From Wayne Besen at HuffPo:

It is time to admit that the gay community has a gigantic Pope problem. Under the leadership of Benedict XVI, the Vatican has become an implacable foe of liberalism, modernity, and basic rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Rome has eagerly jumped with both feet into America’s culture wars and is working on a global scale to punish or purge ideological dissenters within the church. This aggressive activism presents a formidable new front in the fight for parity — one with considerable political clout and financial resources.

Besen is absolutely correct – the gay community has a Pope Problem.

The Pope however as a lay problem – hat tip to I T at Street Prophets. The Catholic church in the English speaking world has suffered a devastating loss of prestige, power and influence – especially among its younger members. As a result of the clergy sex abuse scandal, a wide swath of Catholic laity simply ignores the pronouncements of the Catholic hierarchy and goes about their business. The church has purged its leadership ranks of many of its most out-spoken and justice oriented members.

The Catholic church has allied itself with the most conservative – and previously virulently anti-Catholic groups in the US, for a simple reason, as James Carroll explains:

That Catholic bishops are genuinely conservative is beyond doubt, but one might also note how their unprecedented alliance with an already powerful political-religious movement nicely solves the bishops’ biggest problem–the bankruptcy of their moral authority and loss of social clout in the wake of the priest-pedophilia scandal. New Protestant allies are happy to let go of old anti-Catholic prejudices, even those confirmed by priestly child abuse, for the sake of advancing their narrow moral agenda. Meanwhile, an equally divided political culture puts bishops in the cat-bird seat when it comes to tipping the scales of close elections or contested legislation, and that unexpectedly pivotal role has rescued them. The self-righteous glee with which they spout ethical absolutes, the fervor with which they threaten excommunication of dissidents, and the chest-thumping with which they mark their decisive influence on urgent legislation all suggest the degree of their relief to be out from under the cloud of contempt in which they were held because of their handling of the sex abuse-crisis. But that crisis, the sources of which have yet to be addressed, is not over.

The deeper problem remains – the priestly pedophilia scandal wasn’t the result of a “few bad apples” – it was the result of a massive, rotten barrel, a system wide corruption in which bishops readily covered up profoundly immoral actions on the part of priests in the name of preserving the public image of the hierarchy.

Ross Douthat reflects on the fact that the US Catholic church is actually a clear outgrowth of the Irish Catholic church – as a result of the tremendous influence of Irish immigrants in the US and the extraordinary influence in the Irish American community of the Catholic church.

I’ve been reading American Catholic, Charles Morris’s history of Catholicism in the United States. His account emphasizes the extent to which the modern Irish Church — which, because of the extraordinary influence of Irish clergy in this country, is in many respects the American Church as well — was the invention of a small group of strong-willed Victorian clerics, led by Dublin’s Cardinal Paul Cullen. Pre-Cullen, Irish Catholicism was “one of the most ragtag national churches in Europe,” Morris writes; post-Cullen, it was one of the most unified, rigorous, enthusiastic and militant branches of Catholicism in the world.

At the same time, it was one of the most hierarchical and clericalist, with priests and bishops who were invested with nearly-unchallengeable authority, and who became accustomed to extraordinary deference from civil authorities. And on sexual matters, it was a far more puritanical Catholicism than, say, the Mediterranean or Latin American varieties, or for that matter than the Gaelic Catholicism it had superseded.**

This combination was the source of enormous strength for a very long time, especially in the New World. A Cullen-esque Catholicism was ideally suited to the task of building a thriving immigrant church in a hostile Protestant society. The remarkable prestige, power and cultural cachet of mid-20th century American Catholicism almost certainly wouldn’t have been possible without the extraordinary exertions and self-sacrifice that the Irish Church inspired from priests and laity alike — and without its hierarchy’s ability to be power brokers and politicians as well as shepherds, and to bend the civil authorities, when necessary, to their will.

But you can see how it could all go bad . . .

From Carroll:

Many Catholic lay people “of a certain age” are profoundly alienated from the bishops’ worldview and understanding of the Church, but, because of firm clerical control over the institution and the tendency of the secular media to define “the Church” in strictly clerical terms, there is little they can do to affect either. Catholic young people, meanwhile, are indifferent to what the bishops say and think (only 15 percent of college-age Catholics attend Mass regularly). Given the current tilt of Church power, such Catholics are, for now, unwilling hostages of the reactionary hierarchy.

There are a number of strands being woven together into this particular tapestry. The last pope was a conservative, yes, but a gentle conservative. In his wake, however, he left a hierarchy transformed, a hierarchy dominated by conservatives, intolerant of dissent and under the leadership of the most regressive pope in a very long time. Benedict XVI is, to put it mildly, a retrograde theologian, rigid, authoritarian, distrustful of women (hence the investigation into American nuns and whether or not they are “too liberal”); a scowling unloved figure, Benedict XVI is the polar opposite of priests I know at Judge Memorial; even those who were not beloved were respected for their dedication, honesty, and ability to teach, but those who were beloved were passionate, dedicated, compassionate men who clearly loved their vocation and cared about their students as individuals.

The church’s apparent unwillingness to really face the root causes of the priestly pedophile scandal – and the willingness of Catholic leadership to engage in a decades long, multi-national conspiracy of silence. In a strange way, the Catholic church and the Mormon church are on parallel paths – both seem to be moving in the direction of greater and greater authoritarianism and intolerance of internal dissent, a quest for theological purity and political influence at the cost of their religious mission; paradoxically both are aligning themselves with the same evangelical protestants who not so long ago regarded both faiths as unChristian.

From I T at Street Prophets, though, there is hope:

Can the Institution be redeemed? From my perspective they are perpetrating a series of horrors, and the Catholics I know are horrified in return. Is there a way, within the structure of the institution, to regain the tradition of social justice and progressivism from the cynical neo-cons and cons who appear to wear the purple and scarlet? Or perhaps true Catholicism, in the person of its people, will have to rise, Phoenix like, from the ashes of a corrupt institution. After all, Christ did not live in a palace with gold chalices, negotiating with governors and ministers. He was an itinerant carpenter with a rag-tag group of hippy followers who tended to the common people.