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At this time of year, the mind has a way of drifting with little in thought except to drift. Occasionally, one comes across something in the drifting that needs thinking and saying. So in that mood, I offer this month's web page for a drifting consideration.

I was musing over the Christian Church, its many sins and graces over the centuries, and how to this day and moment, there is leadership that continues to think of it as a nation among nations. They do not understand or care that the very fact of nation can intrude on the teachings of Jesus Christ in its usual rude and clumsy way. I speak of the Vatican, in Rome, Italy.

Consider: the obvious driving force of the Vatican's understanding of their place in the scheme of things is to ape the concerns of nations in general (i.e., power) and to try to see to it that they have enough people in their membership to pull off their desired aches and itches for power and other influences in the world.

By that I mean that all their efforts in trying to eliminate such things as birth control, and abortion rights, are aimed at ensuring that their population – especially the poor – to remain high and stable enough to be able to wield that power and influence. They make no bones about it, and have spent enormous amounts of energy and money to try to stop such matters.

In the Third World and Africa, they are somewhat successful in terms of the numbers of people. The Third World and Africa now contains the largest pieces of the entire Roman Catholic population: the Vatican claims a population of one billion people out of six billions of world population. The Caucasian portions of that population rate are amongst its weakest. In Latin America, it is the fundamentalists and evangelicals who have emerged as prominent, putting Roman Catholic interests in the shade.

Europe is a lost cause for the Vatican, and any student of European history can tell you why: all the power abuses of their centuries there have resulted in the phenomenon of “anti-clericalism.” That is, an authentic hatred of Roman Catholic clergy because of the terror and heartbreak they brought to the general population over those centuries.

On another hand, I remember one dramatic moment in a tiny evangelical church in Cuernavaca, Mexico years ago when I was on a study tour. We entered the church to find that a repentant sinner was on his knees at the rail, and hovering about him, with their hands on his head, were two sponsors and a pastor, all of whom were praying fervently that the spirit of God enter this man.

He was sweating with the effort of the moment, and finally, caved in, semi-conscious, spent with the effort of reaching within his own soul to find the centers of peace, of salvation, of redemption.

This image is offered in contrast to the deliberate ignoring of the peasantry of Latin America by the Roman Catholic policies. It is small wonder the evangelicals are making such headway there.

The latest flap amongst Catholic clerics in America has been the pedophile issue, and understandably, this has cost the Catholic hierarchy much anguish over lost members and money. Still, it was even more gruesome to watch the latest step in that issue when one Cardinal Law, formerly of the Boston Diocese, after being booted out of his realm for protecting pedophiles, had re-appeared as the steward of one of four major posts in the Vatican itself that are much desired. And he is still a Cardinal, and will vote for the next Pope.

Nice salary - $144,000 per year, plus generous operating expenses. So apparently it pays to turn a blind eye to sins of the clergy in that communion if you are a Cardinal.

John Cornwell is a Roman Catholic version of a pain in the Vatican derriere, a former seminarian who left the church in the 60s, only to return as a professor of religion in Cambridge University in England, and a devastating critic of the church. He suggests in his writings (“Hitler's Pope,” and “Breaking Faith,” for two) that the numbers the church cites as to its size are in error. For one example, in America, with a claimed 62.5 million members, the real attendance like one sixth of that number. Same for world wide numbers: one sixth of one billion.

In Tampa, Florida, the church put up billboards showing a picture of a Caucasian male face from below the chin to the beginning of the neckline – black suit, white dog collar, backed up by the sentiment that 62.5 million American Catholics love their good priests. The numbers are, as ever, deceiving.

The pedophile scandals in the Boston Diocese have been so devastating that it has announced that it is closing something like 370 parishes in eastern Massachusetts. By selling off the closed properties, they look to realize something on the order of $400,000,000.00, a windfall of enormous proportions for them. Considering that they got out of the pedophile scandal by paying off something like $25,000,000.00 to the survivors, I would say that clerical sin pays and pays and pays.

One bone in the Boston Diocese's throat was the emergence of a local reform group now gone national that calls itself The Voice Of The Faithful. VOTF. They pushed very hard on this pedophile scandal, are largely responsible for bringing about some of the reforms that were necessary. Still, they are still up against the hostile bulk of attitudes toward the laity by the clergy, and recently published a web page that put everything into perspective in a hurry.

Their next, and largest goal, which includes the practices of the Vatican itself, is to challenge the very authority of the clergy. This means they are taking on the attitude of the Vatican that was begun to be cemented in place in the 1800s, and has now reached godawful proportions with the present Pope. That attitude says that the Pope is the boss, and no one else has any say.

So we onlookers are in the midst of the New Reformation. Call them “Neo-Refs.” Where it goes is anyone's guess. But the membership of the Reformation effort is not “average.” They are highly educated, professional people from all walks, and are determined to change the structure and spirit of their church into a system that has direct accountabilities to the laity of the church. Does that sound familiar, or what?

Step two in this process, after they get their concerns established, will be to sit down with the rest of the Christians in the world and see if we cannot put together a New Church, in an agreeable fellowship and much more efficient use of resources. If we mainline Protestants are still around.