The Very Big Deal Catholic Crisis

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An article by Rod Dreher which is about an article by Jonathan Last, about the current Catholic Church crisis.

Dreher may be way too apocalyptic in his analysis, while Italians are way too blasé. He says this about the Italians:

“I have been in Italy one week, and have had countless rich, stimulating conversations with Italian Catholic friends. Yet I find that I struggle to convey the gravity of the scandal roiling the US Catholic Church. It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to many folks here. Some think it’s nothing more than a political attack on Pope Francis. Others agree that it’s bad, but they say the Church has always been corrupt to a certain degree, and don’t grasp why Americans are so worked up about it.”

continued here:

 
Well, according to the Rod Dreher article, the coming crisis in the Church will be worse in its effects that the Protestant Reformation. The article from Jonathon Last is pretty much in agreement. But it’s not easy to judge a historical event when one is in the midst of it. The article from the two Evangelicals warns Protestants that to treat it as simply the business of the Catholic Church would be a mistake.
 
National Review Online has some articles on the crisis, perhaps not as gloomy. I’m skeptical of the TAC (The American Conservative) website, I have read it before. Undeniably, I am a fan of one of the founders of that website which is Pat Buchanan, though as usual, I don’t agree with all he says and I don’t agree with a whole lot of things at TAC.
 
The only items I have read in the American Conservative have been the posts by Rod Dreher. He, at least since I’ve been reading him, is consistently apocalyptic, but always entertaining. After all, he wrote “The Benedict Option.” I misappropriated the initial post to Jonathan Last, but that’s who Dreher spent a lot of the article quoting.

Anyway, compared to the seemingly placid Church of my youth, the Church now always seems on the verge of apocalypse.
 
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MikeInVA said:
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gracepoole:
And that’s true.
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No, there are corrupt individuals but the Church is not.
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I understand the point you’re making but for most Catholics and non-Catholics, the distinction is meaningless. We’re mortal and we typically recognize systems/entities in the guise of other mortals. I’m guessing that for many victims, there is no solace in the fact that it’s the membership of the Church that’s been corrupt and not the Church Herself.
 
I understand what you’re saying, but it is important to make the distinction, especially for those who don’t realize the difference.
 
For someone who’s not even Catholic Rod Dreher is sure spilling a lot of ink on this topic. Makes one wonder what his true intentions are.

A bigger deal than the Protestant reformation? The schism that ripped Christendom nearly in half? That Protestant reformation? To even compare this crisis to that one is laughable. Newsflash: no one is leaving the Church because of this with the exception of some flimsy Catholics who were looking for a way out anyway.
 
I recently encountered someone who claims she and her husband have removed their family from the Church because they want to show victims that they stand with them. I attempted to explain that healing doesn’t happen without the sacraments but I’m certain I didn’t have any impact. In most other cases of those I’ve run across personally (admittedly a small sample) who are leaving, their faith was rather shaky to begin with.
 
From the originally linked article:

" I wish to point out yet again historian Barbara Tuchman’s three aspects of why the Renaissance popes lost half of Europe to the Protestant Reformation:
  1. obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents
  2. primacy of self-aggrandizement
  3. illusion of invulnerable status"
Click to expand...
 
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