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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3515 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 18, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Yeah.

I don't really know enough about Catholicism to say, but I assume that that advancement of clergy to higher positions doesn't directly select for who seemingly believes the hardest in the doctrine. I mean, those who genuinely lose faith are probably going to self-select out, but someone who doesn't really have a deeply-held belief in the truth of the Bible could still be a loyal cleric simply because they see the church and its' teaching as an overall net good in the world that should be maintained. Or because they personally gain from it.

And that element of belief also seems like the easiest part to fake?

I mean, assume that you commit to the cloth out of a true belief in the divinity of the Pope et al., but after many years you simply do not observe the evidence that would support the churches' teaching about God (I do not make a comment on whether he exists or not, here), and see the churches' failures up close. Do you continue to present yourself as a believer on the basis of simple inertia, do you double down on your faith, or do you decide to simply 'game the system' and see how far you can get?

I know this is a tangent, but the selection of senior clergy in the Catholic Church is interesting because it doesn’t work quite the way you expect. Future bishops are selected before the end of seminary(by grades and connections) and early assignments(right out of seminary; priests marked out as potential bishops spend decades building their resumes, largely with experiences that they themselves don’t pick) determine a lot of the career progression. Becoming a bishop is also a major, further commitment that lots of priests decide they don’t want to make after doing their several decades of necessary experience and further degrees.

There certainly are ambitious career climbers in the upper clergy(and the current pope wasn’t one of these as an archbishop), but these guys knew by the age of, say, 25 that they had a good chance of hitting very senior positions and they’re in their sixties now- and at each step of the process they knew what the next step would be. And the evidence suggests that while less than 100% of them believe in 100% of catholic doctrine, the ones who lose their faith entirely usually leave the clergy- with the archbishop of Paris being the most recent example here. Remember that highly intelligent(nearly all RCC bishops have graduate degrees) senior citizens are a carefully selected population.

Interesting. It sounds like the Vatican is looking for a set of factors which contribute to the long-term success of the church.

Considering the history of the Catholic Church, making sure the well connected yes men are actually competent is understandably a priority.

Moreover, the other big fact of Catholic Church internal politics is really, really long terms of service. It just makes sense to filter in potential candidates for authority positions ahead of time when you have decades long terms of service whose ends can be predicted to within a few years(all senior clergymen submit their resignations at 75 but Vatican bureaucrats processing them act with typical Italian inefficiency).

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