Advice to the Cardinals and to Catholics: the quickest way to irrelevance

George Jonas gives some advice to the Cardinals in the Vatican as they set out to choose the next Pope and head of the Cahtolic Church.

Jonas tells us he is neither a Catholic nor religious. Nevertheless, I think his advice may be divinely inspired.

"Dear cardinals, the next Pope must be willing and able to restrain predatory priests. He must be willing and able to clean house. But there’s a difference between fumigating the church and blowing it up. Fashionable as blowing things up has become, you’re not in the fashion business. You’re in the faith business. Restoring the church and hijacking it aren’t the same thing. Appearances and vocal demands to the contrary, you don’t have to be up-to-date.

I say this knowing that hardly a week goes by without a person accusing the church of being insufficiently up-to-date, or of unfairly restricting some human desire or ambition. Complaints may range from sexual matters to points of ritual. Some people may demand that the church approve of divorce, or maybe of contraception or abortion, or the ordination of women and homosexuals, or whatever else would bring the church’s doctrines more in tune with the complainers’ own philosophies.

All such complaints boil down to one thing. It is that the moral teachings, or sometimes the mysteries, of a given religion restrict some of the complainers’ worldly ambitions. The usual code-word expressing this complaint is “relevance.” The complainers worry that the church is becoming “irrelevant” to their lives. Only if the church agreed with their views on contraception or whatever would it become “relevant” again...

Jonas then gives us an example of this "irrelevance" by way of Tolstoy's character Helene Bezuhov from the book War and Peace, whose:
"standard is held up by men and women who, having acquired the liberty to do as they please, now demand religion to also applaud their moral choices. They want their churches, their priests, even the very Vicar of God, to approve and endorse what they do, or else they threaten him with irrelevance. God Himself becomes irrelevant unless he can be used to rubber stamp human desires – because, as Tolstoy points out, that’s what God is for, at least as far as Helene Bezuhov is concerned. That’s how it was in 1812 and that’s how it is in 2013.

Helene would be reassured to know that her heritage lives on. Her standard is held up by men and women who, having acquired the liberty to do as they please, now demand religion to also applaud their moral choices. They want their churches, their priests, even the very Vicar of God, to approve and endorse what they do, or else they threaten him with irrelevance. God Himself becomes irrelevant unless he can be used to rubber stamp human desires – because, as Tolstoy points out, that’s what God is for, at least as far as Helene Bezuhov is concerned. That’s how it was in 1812 and that’s how it is in 2013.

I’ve little doubt that the Countess Bezuhov’s spirit will attend the conclave in Rome, right along with the Holy Spirit. Both will be available to the cardinals, and we can only hope they’ll listen to the right one.

As I mentioned before, I’m not religious. If I were, however, I think I’d have something more important to worry about than God’s relevance to me. I’d worry about my relevance to God. And in the unlikely event that the cardinals asked me, I’d say that worrying about what’s relevant instead of what’s right is the quickest way to irrelevance."

Amen to that.