Pope Francis has lamented a “very strong reactionary attitude” in the US Catholic Church, saying that ideology had replaced faith in some parts of it and some members had failed to understand “there is an appropriate evolution in understanding matters of faith and morals.”
During his decade as pontiff, Francis has often faced criticism from conservative sectors of the US church, opposed to reforms such as giving women and lay Catholics more roles and making the church more welcoming and less judgmental towards some, including LGBT people.
The comments were made in Portugal on August 5, during a private meeting on Francis’ trip to Lisbon with members of the Jesuit order the pope belongs to, but were scheduled to be published in full as part of the Italian Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica’s end-of-August edition. Daily paper La Repubblica published excerpts in advance on Monday
During the question-and-answer session, a Portuguese Jesuit said that he was saddened while on a sabbatical in the US to find many Catholics, including some bishops, who were hostile to Francis’ leadership.
“You have seen that in the United States the situation is not easy: there is a very strong reactionary attitude,” Francis said. “It is organized and shapes the way people belong, even emotionally.”
The liberal Argentine pontiff, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, has also faced criticism from religious leaders and conservative media in the US on a host of his other stances, including climate change, immigration, social justice, gun control and opposing the death penalty as “neither human nor Christian.”
“You have been to the United States and you say you have felt a climate of closure. Yes, this climate can be experienced in some situations,” Francis told the questioner. “And there, one can lose the true tradition and turn to ideologies for support. In other words, ideology replaces faith, membership in a sector of the church replaces membership in the church.”
Francis said his critics needed to understand that “there is an appropriate evolution in the understanding of matters of faith and morals,” and that being backward-looking was “useless” for the church.
He said it was an “error” to consider church teachings to be a “monolith.”
Francis gave both a historical and a more recent example to try to illustrate this, saying there was a time when many in the Catholic Church would have supported slavery. In the more recent case of homosexuality, he said, “it is apparent that perception of this issue has changed in the course of history.”
“But what I really dislike more generally is when you look at the so-called sins of the flesh through a magnifying glass, as people did for so long,” Francis said. He argued that pastoral care required “sensitivity and creativity,” also mentioning his first meeting with trans people. “It’s become clear to me that they feel spurned. And that’s really hard,” he said.
One of the pope’s fiercest American critics is Rome-based Cardinal Raymond Burke. He wrote in an introduction for a recent book that a meeting of bishops called by Francis for this October to try to help chart the future of the church risked sowing “confusion and error and division.”
Intelligent people are leaving the church, so those left behind are leaning more and more on emotion to guide them. Since they’re watching their religion slowly fall apart around them, the emotions guiding them are often related to fear.
Things are changing, they’re losing power, losing relevance, and they’re angry about it.
I’m an atheist. I disagree that this is about intelligence… I think it’s more about ignorance. This is an important distinction and I think it’s more harmful to our cause to demean them the same way they might do to marginalized groups.
A lot of people have trouble empathizing with those in marginalized groups because they don’t have anyone close to them that is affected by their hateful ways of thinking. Often, just having a family member or friend come out to them is enough to open their mind. I think that most of the time, these people just lack the information (emotionally) necessary to understand harmful their beliefs have been. Years of indoctrination make it so much harder to overcome, but indoctrination doesn’t necessarily mean they lack intelligence. I think the words we use are important tools in changing minds.
Honestly, the ignorance goes both ways. I used to think very lowly of religious people in general and maybe especially Catholics back when I was a teenager who had just realized the profound truths of atheism. Having travelled a bit more and made friends from various religions, I’ve realized that while my diagnosis of the Catholic church was somewhat accurate, judging the people was a product of my own ignorance rather than theirs.
Emotions motivate everyone.
It’s insulting and counter productive to say this thing is about dumb people following their emotions when education, money and opportunities play such a big part.
And some people, having grown up with something, just end up liking parts of it even if they might be critical of other parts.
The Catholics I know are quite happy to voice their disagreements with the Vatican when there is anything, they just enjoy the role faith has in their lives and want to keep it. Personally I like to have a bitter liquor for digestion after a nice big meal - I have a feeling it’s probably not good for anything on a rational level, but I appreciate living in the belief. It makes my life richer, even if in a little way.
Yeah had I not been queer and slutty I’d probably still be Catholic. I always had my issues with the church but I get something out of religion and it took being made clear that I wasn’t welcome in their religion to drive me out. I spent a few years as an atheist but religion does benefit me so I sought one that was right for me and wound up pagan. Are the gods real? Well the Earth is, but the others who’s to say. But if all I’m doing is rituals to a personification of ideas and stories that appeal to me that’s ok. I feel better for it and it reminds me to be intentional in a lot of ways.
I’m not trying to demean them, just sharing my observation, but yes I take your point. Hard to convince someone of something right after you insult them.
You strike me as someone very close to people who don’t share your same views on a lot of topics.
I’m pretty liberal but I work for a construction company with a lot of very conservative people, and my father and his family are catholic and very conservative as well. I regularly interact with a lot of people that share vastly different views.
Exactly, as long as the group they’re harming remains this faceless “other” they usually can’t see the issue.
Some will never change, but plenty will once they realize the group they’re marginalizing are just regular average people, which is difficult when your perception is essentially just straight up tribalism.
I have to agree. I saw a mini exodus from my childhood church. I grew up “catholic”. My parents made me go to church and get confirmed, but they were always part of the more progressive part of catholics. Believed that gay marriage was perfectly fine, abortion was only the woman’s choice, and evolution was a fact. And they always taught me that the Bible was mostly fiction. Jesus existed, but he was a person, not a magic man and the Old Testament was a book of parables. They were obviously in the minority, but our church had a bunch of people like them. They actually just really liked the teachings and the community.
It wasn’t until 2012 when our city’s diocese sent out a flyer telling them how to vote and a fellow churchgoer did the same, telling them they weren’t real catholics if they didn’t vote straight R. They haven’t been to any church since and although they both consider themselves catholic, heavily criticize the current state of the church (and all the pedophilia shit).
So they are really jewish in belief?
What a shitshow. Church shouldn’t mingle in politics.
Yeah, so there was a broad understanding of that principle for a very long time following the complete shit show that state sponsored churches created in Europe, so much so that it was enshrined in actual law in the first amendment to the US constitution. Other countries such as Australia also have similar laws.
Unfortunately, as a reaction to the perceived anti-religion policies of the USSR during the cold war, the US decided to emphasize religion as a staple of life in the US, going so far as to add “In God We Trust” to US currency, something that is arguably a violation of the first amendment and most likely should never have been allowed. Making things worse Republicans realized that they could weaponize ignorant evangelical Christians as part of the southern strategy, and so began to depict themselves as the party of Christianity, once again walking the line of what’s allowed under the first amendment.
Recently evangelicals have managed to convince themselves that first amendment does not in fact prevent religion from getting involved with government, but in fact merely prevents the government from putting any restrictions on religion. They have decided that that means they can simply ignore any laws they disagree with by claiming it violates their religion, while also seeing no conflict with trying to enshrine their religious beliefs as law. Many of them also push a revisionist history that the US was founded as a Christian nation and that therefore Christian beliefs should be the basis of law in the US, some going as far as to suggest the US officially adopting Christianity as a state religion.
The one ray of hope in all this is the waning belief in religion. If religion can be successfully kept out of politics for the next couple decades it’s possible that churches won’t have enough sway to be a useful tool of politicians anymore.
The oppression of religion in the USSR wasn’t a mere perception but a daily reality for millions who were killed or thrown in Gulags.
Everything else about your statement is pretty much spot on, from the perspective of someone who was raised to believe those lies.
I wasn’t using perceived there to suggest that the USSR didn’t oppress religion, but rather to point out that it was a reaction to beliefs in America at the time. Whether the reality of USSR was different from that belief wouldn’t have mattered as the decision to emphasize religion in the US was a direct product of the US anti-communism propaganda effort (once again, because I know there’s a significant tankie population on Lemmy, I’m not advocating FOR communism here). It’s sort of like a second order effect. First you have the reality of life in the USSR. Then you have how the US populace perceived that life. Lastly you had the political decisions designed to steer that perception towards their own ends. Encouraging deeper religiousness in the US or even the perception of such was simply seen as a wedge issue that could be used both domestically and abroad to try to steer people towards the US side of the cold war.
For sure, sorry you seemed reasonable enough that I figured you meant it more as “regardless of the reality this is what the US thought and used it as a point to make legislation based off of” but with how many USSR apologist tankies there are I wanted to make sure everyone is clear that there was a massive push from the established powers in the Soviet Union to wipe out religion. They even had a five year plan (as if) to try to accomplish this goal.
It’s also worth pointing out that this was all taking place at the height of McCarthyism. There’s a lot you could get away with in the US at the time simply by framing it as anti-communist and adding “In God We Trust” to the currency was just one such example. Something else interesting that I ran across while doing some fact checking here was this flier from 1955 that seems scarily similar to current propaganda. Just goes to show I guess that the more things change the more they stay the same.
Don’t forget adding it to the pledge, that happened around the same time because Eisenhower was onboard with McCarthyism.
Thanks for the lesson in US history! You don’t know those kinds of details as european.
Is this too why “Gods own country” came to be?
As far as I can recall, I’ve never heard anyone refer to the US as “God’s own country,” though I’m irreligious. The Wikipedia entry suggests it’s been used to refer to all sorts of places, and perhaps most notably (pertaining to the US) by Goebbels.
I think i heard this in MAGA context sometimes.
Lol, I didn’t realize how close that sounds to Judaism.
More like, still accept him as dying for your sins and following his teachings. They’ve always ascribed more to Deistic beliefs anyway.