When applied to Christianity, the world ‘relevant’ has the same effect on me as loud cacophony has on music lovers. On the plus side, this pernicious word provides several reliable clues to the personality of the person using it.
He can be guaranteed to be a) an atheist, b) a pseudointellectual who believes that, though clever people like him know better, religion has some social value for stupid people, c) ignorant of Christianity and most other things that matter, including human nature, d) a trendy leftie, for all the lip service he may or may not pay to free enterprise and some such.
Whoever wrote today’s Times editorial Vatican III? is all those things, and also not very bright to boot.
Some identified “observers on Catholic affairs” believe, says the article with obvious glee, “that the Pope [is] beginning the long, painful process of bringing church doctrine on sexual and family matters into line with what ordinary Catholics in many parts of the world actually do or think.”
The observation is as accurate as the relish discernible behind it is subversive. Yes, the Pope is doing just that. And no, unlike our government the Church isn’t run by focus groups. It’s ordinary Catholics who should get in line with the Church and its dogma, not vice versa.
The process the Pope is beginning isn’t so much long and painful as destructive. And if it’s true that he’s indeed planning a Vatican III, then the Church, already deeply shaken by Vatican II, may fall apart.
Take the Pope’s desire to “increase the role of women in the Church”. It isn’t immediately obvious how the role of women can possibly be increased above that already played by Mary Magdalene, St Theresa, St Catherine, St Bernadette – to say nothing of the Virgin.
One can’t get rid of the gnawing fear that His Holiness tries to step on the thorny path leading to the ordination of women, pushing the button on the time bomb that has already shown its explosive potential in the Anglican Church. Add to this his ambivalence on homosexuality and divorce, and the bomb’s yield goes up a few megatons.
Traditional, which is to say truly Catholic, prelates have so far been fighting successful rearguard action against His Holiness’s reformist zeal, but for how long?
This week they’ve written a letter warning that the Catholic Church may suffer the same collapse as that suffered by liberal Protestant churches, which was “accelerated by their abandonment of key elements of Christian belief and practice.”
I’d be tempted to express my concern in even stronger terms. Such abandonment, to various degrees, isn’t just a feature of ‘liberal Protestant churches’ but of Protestantism as such. The Reformation tore the Western Church asunder, paving the way for anticlericalism first, agnosticism second and atheism third.
It also showed that believers reform the Church at their peril. This organisation, after all, exists to guard and transmit what it must see as the eternal, revealed truth, which is by definition absolute.
The moment compromises are made to make the Church more ‘relevant’ to a world increasingly alien to it, it loses much of its credibility and some of its legitimacy. The Church is a viscerally conservative body – or it is nothing.
Its founder being a living God, Christianity is of course a living religion. That leaves room for the possibility that the revelation wasn’t given all at once, and subsequent generations may receive new instalments to what was given to those Galilean fishermen.
Indeed, several Church Councils held centuries after the apostolic mission began clearly received embellishments on the original revelation. It’s on that basis that they modified the doctrine, dogma and rituals of Christianity.
Should the Pope or likeminded prelates claim that God has spoken to them and guided them on the path to liberalisation, such claims would deserve respect. But they say no such thing. Their desire is to get more bums on pews by making the Church ‘more relevant’ to a world utterly corrupted by variously evil secular fads.
There perdition lies, and champions of its arrival can count on thunderous applause from The Times.
Because the Church “is an important part of the social fabric of many societies,” continues the editorial, “…it is in society’s interests for the church to… be relevant… It is seemingly wise to want to see church doctrine more closely and sympathetically reflect the lives of both believers and non-believers.”
This is ignorant gibberish. Church doctrine must “closely and sympathetically reflect” not the lives of “both believers and non-believers” but the revealed truth of Jesus Christ. The moment it starts catering to perverse fads that are destructive even in their secular context, it stops being the body of Christ it’s constitutionally supposed to be (1 Corinthians 12:27).
It becomes instead an extension of social services, and we know what a resounding success they are. Its relevance increases in inverse proportion to its holiness.
Oh well, we know The Times isn’t Catholic. But I for one am trying to suppress the urge to ask seriously the question often posed facetiously: “Is the Pope?”