Bill's 'Faith Matters' Blog

The religious makeup of Congress changes: 1-8-19

Let's back up a few days to this past Thursday, when the makeup of Congress changed because of the 2018 midterm elections. Both houses of Congress look a little different now, especially the House of Representatives and especially there because the first two Muslim women in American history have been sworn in.

The CNN story to which I've just linked you was written by another Muslim woman to describe what a remarkable thing she thinks it is finally to have Muslim women in the House.

"In the faces and politics of the two women," writes Rafia Zakaria, "I see a welcome challenge to Muslim orthodoxy and American stereotypes, and a huge win for Muslim feminism."

If you are among those Americans who can't imagine there is such a thing as Muslim feminism, allow me to suggest that you get out more.

There is, as no doubt most of you know, no religious test for public office in the U.S. So keeping track of the religious makeup of Congress may seem like a sort of useless thing to do. And yet it's interesting, and the Pew Research Center keeps track of that makeup as a way of keep tabs on the American religious landscape.

Here is the latest Pew information on the religious makeup of this new Congress.

It concludes that "Congress is slightly more religiously diverse than its predecessor," but its members identify overwhelmingly as Christian.

It takes quite a while for the trends in religious makeup among Americans to be reflected in Congress, but it's slowly happening, and perhaps at a pace that's not particularly surprising.

What matters in the end, of course, is not whether members of Congress are Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim or followers of some other faith tradition. What matters is how they translate their beliefs and values into public policy. That's what we should be following, not how many Lutherans or Baptists there are in the House.

(The illustration here today came from the Pew story to which I linked you in the text.)

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EVANGELIZING GREAT BRITAIN?

I wrote here yesterday about how there seem to be growing cracks in the support given President Trump by white Christian evangelicals. A related story comes now from England, where an American evangelical movement known as Red Letter Christians plans to open operations. The people in this movement call themselves evangelical Christians but they have what the story calls a "commitment to living out the radical social justice message of Jesus." Which, of course, often would put them at odds with Trump.

Are evangelicals distancing themselves from Trump? 1-7-19

The late Phyllis Tickle, a wonderful Christian author, described in her book The Great Emergence how the Christian church goes through a big change (she called it a rummage sale to get rid of old stuff) every 500 years or so. You know, the Great Schism of 1054 that separated the Roman Catholic Church from the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Protestant Reformation starting in 1517 that separated the Catholics from the Protestants and so forth.

All true, but, in fact, we are living in a speeded-up time when significant changes can and do now come more frequently.

One of them several decades ago was the emergence of what became known as the Religious Right, with Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed and others moving people who called themselves conservative or evangelical Christians to be much more active in the political arena.

That era came to something of an astonishing peak in 2016 when more than 80 percent of white Christian evangelical voters marked their ballots for Donald Trump.

As I've said before, it was an amazing example of people losing their moral compass by electing a man who for nearly all his adult life has stood for and lived out values quite opposed to the values that those Christians said were theirs.

Now, however, we're starting to hear that at least some of the major evangelical political donors are changing their minds and withdrawing from the Trump coalition.

That's the conclusion that journalist Emma Green draws in this Atlantic article.

She notes that "In 2005, Time magazine crowned Howard and Roberta Ahmanson the most powerful evangelical financiers in America. As an heir to the assets of Home Savings and Loan, a mortgage and insurance empire, Howard Ahmanson became an influential philanthropist, backing projects in Bible translation, art and — perhaps most notably — politics."

These days, she writes, Ahmanson "has become disenchanted with the GOP and many of its associated institutions.

“'The Republican Party is a white-ethnic party. And I don’t want to be identified with that,' Ahmanson told me recently. He dislikes that white evangelicals are largely supportive of Donald Trump — 'Whatever this is, it’s not the Gospel,' he said — and has stopped giving to groups such as the Family Research Council, an influential advocate for socially conservative causes in Washington. These days, his giving is focused on issues such as land use and zoning in California — connected to his father’s work in facilitating home building — and he’s funding a project to create a digital illuminated Bible. 'God is using this time, and Donald Trump, to purge the church,' he told me. 'Are you about Christ and the Gospel first or is your church just a Sunday extension of your political team?'”

It's an intriguing article, though it could have used a few more examples of such individual donors wandering off the Trump reservation to be part of a trend.

But what I found especially interesting is how Ahmanson thinks God is at work purging the church by using Trump to do it. That's quite an opposite view from those evangelicals who sincerely believe God has chosen Trump as a divine deputy to accomplish politically what's in God's own political platform.

Either way, they've got God directly involved in American politics. Which God may or may not be, though it raises the question of how and whether God is involved in British, Colombian, Pakistani and Japanese politics, say, and how God keeps all that straight.

My hunch is that some day American Christian evangelicals will deeply regret the way they've been used and hustled by Trump and others and that it will take them a very long time to recover from the damage they've done to themselves and to the reputation of Christianity generally in this process. But at least we're starting to see evidence of a move away from support for a man who clearly cares very little for evangelical theology.

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THE POPE BECOMES A SPIN-MASTER

Leave it to folks on the internet with access to photo editing software. Pope Francis was photographed the other day spinning a soccer ball (called a football in most parts of the world) on his finger. People started editing the photo and replacing the ball with, well, all kinds of things. It's pretty funny and seems all in good humor. This story about it has reproduced some of those pictures.

One of the grossest misuses of scripture: 1-5/6-19

When we consider the many ways religion has taken wrong turns throughout history, it's hard to think of one that was more reprehensible and destructive than the various ways many Christians -- both American and European -- used the Bible to support the concept of human slavery.

Not only was the Bible used to justify slavery to the slaveholders, who needed all the excuses they could find to ease whatever was left of their consciences, but the Bible also was twisted -- sometimes quite literally -- into a guide book to keep slaves in their place.

Which brings me to this Religion News Service story about a current display at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., about what's called the "Slave Bible." I somehow missed the story when it was published in late November, but a friend recently called it my attention.

As RNS writer Adelle M. Banks describes the Slave Bible, "It’s a small set of Scriptures whose title page reads 'Parts of the Holy Bible, selected for the use of the Negro Slaves, in the British West-India Islands.'

"The so-called Slave Bible, on loan from Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., excludes 90 percent of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, and 50 percent of the New. Its pages include 'Servants be obedient to them that are your masters,' from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, but missing is the portion of his letter to the Galatians that reads, 'There is neither bond nor free. . .for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.'”

Banks notes that "The exhibition draws on the dichotomy of coercion and conversion, keeping slaves in their place while also attempting to tend to their souls. On two walls portions of the Bible that were excluded from the slaves’ text are juxtaposed with verses determined to be appropriate for them."

Sacred writ, of course, is often misused for political, economic and other purposes. And it's so vulnerable to that because of its reputation as representing the words and thoughts of God.

This is how and why terrorists who find excuses for their violence in the Qur'an and/or the Hadith (the collected extra-Qur'anic sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) can be so persuasive to people who aren't schooled in the need for an interpretive process that can make sense of such writings.

Some pretty good rules about reading sacred texts include: A) Don't read it alone without help from someone knowledgeable about the writing. B) The first rule is especially important if you're reading a text outside your own religious tradition. C) Understand some of the important rules of interpretation, or exegesis, such as the need to know who translated it and why, the importance of understanding how the first audience would have understood it and the intentions of the writer.

Scripture from all traditions can be -- and often is -- misused for a variety of reasons. The Slave Bible is just one more example, though surely one that perhaps caused more harm than most examples of scriptural chicanery.

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WHAT MAKES PEOPLE RELIGIOUS?

An old, old question has to do with why people are religious. Lots and lots of answers over the centuries. But this piece from the British newspaper, The Independent, focuses on answers from some psychologists. Part of the answer, the article suggests, is that "religion is a by-product of a number of cognitive and social adaptations which have been extremely important in human development." Do you have a satisfactory answer to the question?

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A BLOGBEAM: Control of the U.S. House of Representatives flipped from Republican to Democrat this week. Our friend Orly says something similar also just happened in his house, where he and his wife are Republicans while his children, 5, 2 and just-born, are Anarchists.

Saudi Arabia wounds Islam again: 1-4-19

The reputation of Saudi Arabia, ground zero for Islam, continues to deteriorate in the wake of the murder late last year of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Which means Saudi Arabia is continuing to injure Islam.

In the latest development, this Business Insider report says that "Netflix removed an episode of a comedy show that was critical of Saudi Arabia and accused the country of covering up the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi to protect its crown prince." 

The now-gone show was an episode of Hasan Minhaj's "Patriot Act." Minhaj (pictured here) is an American comedian and political commentator who first gained fame as a voice on "The Daily Show." He's been a persistent critic of Saudi Arabia and in the Netflix piece also criticized Saudi Arabia's involvement in the war in Yemen.

The Business Insider report notes that "Netflix told the Financial Times that it pulled the episode after the country's Communications and Information Technology Commission requested its removal, accusing it of violating the country's cybercrime law."

Saudi Arabia is the home to Mecca, to which all Muslims who are financially able and healthy enough are to make a pilgrimage at least once in their life. And it occupies the land from which the Prophet Muhammad came and where he introduced Islam to the world.

So anything the rulers of the House of Saud do inevitably reflects on Islam. A similar sort of guilt-by-association has happened to Christians in light of the continuing scandal in the Catholic Church (and among some Protestant branches) involving sexual abuse of children by priests and bishops who have covered up for them.

The Khashoggi murder, which the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency says was carried out on orders from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has become an international scandal that has crushed hopes that MBS, as he's called, would really be a reformer in Saudi Arabia.

At a time when the world needs the good, constructive ideals and actions of which healthy religion is capable, Islam has had to go on the defensive again. MBS should be so ashamed of himself that he resigns, and Netflix should find some backbone.

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HOW BEST TO USE SACRED SPACE?

Many houses of worship in cities around the country are facing a similar problem: How to keep up a large building with fewer members. One answer is to turn more of the space over to use by community groups, something that's in process of happening as my own congregation makes a major investment in our building. This RNS story tells about what some congregations in the Philadelphia area are doing about all this. What about your congregation, if you have one?

She said she saw God wearing a crown: 1-3-19

Because yesterday was the 27th anniversary of the death of my father -- another Bill Tammeus, though his real first name was Wilber, not William, which is mine -- I sometimes wonder what he experienced in his final minutes in a nursing facility in Woodstock, Ill.

We were told that Dad, suffering from some serious dementia at that stage in his life (he was 82), had gotten out of bed in the middle of the night and wandered down past the nurses' station in something of a stupor. Whoever was on duty got him back to bed. When someone checked on him an hour or two later he was gone.

Did he imagine, on his last journey down the hall, that he was entering some final divine space? Did he think of anyone either then or when he got back to bed -- such as my mother or me and my three sisters? Was he aware that his demise was at hand and did he feel some kind of welcome envelopment in welcoming arms?

I have no idea. But I do know that sometimes people describe rather remarkable experiences as they near the end or as they have what has come to be called a near-death experience.

For instance, this story from England tells of a woman who had a near-death experience, felt herself in God's presence and was later able to describe meeting God and noticing something God was wearing.

The story quotes the woman this way: ". . .God was standing next to me with a crown made of lapis lazuli and pearls. I knew the crown was light although the pearls and lapis lazuli were heavy stones. I then realized He was there to take me with Him.”

But, she says, at the last moment God changed his mind: “But in the moment of death, He decided to send my spirit back into my body and I came alive.”

Well, all of that is a pretty detailed account of what she says she went through. Was it just the chemistry in her brain giving her visions? Does God really wear a lapis lazuli crown with pearls? If, so, why?

My suggestion is that we save up all these questions in case, the other side of death, we get a chance to ask them of someone who might have real answers -- no doubt answers we'll no longer need nor care about.

(The photo here today is one I took either from heaven or from an airplane a few years ago. I'm guessing from an airplane.)

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PARADISE LOST AND REGAINED?

The people in and around Paradise, Calif., which was pretty much burned to the ground in last fall's raging wild fires, seem determined to rebuild, including some of their churches, this RNS story reports: ". . .Latter-day Saints had two meetinghouses or chapels in Paradise. Only one remains intact." The plan is to rebuild by paying close attention to construction that is environmentally friendly. One unanswered question is whether people who really care about the environment would have built in that ecologically fragile place in the first place.

Modeling works of justice after biblical prophets: 1-2-19

For Christmas, a friend gave me a new book by Yale historian David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. I'm not very far into it yet, but I was struck by something in the introduction that I'm not sure many people who have heard of and know a little about Douglass, a great anti-slavery crusader, are aware of. Maybe you didn't know this, either.

Blight writes about "Douglass's deep grounding in the Bible, especially the Old Testament. From his earliest speeches on the abolition circuit, through his political emergence in the 1850s, in his stunning orations and editorials about the Civil War as an apocalyptic break in history somehow under God's intervention, to his nearly endless postwar lecture tours, Douglass rooted his own story and especially the story of African Americans in the oldest and most powerful stories of the Hebrew prophets.

"In America the people had turned from or never embraced their creeds or their God; the American Jerusalem, its temples and its horrid system of slavery, had to be destroyed; the nation had to face exile or extinction and bloody retribution; and only then could the people and the nation experience renewal, reinvention and a possible new history. Douglass was a living prophet of an American destruction, exile, war for its existence and redemption. Jeremiah and Isaiah, as well as other prophets, were his guides; they gave him story, metaphor, resolve and ancient wisdom in order to deliver his ferocious critique of slavery and his country before emancipation, and then his strained but hopeful narrative of its future after 1865."

Several things about this are worthy of attention. The first, of course, is that Douglass, born a slave, learned to read and eventually became an avid reader of the Bible. Clearly he was moved and influenced by the great Hebrew prophets and their role in the history of the people of Israel.

The job of being a prophet was never easy. Prophets were to call both leaders and the people as a whole to act justly and to behave in God-approved ways. Much of the Hebrew Bible, in fact, is the story of the people going astray and being called back to righteousness by the prophets, who often were despised for their work -- as they sometimes are today, too.

I'm guessing that as the Blight book progresses I will learn how much Douglass thought of himself as a prophet. That can be a dangerous business for true prophets but it also can be dangerous to imagine, without much evidence, that you've been called on by God to voice divine judgment on the world. If you speak for God you'd better be darn sure that you're not just suffering delusions of prophethood.

Something else that caught my eye in what Blight wrote is that Douglass considered ". . .the Civil War as an apocalyptic break in history somehow under God's intervention. . ." President Abraham Lincoln more than once used similar language.

One point in Lincoln's use of such terminology was to suggest that slavery was such a deep sin against God that it would require a major sacrifice to cleanse the nation that had allowed it from the beginning of the union. It's clear that Douglass held a similar view. Again, however, it's dangerous to try to read the mind of God and it's dangerous to imagine that God has ordained a bloody civil war as a means of repentance. From there it's an easy jump to suggest that God not only approves but authorizes and even demands the wars we fight. Really?

Well, I'm looking forward to reading more about Douglass and that tumultuous era in American history. Maybe in an afterlife I'll have a chance to check to see what God thinks about all of this. That would be a conversation worth having, eh?

* * *

A MORE RELIABLE LOOK AT WHAT 2019 MIGHT BRING

In my Monday blog post here, I made some remarkably prescient predictions for what might happen in 2019, based on my dreary record of predicting the future. But if you are interested in a more serious take on what might be coming this year in the field of religion, Religion News Service has you covered in this piece. Just for the record, I'd trust RNS over me.

Where have we been and where are we going? 1-1-19

Sometimes a lot of Americans spend the first day of a new year watching football and nursing hangovers. Well, at least they're not outside causing trouble.

But let me suggest another activity today: Thinking a bit about history, both yours and your nation's and the world's.

As for me personally, I'm today cognizant of the reality that 100 years ago, in 1919, my father turned 10 years old and my mother turned six. They hadn't yet met. I'm glad they finally did -- at the University of Illinois in the 1930s -- because otherwise I have no idea who would be writing this post today. (Dad died 27 years ago tomorrow; Mom in 1996.)

But let's think a little about religious history, too, today.

It was, after all, on this date in 1784 that the Methodist movement inside the Anglican Church officially seceded and formed a new Protestant denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church, which today has morphed its way into being the United Methodist Church.

And today's UMC stands on the brink of schism over the question of how to handle questions of human sexuality, specifically whether to affirm LGBTQ people not just as full members of the church, which they can be, but as possible pastors and as same-sex couples in a marriage performed by a UMC pastor.

A year and a half or so ago I wrote this Flatland column about the efforts by the Rev. Adam Hamilton, founding pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in suburban Leawood, Kan., to hold the denomination together. There will be an important church gathering in February to decide what to do. I am not hopeful that schism can be avoided -- or should be -- but perhaps the Methodists will surprise us and stay united. Stay tuned.

Today is also the 535th anniversary of the birth of Ulrich Zwingli, the Swiss reformer who could not come to agreement with Martin Luther at the start of the Protestant Reformation about what happens in the sacrament of the Eucharist. At a meeting of the two and others in 1529, Zwingli argued that the bread and wine of Communion were merely symbols, while Luther argued that in the ritual they became the substance of the body and blood of Christ. Frustrated with his inability to convince Zwingli, Luther finally said he'd rather "drink blood with the papists than mere wine with the Zwinglians." And that division has remained to this day.

Finally, it was on this date in 1955 that the great author and Christian apologist C.S. (Jack) Lewis was named professor of medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University. Almost nine years later Lewis' death got buried in newspapers around the world because he died on the very day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

There's more, but perhaps you'd rather watch football, recover from a hangover and wonder if and when the federal government will ever reopen. Perhaps. In any case, happy new year.

* * *

SPEAKING OF GOD. . .

Lots of Americans rarely have any conversations about God, this America magazine piece notes, but many would like an opportunity to do just that in a reasonable way. It's disheartening that people have quit talking about God. In the end, what other subject is there?

Absolutely semi-reliable predictions for 2019: 12-31-18

When I tell you that I never came close to predicting that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election but that I predicted that the Cubs would win the World Series every year from about 1950 through their eventual win in 2016, you will know that my predictions are, at best, suspect.

Still, it's a gift I have. And I can't help sharing it with you. So, in the field of religion, ethics, spirituality and similar pursuits, I offer you a preview of what you're likely to see happen in 2019.

-- Pope Francis will decide the miters (tall hats) that bishops wear are just too silly to continue. And will order those leaders, instead, to wear baseball caps embroidered with the Ten Commandments.

-- The Protestant Church of Reformed Anglican Baptists of the East will finally give up trying to hide its internal divisions and break up into the Protestant Church of Reformed Anglican Baptists of the Near East and the Protestant Church of Reformed Anglican Baptists of the Far East.

-- Hanukkah, pretty far down the list of important Jewish holidays, will be sponsored in 2019 by the National Council of Churches as an interfaith act of friendship -- and because 98 percent of American Christians think Hanukkah is the Jewish Christmas.

-- A megachurch in Texas will secede from the state and elect its own governor, the founding pastor, who will declare all cash gifts to him tax free -- for both the giver and receiver.

-- Six new movies about Jesus will appear. All will claim to be based strictly on the gospels and each of them will present a radically different image of Christ. Viewers of each film will gather into six new denominations, each of which eventually will split into six more.

-- Publishers will put out 185 new editions of the Bible, ranging from The Bible You Thought You Knew to The Commuter's Bible and Lunch Box to The Camper's Bible and Solar Lantern.

-- The congregation of a mosque in Michigan will offer sanctuary to Syrian refugees. Both of the Syrian refugees the Trump administration allows into the country in 2019 will accept.

-- One Catholic diocese after another, to pay for never-ending costs of the sex abuse scandal, will set up GoFundMe pages. By this time next year donors will have kicked in a national total of $1.38.

-- The United Methodist Church, now arguing internally about LGBTQ issues, will split. One side will be known as the United Methodist Church That's Faithful to Scripture and the other as the United Methodist Church That's More Faithful to Scripture.

-- A new religion called the Twitter House of Shallow Spirituality will sweep the country. But no more than 140 members may join at any one time.

-- John Nelson Darby will return to Earth to admit that he just made up the whole idea of the Rapture. "But," he will tweet, "I made it back to Earth so maybe Jesus might, too."

A year from now I will be back to grade myself on my predictions. But I'm guessing I'll still be thousands and thousands of falsehoods behind President Trump.

* * *

MORE BAD NEWS FROM CHINA

On a much more serious -- and real -- note, religious freedom in China seems to be deteriorating by the day. As this Fox News piece notes, "China under President Xi Jinping is clamping down on minorities, tightening control over a wide spectrum of religious and political activity. In some places, a campaign to 'Sinicize' religion has prompted authorities to seize Bibles, remove the 'halal' designation from food products, demolish churches and strip mosques of loudspeakers and Islamic crescents and domes." Let your member of Congress know you are concerned about this. Let Sam Brownback, ambassador at large for international religious freedom, know, too. There's a "contact us" link on the State Department page to which I've just linked you. Write to Brownback. I just did.

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P.S.: My latest Flatland column -- about a Catholic and a Lutheran church forming a partnership -- now is online here.

On Jesus turning water into grape juice: 12-29/30-18

As you know if you've been following my writing for awhile, I think that you have two choices when reading the Bible: You can take it literally or you can take it seriously. But you can't do both.

In that spirit, I point you to this Patheos.com blog this weekend.

The author describes an illustrated children's Bible that has been distorted to fit the theological beliefs of the people who put it together. Which means that in the story of the wedding at Cana about Jesus turning water into wine, the whole story gets watered down, almost literally.

The headline on the story is "Jesus turns water into juice."

And the text reads: "Jesus and His friends went to a party. They had good grape juice to drink. And then the juice was all gone. Jesus told the helpers what to do. 'Put water in those big jars,' He said. The helpers did, and then -- Jesus changed that water to juice! How could He do that? He is God's son."

Oh, my.

Maybe the first clue that this story is going to have a specific theological agenda is the third word, "His." Throughout the short story, the pronouns referring to Jesus get capitalized. It's a way of making sure readers know that Jesus is to be respected because he is divine and deserves capital letters. It's an understandable conceit but also unnecessary. The divinity of Christ does not depend on the capitalization of pronouns, after all. But let it go.

However, the major problem here is that the authors don't want kids thinking it's OK for even adults to drink wine. So they change it to grape juice, thus completely distorting and disrespecting the text.

The author of the Patheos blog rightly condemns all this: "What they fail to realize is that they are in fact deifying themselves and their own opinions in this process. And worse still, by passing on these practices to children, they are causing little ones to stumble into the same sins that they commit."

Well, until I ran across this Patheos blog I had never seen a children's Bible that bent the Greek and Hebrew (and some Aramaic) original text out of shape in this way. There are, of course, always interpretive choices to be made by translators, but those translators are not free simply to make up things to meet their own theological agendas.

Do your children or grandchildren have Bibles written for children? Maybe it's time to give them a read. If you discover this kind of dishonesty going on there, it's time to replace those books with something reliable.

* * *

SHOULD THE GERMANS TAX MUSLIMS?

What happens when the line between church and state gets blurred? Take a look at Germany. As this Washington Post piece reports, the national government there is considering taxing Muslims to help control Islamist radicalism. To American ears, that sounds like an unwise, unhealthy crossing of the church-state border. But because the state there already collects taxes on Catholics and Protestants just because they're Catholics and Protestants, the Muslim idea begins to sound halfway sane. And that's the problem. Government everywhere should get out of the religion business. On the other hand, religion should be free to have its voice heard in the public square. That's how it should work.

* * *

P.S.: My latest Flatland column -- about a partnership between a Catholic and a Lutheran church -- now is online here.

A church looking into the abyss: 12-28-18

This year, 2018, may well be remembered as the time in which an important shift occurred in the Catholic Church, one that finally convinced not just the people in the pews but many of the leaders of the church that something has to change in the institution's approach to the now-decades-old scandal of priests abusing children and bishops covering up for them.

One sign of that is that the National Catholic Reporter just named disgraced Cardinal Theodore McCarrick (pictured here) its "Newsmaker of the Year."

When the Vatican removed McCarrick from ministry after revelations of a long history of abuse, this NCR editorial notes, "The secretive, all-male, allegedly celibate clergy culture, where bishops can enjoy privileges once reserved for royalty and the extremely wealthy, was coming apart. There is no place left to hide. Insiders knew that — many of them saw it coming — and wondered when the scales would tip toward total disclosure. But it remained largely a deep-in-the-Catholic-weeds understanding of things. Theodore McCarrick helped move it into the open."

Some people who have stuck with the church through this horrific scandal have begun leaving, a deeply painful choice that they did their best to avoid.

Their departure is yet one more voice calling for significant institutional change in Catholicism.

As the NCR editorial notes, "McCarrick's fall provided the world with a rare look at a privileged life, protected by clerical secrecy and advanced by accumulated power and access to monied interests. It was all fertile soil for corruption. He was the beneficiary of a system that remains in place. If it is not radically reformed, changed well beyond alterations to institutional structures and norms, the corruption will continue in one form or another.

"Theodore McCarrick paid a huge price for his deception and betrayal of trust. He did not, however, act alone. He was enabled by peers who operated within an ethos that encouraged secrecy and protection of hierarchical privilege at all cost."

I have said again and again that the world needs a strong, healthy, compassionate, merciful Catholic Church. But it can't be any of those things so long as its Theodore McCarricks can go decades without being forced to confront their egregious sins. If the church leaders can't fix this now, when members are demanding change, the future of the church looks grim, indeed. And should.

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HOW EVEN POPE FRANCIS GOT COMPROMISED

Staying on the same subject today, I offer you this link to an AP story about how Pope Francis took far too long to confront the sex abuse scandal in the church. The result, the piece says, is that "damage to his moral authority on the issue has been done. Before his eyes were opened, Francis showed that he was a product of the very clerical culture he so often denounces, ever ready to take the word of the clerical class over victims." Can he now recover? I'd like to think so, though it's really late and he may not have enough time left in office to undo the damage.