How to reform the Catholic Church

A simple set of structural reforms would probably create a Catholic Church that was much safer for both its members and the world at large:

1. All priests must be married men with children of their own [See Andrew's comment for the biblical justification for this].

2. All priests must have normal day jobs and do their job as head of a congregation avocationally, not vocationally.

3. To make (2) possible, most of a priest's day-to-day duties are distributed among the congregation, with no one getting a portion too big to be done by someone who also has a day job. In computer science this is called distributed processing. It lets a network of ordinary computers do many software operations that used to require a big honking mainframe.

4. Make most of the church hierarchy above that of congregation leader (i.e. priest) also avocational work, with full time work reserved for the highest levels, and all of those only done by people who had previously had a career in the real world.

5. Make all the work in the hierarchy callings, not jobs you can apply for. This ensures that ambitious, power-hungry individuals will look elsewhere as an outlet for those ambitions.

Someone familiar with comparative religions will recognize these as features of the Mormon church. But there's nothing in the Bible that would prevent other conservative Christian religions from adopting these innovations. And it certainly doesn't create the sort of religion conservatives would be uncomfortable with. Look at the Mormon lifestyle--about as conservative as it gets.

Just as the Episcopal/Anglican churches preserved many features of the Catholic church--ancient rites etc.--a Catholic church with these innovations could retain the look and feel of today's Catholic church. But it would be orders of magnitude harder for pedophiles to get into positions of responsibility. Not impossible--but much, much harder. Especially homosexual pedophiles. And the church hierarchy would be more connected with ordinary people's lives and challenges.

NYTimes columnist Maureen Dowd has written several columns questioning her Catholic faith and berating her church for failing to protect its children. The column got hundreds of comments, nearly all talking about how the church had to go after its pedophile priests and stop harboring them, or about the futility and evil of all religion, along with a handful of defenders of the faith.

My structural comment got almost no reader recommendations. I think because people find structural reforms bo-ring, while defending your faith in toto or attacking it in toto or seeking revenge on the bad guys is exciting.

But even if the Catholic church quit protecting its pedoPriests, its structure will continue to attract them and the problem will continue.

It's like if your home is invaded by ants. Sure, you can get out the Raid and kill ants right and left. But they'll keep coming until you keep the kitchen so clean that ants will find nothing to eat and quit coming.

It's the fate of centrists to find their observations rejected by zealots of the Left and Right, who prefer to live in a hard, bright world of Right and Wrong, even though it doesn't map to reality.

[Note: I posted this as a comment to a column by conservative Catholic columnist Ross Douthat. The NYTimes editors picked as one their highlighted comments.]

The path to hell is paved with good intentions, part X

There are lots of great people who are Catholics. I'm particularly impressed by the association of 59,000 nuns who work in hospitals and the Catholic hospital association, both of which defied doctrinaire America bishops to support healthcare reform.

But with apologies to such people, I think the church they serve has not served them well.

The Catholic Church has done far worse than put generations of innocent boys in the hands of criminal priests; than order its devotees to disobey American laws; than continually interfere in American elections while hanging on to its tax-exempt status.

The worst sin of this religion--committed with the best of intentions, ironically--is ecocide, caused by the Pope's opposition to all forms of population control (all forms that work, certainly).

Some facts anyone can verify through reputable sources:

1. The world's population has doubled--doubled--since 1966.

2. One billion humans can't get enough to eat and drink daily.

3. 16,000 children die every day from starvation-related causes. That's one every 5 seconds.

4. Mexico's population exploded from 20 million in 1940 to over 100 million in 2000. That's the true source of illegal immigration--not any "job magnet."

5. Haiti's population exploded from 3 million in 1950 to 10 million today (including a flood of Haitian illegals in the Dominican Republic). This has made the country far, far more vulnerable to hurricanes and earthquakes.

Not all of these are entirely the Pope's fault, of course. Islam fosters just as high a birthrate, and, like Catholicism, its huge numbers give its doctrines great leverage.

All institutions that oppose population control do so in the name of life and holy commandments. That's why it's so ironic that the product of this kindness is so much starvation and death.

And they're taking the planet with them. For example, the Haitians have chopped down 98% of their country's trees. Now every rainstorm washes more of Haiti's topsoil into the sea. Haiti's becoming a desert. A desert with 10 million mouths to feed. As goes Haiti today, so goes more countries tomorrow.

Biologists report that the world is experiencing the biggest mass extinction of species of animals and plants since the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.

That makes the Catholic Church+Islam+all other churches that oppose population control the equivalent in destructiveness to an asteroid hurtling into our atmosphere at 30,000 miles an hour, hitting our planet with the force of thousands of H-bombs--only in slo-mo, taking decades to do what the asteroid did in days.

Catholics and others dismiss accusations like this out of hand. What overpopulation, they say. We just need to move the food around better, they say. They're in denial. We're using our technology mostly to destroy the planet's ability to support us. For example, our fishing fleets are marvels of technology. They work amazingly well until the last fish is gone.

You can't bring back the dodo, the emu, the passenger pigeon. They're gone forever. You can't bring back overpumped wells after the porous aquifer collapses. You can't reverse desertification once the topsoil's gone (Greece did this over 2,000 years ago when it cut down its trees to fuel kilns; it has yet to recover). Our vaunted agricultural technology is poisoning rivers and coastal waters, exhausting the soil, depending on cloned plant species that are more and more vulnerable to different plagues.

Everything looks great to the average American, but the scientific community has been freaking out for decades, while ordinary citizens just say, like Scarlett O'Hara, "Ah'll think about it tomorrow." Or they villify anyone who disturbs their fantasy that we can do as we please, forever, without consequence. But if we don't fix this today, Nature will tomorrow.

You aren't going to like tomorrow.

Of course to the truly religious my indictment is immaterial. For them this life is an eyeblink compared to eternity. So what if their policies trash the planet? What does that matter compared to following God's commandments? This is how a love of eternity can foster indifference to life.

Some religions teach that Man has dominion over the Earth. Others, that we have Stewardship--an enormous responsibility.

The Catholic Church's leadership has opted for dominion. With so many followers, it will make all of us pay for its folly.