Godfather Church

There must be a change in the way church is managed, mostly because all denominations everywhere are in various stages of disrepair because bureaucracy has crept in wherever it can. Various evils have crept in along with bureaucracy, but if we fix the one, we can chase out most of them.

Basically, I think a bishop should have a list of last names. He doesn't get to say he's doing a good job unless those names are preserved, and the number of people practicing them increase (or at least stay the same during trying times.

So, in some cases the bishop might have to get up and go elsewhere, if the bulk of his people were migrating for some reason. On the flip side, that means the clergy in a particular area cannot claim to be doing God's work by grabbing whoever happens to be migrating through and pretending they are the flock- no, you lost your flock, you little bastard.

Also, this would put a serious stop to child abuse. First, instead of the gay mafia sitting in the Vatican and pretending there is no tradition of married priests, the bishop would tend to rely on married priests. Secondly child abuse tends to screw up family formation pretty badly. Milo is Milo, and not a father of five, in no small part because of that sort of stuff.

Finally, a bishop under such constraints, would find himself needing to think more about economics. Families need to be able to produce in order to have and care for children. This is where the imagery of the Godfather comes in. In some real sense, it is a family, and it is a family versus the world. We are taught to think otherwise, but we are taught to think otherwise by bureaucrats who ultimately want us to refer to them and/or the system for all our morals.

The system is ultimately evil, in no small part because it asks us to abdicate our responsibilities to it.

Yet, where do your elders think you are going to get a job? They expect you to hook up to the system, and not to rock the boat too much, because they want their pension. If you must destroy the system, please wait until after they are dead, and have extracted as much of the promises as they could.

But none of that works if you are looking at your list of names. Who did you lose? Who got married? Who did you gain? How many generations have crossed your door?