Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "We Have Made Our Catholic Church the Victorian Age in the 21st Century"

TMacCathmhaoil in a thread at National Catholic Reporter responding to commentary by Michael Sean Winters about the attempt of some right-wing prelates to parse the papal statements about not judging those who are gay:

We have made our Catholic Church the Victorian Age in the 21st century. We need a new horse. Francis as Pope is a good start to moving the comments of the day from the bathroom and the bedroom into the livingroom. The constant harping on the purely physical is leaving the spiritual out in the dark. The materialism of the hierarchs is no example for the faithful. Where is freud when you need him? Bring Jesus and Scripture back into the equation.

"The constant harping on the purely physical is leaving the spiritual out in the dark," and "Francis as Pope is a good start to moving the comments of the day from the bathroom and the bedroom into the livingroom": as theologian Matthew Fox points out, the great Jewish scholar of the prophetic tradition of Judaism, Rabbi Joshua Heschel, states that "[w]hen faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion—its message becomes meaningless."

And as Andrew Brown notes, in its official teaching about sexual morality, the obsessive focus of contemporary Catholicism on acts divorced from the personal and relational context in which acts occur has ended up making many thinking and spiritually sensitive human beings simply laugh when celibate Catholic churchmen hold forth on matters of sexual ethics. 

Hence the ongoing exodus of a large proportion of a whole generation of Catholics in much of the developed sector of the globe--as people seek spiritual meaning where they can find it, when it is decidedly not offered to them in a Catholic religious tradition that has long been home to them and their families, but appears unable or unwilling any longer to talk about sex in a way that makes any sense at all to rational human beings seeking spiritual foundations for their lives. While Jesus and the gospels are light-years removed from all this toxic nonsense, and might provide a real spiritual foundation for people's lives, including their sexual lives . . . 

if those preaching about Jesus and the gospels to the Catholic community would only stop and listen for a change to the voices they claim to be channeling to the rest of us.