Christ-minus-Cross religion is fatally flawed and unable to sustain itself

May I comment on your editorial (February 23) about a new set of rules following your research on ‘Family Matters’.

You say “in the working life of men summoned to Rome ... this defiance of the mores society once held dear would have been unimaginable”.

So permit me to imagine such thoughts as these going through the Pope’s mind.

Before the end of the first five centuries the faith of a small group born within Judaism had become the faith of the majority in the Roman empire and had spread eastward to central Asia and westward to then faraway Ireland.

Perceptive people who have studied that period point to Christianity’s uncompromising adherence to its basic convictions. The pagans, the early Christians were told, could have it all: their idols, their infanticide, their abortion, their divorce, their homosexuality, but Christians could not. From the beginning these were features that put people off, but they were also features that drew people in. What was true of Christianity in the Greco-Roman world remains true today. The more decadent the age, the more does the forceful insistence that there is a right and a wrong about matters of sex exert a gravitational pull of its own.

Though I’m writing in the context of Catholicism reeling from devastating sexual scandals here, coupled with the constant assault from secularism. I’m getting the impression that the clamour of dissent has had its day.

You have told us editorially that preaching Christianity is irrelevant to people’s lives. May I say it is Christ-minus-Cross religion, and not Christianity, that is irrelevant to people’s lives. It is the Christ-minus-Cross religion that is fatally flawed and unable to sustain itself.

The unwanted teaching for some, especially the sexual moral code, demands of the modern mind a new and respectful look. May I say to dissenters of all kinds that the gospel of Christ-minus-Cross has not pulled in the crowds. I realise there are other problems dividing Christianity, the same old ones since the time of Luther and Henry VIII that split western Christianity almost 500 years ago.

But these divisions may not now be the crucial ones; there could well be new alignments. From pagan Rome 2000 years ago to secular Europe and beyond today the church’s rules about sex have amounted to saying “no, no and no” to what others have come to say “yes or why not?”

There is no denying the traditional rules do seem to be more problematic now than ever before with widespread abortion, ubiquitous pornography, diminishing social opprobrium. All have divided recreation from procreation as never before.

Many might even say: hasn’t this explosion of sexual expression made what was once a difficult code now an impossible one. Shouldn’t the proper Christian response be one of mercy, rather than censure, including what you call for: a rewriting of the moral rules, some new kind of Ten Commandments? The experiment of Christ-minus-Cross religion has been going on for a long time in this elastic fashion – born, some might even suggest, of compassion for human frailty.

First, limited exceptions are made to a rule; next those exceptions are no longer limited; finally the new norm is itself pronounced acceptable because the effort to hold the line at carefully drawn borders eventually proved futile.

Once traditional sexual morality is dispensed with, once the contemporary cafeteria menu with such items as blessings for remarriages and even homosexual unions is presented, it is difficult to keep the rest of the church’s teachings off the chopping block.

The experiment of Christ-minus-Cross religion has left enough evidence in its wake to declare it a total failure. If enough people over time turn their backs on the divine injunction to be fruitful and multiply, eventually their churches will cease being fruitful and multiplying too. People who cannot be expected to obey in difficult matters cannot be expected to obey in easier ones either.

Christ-minus-Cross religion that attempts to make life easier for those in the pews has not made them any likelier to sit there and their empty churches might well be turned into shelters, nightclubs, concert halls, museums, maybe even mosques.

The promoters of Christ-minus-Cross religion argue that the antiquated sexual notions of the Catholic Church are an anachronism that has to go for the sake of a kinder, gentler Christianity. Have they forgotten that the stone rejected by the builders turned out to be the cornerstone?

Could I suggest to your readers to read this again on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The church has but one job: to pass on its founder’s message, unaltered.

Fr Tom Kelleher

Courceys

Kinsale

Co Cork