Can the Catholic Church become modern? (by Pedja dell’Arno)

Eugenio Scalfari has an article today in La Repubblica about the “long crisis of the Church.” The article is triggered by the current crisis in the Vatican due to the alleged activities of a butler.
But Scalfari goes back to the series of popes in the XX century to describe how the attempts of Pope John XXIII to modernize the Church were basically undermined by all his successors. The question to me is not whether modernization in the Church will ever succeed, but whether it is possible at all. Here we are talking about a creed that after all the scientific discoveries of the past four centuries keeps promoting a kind of knowledge that is at odds with all we know, keeps promoting a powerful organization were women are excluded from power, and is based on the dogmas expressed by an elite of co-opted, oddly disguised and unelected priests. Today that the current financial and economic crisis in Catholic Europe is undermining so many institutions (see the monarchy in Spain), one wonders how the Catholic Church will react to keep its role. A modern Catholic Church should probably stop being a Church as we know it, but for that it should stop having the (political and fiscal) privileges it still has in some countries. One wonders how the West can fight Islamic fundamentalism without fighting the Catholic type with the same energy.