We are living in the Zeitgeist of the consumer market driven life. Money acquires the halo of God in our life and culture. Marx was a prophet who saw the capitalist culture that had a God who was nothing other than Money. “Why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism?” asked Adorno & Horkheimer. Marx and Engels write that “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” This is perhaps what we fear about the situation of the church in Kerala as well. The ethical culture of strict ascetic spirit in the church is losing its fibre and the ascetic strictness, especially in matter concerning money and property. Handling public money and property with moral rectitude has relapsed.

In the West, the consumer culture has produced a sensual culture of sex and pornography. Pope Benedict XVI explains the fall out of that situation in the Church. He said: “Fundamentally, the authority of the Church in matters of morality is called into question.” He publicly confessed that in “various seminaries homosexual cliques were established, which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the climate in the seminaries.” He said the mentality of the new bishops also is changed, “a criterion for the appointment of new bishops was now their ‘conciliarity’, which of course could be understood to mean rather different things.” Critical or negative attitude towards the hitherto existing tradition, is to be now replaced by a new, radically open relationship with the world. In one case, “One bishop, who had previously been seminary rector, had arranged for the seminarians to be shown pornographic films, allegedly with the intention of thus making them resistant to behaviour contrary to the faith.” The Pope bluntly spoke of paedophilia was “theorized only a short time ago as quite legitimate, but it has spread further and further.” He further said a “so-called guarantorism, [a kind of procedural protectionism], was still regarded as ‘conciliar’.” He conceded that this moral plague exists in the church. It is also the result of the crisis in moral thinking: “Fundamentally the authority of the Church in matters of morality is called into question.”… “The Church does not and cannot have her own morality.” The image of God and morality belong together. The power of evil arises from our refusal to love God. This plague has revealed its monstrosity. In 2004 there were 10667 cases of paedophilia as per the Vatican with 4392 priests accused. 20 bishops had to resign from their episcopacy because of cover up. It clearly shows the vast extent of the plague in the Church.

Pope Francis spoke in a strong language about it: “all this idolatrous sacrifice of children to the god of power, money, pride and arrogance, empirical explanations alone are not sufficient. These words make us grasp the breadth and depth of this tragedy.” As revelations of such atrocity against boys and girls became public the Church, her institutions received much negative public humiliation and ridicule. Many priests and bishops were prone to cover up the cases to defend the good name of the Church. But Pope Francis was categorical: “No abuse should ever be covered up (as was often the case in the past) or not taken sufficiently seriously, since the covering up of abuses favours the spread of evil and adds a further level of scandal. Also and in particular, developing new and effective approaches for prevention in all institutions and in every sphere of ecclesial activity brought to light. “ But in the Syro-Malabar Church and the Latin Church in Kerala seems to take a different turn. It is economic indiscipline that has taken the shape of a plague infiltrating every realm of the church. Many bishops are attempting to cover up land dealings, continually stating that “there is nothing immoral, these are what everyone does.” Perhaps, one could very well conclude that such transactions are “what everyone does.” It is here that we have to return to what the retired Pope said on paedophilia: “In the end, it was chiefly the hypothesis that morality was to be exclusively determined by the purposes of human action that prevailed. While the old phrase ‘the end justifies the means’ was not confirmed in this crude form, its way of thinking had become definitive. Consequently, there could no longer be anything that constituted an absolute good, any more than anything fundamentally evil; (there could be) only relative value judgments. There no longer was the (absolute) good, but only the relatively better, contingent on the moment and on circumstances.” ‘The end justifies the means’ is also a Marxian moral principle. Nobody will openly accept this metamorphosis that has happened to the Church, but is a principle that plays into the running of the economics of the Church.