Revisiting Church Reform

Sitting in my father's house this weekend and reading from a dilapidated and antiquated pack of Trivial Pursuit cards (so old they still recognize the Soviet Union as a country), I came across an interesting question.

"What could Roman Catholics do in good conscience for the first time on Dec. 5, 1966?" the card asked.

The answer? Eat meat on Fridays.

My father got the question right, and the card made its way to the back of the pack. But it seemed weirdly appropriate for the question to pop up during a time of such controversy in the Catholic Church. Picking up the card, I had to keep myself from making a tasteless comment about priests and little boys, for the institution that once stood for moral superiority and salvation from sin now stands for the despicable underside of human nature.

I thought about that Trivial Pursuit question on the train back to the city. It seemed logical that the Church would allow the consumption of meat on Fridays, since the law was obsolete and not particularly integral to one's relationship with God. In the United States, laws are constantly changing, updating themselves in accordance with changing times and changing people. Slavery used to be legal and now it isn't; alcohol was legal, then illegal, then legal again. Laws are as fickle as people, constantly in flux, constantly adjusting to fit changing perspectives--and, in 1966, the Church must have understood this flexibility.

But the Church has never really been willing to modernize. The Pope decries abortion, contraception, and homosexuality, and the Church maintains that priests cannot marry. And recently, when the corruption of the Boston Archdiocese was revealed, the Pope remained silent, as if to say: when it comes to molestation, we will turn the other cheek.

I wanted the opinion of someone more directly involved, so I talked to my best friend, who is both a practicing Catholic as well as a strict traditionalist when it comes to religion. The Church, to her, must uphold the same laws as it always has, regardless of whether or not we agree with them. As a Jew and a liberal, I had to disagree. "Don't you think," I asked her, "that the Church would be far more successful and far more inclusive if they were willing to update?" I was thinking was that extending the sacrament of marriage to priests would actually protect a whole generation of young Catholics from suffering the way those boys in Massachusetts had. But my friend disagreed. I couldn't convince her that some of the ideals that the Church stands for simply make no sense in the 21st century. It is her choice--and, regrettably, the choice of many other Catholics--to avoid the Humbert Humbert-ness of these priests, to ignore the Church's archaic laws in the interest of protecting the religion.

I hoped that this perspective was not the pervading one. I asked another Catholic friend of mine what he thought of the scandal. "It's an embarrassment to my religion," he told me. "I don't want to tell people I'm a Catholic anymore." I asked him if he thought allowing priests to marry would solve the problem. "Absolutely," he said. "Some of the things that the Church still stands for are absurd."

Absurd or not, the problem persists. As Frank Bruni wrote in The New York Times on April 14, "Lawsuits have not done the trick. Over the last two decades, dioceses across the country have faced hundreds of civil actions and paid an estimated $1 billion in damages. Yet the Church has not made the fundamental changes many feel it must."

Traditions are important. They bind us to other people, to our pasts, and to our futures. But there is a distinct difference between traditions that must be preserved and traditions that no longer stand for anything. And if the celibacy of priests was designed to forge a connection between man and God, it has clearly failed. For when those priests are espousing their views of pedophilia at the Man-Boy Love Association, they aren't thinking about their relationships with God, and they certainly aren't thinking about leading holy lives.

"So far, the Vatican's response has been late and lame," wrote the staff of The New York Times in a recent editorial. "That kind of willful ignorance can only visit on the Vatican the same storm of scandal, pain, and regret for missed opportunities that so many American dioceses are facing now." It is the responsibility of the Pope to take immediate action. Speeches are not enough and removing the violators from the Church is also not enough. It is time for drastic action, action that will not only punish those guilty of these crimes but will also stop the juggernaut of abuse from continuing. It is time to let priests marry, if only for the sake of saving the innocent. Hannah Selinger is a Columbia College senior majoring in English and comparative literature.