Sex Abuse Scandal Could Split the Church, Like Another Reformation

Though I would prefer that the Pennsylvania scandal take down this immense, globally districuted, human constructed edifice called Roman Catholicism (1.2 billion population) entirely, I realize that my habitual revolutionary point of view is not widely held. Furthermore, that would be one more society-wide crackup that would lead to chaos, if done suddenly.

Yes, I am learning from the brilliant Qanon posts just how strategic and long-term must be one’s thinking and acting, if hoping to instigate a tectonic shift the mind of the mesmerized masses. It can’t be done all at once! Not by a longshot!

I spoke to a close relative of mine in Seattle yesterday. He is in touch with a priest who runs a school there, and works with major funders to the Catholic Church. Since the Pennsylvania report that implicated 301 priests and at least 1000 children, he has spoken to a number of these wealthy people, and they are all independently telling him that they are done funding the Catholic Church hierarchy. That from now on, their money will be going only to their local Catholic community.

As my relative says, “This is our community. Though the reports from elsewhere sickening, what are we going to do, divorce ourselves from our community?” He chooses not to. Understandably.

Despite my tendency towards an all-or-nothing stance, I too, totally recognize the immense and crucial value of community, as the underrepresented polarity to balance much vaunted American “individualism.” Community needs to be nurtured, not torn down, no matter where we find it. After all, that’s what we seek to build here in Green Acres Permaculture Village, a new/old culture that dynamically balances the needs, strengths and creative energy of both individualism and community.

What strikes me about my relative’s discovery about the funders making a distinction between local and hierarchical, is that the new sexual and pedo abuse revelations from the priestly caste within the Catholic Church have inspired this new thrust towards decentralization. And if that is the outcome of the Pennsylvania Report, then we can be glad.

When I say, tear it all down, all the old centralized structures that are crippling us in our capacity to both be fully ourselves and fully in alignment with each other and Mother Earth, I exempt local structures from that rallying cry. For though they too can be riddled with corruption, because they are close at hand, corruption can be identified and corrected. Not so with hierarchical power structures which allow for an increasing lack of accountability the higher you rise in the pyramid.

Also, I read where a number of states are now calling for their courts to step in to church affairs and conduct the same kind of investigations as Pennsylvania. Good? Bad? One institutional authority interfering with another?

Just what is local? What you can see, taste, touch, hear with your own senses? Are states themselves too far up the ladder to be considered locally accountable?

However we answer these questions, we must make sure that power returns to concentrate at the bottom, where it originated, rather than rising inexorably to the top.

Ultimately, I ask a question that most people who have found themselves brushing away the cobwebs of the religion they were raised in, do begin ask. Is religion ever a good thing? What is religion, but an attempt to insert some kind of mental and emotional screen, or “matrix” (usually with dogmas and priests or other “experts” and “intermediaries”) between me and the divine, i.e., Wild Nature, in all her profusion and abundance, from to microbes in the soil to the blood pulsing through my heart, to whirling galaxies above. It’s all there for us to commune with and learn from, inside our bodies, under our feet, above our heads, and hearts reaching and aching for each other; and we sure don’t need no damned intermediary.

Furthermore, these religions often, but not always, say they are the only one to lead to “salvation,” and that everybody else is going to hell.

Hell?

That’s here on earth, a human invention by those who would separate us from others by virtue of the “wrong” ideology, the “wrong” mental construct. Gag.