Can We Stop Pretending Reforming Catholicism Is Possible?

This article is dedicated to Margaret Talbot, a writer for The New Yorker who wrote the 6/21/2021 piece “The Women Who Want To Be Priests.” The article talks about women who are trying to change the mind of the Catholic Church regarding the rule that only men can become priests.

Personally, I have no dog in that fight — I am not Catholic, nor even a Christian, but an atheist. Not only that, but of all the branches of Christianity, the strict authoritarianism and somewhat oligarchic nature of Catholicism already makes it one of the sects I most disagree with. If the Catholic Church wishes to keep its two millennium old rule that women are not allowed to become priests, I may think that it’s both a randomly sexist rule and that the Church should be spending its time doing a very different kind of vetting for its priests, but I do not expect them to change their tradition out of nowhere because it offends my modern sensibilities.

Although I would not call Catholicism the most mindlessly conformist branch of Christianity — both Baptism and Mormonism are good contenders for that — they are certainly the most mindlessly traditional. Even with all the talk about Pope Francis’s desire to reform the church, the most he has done is say that we should deal with climate change, show mild criticism towards capitalism (which is not…