Studies like this in the Sunday Globe annoy the heck out of me. "Boston-area Catholics, increasingly alienated by the sexual abuse crisis that has rocked the church, say the characteristic they would most like to see in a new archbishop is openness to change, according to a new Boston Globe poll." I just love the phrase "openness to change," which everyone knows is a euphemism meaning liberal Catholicism (ordaining women/homosexuals/married men, no more chaste priests, no more birth control strictures, etc.)

One, they annoy me because it is obvious to all but the most intransigently dumb that a new bishop has absolutely no authority to do anything the liberal Catholics want. The day a Boston bishop begins ordaining women is the day he will also be removed by Rome. Who doesn't know this, or refuses to see?

Two, they annoy me because if lightening struck and the next pope were to do all the things liberal Catholics want, the RC Church would end up just like all the mainline Protestant churches: splitting and fighting and low attendance. Have American RCs ever seen or heard of the evangelical churches? Have they seen the statistics?

Three, they annoy me because American Catholics are but a sliver of the worldwide RC population. The overwhelming majority of world Catholics are Hispanics, Africans, and Asians, they are "conservative" (not interested in an "openness to change," see above), and Rome knows it. This is why Pope John Paul II has been much more outspoken about things like social justice; it is the issue on the minds of many more Catholics, rather than the Americano angst on ordaining the lady next door.

Fourth and finally, they annoy me because if the Church ever made itself again "open to change," it would cease to be an alternative and a challenge to the world. What makes the Church attractive is precisely because it is different and slightly mysterious. Make priests just like your local grocer, make churches look like the local bank, make worship look like the local cabaret, and you will get the Church you deserve: an empty one. Just like the empty seminaries and convents, dusty and quiet since the last time the Church wanted to make peace with modernity. When the Church decided it no longer wanted to abide by the adage, "in but not of the world," it began to lose relevance.

The real heart of the matter is found in paragraph three: "But nearly one in five Catholics say they have considered joining a non-Catholic church over the past year, and 39 percent say they would support an American Catholic church that is independent of the Vatican." Apostasy and schism. And this is beaut, a remark by one of the "openness to change" people: "''The Catholic Church for so long has relied upon dogma, and hasn't kept up with the times, and as society has become more open and encompassing of all, the church has stayed in its own staid pattern ... I used to accept that, but when the [sexual absuse] crisis hit, it shook everybody up, and maybe now, instead of us always answering to them, maybe they should answer to us.'' So, no more dogma (which means the Church can longer tell its adherents what to do, which would mean an end to sin, I suspect), "open and emcompassing" (which means anyone believing anything at anytime can be a Catholic -- gives new meaning to the term "universal Church"), and "they should answer to us" (which means a democratic church -- I guess the libcaths would get more meaning and power from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John if Jesus was referred to as "President of the Jews" and the disciples were "party members").