Father Jerry put up the Pope’s/Bishops’ questionnaire on the Our
Lady of Grace web site and asked for comment, which I provided. Bishop
Jones had asked pastors to consolidate lay input on the questionnaire.
Father Tom made it clear that no comment was going to change church
doctrine, but he not only urged us to comment, but also he had a meeting to
discuss the questionnaire. I had already commented on the questionnaire,
so I did not attend the meeting. Second hand reports indicate that the
15-20 attendees were all of my age. Not what I take to be a good sign,
but about what I would expect.
My first problem with the questionnaire was one of translation.
The official church (and the questionnaire) communicates in a language
that I do not understand. I have lost my decoder ring for official church
documents.
I read the original Vatican II documents and fail to ‘get it’.
I had to look up ‘natural law’ in the catechism to remind myself what the
bishops’ questionnaire was talking about; Catholics younger than I probably
were not exposed to the concept of natural law and they may not have had the
time or the inclination to look in up in their catechism, if they had one.
I mention this, because, before reaching any serious content, the
official church has a communications problem; it simply does not speak the
language of the (unwashed, lay) church. Where I had comments to make I
could not reliably tell whether my comments were germane to the question under
which I put my reply, but I’m confident Father Jerry sorted that out. He
has a decoder ring.
Viewed from the level of the parish, the church is absolutely dependent
on women. Our Lady of Grace would collapse were it not for the women who
staff it and those who do almost all the volunteer work. Luke makes women
witness to every important Gospel event. The questionnaire does not
mention them. What’s wrong with this picture? After all we are
talking about family and sex.
The questionnaire never addresses family issues from the perspective
of a woman, not that I’m an expert on a woman’s perspective. Implicit in
the questionnaire is the assumption of the two-parent, wage-earning male,
stay-at-home female family core. That is not a model I recognize. I
have four children, all married; all of the four women in these marriages work
full time; three are the primary breadwinners of the family. The issues
of sex, birth control, contraception, numbers of children, etc. are entirely
different for these women than they were for their mothers, and the
questionnaire simply does not adequately address them.
The questionnaire talks about marriage and marriage preparation.
I have four children, all married. Three took their pre-Cana
preparation in the Catholic Church; the fourth in the Episcopalian Church.
There was no essential difference in their preparation, and in three of
the four cases the preparation shows no sign of having had any impact.
What formation in the church occurs in three of these families is 100%
the result of the woman involved. In three cases the man almost never
attends Mass (unless Ann and I are in town); the children attend Mass and go to
religious education because of the woman. So much for the efficacy of
pre-marriage training.
I think the Pope’s and the bishops’ hearts are in the right place,
but this process all but guarantees the Pope is going to get none of flavor of
frustration that pervades the pews of my parish. The frustration arises
because the church is not talking to the laity in a language that resonates.
I give Bishop Jones credit for giving the laity a chance to speak
its mind, but my background with large, bureaucratic organizations, such as the
Navy, the IAEA, the Energy Department, the CIA, and the State Department,
suggests that this effort will end up being a bureaucratic drill with no
discernible impact on what I see from the pew. Father Jerry’s input may
reflect some of the unvarnished comments I’ve made, but they will be edited and
ground up by the chancery and emerge unrecognizable church pap, unless I miss
my guess.
Pete
I think this is a very interesting insight—how the questionnaire was
skewed right from the beginning by language and by gender-bias. This is not that the Pope or even those who
prepared the questionnaire did anything malicious, or even wrong. To be honest I (degree in theology, male) had
not picked up the compositional bias—the questionnaire reflects my world. (I had notice the natural law thing, but
only because I am sensitive to the fact that not everyone agrees to the
position that there is such a thing as “natural law,” or at least not as it is
defined in Catholic moral teaching. I
have been through that argument enough not to take it for granted.)
The questionnaire is certainly a step in the right direction—a huge
step in the right direction—but it serves to illustrate the importance of
language and the importance of language being precise so as not to bias
outcomes. In the same way, how does the language of the liturgy distort the
faith to preserve certain biases.
When
I was in Grad School I did a paper in a course on Tudor-Stuart England on how
the language of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer was used to reinforce certain
political ideas regarding the Crown. I have
been aware ever since how our “god-language” is not always about God but about
how we can keep a social hierarchy in place and in power. Now that we have had the “new translation” of
the Roman Missal for two years I am sensitive to problem after problem—not that
the previous translation was better—in reinforcing certain biases. Such problems are inevitable—we all unconsciously
use language to favor our own positions. The problem is when language in
consciously designed to favor the interests of one group over another. 
No comments:
Post a Comment