“The Catholic Church and its imaginary doctors”

Western Catholicism is sick: religious practice in free fall, priestly vocations at their lowest, the accumulation of cases of sexual and spiritual abuse, and the loss of confidence in the ecclesiastical authorities… If the sick person is far from being imaginary, the abundance of doctors at his bedside comes from Molière’s comedy: “It’s the kidney! exclaims one sociologist; “No, it’s the stomach! », retorts such a nun; “You don’t think about it, it’s the lung! », concludes a theologian quite astonished and flattered that one is interested in him.

Around the patient, doctors of all stripes are agitated, in the indifference of the crowd for whom the patient is already dead, buried, and above all forgotten, for a long time. The people of God, for their part, reduced to a trickle, avert their eyes, between indignation and incredulity in front of this lamentable pantomime.

Predict a bleeding

The patient is not imaginary, but the doctors who prescribe a bloodletting rather resemble the Diafoirus father and son in the play: they often have the advanced age of the father, the uncertain knowledge of the son, even more so, and the ineffectiveness of either. If there is moreover a scientific miracle in the matter, it is to note that in and around the corpse of the Church, the fossils reproduce themselves.

The battalion of licensed doctors is a farce: theologians who want to be subversive but are only subsidized by the institution sing the old refrain of progressivism by imitating the last Marxists or ultraliberals: “If our remedies do not yet cure, it is that you have to double the dose”; religious from congregations which have not received a vocation for thirty years are trumpeting their infallible recipes for rediscovering an authentic religious life and plethoric numbers; sociologists or historians who combine an often correct diagnosis with remedies outside their field of competence. The list of prescribed remedies is worth considering.

Ordained women?

The ordination of married men or of women to revive vocations? Even a superficial look at the state of liberal Protestantism is enough to denounce its inanity, as indeed for the alignment of faith or morals with the ideas of the contemporary world.

More women and laity in church government? Pope Francis urges it. It is indeed better founded. But the effect of this desirable development will be limited, as illustrated by the situation of parishes – where women and lay people hold the handle – and that of women’s congregations – where spiritual abuses and problems of governance also exist.

More democracy in governance? Yes of course. Authority needs to be enlightened. But beware of the manipulation of democratic processes by active minorities, as we see in the German synodal path.

Indecency

There is also some indecency in exploiting the terrible tragedy experienced by so many victims of abuse in order to sell outdated goods manufactured in another era when the problems were quite different. The doctor who claims to cure all diseases of all times with the same remedy denounces himself as a charlatan. In reality, we bring out the same old ideological agenda by dressing it up in the tinsel of urgency and compassion. A smokescreen to better camouflage the abandonment of the substance of faith and morals.

If the disease of the Church is called clericalism, it is in the broad sense that Julien Benda gave to this term when he spoke of “treason of the clerks” to qualify the attitude of the French elites before and during the Second World War. The result was collaboration with absolute evil. Priests, lay people, men, women, theologians or sociologists, clericalism is the best shared thing in the world. And the betrayal of clerics is the common denominator of all crises.

A community united by faith

In the Gospel, we speak of a haemorrhaging woman “who had suffered much at the hands of many physicians and had spent all her wealth without any profit, but rather went from bad to worse” (Mk 5, 25). The Church is that woman. The only one who can heal her is Jesus himself. And the remedies are known, effective because they come from God and not from human expertise inflated by the winds of the times: the sacraments, Holy Scripture, prayer, and personal conversion. And the courage of decision-makers. Without this, institutional adjustments, if there are any legitimate ones, are doomed to failure.

The Church is a community united by faith in view of holiness. Any serious illness that affects him therefore bears on faith and holiness. Physicians who no longer believe in the gravity of sin or in the power of grace, even less in a Judgment at the end of which two outcomes are really possible – Heaven and Hell – render themselves incapable of understanding the importance of punishment, penance and conversion.

The Church is there. Mother Teresa had understood everything, who replied to a journalist who asked her about what needed to be changed: “You, and me. The rest is bad literature and bad medicine.

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