Another Institution on the Verge of Irrelevance

Courtesy of the Boston Globe: A Catholic moment of truth. I feel a great deal of anger and sorrow in the impending witch hunt -- not only is it a bad idea, but it's also a betrayal of the principles that are supposedly at the heart of the religion. What ever happened to "love thy neighbor" and to seeing the goodness and essential humanity in each person? Didn't Jesus spend his time in the Gospels showing compassion and justice to the poor and the sick and the outcasts of society? More GRRRRRRRRRR. October is really shaping up to be one heck of a month.

(Just to clarify -- I am a lapsed Catholic, and this kind of garbage is a big part of why I'm lapsed. Belief in the universal divine as expressed through humanity has nothing to do with cults of personality and authoritarian control over every last detail of personal conduct. I struggled with this frustration for about ten years before personally giving up on the Church as an institution. I'll always have some facets of Catholicism in my life, but I can't put up with the hypocrisy, the triviality, and the refusal to endorse pragmatic efforts to achieve social justice. There are so many good things the Church can and should be doing to continue Jesus' teachings -- and yet they're wasting the opportunity because the leadership is more concerned with some artificial purity tests.)