I was once technically of the Roman Catholic faith; the church I attended six days a week, went to confession to lie about lying, and the school I attended from first to eighth grade is still there after all these years, still surrounded by boondock:
The school closed in 2005 due to low attendance; I don't see the building where the nuns who administered the school used to live there anymore. Money, or lack thereof, of course is the likely culprit. I recall how every year the church released a list of how much money each family put in the collection box, probably to shame people who were giving less to give more. Even the amount that kids who were given an envelope for each Sunday was tabulated; the nickel I was given to put in my envelope was my entire "allowance" for the week, so I didn't feel any "shame" about it.
Recently we learned that Pope Francis took the extraordinary step of firing the bishop of the Tyler, Texas diocese, Joseph Strickland. Although the “official” reason for this was that after an apostolic visitation investigating the governance of a high school (including the hiring of a nun with “controversial views"), the high turnover rate in the curia which suggested internal disagreements on how Strickland was running the diocese, and the aborted creation of a “village” for “true believers” in which millions of dollars in loans were acquired but not a single structure was built in the midst of controversy involving an adulterous relationship and questions about where the money went.
All of that alone should have been enough for Strickland’s dismissal, but he drew attention to himself with open criticism of the Pope concerning his “liberal” leanings in regard to abortion and same-sex marriage, which Pope Francis was being “pragmatic” about as not to alienate Catholics who were not “culture war” types, and who thought the Church should be “inclusive.” Of course most will look upon this episode as being about the Pope having enough with Strickland’s rhetoric, in which he insisted that the Pope himself should “resign.”
Pope Francis apparently sees the Catholic Church in the U.S. as unruly and openly defying his authority, or at least in those parts where far-right politics has wormed its way into religious doctrine. Tom Roberts wrote in the Catholic news magazine Sojourners about this occurrence back in 2019. Money, of course, has a great deal to do with it:
Timothy Busch is a wealthy man with big ambitions. His version of the prosperity gospel, Catholic in content and on steroids, is a hybrid of traditionalist pieties wrapped in American-style excess and positioned most conspicuously in service of free market capitalism. Busch’s organization, the Napa Institute, and its corresponding foundation are among the most prominent of a growing number of right-wing Catholic nonprofits with political motivations. Such groups, some more extreme than others and all on the right to far-right side of the political and ecclesial spectrum, have in recent years muscled in on territory that previously was the largely unchallenged domain of the nation’s powerful Catholic bishops.
It was noted that the rise of the “Catholic Right” parallels “the ascendancy of the Religious Right out of 1980s evangelicalism,” and is “well-financed.” Furthermore, “While pendulum swings are common between conservative and progressive tendencies in Catholicism, the 35-year traditionalist reign of popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI allowed the Far Right to flourish.”
Apparently, some Catholics don’t agree with how Jesus advised they should practice their religion as expressed through the Sermon on the Mount: “Some groups are aggressively involved in aligning Catholic thought with libertarian economic theory while others are devoted to defining Catholicism for the culture by exceptionally conservative theology and practice.”
Besides the issue of pedophilia that has plagued the church, many have also forgotten the lesson of the incident with the money lenders and how money led to betrayal and scandal:
For Christianity, money and power have been corrupting influences since Judas Iscariot accepted the silver in exchange for a betrayal. In Roman Catholicism, from the times of the Medicis and Borgias up to more recent scandals—such as when the Legionaries of Christ used large sums of money to buy influence (and a temporary buffer from scrutiny) in the Vatican—the mix has produced high art, toxic papacies, and distortions of the gospel and of church teaching.
Even the power of ostensibly “charitable” organizations like the Knights of Columbus has aided far-right politics: “With that kind of financial power, no one in the hierarchy is likely to object when the Knights appropriate funds for politically conservative think tanks, news agencies, and even the Federalist Society, an organization that advocates for conservative justices, with no connection to anything religious or charitable.”
Far-right bishops in league with well-financed “lay” extremist groups have joined forces in using religion as a vehicle to promulgate far-right policy, whether cultural or political in nature. Thus the power of the conference of bishops which is supposed to guide policy is becoming increasingly indistinguishable with that of political players.
In fact the new power brokers in the U.S. Catholic Church act just like their Protestant evangelical counterparts, with wholly “unchristian” behavior: “Their devotion to individualism, unrestricted capitalism, and diminishment of government services, especially to the poor and marginalized, runs counter to the central tenets of Catholic social teaching.”
Is it really "bad" to have religion guide government, you might ask. Current House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has already angered some on the extremist side of his party by recognizing reality and compromising with Democrats on another temporary budget deal, has taken to asserting that it is a “misnomer” that the U.S. Constitution mandates the separation of church and state. Johnson claims that the Constitution only mandates that government stay out of religion, not that religion stay out of government. He claims to support the formation of a “Christian republic,” rather than a “democracy.”
A Christian “republic” is not a new idea; philosophers have been discussing what such a government would mean in principle for centuries; philosophers like Hobbes and Locke debated whether a “fusion” of Christian law and civil government were “compatible” with each other. The general conclusion is that they are not, and we can see how such a government works in "principle" in countries like Iran, which technically has an elected government, but the real power is in the hands of religious overseers who rule by sharia law, and physical punishment can be meted out for even “violations” of the “dress code.”
The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau also noted the incompatibility between religion and a “republic” form of government, where religion demands conformity and submission to a single authority, and thus its adherents would be susceptible to accepting an authoritarian form of government. The main problem with Johnson’s “religion” is that is that it lacks tolerance in a pluralistic society, which is something that Locke also found “troublesome” about inserting religion into civil government despite his own strong religious beliefs.
The recent Kennedy Supreme Court decision sidestepped the question of whether religious “law” could take the place of civil law, asserting only that government could not interfere with the practice of religion on a “personal” basis, as in a high school football coach bringing players together on the field to say a prayer, which apparently some players thought they were being coerced into joining in or be punished if they didn’t.
Of course the next step would be to force children in a public school classroom to follow a teacher in such prayers, which could also be seen to be coercive and crossing the line between church and state, since while the Constitution’s establishment clause may say that government may not be in the business of establishing a “state religion” or interfering with one's practice of religion, it does not say that the tenets of a specific religion (say Christianity) can replace the civil law as a basis of government.
As Thomas More believed, “God’s laws” were only “practical” if they guided one’s personal conscience, but “Mans’ laws” were necessary to maintain civil society; they were simply not compatible with each other in practice, and should stay out of each other's spheres. In the end, More's fate was determined not by “Man’s laws” that should have saved him, but as he feared by “God’s law” as interpreted by a tyrant, King Henry VIII.
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