Trouble in the Catholic Church

I read a couple of things today that would seem to indicate big trouble for the Catholic Church. The first was in Susan Jacoby's column about a recent report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Her column wasn't particularly encouraging, but this part about Catholics struck me as being significant:

Just 17 percent of Catholics under 30--and only 15 percent over 30--believe that their own religion is the one true faith that leads to eternal life. For someone brought up as a Catholic in the 1950s, as I was, that last statistic is just staggering: It points to a negation of every absolute truth claim that the Catholic Church has made for centuries. If I were a Catholic bishop, the results of this poll would terrify me. If you've based most of your indoctrination on the idea that yours is the one true church, and 85 percent of those who still identify with Catholic tradition don't believe it, you're in trouble as an institution. 

Of course, most Catholics I know just ignore whatever church teachings they dislike (most notably, those about birth control). And maybe this is simply the general tolerance of other faiths - other Christian faiths, at least - in America. Whatever the church said in the 1950's, most Americans in my experience didn't seem to think that it mattered much which church you went to, as long as you went to one of them (and decent people, at least, extended that tolerance to Jews, as well).

Still, the child abuse scandal has no doubt hit the Catholic Church hard, and rightly so. It's not over yet, either. Now, after the recent horrible reports from Ireland (which themselves came too soon for us to forget about the sexual abuse of children in America - and the church cover-up here), we're also hearing scandals from Germany. And these seem to directly implicate Pope Benedict, in his previous position as cardinal.

Here's how Christopher Hitchens puts it in his latest column:

Very much more serious is the role of Joseph Ratzinger [now Pope Benedict XVI], before the church decided to make him supreme leader, in obstructing justice on a global scale. After his promotion to cardinal, he was put in charge of the so-called "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" (formerly known as the Inquisition). In 2001, Pope John Paul II placed this department in charge of the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. In May of that year, Ratzinger issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture. The accusations, intoned Ratzinger, were only treatable within the church's own exclusive jurisdiction. Any sharing of the evidence with legal authorities or the press was utterly forbidden. Charges were to be investigated "in the most secretive way ... restrained by a perpetual silence ... and everyone ... is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office … under the penalty of excommunication." (My italics). Nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children, but exposing the offense could get you into serious trouble.

It's not surprising that Catholics are questioning their own faith (the Pew Report also indicates that 25% of American-born Catholics are no longer members of the church). This kind of thing might be particularly damaging in a religion that still accepts the old "divine right of kings" philosophy of the Middle Ages, whose leader is not chosen by the membership and is supposed to be infallible when it comes to church teachings. This doesn't give them a lot of wiggle room, does it?

And when priests, the very people who are supposed to teach you, guide you, and interpret God's will for you, are sexually abusing children - and when their superiors are covering it up, moving the abusers to new congregations elsewhere, and deciding that the real sin is reporting the crime, not the abuse itself - well, even the most diehard believer has got to start wondering, don't you think?