From Saving the Catholic Church Newsletter, 1 December 2016
Ever since Vatican II, people have talked about reforming the Curia, but the Curia didn’t want to be reformed. It was a good deal. Great power. Not much hard work. Why change anything except to steadily take the Church backward to before John XXIII threw open those windows?
Famously, when the ultimate conservative insider Benedict XVI was asked if he would try to reform it, he said that it was impossible, because no one knew how to do that.
When I was about eight years old, my dad organized a Boy Scout troop in our parish and served many years as chairman of the troop committee. I couldn’t wait to join. There was no Cub Pack so I had four years to wait. In those pre-historic times, you had to be twelve to become a Scout.
Of course, there was a Cub Pack at the Baptist Church across the street, but our pastor wouldn’t allow us to join it.
When I turned eleven, I talked my mother into give me about a six-foot piece of her clothesline, which I cut into one-foot lengths to practice tying knots so I would breeze through that task. My dad was watching me practice one day and he asked me if I knew how to tie a Gordian knot. I looked at my prescribed list and there was no Gordian knot. I asked what it looked like and he gave me his standard answer: “Look it up.”
I did and found that it was a knot that no one could tie and therefore it couldn’t be untied. In fact no one even knows what it looked like. Seven centuries passed until Alexander the Great figured out the solution. He pulled out his sword and chopped it in half.
The Gordian knot is an appropriate metaphor for the entire hierarchy of the Church and especially the Curia. Pope Francis has tried mightily to untie it, but it seems to be getting tighter. He is the only one with an interest in untying it, so we have more synods, commissions and letters with paragraphs that require 75 percent agreement for acceptance and publication.
There is no chance for a reformed hierarchy and a surviving Church until someone pulls out his or her sword and chops that metaphoric knot in half. {jcomments on}