrocious enough, and we have no need to excavate the details of the thousands of sex scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church in the last twenty years.
But journalists are not usually theologians. They leave religion well alone and address the moral and criminal failures of the Roman hierarchy.
Pope orders summit on sexual abuse
Pope orders summit on sexual abuse
Few commentators have tackled the sheer scam of sanctity. The claim to be the holy Roman Catholic Church, with a leader revered as a holy father and church ceremonies cloaked in a veneer of mystery designed to impress the faithful that they are only a sacrament away from the very holiness of God himself was roundly debunked at the Reformation in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Catholic Church, however, always controlled the message, lived with the divide between Catholicism and Protestantism, and continued to proselytize and subjugate untaught multitudes around the globe to the lie that they were God’s holy church, alone appointed to bring the message of salvation to the world.
To use the modern cry of teenagers calling for government to control the spawning disease of gun violence, we call BS on the so called spiritual claims of the holy Roman Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church believes it is the ONLY way of salvation, the only true faith, opening the gateway of heaven to believers through the administration of the sacraments – which are the means, the channels of God’s grace, to the penitent; all other versions of Christianity are invalid, blind alleys, leading nowhere. However outward looking the church might appear to be, however ecumenical, there is no salvation, no reconciliation with God, no pathway to eternal bliss outside of the only ordained holy church of Jesus Christ – the Holy Roman Catholic Church.
Bluntly, if you want to be right with God and get to heaven when you die you are stuck with a priesthood of intermediaries between men and God who are amongst the most unholy of all religious clerics. And we now know that the management of the offending clergy was criminally designed to obfuscate discovery of their lusts, and give them the chance, after behavioral modification, to start afresh -- as if the leopard could change his spots. Or more to the point – as if repentance and the power of the Holy Spirit working in the life of the priest would accomplish a total reversal of the very nature of the offending man. We now know too much to believe that pastoral care of priests by bishops and cardinals did anything other than temporarily check their behavior and send the man to prey on the fold elsewhere.
The hands that fondled the genitals of a child on Saturday night, and spoke words of terror to him never to divulge what unseemly behavior had just passed between the two of them, also took a wafer on Sunday morning, spoke the sacred words whereby every particle of the bread miraculously gets transformed into the very body and blood of Christ, and fed the holy sacrament to believers who always thought the parish priest, their Father in God, was such a wonderful man.
In a word, the claims of the Roman Catholic church to be the only ark of salvation, to be the only truly spiritually chosen heirs of St. Peter – are just so much bunkum. The sacrament of Holy Orders, and the discipline of celibacy, does nothing to secure and seal the observant priest from an inner lust that can worm its way out with a spurious, self-deceiving rationale that his sexual gratification with young innocents can be justified in the eyes of God, or at worst, forgiven at his next confession.
There is nothing holy about the Catholic Church. Yet is still parades its show of holiness. While not doubting that there are many priests still faithful to their vows, let it not be supposed that these have thereby given integrity to a religious system which over the centuries has exploited the poor and needy with the threats of purgatory, to the enrichment of the church’s coffers. No amount of incense, clerical costuming, splendid ceremony and liturgy, or reverence offered to their Pope, or public groveling for the sins of its priests can conceal that this is all outward show, a sham, a confidence trick perpetrated on the sensibilities of a vast public too afraid to call it what it is: the scam of sanctity.
This is the inner terror of the Pope, his cardinals, bishops and priest, far worse than the scandals wrought by uncontrolled priests. The system is spiritually bankrupt. The Holy Spirit is incompetent or non-existent; Celibacy is a burden, not a release from the works of the flesh. The king has no clothes. The game is up. The so-called holiness, the sanctity, is a scam.
Michael Buss
February 2019
The writer holds a degree in divinity from London University and for 20 years was an ordained pastor in a number of evangelical churches in England. He quit in 1986, no longer believing the basic doctrines of the Christian faith.
