Reforming Christianity...and the Church

As we note earlier here, Church royalty such as Philadelphia's own Cardinal Chaput, have taken to criticizing the Pope for attempting reform of the Church and its teachings, most recently for sowing confusion -- confusion is the work of the devil, said Chaput, which is pretty strong criticism of a Pope, and ignores the fact that Chaput himself is sowing discord with the statement.

Reforms of the Church have been tried and tried and tried, and in "Erasmus and his God," (contained in his book Is God Happy?) philosopher/theologian/etc. Leszek Kolakowski wrote about Erasmus, the reformer (and Luther contemporary):

All genuinely ecumenical currents within Catholicism, all attempts to find a way of freeing Christianity, at least to some degree, from its confessional exclusivity, are a continuation of Erasmus’s thought, and all are to some degree conscious of this....
 

Erasmus’s thought was grounded in two fundamental principles. The first was the belief in the innate goodness and value of human nature (including natural reason); the second attributed salvation to Grace as the efficient cause and enjoined us to put our trust in God instead of trying to gain favour with Him....
 
For Erasmus the Church was not a goal in itself, to which all other values must be subordinated; on the contrary , it was an instrument, useful only in so far as it was able to transmit the pure and undistorted values of the Gospels to the faithful. Religiosity focused on what was beneficial to the Church, conceived as an organization and a system of power, was entirely alien to him. It was not his aim to destroy the Church; he wanted only to deprive it of the ideological instruments which allowed it to maintain its system of power. He could, accordingly, speak of his loyalty to Christian ideals, declare that he wanted only ‘to build, not to destroy’, go on repeating that he was not a rebel and wished only to teach the wisdom of the Gospels. But for his opponents the destructive influence of his gentle moral teaching was clear. There was no escaping the fact that his ideas, if followed to their logical conclusion, ultimately compelled a choice: either Christianity or the Church; either the Gospels or organized religion. Erasmus himself never spelled out this alternative and perhaps was not entirely conscious of its unavoidability; perhaps he really did believe in the possibility of reforming the Church in the spirit of the Gospels. But later generations of reformers knew that such an alternative was unavoidable and that it was Erasmus who implicitly formulated it.
 
Erasmus’s work was not fruitless, although it might, on the face of it, appear so: after all, his ideal of Christianity remained unrealized, one of the many utopias which have appeared and then vanished throughout the history of the Church, leaving no visible mark on the Church system. Of course his propaganda did not destroy the system which was its target. But it did have an effect : it put certain basic principles of the Christian faith back into circulation, with the result that they were incorporated into the language of the Church, becoming a natural part of it; and this made it difficult to violate them too blatantly. All internal criticism of the Catholic Church made since Erasmus’s time, all attempts to reform it from within, have relied on the same sources and drawn, more or less consciously, on his work. Everything that has been done to repair, even in part, its ossified rigidity, was inspired by those ideas – ideas which go through a regular cycle of being condemned by the orthodox and then, after a time, taken up again, in a weaker and simplified form. Modern attempts at repairing and renewing the Church are also part of the Erasmian heritage; whatever succeeds in loosening its rigid exclusivity and weakening the system of intolerance is a continuation of Erasmus’s ideas.

Kolakowski, Leszek (2013-02-05). Is God Happy?: Selected Essays (p. 173). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.