WHAT YOU NEED NOW - CONTENT UPDATED THROUGH THE DAY

June 23, 2005
 
MANN TALK: Latin America' Re-Reformation
 
by Perry Mann
 
Hinton (Special to HNN) – Pope Benedict XVI, the erstwhile cardinal who kept the Catholic worldwide hierarchy teaching the same dogma, dogma founded on absolute and divine premises, among which are that God abominates homosexual unions, abortion, the use of condoms, stem cell research and euthanasia---is confronted with a reformation, not in the manner of the dramatic beginning of the Reformation in 1521 when Luther burned the bull issued by the pope and for his contumacious act was excommunicated, but by thousands of Catholics who are ignoring the Church's teachings in practice and thousands who are moving their Sunday attendance to an evangelical church where a more pragmatic view of life is tolerated if not advocated, particularly with regard to condom use and contraception.
 
Thousands have died in Brazil and millions worldwide from AIDS and many have died because they have not used a condom while having sex. The Catholic Church bans the use of condoms and also teaches that condoms do not prevent AIDS. Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times, writes from Sao Paulo, Brazil, and quotes Roseli Tardelli, a Catholic who is editor of the AIDS News Agency: "The Catholic Church helps increase AIDS in the world. That's wrong. God doesn't like it."
 
One Brazilian priest told Kristof: "If I were pope, I would start a condom factory right in the Vatican. What's the point of sending food and medicine when we let people get infected with AIDS and die?" A coordinator of a Catholic-run AIDS orphanage in Sao Paulo believes that it is more important to save lives than to obey church rules so she tells HIV-positive teenagers in her care to use condoms when they have sexual relationships.
 
But the church persists in its long practice of sacrificing people on the altar of its theological purity. If there is one law in this universe that is absolute, it is that the hierarchy of a church, of a corporation, of an association, of a union, of a nation or of any group---considers the sanctity and perpetuation of its entity more important than any individual within the group---which concept is universal and without exception. And the rabid dedication to such law is manifested throughout history by among other events the Inquisition, the burning at the stake of numerous heretics, the threats to such unorthodox luminaries as Copernicus, Galileo and Servetus, among others, and in modern times, the threat of denial of Mass to politicians who are pro-choice, who are for same-sex marriage, who advocate the use of condoms and stem-cell research and any other practice or concept anathema to church doctrine. The law is that one does not think and act outside the group or put the group to the intellectual expense of defending its orthodoxy. A theological whistleblower is damned.
 
But theological purity and the sacrifice of the laity on the altar of dogma have their costs. Kristof: "Here in Latin America, the great remaining heartland of Roman Catholicism, some Catholics have a blunt warning for Pope Benedict XVI: Unless the Catholic Church changes course, it may come close to committing suicide. The result is that many local Catholic parishes have quietly seceded from the Vatican's control on sexual issues. The pope can thunder against birth control (other than a method based on timing a woman's cycles, derided by critics as 'Vatican Roulette'), but 70 percent of Brazilian women use artificial contraception. So the pope pontificates and his flock here yawns."
 
Other testimony relative to the flouting of dogma from Rome comes from a psychologist at an AIDS center in Sao Paulo: "We partner with priest to give out condoms." A gynecologist declares that in her 35 years of practice she has never had a Catholic object to most forms of contraception.
 
The handwriting is on the wall for Catholicism in Brazil, which houses 140 million of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics - the largest number of any nation. During John Paul II's papacy evangelicals -- especially Pentecostals -- quadrupled. It is now a probability that Brazil will become a Protestant country. Even Pope Benedict as a cardinal foresaw the probability: "Either the church finds an understanding, a compromise with the values propounded by society which she wants to continue to serve, or she finds herself on the margin of society."
 
Valeriano Paitoni, a priest widely admired in Sao Paulo, takes this position: "Most Brazilian Catholics want to see changes in the church's stance on birth control, homosexuality, marriage of priest and the role of women in the church. If the church doesn't have the courage to take these issues up, and listen to science and the world, then there will be a disaster."
 
The Vatican responded to the challenge of Martin Luther in 1521 by a bridge-burning finality: it excommunicated him and thus gave birth to the Reformation and the schism that became Protestantism. In view of that schism and today's chasm between the church's preachments and the people's practices, Kristof predicts: "Unless the Vatican reconnects with ordinary people here in the Catholic heartland, the tens of millions who find spiritual meaning in their pews but have been turned off by many church positions, then the Vatican's obstinacy may yet rekindle a Re-Reformation."
 
The church's dogma was formulated in a world altogether different from this world. Yet the church turns a blind eye to the changes and hangs on to the dogma that time, events and science have subverted. A world that is parent to six billion people is a different world from one that housed just a few thousand cave dwellers or a few nomadic tribes. Dogma then was premised on the cosmological, theological, biological and astronomical knowledge of that day. But the church has had to retreat from that dogma. It doesn't claim now that the earth is the center of the universe because Copernicus established that earth is a mere planet among planets. Science says homosexuality may be natural and not chosen. There are those who believe that man has no soul or that he has no free will.
 
The church's dogma is man conceived. It is a consensus of wise men over ages who attributed it to God to give it divine origin and authority. But even a wise man could not have perceived the world a thousand years hence and thus could not have foreseen millions infected with AIDS and a population of six billions. If he had he might have had a different view of the use of condoms and contraception.
 
Rigidity in belief and the scorning of compromise on the ground that the one is right and the other is wrong is a reef upon which many a ship has sunk. The Reformation should be an indelible memory of what not to do in matters of dogma. Latin America may become the church's Re-Reformation and the beginning of the end of St. Peter's Reign.
 
Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a regular columnist for the Nicholas Chronicle in Summersville. Born in Charleston, W.Va. in 1921, he lives in Hinton.