God On Our Own
When Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said earlier this month that the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has lost “all credibility” over how it had dealt with pedophile priests, he may have been opening an exceedingly large can of worms. The Latin root of “credibility” is credo (I believe), the first word of the Act of Faith in the Catholic liturgy and part of the Mass. It’s a loaded word.
Truth be told, the Roman Catholic Church is finding itself besieged—and discredited—not only in Ireland, but in Germany and other countries in Europe, in the United States, Chile, and here in Mexico, where scores, maybe hundreds of boys and girls were allegedly abused by the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ. Just the other day we learned from the Archbishop of Johannesburg, Buti Tlhagale, that the church in Africa “is inflicted by the same scourge” and “trust has been compromised.”
The issue on the front-burner is, as it was in the Watergate scandal, not only the illegal (and in this case immoral) acts at the center of the storm but the cover-up—a pattern of high clerics, perhaps even the Pope himself, ignoring, denying, excusing, explaining away, and otherwise sweeping under the carpet the dirty sex secrets lurking in the shadows of the sacristy. Maybe this scandal should be called Holy Water-gate.
While the revelations about the “sins of the fathers” are remarkable—after all, hadn’t we entrusted them with the care of our souls and the souls of our children?—perhaps more remarkable is the idea that the scandal might bring down the Pope. Might Benedict XVI, Nixon-like, be forced from office? Could a small handful of cardinals led by the ecclesiastical equivalent of Barry Goldwater be dispatched to the papal apartments to say, “Your Holiness…it’s over.” If so, would the Pope take the Roman Catholic Church down with him?
All of this begs a further question: if the Catholic Church—if all organized religion—went away tomorrow, would that be such a bad thing? Would it make any difference to our spiritual lives? A post-religion world might sound implausible, but twenty years ago a world without the Soviet Union was equally unimaginable…and we seem to be getting along quite well without it.
We may have outgrown religion in the same way the world outgrew Soviet Communism. We simply may not need religion anymore. At an earlier time in our evolution, it probably was wise of us to invent rules and regulations to bind us (“religion” means “to bind back”) to the divinity. We may have needed intermediaries, holy men—alas, always men—to help us reconnect (another meaning of the word “religion”) to our Creative Source.
But now many of us everywhere are finding that we can take care of our souls by ourselves, thank you very much. Two years ago the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that the number of people unaffiliated with a particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who were not affiliated with a religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four are not affiliated with any particular religion.
Giving up religion does not automatically make one an atheist. Far from it. Last year’s Trinity College poll revealed that more than half of Nones (people who mark “none” when asked for a religious affiliation) believe in God or a Higher Power. We don’t have to be religious to be spiritual.
Teilhard de Chardin, the mid-twentieth century mystic, wrote, “We have been thinking of ourselves as human beings on a spiritual journey; it would be more correct to think of ourselves as spiritual beings on a human journey.”
But up to now we seem not to have understood that truth. According to Carl Jung, that which we cannot or will not see in ourselves, we project out onto others. Have we for eons been projecting our core spiritual identity out onto an imaginary God up in the clouds and assigning connection to that distant deity—within us all the while—to priests, shamans, ministers, gurus, and the rest? If so, the time may have come for us to withdraw that projection, which is the first step toward what Jung calls individuation: psychological maturity. We may be ready, in other words, to own our inner divinity.
If there are any heroes in this squalid mess of a scandal so full of villains, they might be the unfortunate victims of priestly sexual abuse. Unawares, they may have sacrificed themselves to bring about the toppling of organized religion in our time. Having suffered at the hands of priest perpetrators on our behalf, these innocents may go down in the history books as the martyrs of a more highly-evolved, religion-less world, where we all have the opportunity to take personal responsibility for our spiritual lives.
Joseph Dispenza is the author of God On Your Own: Finding a Spiritual Path Outside Religion and other books. He is a founder of LifePath in San Miguel. joseph@lifepathretreats.com.
