New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Redefine the church

New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Redefine the church: Redefine the church

Agendas for the new Pope

I find the Catholic Church one of the most uplifting organizations to have risen from the human family because of the extraordinary art it has inspired and the majesty it has stylized in its ritual. I will never forget how my brother used to love to go into the neighborhood cathedral because he said that it was so calm and so beautiful and was a refuge from the heat or the cold of the outside world.

But in a time as vulgar as ours, when we have trouble finding things to believe in that are beyond our bodies or beyond goods and services, it is easy to take a cheap shot at something as large and as important to Western history as the church.

As Pope Benedict XVI considers what the future holds, he must remember that the Catholic Church and its Popes have stood strong through every imaginable crisis, but in so doing have submitted to monarchies and given aid and comfort to colonizers bent on destroying any society not part of Christendom.

Of course, we all know it looked the other way when Adolf Hitler and his murderous, jack-booted buffoons strode this bitter Earth. And we know that the church has held high the Virgin Mary while keeping women in a secondary position - as minor voices in the executive branches of its order - and has maintained a basically dismissive attitude toward what many consider contemporary women's issues.

In our own land, the church has tried to hide its sex scandals behind the skirts of its cardinals and bishops.

A fissure in the faith emerged as one young man after another gave testimony. They were far from hysterical and bespoke the depths of pain one feels when used and kept from plain sight by an administration surely corrupted by its own embarrassment.

The Pope must carefully guide the church as it is forced to stand up to the complex difficulties that arrive on the planes of sex, poverty and color. The Pope's greatest challenge will be to strengthen the voice that will speak to counter this time of apathy, an age bereft of any sort of serious thinking about religion, partially because it is crudely used to push political agendas and partially because the pain and cruelty of life do not seem to be assuaged by anybody's code of God and His dictates.

This is the age of AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases and massive sexual exploitation in the Third World. It is an age that will continually be redefined by the sciences.

But one's church is one's church, and we suffer through it and from it just as one does with one's parents and one's siblings. It is always a familial thing and what has been bred into the blood of the believer in Christianity is founded in forgiveness, which seems a much larger word than we commonly think once we realize that it means setting aside the harsh emotions that come with looking evil in the face.

Now is as good a time as any for the Catholic Church to redefine itself in terms that speak with depths of feeling, perception and faith in this difficult, vulgar and demanding moment in which so many fine things have fallen.

Originally published on April 20, 2005