More Catholic strategy

I’ve given up reading blogs for Lent, but not writing, so rather than respond to the provocations of the moment (whatever they are), I shall continue with my own monomania.

Overall, Pope Francis is responding admirably to the terrible predicament he is in.  However, having said as much of it as was demanded of him, he needs to drop this “clericalism” nonsense.  The clericalism rathole is even more to be avoided than the lavender mafia rathole.  A crusade against clericalism is a crusade against clergy, because it invites laity to make a fuss over anything a priest does that annoys them.  Clericalism is the microaggressions of the Catholic world, whereby a high moral status majority is invited to scrutinize a low moral status minority* for subtle signs that the latter secretly think themselves superior.  Priests will never be able to grovel to the satisfaction of the laity, any more than whites can to blacks.

On the other hand, “synodality” was a stroke of genius.  One of the things that is desperately needed in the Church is a way to minimize legal liabilities.  The Church makes records of everything, then sends them up the chain to the Vatican, whose scarce personnel usually never read them.  “What did the Pope know, and when did he know it?”, the conservatives keep repeating because it makes those idiot baboons feel clever.  The Holy See must be protected, and for its own protection, it must have no more information than it can actually process and use.  Anything else only makes it legally vulnerable.  There is absolutely no reason why Rome should even be informed about local disciplinary issues–and worse, unsubstantiable rumors–especially now that we’re a synodal Church.  Now if only an excuse can be found to destroy the CDF’s existing records.

In a bishop, I can forgive every sin but stupidity–the one sin the world also will not forgive.  So, their Excellencies have decided they want episcopal accountability, which will certainly lead to an unprecedented reign of terror against priests, because no bishop would dare judge a priest innocent of even the most absurd charge of sexual misconduct lest he later himself be condemned for “covering up”.  As soon as this is widely known, every priest in America will be accused of sexual abuse.  This is easy enough to anticipate.  In addition, their Excellencies have been for about two decades implemented a system of extreme vetting and arduous training in the seminaries, with the result that we probably have the most elite (certainly in terms of dedication, but also presumably in whatever personality qualities they have been discriminating for) cohort of new and upcoming priests that it is possible to have.  Now, if only they would try to put these two thoughts together for once.  How do they intend to protect this enormous investment?  They are like a team of generals whose idea to win a war is to train an elite cadre of warriors and then set them up to be mowed down by enemy machine gun fire.  The injustice doesn’t bother me half so much as the waste of precious human material.

Your Excellencies, your job is not to be holy, not to be faithful or merciful, not to pray or fast, but to anticipate the enemy’s moves and preemptively counteract.  You need to be thinking now about how to make sure that every priest in America is monitored (say, by some sort of body camera) every minute of every day.  These recordings must be impossible to tamper with (because, remember, the whole world thinks that we’re a giant conspiracy to molest children, but they will give us no help with viewing or storing these tapes), timestamped, and long-lasting, the latter because they must be stored forever because there is no reliable statute of limitations for Catholic priests in the public realm and ecclesiastic courts don’t even seem to have the concept.  Current priests are doomed; I can’t think of any way to save them.

The above, involving enormous amounts of data, will seem like a terribly impractical idea.  Give me an alternative.  I don’t want to hear any conservative nonsense about praying and fasting; that’s just an excuse to refuse to serve God with one’s brain.  We must anticipate.  We must counteract.

 

• In the case of microaggressions, this fact is obscured by our calling the high status group “minorities” and the low status group the “majority”.  However, heterosexual white men are a minority in every country on Earth.