Reformation of the Catholic Church – Verghese Pamplany
This is a brief study on the history of reformation movements in the Catholic Church followed by the authors' assumptions on the outcome of KCRM efforts in Kerala. CCV is an open forum of all Church citizens and we gladly publish these unprejudiced observations of a well studied Church citizen from UK. Shri Varghese thinks that the war inside the Church is a tough venture for the armless citizens. But he also admits that the sitution is different and the cry is getting widespread and louder. Whereas the Church is devoid of self critical analysis and lacks corrective measures against offending members, the whole of the society is disturbed about the corrupt clergy slowly eating away the morals of the Nation. Shri Verghese thinks that the outcome is unpredictable. (Joseph Mattappally – asso. editor, CCV)
The KCRM activists, other organisations and various well‐meaning individuals are making all out efforts to reform the Kerala Catholic Church and mend its recalcitrant ways. But it's easier said than done. It is a tall order. History is not on their side. The annals of the Roman Church would show that the efforts to correct it within were not successful. Those who tried to reform this non‐reformable outfit; Arnold of Bersica, Fra Dolcino, Savonarola, the Albigeois, the Vaudois, the Lollards, the Hussites, all were persecuted ruthlessly and put down. Only the Protestant Reformation could fructify and survive because of political support in Germany. What followed was the turmoil of prolonged religious wars in the West. The Reformation ruptured the Christian Church beyond repair. The Lutherans, Calvinists and many others, threw to the dust‐bin, the so called sacraments of the Roman Church expect Baptism and the Holy Communion. Mary has been shown her place. The Reformation spawned secularism, capitalism, neoliberalism,democracy and a host of other modern tendencies and movements. The reform minded friends in Kerala are pitted against a major socio‐ economic organisation that operates “omertà” style with 2414 canons covering every facet of its member’s life.
The Church was and continues to hold on to its obstinate and obscurantist mind set with a tenacity which has very few parallels. Its aim seems to be the perpetuation of its power and pelf. The Curia rule the roost. The wealth already accumulated by the Vatican can feed the hungry of world for years. But charity does’t begin at home.But the followers of the simple rustic Galilean Jesus seem to interested in clinging to wealth and its appurtenant comforts with all the accompanying paraphernalia to the exclusion of all matters that would improve the universal human condition.The Church had wielded enormous economic and political power till the end of the 19th century. Today its opinions and views are largely ignored. In Kerala look at the life of the bishops. These people hailing from ordinary families take advantage of their position to enjoy a life of maximum comfort while preaching to the have not’s the virtues of poverty and abstinence.Do they follow Jesus in any way? It is high time for the faithful to see through the dichotomy of double speak and shed the blinkers from their eyes to see the realities. The silver line in the horizon is that the Church’ does not run as before. It is now deprived of the cruellest instruments of oppression and repression to prosecute the dissenters. It no more wields both spiritual and secular hegemony of the olden days. But it has a powerful weapon at its command, namely a belief system of hell of brim storm and eternal fire where sinners would be burned alive for all times to come and undergo innumerable other unimaginable forms of torture versus an alluring heaven of all happiness and luxury with no work, except singing Hosannas, without interruption in praise of Christ and Mother Mary. And this apparent absurdity is swallowed, hook line and sinker, by the gullible faithful.
A view may be taken that the aberrations of the Kerala priesthood that have come to light in the public domain is mere symptoms of the deep rooted festering rot in the body of the Church. But the fact remains that even the most radical Catholics have no hesitation to make bee‐line to participate in all the apparently meaningless rituals of the Church as a matter of habit. They pay the exorbitant monetary levies imposed on them, without rhyme or reason, so that their children are baptised and married in the church and their dear departed ones are interned in the church cemetery under the aegis of the priests. What good is served in water‐dunking of a howling infant (baptism) and naming it after some mythical saint totally strange to our culture and ethos except making the poor thing a life long slave of dead habits. Most of the credulous pay for the offices and masses purported to aid the departed souls, whose fates, as the belief goes, have been already decided by God the Almighty at the very moment of their deaths But the clerics claim that they can override the judgement of God! It is a moot question whether a wedding in the church would ensure successful married life for the couple, despite the long and tedious rites of marriage;’reading from the moth eaten and irrelevant letters purported to have been written by the misogynist Paul two thousand years ago to some specific group of his followers in another place and environment.
The Holy Mass and all kneeling and prostrations and blessing by the priest(s), the customary offerings before all and sundry saints, may not ensure a happy married life to the couple or confer them with fertility. The blithe faithfuls may have a look at how marriage is viewed by the Church. The 1917 Code of Canon Law reads: “The primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of children; its secondary end is mutual help and the allaying of concupiscence”.The 1917 definition jells with the contemporary theological postulate of Hieronymus SJ that sexual intercourse per se is “ a thing filthy in itself”. Edward Genicot in his moral theology (1931) assured the faithful that such “shameful” acts were lawful to married people. Pope Gregory (who condemned Mary Magdalene as a prostitute) observes that “although these acts are not sinful in themselves, it is in practice,not possible to avoid sin as a result of enjoying them.” Mercifully Pius XI, 1930 encyclical ‘ Casti Connubii’ containing anathemas such as “base”, “indecent” “ sin against nature” and “intrinsically vicious” against birth control are not read during marriages. Take comfort: the 1983 Code of Cannon Law reads “(Marriage is ) a partnership of the whole of life which is ordered by its nature to the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of the offspring”. What an improvement of perception of Infallible Church?!.
May the blind diehard faithful be not aware of the contempt with which the so called celibate clerics view marriage and what the couples do thereafter. Who are they to preach that men and women in India require the permission of one Paul of Tarsus, dead and rotted two thousand years ago,how spouses behave between each other and conduct themselves in their married life. Who has authorised the priests as bed room supervisors? It seems the Catholic hierarchy allow the union between male and female only for the purpose of producing slaves to take care of the well‐being of “God’s chosen and anointed representatives on earth” who often think themselves as Gods themselves. One of the problems faced by Catholic parents is securing admission for their wards to the educational institutions run by the Church. Schools and colleges are built with the sweat, labour and financial aid of the members of the church. But they are now under the sole custody of scruples priesthood. The teachers in these institutions get their salaries paid by the public exchequer, but their appointments are made by the a Catholic management. The system has become a den of corruption, cronyism and favouritism and other unsavoury practices. Huge sums of un‐ accounted money is generated in the process of admission and appointment of staff. Admissions for plus two and graduate courses, particularly for professional ones under the management quota involves payment of huge donations. The problem is acute by in the case of unprivileged parent with a ward, not qualified through the general screening process, to professional educational institutions owned by the Church. These institutions are established ostensibly for the benefit of Christian minority community. But the hapless Catholic parent is forced to swallow his self respect and knock at the doors of all and sundry and made to bent backwards before the insolence of the petty self important individuals of the ecclesiastical order. Parents are compelled to beg and borrow to satisfy the exorbitant monetary demands of the predatory ilk. Then who is responsible for this predicament? In the ultimate analysis The responsibility could squarely be paced on the parents themselves. Pre‐programmed already with a diehard faith and egged on by uneducated and anxiety ridden mothers a children who are preys to all sorts of fears about ogres and bogymen, are further pushed into the mire of the Catholic milieu of sin, guilt and damnation. The priesthood zero in on human sexuality as the favoured area for the exploration for mortal sin.
The spiritual training of the children is assigned to uneducated nuns with shallow knowledge, hailing from lower middle class background, whom Nietzsche had consigned to the realm of “slave morality” and clerics with the same intellectual genre but possessing an exaggerated sense of self‐ importance and elephantine sized ego. The extent to which these elements can play havoc with the life of a child is hard to describe,some of which had come out in the open in the US and Europe. With an educational system hardly conducive for the development of the true potential of a child, who is forced to be a conformist and and an also ran horse (a race horses lumped together as also ran category) With most of the academic time spent on private tuitions to score maximum marks at school level public examinations, but ill equipped to qualify through entrance tests for admittance in professional institutions for for further studies, the hapless parent will be at his wit’s end. This scenario is the fertile ground for the clerics to fill their pockets with ill gotten money. Hence, parents concerned about the future of their wards, better keep them miles away from the church with its confessions, holy communions, hours long masses and Sunday catechism classes et al.. Even the most vocal critics of the clerics often show undue deference to them, even the defrocked ones, as “Reverend Fathers”. A bishop is “His Excellency” and “ Universal Father” even to octogenarians, expecting them to kiss the ring of “The Lord ( Mar)” and do other demeaning reverential gestures. What an irony that even a ninety year old senior citizen is required to call a thirty year old cleric , even his great grand son, “father”. The incalculable harm done by an unenlightened and superstitious average Catholic mother stuffing her child’s brain from its infancy, with all sorts of fears of hell and damnation, if they fail to follow implicitly the dictums of the priesthood. The average parents seem to be afraid of their wards “going astray” from the morality of lower middle class, which is sought to be corrected by the clerics. Europe and North America have shown grim examples of what these desperadoes do to innocent children. In Kerala the children and their parents, out of shame, may not come in the open to expose the offenders. The cunning clerics do not disclose whatever relaxations that come into being periodically in the Church of Rome in its rules and practices such attending Sunday masses, fasting, consumption of meat on Fridays, during Advent and Lent, routine confessions and many other matters. Elaborate and huge festivals are being conducted all over Kerala in honour of St. George and other saints of doubtful pedigree who were dethroned by the Church decades ago. The only aim of these jamborees is collection of huge amounts as offerings.
The clerics beat the “goats” with whatever sticks available to keep them pliable and obedient in order to milk them dry. Pope Francis is humane. His ideas are refreshing and illuminating. After Pope John, he is the new hope for millions for ordinary Catholics. But the world of today is totally different from that of the early 1960s. While John Paul and Benedict duo had pushed the Catholic Church back to the Medieval World, the secular world has marched far ahead in Europe and in the wide swath of North America. Whatever new ideas that had emerged out of Vatican II has been nipped in the bud and sent to premature death by the forces of orthodoxy in Vatican. It seems that the entrenched interests in the Vatican will not allow Francis his way. In the ultimate analysis, to Indians and particularly to independent thinking Keralites, does it matter what happens in the corridors of power in the Vatican? How long we have to cling to the apron strings of the Portuguese imposed Roman Catholic Church. Why not liberate ourselves from the shackles of colonialism and find means to plough an independent furrow? Heaven, if there is one, is not assured by being buried in the church compound with depressing prayers and the blah‐blah of some priest. Cemeteries came into being because of lack of space in urban centres. If sufficient owned land is available, the mortal remains can interned in own premises or opt for cremation in public facilities or even the body can be donated for medical studies. What make the Kerala Church arrogant is the vast wealth already accumulated by various dioceses in the form of income generating estates and other immovable properties in addition to huge funds in their coffers. All the funds are at the disposal of the bishop, who is not accountable to any one, and a law undo himself. A good part of the funds are ferreted away by the cronies of the bishops, the rest is often mis‐managed. There is neither any financial accountability or statutory audit of the accounts of a diocese. Hence prudence say not to waste one’s hard earned money by way of tithes, contributions for unwanted construction of new churches, huge complexes to house the clerics, offerings to the innumerable saints in every nook and corner and under various other pretexts. If the fund flow to the church is chocked, the priesthood may come to their senses. Why waste hard earned money to pay for a dog that bites viciously. KEEP THE ECCLESIASTICS DRY OF FUNDS AND AVOID THEM LIKE PLAGUES. The Christian heaven is modelled on the court of Constantine with the Emperor Christ (in the place of Constantine) Mother Mary (instead of Helena) and sycophant courtiers ( hundreds of so called saints). Helena had a large influence on Constantine, so believers think that Mary, the mother of Christ, would have a similar sway over him and intercede on their behalf. The same analogy for the saints too. Most of the people seem to be arguing in circles. Somebody has cobbled up the Bible with alterations, extrapolations and add ons and called it ‘The Book’ and the “Revealed Word” containing all the wisdom of the world despite the fact it is the worst example of contradictions and errors. But many resort to this book to prove and substantiate their points and arguments. A logical mind may find this approach ludicrous, if not an insult to intelligence. There are about 7.30 billion people in the world. Only a fraction of them follow all the tenets and rules of the Church. Most of the believers pick and choose and discard whatever they consider irrelevant. This is the position of very large segment of Kerala Catholics too. They still go long the crowd being unaware of what is happening elsewhere and afraid of social isolation in their local communities. They are also sacred of being denied of baptism, weddings in the Church and most of all disposal of dead bodies . Many are only ‘convenient’ Catholics. The pews in Catholic Churches in Italy, Germany, Ireland and the rest of Europe are becoming more and empty and the number of people who really profess the tenets of Catholicism are on the decline. The other areas where Catholic Church is prominent are the countries spread over in Latin America with Brazil at the top and Spanish Mexico coming second. The Catholics in these counties are leaving the Church in their thousands the latest PEW surveys show. Philippines is the only Asian country with a predominantly Catholic country. The other Basilian of the Catholic Church is the Democratic Republic of Congo (erstwhile Belgian colony); the church there is under the threat if Islamists. The tribal chiefs of Africa don the garbs of Catholic priests and their beliefs are potpourri of magic and shamanism. In many parts of the world the episcopal churches are shunned. People assemble in small groups in homes and small halls and pray together and share their concerns, joys and sorrows in a free atmosphere. They don’t collect funds except for defraying the expenses for snacks and non‐alcoholic beverages. No surpluses or bank accounts or book keeping. It may be an idea worth pursuing in a Kerala too. The KCRM may be a forum for venting the ire and frustrations against misdeeds of the ecclesiastics. But they may be missing the woods for the trees and even whistling against the wind. Mere salves would not cure the malice in the innards of the Church. The Church knows that even the most vocal critic of it cannot abandon the deep attachment to its time worn and illogical nostrums and meaningless rituals. What may be required is common sense and analytical mind to think things through and willingness to abandon the unwanted and to become intellectually free. KCRM’s efforts should not end as “ tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing” to quote the Shakespearean tragedy ‘Macbeth’. The words of Milton in ‘Paradise Lost’ comes to mind. “ If heaven is lost; nothing is lost. If freedom is lost; everything is lost.” And “ It is better to reign in Hell than serve in heaven.
Vargese Pamplanil Mob. 9447152533.
Shree Vargese Pamplanil has pinpointed almost all the ailments harrassing the Catholic church of India. The very number baffles any thinking catholic that one becomes almost hopeless. It is the nature of priesthood in any religion, be it Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity that it usurps power and control and turn everything to its advantage with fables, dogmas and laws. They chain the believers and hold them in schackles and only the very brave set themselves free and remain so. Such brave people are very rare compared to the masses who have no courage to think for themselves or are totally unable to distinguish between what is good and bad or what is just and unjust. The church in India is in this plight at the moment and people like Pamplanil can't be blamed if they think that no reform in its real sense is possible. I'm also of the same opinion. Unless we are willing to abandon the religion based on an imaginary glorious Christ, the Son of God come as the Saviour of sinners, as Paul taught, and go back instead to Jesus, the Son of Man, and his message of love and sharing, we toil in vain. The church with all its well established structures based on money and power will never allow its followers to take any other line other than the one it has been following since twenty centuries.