Set-decorator Catholicism

The following excerpt is from a two-part article by Eugene Kennedy in the National Catholic Reporter (ncronline.org) published on June 30 and July 7, "Set-decorator Catholicism: clericalism thrives in a new phase of the sex abuse crisis":


American Catholicism should be preparing for 2020 when a large increase in the Catholic population, mostly Hispanic, will present Church leaders with the challenge to open rather than close new churches and schools. Instead of preparing for the future, bishops and priests now in key administrative and pastoral positions, led by Pope Benedict XVI, are dressing the set of Catholic life with props from the past in an effort to take the church back to 1920.

That era of simplistically captioned silent movies is now re-created through the awkwardly translated liturgical readings soon to be expensively imposed on what these self-styled "reformers" hope to be passive and silent parishioners. Americans are not, however, alone in experiencing this phenomenon. In May the bishops of England and Wales restored meatless Fridays year round for Catholics. In the same month a nun held up a silver reliquary carrying the blood of the newly beatified Pope John Paul II, to applause by a large crowd in St. Peter's Square. Besides alerting Pope Benedict to beware of doctors holding syringes, this reveals the Transylvanian caste of some of the clerics now decorating the set of Catholicism throughout the world.

As demanding and sometimes as narcissistic as great actors, these set-dresser clerics are tantrum ready if they pick up any symbol or practice of Vatican II in their sight lines. While the makers of "The Untouchables" knew that they had emptied a warehouse of dusty props to create a temporary illusion of Prohibition era Chicago, these "New Men," as they sometimes style themselves, believe that placing pre-Vatican II artifacts everywhere in contemporary Catholicism actually restores the high times of the hierarchical Church.

Clericalism redux energizes this spreading movement to reinstate that Neverland age of Catholicism when priests controlled the church, lay people knew their place, the Mass was in Latin, God was in His heaven and all was right with the world.

On the Murdoch Empire

For years I have been convinced that the Murdoch enterprise was a genuine evil empire. As some of you know, for days now I have been posting a lot of links on Twitter to describe the growing disintegration of that empire. I also wanted to state the problem in a nutshell, but yesterday Avaaz (www.Avaaz.org) did that job for me. Here's how they put it:

"Murdoch is a global problem. He's famous for dictating editorial positions to his papers. He corrupts and controls democracies by pushing politicians to back his extremist ideas on war, torture and a host of other planetary ills, and destroying the careers of politicians with smear campaigns unless they do his bidding. In the US, he helped elect George W. Bush and has most of the Republican presidential candidates actually on his payroll. His Fox News Network spread lies to promote the war in Iraq, pushed resentment of Muslims and immigrants and spawned the right-wing tea party. Maybe worst of all, he has helped block critical global action on climate change."

Amen. Now keep your eyes on London.

A note about this blog & Twitter

While I am (quite obviously and regrettably) as slow as ever with this blog, I just posted my 2000th tweet this morning. That's at:

http://twitter.com/relford

Readers especially looking for information about the US-Mexico borderlands and the wider immigration crises (yes, plural) will find a lot of tweets on those issues. In recent days, I have also done quite a bit of posting on the major cracks (finally!) in the Empire of Murdoch.

ricardo, in Tucson, where presently (10:35 a.m.) it is a cool 87, and where it will again be 104 by monday