1.  IDOLATRY We, the church community, have put the institutional church ahead of God.    Root Cause Number 1 is not immediately obvious. I came up with my choice for Number 1 after reflecting on the most apparent root causes: authoritarian structures; the church’s culture of clericalism, celibacy, deceit, denial, silence, and secrecy; leadership failure and management incompetence; and two of the seven capital sins: pride and lust.   My choice for Root Cause Number 1 is idolatry, a violation of the First Commandment. The translation I remember from childhood is “I am the Lord thy God. Thou shall not have strange gods before me.” Many in the church community—pope, bishops, clergy, religious, laity—have put the institutional church, a strange god, before God.   The Catholic View.  It’s hard for many of us Catholics to see this because we’ve been taught from early childhood that we need an intermediary—Mary, the saints, but most of all the church—between God and us.   Some Catholics worship the institutional church rather than God. The church is a middleman (the writer's decision on gender was easy). We all know we pay an extra price when there’s a middleman involved. A good middleman (e.g., an experienced real estate broker) adds value. Recently, the church as middleman has subtracted value.   Some who reflect on our present-day culture say we’re in the age of disintermediation. The term disintermediation was coined to refer to cutting out the middlemen in e-commerce transactions. The internet itself is a technology of disintermediation. Intermediaries are sometimes helpful. But when the church as intermediary becomes God’s only gatekeeper or hinders one’s access to God, it’s time for change. The scandals and the crisis are evidence that we need greater disintermediation in our journey to God. We need less institutional church and more God.   Lenses and Worldviews.  The entire church community focuses too much on the institutional church and not enough on Jesus and His message. Richard Rohr (Note 1.1), a Franciscan who speaks and writes with prophetic authority, says that how you see is essential. I got the idea of a lens through which we see the world from Rohr. Our worldview depends on our nature, nurture, and lens. I understand the concept of a lens comes from the field of cultural anthropology. The lens through which we see, analyze, and synthesize the world more than colors our view of it.  The lens either brings reality into focus or distorts it. The lenses of the majority of the hierarchy, of some priests, and of many in the laity distort reality. Through a distorting lens, one can see the institutional church and the priesthood as God’s only means of dispensing grace to a radically corrupt human condition. This distorted view tolerates clerical and church deception, wrongdoing, and wrong decisions in the interest of pursuing the salvation of souls. A distorting lens doesn’t provide an opportunity for the Holy Spirit to bring wisdom, doesn’t allow for the “sense of the faithful” (sensus fidelium) to be factored in.  A distorting lens doesn’t focus on the New Testament teachings and parables of Jesus. It focuses on papal authority, the Magisterium, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, canon law, encyclicals, Cardinal Ratzinger, the authority of the bishops, new rules for kneeling at Mass—the whole institutional enchilada. This narcissistic institutional focus is idolatry. It is the Number 1 root cause of the seemingly insurmountable problems we as church face today. This focus leads bishops to preserving the church’s reputation and financial capital, rather than emulating the compassion of Jesus by ministering to abuse survivors. The messages from the bishops dealing with the clergy sex abuse crisis have been loud and clear: money is more important than people, institutional reputation is more important than the truth. Other Lenses, Other Views.  In a recent e-mail message to subscribers of his newsletter (Note 1.2), Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong had some interesting things to say about idolatry.
		Idolatry means ascribing to anything less than God the qualities that pertain only to God. Infallibility, inerrancy, eternal truth are but a few of these God qualities. In the history of the Church, various bodies of Christians have claimed infallibility for the ex-cathedra utterances of their spiritual leader, inerrancy for the words of scriptures that human beings wrote, and absolute truth for human formulations of doctrines and dogmas. Recognizing the weakness of such idolatrous claims for human persons, human creations, and human formularies, they developed an even stranger claim that the Holy Spirit somehow directed the leader in his (not her) infallible utterances since God would not allow the divine Church to live in falsehood or that the Holy Spirit guided the authors of the Scriptures so that the words were inerrant or that the Holy Spirit assisted the Church in its doctrinal formulations so that these creeds might reflect perfectly God's ultimate truth. Each of those claims borders on the ridiculous. The evil that has been done by the papal claims, the biblical claims, and the doctrinal claims can be documented all too easily. One has only to look at crusades, the Inquisition, and the biblical defense of such outdated evils as the divine right of kings, the condemnations of Galileo and Darwin, and the affirmations of slavery, segregation, second-class status for women, and homophobia with proof texts from scripture.
	These are difficult words for most Catholics. You may agree with none of them, some of them, or all of them.  I believe there’s truth in at least some of them. Correcting Lenses and Integrating Views. We can learn a lot from our fellow non-Catholic Christians. Maybe someday we will become a Bible-centered church, not in the sense of biblical fundamentalism, but in the sense that the faith community focuses on the Word as a principal part of God’s revelation and that the Word will animate the actions of the community. Maybe someday Catholics will become more like Protestants, not in the sense of having no papacy or giving up our Marian devotions, but in the sense that lay people will have more control of the personnel and financial decisions of the institutional church.  After all, the church is a family- owned business (Note 1.3). Conclusion.    The distorting lens of the traditional Catholic worldview needs to be corrected so that we can put the institutional church in correct perspective and, to use the motto of the Cistercians, see God alone.
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