People And Planet
October 28, 2010
or google Marie Schickel Rottschaefer
Resume Blog 1
10-28-10 As a laywoman reading and writing online in recent times it has become clear that the RC church is in a quagmire. When one is in quicksand generally speaking one’s only recourse is to be rescued. I believe that this is the position the church is in today. Outside help is the only answer because the-struggle has been long. The struggle is multifaceted -- abuse of various kinds, financial disaster, spiritual, doctrinal, ethical, and everyday practical issues needing appropriate resolution have besieged the church. And so I would like to present some people and resources ready to assist. Because visits to my blog [People and Planet hhtp://unprecedentedchange.blogspot.com or google Marie Schickel Rottschaefer] have trickled in since August 2010 I have decided to resume writing my blog but in an ad hoc manner for the time being.
The issues I raise are not so much about parishes and dioceses problem- solving as about the church as an institution and meta-level issues. In my post in response to Peter Steinfels’ A Church Further Adrift 10-22-10, I state that the bedrock, the theological infrastructure of Christianity i.e. the doctrines of the incarnation and resurrection appear to have collapsed. I say this because the book The Acts of Jesus by Robert Funk and the Jesus Seminar as I understand it gives a strong argument for this being the case from the scientific biblical-historical scholarship that they have produced. This is the kind of scholarship that Pope Pius XII promulgated in 1943 with his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu: “11. There is no one who cannot easily perceive that the conditions of biblical studies and their subsidiary sciences have greatly changed within the last fifty years. For, apart from anything else, when Our Predecessor published the Encyclical Letter Providentissimus Deus, hardly a single place in Palestine had begun to be explored by means of relevant excavations. Now, however, this kind of investigation is much more frequent and, since more precise methods and technical skill have been developed in the course of actual experience, it gives us information at once more abundant and more accurate. How much light has been derived from these explorations for the more correct and fuller understanding of the Sacred Books all experts know, as well as all those who devote themselves to these studies.”
Thomas Sheehan in his article in The New York Review of Books Volume 31, Number 10. June 14, 1984 “Revolution in the Church” goes into detail as to why the sea change in the church. Both the encyclical and Sheehan’s piece can be found on the Internet. The Funk et al book is easily accessible.
Indeed the church is further adrift because it is being run aground or in to a quagmire. It has run its course. Its foundation based on the incarnation and resurrection beliefs have to evolve into a new faith phenomenon. The faith and morals issue of more than two millennia must metamorphose. The Axial Age from which it originated is far more ancient (see Loyal Rue’s Religion Is Not About God ---). But things change and Homo sapiens’ history makes the Axial Age look relatively brief. The World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia New York World Book 1996 states that most anthropologists believe that between about 400,000 & 300,000 years ago, Homo erectus evolved into a new species called Homo sapiens.
