by Tom Pantera
Columnist

Obviously, last week was an interesting one to be Catholic. But if you’re a lapsed Catholic (or, as many of us prefer to call ourselves, a recovering Catholic), it was kind of a weird week.

A lot of ex-Catholics have a fairly jaundiced view of the One True Church. Our churchgoing brethren often like to accuse us of bagging our relationship of the church just because we don’t want to get out of bed on Sunday morning, but I’ve found that’s rarely the case. A lot of us have more complex and deeply personal reasons for doing so.

So it’s always interesting when they pick a new pope and we have to sit through a week or so of news coverage filled with bloviating reporters filling time and optimistic statements by guys in Roman collars. It often sent my crapola meter into overdrive. It was particularly interesting watching the proceedings with Karon. Although she’s no longer a churchgoer either, she retains some real problems with Catholicism (a lot of Southern Baptists do). But because she’s intelligent and highly curious, she asked me a lot of interesting questions. It was interesting answering them.

To take just one example, papal infallibility is widely misunderstood, even by a lot of Catholics. The pope is only infallible when he speaks “ex cathedra,” or “from the chair.” The last time that happened was in 1950, when the pope defended church dogma that says Mary was taken bodily into heaven when she died. That was only the seventh time the pope had ever spoken ex cathedra in the history of the church. And by the way, the teachings on birth control don’t fall under papal infallibility, although that doesn’t mean Catholics are supposed to follow them any less.

People like Karon often grow up with a lot of misconceptions about Catholicism. Those misconceptions are purely a matter of lack of information and I don’t mean that in any pejorative way. I mean that in a literal, objective sense; they just don’t know a lot of things about the church. And even when they know something that’s true, it often seems so bizarre to them (understandably) that it takes a little explaining. What I’ve found, in talking to Karon about it, is that often the explanations aren’t real satisfying to either of us.

I can remember, as a kid, trying to explain confession to my non-Catholic friends. They thought it was really weird that you’d go into a little box (which often isn’t done these days) and tell this guy you can’t see, and who can’t see you, all of the bad things you did. And let’s face it, if you aren’t raised that way, it would seem a little weird. What’s hard to explain (and this is one of the few things I actually miss about being a practicing Catholic) is how good it feels, how clean one feels at the moment you’re walking out of the confessional.

My personal break with the church predates the sex abuse scandals, but it’s related. One of the reasons I left the church was because of its deeply twisted and regressive teachings about sex. The conclusion I’ve come to, and I’ve had Catholics argue with me about this, is that at a fundamental level, the church considers sex – any sex – as evil. It’s necessary to propagate the species, but the old, supposedly celibate men who run the church are only willing to accept it for that reason.

Now, I suppose you could make a halfway decent philosophical case for that, given the power that sex has to make people do bad things. But I don’t buy it. Sex is one of God’s great gifts. At its best, when it is a part of love, it is one of the few moments one gets a peek into what heaven must be like. And even when it’s not as good, it has a lot to recommend it. (Sex is like pizza, the old joke goes: When it’s good, it’s very good, and when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.)

When I realized that I rejected the teachings on sex, birth control, priestly celibacy and homosexuality, it became obvious to me that I was maintaining membership in a club whose tenets I didn’t agree with. I realized that for me, remaining Catholic really would be an exercise in hypocrisy.

But even had that not been true, the sex abuse scandals would have pushed me over the edge. There is nothing – nothing – that can excuse how the church has acted. We’re talking here about the rape of children. The only thing worse that you could do to a child is kill him, and the difference between child rape and child murder is one of only a very small degree and in some cases is more apparent than real. And the church did not just allow it. It played an active role in enabling it by moving these monsters around and letting them continue to do it. The church did something that was not just bad. It was actively evil.

Of course, I’ll be accused of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but it isn’t bathwater. It’s a big, steaming tub of cyanide. I really don’t even want to be in the same room with it.

So here’s my prediction: Even though the new pope shows some differences from his predecessors, not much is going to change. The problems in the church are systemic and far beyond the control of any one man. The pope has to deal with a bureaucracy that has had 2,000 years to develop its talent for self- preservation. The men who run the church think that people are still stupid enough to be enraptured about the idea of being able to eat a hot dog on Friday and to still accept the idea that they should have more kids than anybody can reasonably support. That’s because none of the guys making the rules have kids, or theoretically ever will (although we’ve all heard how that’s working out, too).

I hate to be a buzzkill, but my bet is that the last week’s festivities at The Vatican were just a celebration of more of the same. I hope I’m proven wrong, but I wouldn’t bet on that.