The only sin is lack of love.
It's taken them about 1,500 years. And it's still iffy whether such a monolithic beast can shed its history of tyranny over the human soul, of wedding themselves to state power (including horrendous violence) to impose religious uniformity, of male self-worship and obsession with controlling other peoples' sexuality, and all these male prelates' obsession with "doctrine"--especially the utter absurdity that "God the Father" and "God the Son" somehow created each other without "God the Mother," and with "the Holy Spirit" stuck in there, "mysteriously" (Gawd, they are as funny as Tea Partyers--indeed, the "Fathers of the Church" were the original Tea Partyers--people right out of Lewis Carroll's "Mad Tea Party"
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Anyway, they have A LOT of lovelessness to repent of, before they can call themselves Christians, and before they can emerge from the toxic clouds that surround them--of fascism, murder, greed, repression and, lately, raping thousands upon thousands of children.
The male hierarchy's sin is so big, so all encompassing and so persistent, that, in a way, I feel that an equally big and momentous reformation could occur, and could occur quickly. I feel the same about our democracy. The crimes of our war machine and the rich and powerful are so enormous that reform WILL occur--no matter how they try to stop it (lately, with the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines). If history is any guide, it is inevitable. Whether it happens relatively peacefully or not is an open question. Our democracy was designed to make peaceful change possible but all those mechanisms for correcting a wrong course--through political action, political discussion, peaceful assembly, voting, etc.--have been gravely eroded and tampered with. But it WILL happen. Perhaps that accounts for the frantic and obscene profiteering by the rich. They KNOW their time is short for amassing fortunes big enough to buy themselves another country or an island somewhere or perhaps a biosphere in outer space. We haven't seen such mind-boggling social irresponsibility since the Tzars of Russia.
In any case, if history is any guide (and I'm not sure, with Planet Earth in real and unprecedented peril, that history can always help us), the Church--not by action of its monarch, but by action of its lowliest members--ordinary parishioners, nuns--almost all--some rare priests, some monks--may finally acknowledge its wrong path, for millennia now, and become the open-hearted community that the New Testament reveals (and that the earliest Christians were). I have more hope for this happening, and even happening quickly, than I do for us getting rid of our war machine and corporate rule any time soon.
It was the loveliest of ideas to begin with, that all are welcome and ALL ARE EQUAL in the human community--slaves and tax collectors, fishermen and thieves, rich and poor, women and men, the privileged and the untouchable, the educated and the ignorant, no matter their status in society, no matter their prior history--of greed, of prostitution, of selfishness, of crime, of low birth or high birth--no matter their status as tribal enemies, no matter their race. NOTHING mattered to Jesus except that you "love thy neighbor as thyself." That's the New Testament, and it really is a remarkable teaching, and remarkable, too, that its light still shines, despite two millennia of the original Tea Partyers messing with the texts.
Pope Francis is the expression of the collective will of the PEOPLE of the Church. Cardinals voted for him, in that closed, monolithic system, but those cardinals had quite a bit of "handwriting on the wall" to consider--in loss of membership, in the outrage of ordinary Catholics at the child molestation scandals, in the outrage of many Catholic women at being left out of the Trinity, in reactions against the fascist politics of the Church, recently and over the millennia, and more. The rebellion against all this has been under way for some time--at least since Vatican II. Some cardinals and bishops certainly will try to limit the reform and they may undo it all, with another convulsive reversion to the Middle Ages, but change has been thrust upon them, for sure--from below--and we ought to credit those who really brought it about, and not accept the corporate news world's view that it's all about the monarch.
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