Catholic Reformation 3.0

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

As I predicted in my 1967 thesis, Contra Pontifices et Episcopi, ( Against Popes and Bishops) the end for Popes and Bishops is now in sight during our life time. Dismantling the Vatican epicenter of Catholicism is now seen as the only remedy to the clerical pedophilia rot championed by the Second Vatican Council ripping the Catholic Church into open schism. The next Pope will be the last Pope. Good riddance to bad trash. There was never a scriptural, nor theological legitimacy for the papacy in the first place. At long last, the center can not hold. That much is obvious.

Ok. Now that the Pope is back in Rome and done with media hype, it’s time to play Catholic Reformation 3.0. As we garage our ‘Pope Francis Visits America’ coffee cups, t-shirts, plates, spoons, photo albums, and assorted memorabilia, it’s time to take an axe to the tree that sprouted ‘country club Catholicism’. Since Catholic reformations versions 1.0 and 2.0 were colossal failures it’s time to give it another go before the whole thing completely implodes. Yes, two previous attempts have been made to reform the Catholic Church; the 16th-century protestant reformation by Martin Luther, and the Vatican II Ecumenical Council in 1963. Both have failed, not for lack of good intentions, but for lack of deep, sound surgery on the body of the Church. Doctors of the Church failed to realize exactly how sick their patient was, i.e. terminal hocus pocus.

With the October Synod of Bishops about to convene at the Vatican, this should give the Pope and the Curia effective scalpels and knives to make the deep incisions necessary to save the invalid church. This will be the third and final reformation attempt. If this fails, then the Catholic Church will surely implode leaving fragments for antiquity studies. The Catholic Faith, as a religion will survive, but the church as a system of laws and an organization will be finished, consigned to the scrap heap of failed institutions.

No less an expert on this subject than Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI himself predicted as much when he was an obscure young theologian. Today's Church could be faced with a terminal situation undermined, according to then Father Ratzinger, by the temptation to reduce priests to “social workers”, and it and all its work reduced to a mere political presence. In the late 1950's the future taciturn Pope Benedict XVI affirmed in a radio address titled Faith and the Future of the Church:

“From today’s crisis will emerge a Church that has lost a great deal. … It will become small and will have to start pretty much all over again. It will no longer have use of the structures it built in its years of prosperity. The reduction in the number of faithful will lead to it losing an important part of its social privileges. It will start off with small groups and movements and a minority that will make faith central to experience again. It will be a more spiritual Church and will not claim a political mandate flirting with the right one minute and the left the next. It will be poor and will become the Church of the destitute.” (source: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/is-it-time-for-the-benedict-option/#ixzz3bkA8NwiS )

The overall malady of the Catholic Church is a cancerous infection by the matter/spirit substance dualism that lies at the base of its organization, canon law, and Thomistic philosophy underpinning of its dogmas as codified by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13^th century. While it would make sense to operate on the matter/spirit dualism first, cutting it out entirely along with any infected tissue, the patient is dying from organizational and canon law bleeding that requires triage priority. There must be a triage to this reformation. Therefore here is an outline of the next three blogs reforming the organizational, canon law, and philosophical assumptions of Catholic theology.

1. Organizational Reformation:

There is neither scriptural justification nor pastoral need for a monarchical structure for the Catholic religion. There is no longer any need for a Pope as head of the hierarchical Vatican City State to preserve, protect and bequeath the Catholic faith for future generations. With the suppression of the office of Pope comes the suppression of the other monarchical offices, Prince-like Cardinals, Arch-bishops, Bishops and Monsignori. All of these are suppressed as the first act of the 3.0 reformation. These royal offices, with their immodest and ungodly trappings, will be replaced by democratically elected councils at all levels of the Catholic Church as detailed in next week’s blog.

2. Canon Law reformation:

With the suppression of the papacy, the cardinalate, and the episcopacy including monsignori, a new governing structure must be created to reorder the church as a fully functional contemporary organization. The body of church norms, precepts, codicils, rules, metrics, and regulations governing the everyday life of the Church and the faithful is known as ‘Code of Canon Law’. By 1800, there were over 10,000 ecclesiastical regulations and norms covering everything from circumcision to abortion to eating meat on Friday to prayers for the dead at the grave site. No matter was too insignificant to be overlooked lest the faithful fall into sin tempted by the Devil. Over many centuries the number of these ‘canons’ (from the greek κανὠν, meaning; a rule) was finally reduced down to 1752, after Vatican Council II as promulgated by Pope Saint John Paul II as the culmination of the Vatican II reformation. In his own words, John Paul II insisted that “the council’s ecclesiological structure clearly required a renewed formulation of its laws”. (source: http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Blog/1903/vatican_ii_and_the_code_of_canon_law.aspx )

There exists, then, no scriptural, nor canonical, nor pastoral impediment to a complete revision of the Code of Canon Law once again. Central to this reform is the reform of the Seven Sacraments delineated in canon law. These seven are compressed to just five and rebranded ‘consecrations’, thus;

7 Sacraments =	5 Consecrations
Baptism & Confirmation	Consecration into Faith

Penance and Holy Eucharist	Consecration into Communion

Marriage and Holy Orders	Consecration into Service

Extreme Unction	Consecration into Transition

These will be detailed in the second blog.

3. Philosophical/Theological Reformation

Finally, and most properly, replacing the matter/spirit dualism as the philosophical underpinning of Catholic dogma is essential for the full recovery of the Catholic Church. In layman’s understanding, this matter/spirit dualism is unsustainable in contemporary thought, reason, and experience. Even to moderately educated people of the 21^st century the notion of a static, perfect and eternal spiritual word interacting with its mutually exclusive dynamic, imperfect, and infinite material universe is both rationally incoherent and logically inconsistent with reliable experience.

As just one example from Catholic Church dogma, take ‘mystery’ of ‘The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven’. Catholics are required to believe this as an infallible article of faith. The notion is that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so perfect a human being that God ‘assumed’ her into heaven both body and soul.

By promulgating the Bull Munificentissimus Deus, (the most bountiful God) November 1, 1950, Pope Pius XII declared infallibly that the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was a dogma of the Catholic Faith. Likewise, the Second Vatican Council taught in the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium (light of the nations) that "the Immaculate Virgin, preserved free from all stain of original sin, was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, when her earthly life was over, and exalted by the Lord as Queen over all things (n. 59)." (source: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02006b.htm )

If this ‘infallible dogma’ is true under the matter/spirit dualism, then where exactly is the BVM body and soul? Floating out beyond Pluto? What does she eat? How does she spend her bodily time? Is heaven then a physical as well as a spiritual place? If her physical body still exits, then she’s still alive in some part of the physical universe and subject to its physical demands. If you don’t ascent to the belief in this infallible dogma, then you are both impious and blasphemous in the eyes of the Catholic Church’s theological understanding. Yet it makes no philosophical sense.

So long as the Catholic Church clings to this unsupportable matter/spirit substance dualism, then it cannot hope to keep or attract educated minds in faith. The dualism is dissolvable with an evolutionary process philosophy such as one proposed by Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit who shocked the Vatican in 1950 with his The Phenomenon of Man earning him a place on the ‘index’ of forbidden books, and a stern prohibition against further publishing his philosophy. This will be detailed in the third blog.

Ora pro nobis (Pray for us!)

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