A former Catholic chaplain reprises an observation I’ve made often through the years.
The church has always positioned itself as the one true authority. The word “catholic” means “according to the whole.” The existence of such divergent factions within the Church is reminiscent of another historical era of great tumult – the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Christianity was ultimately a beneficiary of that division as the new Christian world order replaced the pagan pantheon of Rome. Perhaps this time the discord will lead to the demise of the Catholic Church.
Exactly so. Just as Christianity ate paganism and unleashed a couple of centuries of turmoil, today science is eating Christianity — all of the Abrahamic faiths, really — and in the process has unleashed a similar instability. I am firmly convinced that we live right now, today, on one of history’s great hinges.