Church not meant to be authoritarian

I read with astonishment comments by Bob Lowth (June 9) about the Catholic Church. No disagreement that the church “is an authoritarian structure,” but Lowth takes a quantum leap when he says “Christ gave Peter the duty to head the church in an authoritarian manner.”

First, Christ never intended to found a church. Second, Christ was most familiar with Jewish law and overtly practiced it. Third, Christ challenged interpretations of the excessive importance of minor laws promoted by the pharisees, an issue freely debated in his time. Christ challenged the proper intent of existing practices but never promoted autocratic methods; his was a pastoral, caring style with an open outreach to the lower rung of society. How could Christ have preached love as the core construct of our faith and then radically depart from that construct to preach autocratic means? We were called to be more than followers.

It is this kind of thinking that too many Catholics have accepted without question. It has given rise to the despotic system that not only tolerated a pope who never spoke out against the Holocaust when it was happening, allowed clerical sexual abuse to exist in secrecy since the 4th century — protecting the church’s reputation with no pastoral consideration of children and their ruined lives by the hands of narcissistic pedophiles — but also attacks sisters whose lives are devoted to Christ’s work and who do not mindlessly follow the party line that holds the hierarchy morally and intellectually superior when they are precisely the opposite.

I am a faithful, “thinking” Catholic but my radical discipleship is worlds apart from those who blindly follow.

Janet W. Hauter

South Barrington