Dogmatic Dictatorship

Reading the news coming out of Iran has set me to thinking. The similarities between the unrest in Iran and the unrest in the Roman Catholic Church are striking. Iran’s ruling theocrats have the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij militias, and the Vatican has Opus Dei, CUF, ETWN and other, so called, “conservative” groups. The ruling clerics in Iran are clamping down in a knee jerk reaction to the aspirations of faithful Muslims who long to be freed from the tyranny of their Islamic Theocracy to embrace the ideal of the Islamic Republic that showed such promise after the fall of the Shah in 1979. In like manner the Vatican is engaged in active suppression of Roman Catholics looking to leave the medieval monarchy of the pre-Vatican II church behind and reclaim the consensus community model of church that characterized her first three centuries.

The Vatican is in much the same place as the mullah’s in Iran in trying to put the “genie back into the bottle” . Of course (thankfully) the hierarchy of the Roman Church no longer has the temporal power to put dissidents to “the torch” or literally beat us into submission. They are, however engaged in an active program of marginalizing the progressive elements in the Church and putting forth the threat of excommunication toward any who even question the Church’s stand on priestly celibacy or the ordination of women. The irony is that while one priest can molest children in parish after parish and be treated with “compassion” and discretion, a priest advocating the ordination of women or married men is threatened with excommunication.

The “threat” to the Church is not women aspiring to serve the Church in ordained ministry, or male priests being forced to choose between a healthy sexual relationship and ordained ministry. The greatest threat facing the Roman Catholic Church is irrelevancy. Since Blessed John XXIII “opened the windows” to let the fresh air (and the Holy Spirit) in, “pew sitting” Catholics have been actively engaged in their Faith journey. We have discovered that there are no “cookie cutter” solutions to the problems we face on that journey. I can acknowledge that abortion is a sin, but is making it illegal (as a matter of secular law) the most life-giving response? We have begun to place a value on faith as a verb, something active and dynamic and are no longer content with merely ascribing to “The Faith” as dictated by the hierarchy. If we are continually told to just sit in the pew and do as we are told, we will eventually exit the pew altogether and find a way to serve God outside of the decaying edifice of the Roman Church.

In both the case of the reformers in Iran and those within the Catholic Church, the goal is distant and beset with many obstacles. But in both cases there is no going back. The theocratic dictatorship of the Iranian mullahs and the dogmatic dictatorship of the Roman Catholic hierarchy are both destined to be jettisoned as those they are trying to control and suppress become more insistent on exercising the freedom and responsibilities we have as Children of God.

Michael F. Iott
Society of Blessed John XXIII