God and Man (or Woman)

Ralph Neas of People for the American Way (PAW) was on Hugh Hewitt's radio show yesterday in a tape-delayed interview. One of the topics was the Catholic Church. He said that the majority of American Catholics are opposed to Pope John Paul II's positions on women priests, abortion, birth control, etc. and hoped the new pope would change that. Neas is a Roman Catholic.

What wasn't mentioned was what God thinks about these issues. Isn't that the main thing? If God's will doesn't apply, then a church is nothing more than a social club with laws that can be changed by the members. I suppose that the members could vote to say they didn't want to live certain commandments, but why pretend that they still belong to the same religion?

I can see that a public official shouldn't feel bound to represent his church ahead of his constituents, but that isn't the case here. When did God bow out from the doctrinal process? As a Mormon, I have an answer to that. It was when there ceased to be Apostles and prophets as the central authority of the church, but for Catholics, whose doctrine is that the Pope is infallible and is chosen by God through the Holy Ghost, I have to wonder if they really understand what a religion is.

Update: Mark Steyn seems to agree:

The root of the Pope's thinking - that there are eternal truths no one can change even if one wanted to - is completely incomprehensible to the progressivist mindset. There are no absolute truths, everything's in play, and by "consensus" all we're really arguing is the rate of concession to the inevitable: abortion's here to stay, gay marriage will be here any day now, in a year or two it'll be something else - it's all gonna happen anyway, man, so why be the last squaresville daddy-o on the block?. . .

Indeed, if you look at the New York Times's list of complaints against the Pope - "Among liberal Catholics, he was criticised for his strong opposition to abortion, homosexuality and contraception" - they all boil down to what he called sex as self-assertion.

Thoughtful atheists ought to be able to recognise that, whatever one's tastes in these areas, the Pope was on to something - that abortion et al, in separating the "two meanings" of sex and leaving us free to indulge in one while ignoring the other, have severed us almost entirely and possibly irreparably from traditional impulses, such as societal survival. John Paul II championed the "splendour of truth" not because he was rigid and inflexible, but because he understood the alternative was a dead end in every sense.

If his beloved Europe survives in any form, it will one day acknowledge that.