Salon.com > roman catholicism

Is Pope Francis a fraud?

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 17:30:00 +0000

It’s easy — maybe too easy — for people with progressive political views to dismiss the Roman Catholic Church as a vile anachronism, a nightmarish patriarchy of aging pedophiles, woman-haters, homophobes and/or closet cases that can offer nothing of value to the contemporary world. When it comes to the church hierarchy, and especially the Roman Curia, the corrupt and labyrinthine Vatican bureaucracy that makes the Soviet-era Kremlin look like a model of transparency, that point of view seems more than justified.

But the church is not just the hierarchy, and as the spectacle of the last several days has demonstrated, there are millions or billions of people around the world -- Catholics and non-Catholics alike -- who wish the newly elected Pope Francis well and yearn to see in him the possibility of hope and renewal for this ancient, powerful and heavily tarnished institution that claims direct succession from the apostles of Jesus. As the first Latin American pope and the first Jesuit pope, Francis represents a break with tradition in several ways. Both the name he has chosen and his personal modesty and humility are meant to recall St. Francis of Assisi, one of the most adored figures in the Christian tradition, and no doubt also St. Francis de Sales, a 17th-century mystic, author and ascetic known for his devotion to the poor.

Pope Benedict XVI: His best of the worst

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 14:12:00 +0000

Pope Benedict XVI stunned the Roman Catholic Church on Monday when he announced his resignation, the first pope to do so in more than 600 years. An uncompromising conservative on social and theological issues who drove many from the church with his orthodoxy, he won't be missed.

The pope, in his own words:

On the church's sexual abuse scandal

The pope refused to open Vatican records to outside scrutiny and took little to no action against his bishops and cardinals involved in participating in and covering up decades of sexual abuse in the church. And, in an interview given before he assumed the papacy, then Cardinal Ratzinger argued that the public outrage over the sexual abuse scandal was really just an American plot to undermine the church:

Wish list for the new pope: Would anything bring you back to the church?

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 01:00:00 +0000

One out of every 10 Americans is an ex-Catholic, according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. If lapsed Catholics were a separate denomination, they would be the third-largest religious subgroup in the country.

That's a lot of people.

But faith is a fraught and deeply personal thing for so many of us, and religious experience can't always be neatly captured with labels or quantified through survey data.

So when Salon asked our lapsed Catholic readers if Pope Benedict XVI's resignation might signal a new direction for the church -- and what that might mean for their beliefs -- the responses we received expressed a thoughtful, sometimes painful, engagement with ideas of faith, family and community.

Like so many other Catholic "in-betweeners," Eleanor Parker Sapia hasn't left the church but struggles to reconcile its conservative doctrine with her progressive values.