An Atheist Wishes He Was Catholic

I wish I could be Catholic for a while. Then maybe I could raise my voice and actually be heard.

Right now the Catholic Church has a monstrous problem: The laity seems to be a flock of sheep, willing to follow the shepherd when he's keeping the wolves at bay, but when some of them see that same shepherd doing naughty things to his flock, they're ... well, they're sheep. They're not standing up for what's right. They're not raising their voices, marching on their churches, and condemning the vile deeds they see.

I suppose that makes sense. After all, Catholicism has, at its core, the belief that the Pope is actually God's personal representative here on Earth. It's hard to criticize the Pope, because it means God Himself made a mistake.

If any one thing brings the Roman Catholic Church to the ground, it will be the complacency of the laity. Priests, bishops, archbishops and the Pope are just men, with the same virtues and flaws as the rest of us. They do good deeds and they make mistakes. The problem is that laity, the common folks with common virtues and common sense, have been brainwashed all of their lives to overlook these flaws.

Common sense tells us that condoms aren't a mortal sin, that priests should be put in jail for making little girls and boys suck their penises (and why do we always gloss over this horrible deed with the insipid term "child abuse"?), and that hiding these priests behind a veil of secrecy is wrong.

If the Roman Catholic Church were any normal organization, the rank-and-file members would have revolted years ago and given the directors and CEO the boot. There would have been outrage, a clean sweep of senior management.

But the Roman Catholic Church isn't a normal organization. People with fire in their blood, the ones who are willing to stand up and be heard, either left the Roman Catholic Church long ago or they never joined in the first place. The Church has a natural filtering process, a sort of "survival of the fittest" filtering of their congregations that ensures that their laity is docile. The fiery souls, the ones who still have a sense of outrage and common sense, are unfit for survival as members of the Catholic Church. The result is a priesthood with no accountability to its members.

I wish I were a Roman Catholic. Catholics don't read this blog, or if they do they won't take it seriously. But if I were a good Roman Catholic somebody might pay attention to me. And if they didn't, I would march in front of my church with a sign or two. If that didn't work, I'd write letters to the editor. Maybe I'd even become a real rabble rouser &ndash I might start a movement to tell His Holiness what I and my fellow Catholics really think of him and how he covered up pedophilia when he was a bishop. And I'd tell him what any healthy, happy Catholic man knows, that sex is natural and healthy and celibacy is an unnatural perversion of our humanity. I might even tell him that his ban on condoms has killed millions around the world.

But I'm not a Catholic, so I guess nothing will get done. The Catholic flock is happy just being sheep.

Or are they?