Bishops Hold Fast to Their Views as Nearly 1/3 of Laity Depart the Church

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he aristocratic purple culture of the bishops has become a prime moral and doctrinal principle in their consciousness. Anything that seems to threaten the ordering of society according to that culture is immediately assumed by them to be an attack on God and on the gospels. They truly believe that the privileged status and absolutist authority they assert for themselves are God’s will. It follows that any danger to that status (they will say, danger to the Church), is defended with righteous indignation, and with any weapons at their command ranging from slander to excommunication.

Astonishingly, they seem to have no problem in either ignoring the servant leadership commanded by Jesus, or in somehow identifying servant leadership with aristocratic domination.

However, people today are no longer uneducated. We question many things, even matters we assumed were accurate because we heard them from people to whom we were taught to accord authority. When flaws and inconsistencies appear in the life and dictates of those authorities, we question even more. And when our questioning leads us to see that our authorities are neither so knowledgeable or pure of heart as we had been raised to believe, our next step is to leave those authorities without authority. “Do it because I/We say so” no longer carries the force it once had, nor does it carry the feelings of guilt that were once such an integral Catholic trait. The Catholic populace is beginning to formulate a Catholic conscience that is their own in every way.

As we noted in the first issue of this blog, nearly one third (22.8 million) born and raised Catholics have left the Church. Over nine million of them are not affiliated with any Church. Over ten million have joined various protestant denominations. Over two million have joined other religions. The majority of those who left did so before reaching the age of twenty-four.

Our bishops like to explain these departures as the result of external cultural realities, the nebulous isms: indifferentism, materialism, individualism, relativism, etc. The current papal and Vatican buzz word for enemy is relativism, the mind-set of those who hold that judging doctrinal and moral matters is relative to the people, events, conditions etc. involved in a particular matter. A friend of mine recently quipped: “In their world, everything is relative – to them.” Neither the Vatican nor the bishops around the world seem capable of looking at the components of their own culture as a major disconnect with both the Catholic laity and the Jesus of Scripture.

Shoring Up the Purple Culture: The Church Turns Away From Equality

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oday, we deal with the Bishops’ response to the question of equality within the Church. Have we returned as a Church to the egalitarian quality of the gospel and the first four centuries of church history? Obviously, no! Is the tinseled clerical aristocracy defunct as is the secular aristocracy? No again! Do the laity have a voice that is heard by the clerical aristocracy? Not at all, unless we reduce the level of conversation to what type of flowers should go on the altar for a particular feast, or to their listening to attorneys in the present sexual abuse crisis. Does the wisdom of the laity enter into declarations of appropriate moral behavior? No. It is not an exaggeration to say that our bishops today inhabit a purple culture that is as unheeding of the laity as the aristocratic culture of old was to its peasants.

As the monarchical world of secular aristocrats declined following the French and American Revolutions, the Vatican felt threatened. Along with its nostalgia for the monarchies that fell, it felt itself in jeopardy. The pope and bishops mounted steps to secure their status. Those steps went further than the condemnations decreed against the liberating forces. 

At the insistence of Pope Pius IX, in July, 1870, the First Vatican Council, with its Declaration of Papal Infallibility, established a new monarchy, one of moral and doctrinal dominance. The Pope now had two monarchies, both absolutist, the Papal States and the newly defined Spiritual Kingdom. The possession of two kingdoms lasted only three months as the foreseen absorption of the Papal States into a united Italy occurred in September, 1870. Still, the Pope and bishops retained their newly formed kingdom. And this new spiritual kingdom maintained all of the aristocratic trappings of the old order. The Pope remained a king. Bishops were still princes. In sum, the clerical aristocratic structure and purple culture remained the same as it had been, and has to this day.

To support the legitimacy of this new kingdom the Vatican began to load the practice of Catholicism with images that subtly carried the message. A feast of Christ the King was established by Pius XI in 1925. The feast of the Queenship of Mary followed in 1954, established by Pius XII. Both feasts work subliminally to validate the aristocratic (purple) culture of the Church. It is difficult to believe that they foster the images of Jesus and Mary that we glean from Scripture.

The Pope and bishops continue to dub knights of various papal orders with all the pomp and ceremony of old. The liturgy remains today a visible celebration of aristocratic manners and style. In liturgical ceremonies we see the throne, the royal garb, the etiquette of bows, genuflections and kneeling, precious metal chalices and ciboriums, all taken from the aristocratic life style. There is, in fact, an ongoing effort to restore all changes to the liturgy made by the Second Vatican Council, especially a return to the Latin language, exclusive to the clerical kingdom. 

Bishops of past centuries had wealth-producing constituencies and appointments. Today as well, bishops have virtually unlimited access to money. In recent times we have witnessed how easy it is for a bishop to reach into the till to cover personal peccadillos, to travel at will, and to live in luxurious abodes. And the laity have no way to give significant input into such expenditures. If bishops utilize lay boards, the members are handpicked by the bishops themselves.

In the past issues of this blog we have seen the history of how and when the episcopacy took on the status consciousness and cultural lifestyle of the aristocracy. We have also seen the shallowness, narcissism, and cultic characteristics native to that culture. In the coming issues we will look at just how this culture has affected moral and doctrinal issues.

We hope you will stay with us.