By Charles Lewis, National Post
[.....] The suggestions I have read and heard range from the Church loosening up on such social issues as birth control, abortion and gay marriage, to allowing women to become priests, ending celibacy for priests and toppling the papacy because popes are monarchs and monarchs are so 17th century.
Taken together, these reforms would transform the Church into a much more relevant and happy institution that would be better liked by the non-Catholic world and would fill churches to the rafters every Sunday morning with lapsed Catholics.
Forget it.
It would soak the Church of its vitality. It would make it just another social agency. The Church is not a radio station that is required to play the latest music to keeps its fans happy.
Where orthodoxy has been firm, the Church has grown like wildfire. And not just the Catholic Church. The Anglican Church is also undergoing tremendous growth in Africa because it is not experimenting with novelties to make Christianity more modern, popular and relevant.
In the African churches, too, attendance is stupendous and incredibly joyful. They are building churches, not closing them.
What Catholic critics and critics of orthodoxy in general miss is that Christianity is not compulsory. Anyone is free to come and go. And the fact that orthodoxy is appealing should say something to those for whom suggesting liberal reforms has almost become an obsession and a hobby.
Many Catholic critics from outside the faith have no idea that Church time and civic time run on different clocks. They have no idea what has really gone on in the great councils of the Church and assume the lone purpose of dogma and doctrine is to squeeze the life out of its members and exercise control. They will never see that dogmas are the lights along the way; they are, to a Catholic way of thinking, expressions of timeless truths. To change them would be to change the basis for the faith in the first place. They are not extras.
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