The Sheep Ain't Sheep Any Longer

Archbishop John Myers of Newark

Archbishop John Myers of Newark came out (pardon the pun) against the legalization of same-sex marriage in a “pastoral letter” issued this weekend and said that Catholics who disagree with Church teaching on this issue should refrain from Holy Communion.  To be fair to His Excellency, let me first reprint an account from the Associated Press that was carried by newspapers this past Tuesday, Sept 25.

More than 1 million Roman Catholics in northern New Jersey are being urged to vote "in defense of marriage and life."

Newark Archbishop John Myers released a pastoral statement today that calls on Catholics to examine how political candidates stand on abortion and "a proper backing of marriage."

Myers also says Catholics who disagree with the church's teaching on marriage should refrain from receiving Holy Communion.

Myers says his statement is not intended as an endorsement for either political party. The archbishop says he's been thinking about issuing a statement on the subject for about a year because he believes there's been a lack of clarity.

The diocese includes churches in Bergen, Hudson, Essex and Union counties.

Garden State Equality, the state's largest gay rights organization, notes recent polls have shown the majority of Catholics favor "marriage equality."

Now, first let us distinguish what is legitimately meant by “disagree with the Church’s teaching on marriage.”  The Church’s competency for definitive teaching is faith (doctrine) and morals.  It certainly may have opinions on other matters—history, law, education, sociology, anthropology, etc. but its area of competency to bind the faithful is faith and morals.  The Church has the right (and obligation) to instruct the faithful on matters of doctrine and of morals.  That the sacrament of Matrimony is contracted between one Christian man and one Christian woman each of whom is free in the eyes of the Church from previous marriages, who intend fidelity in their marriage, and who is open to the creation of new life through their marital love, is well within the Church’s competency.  Furthermore, to teach that sexual relations are gravely wrong outside the context of a marriage that conforms to the Church’s ideals of marriage (not only sacramental matrimony,  but of what the Church teaches that marriage itself is—namely the freely-entered committed-until-death  relationship of one man to one woman, neither of whom are bound by previous marriages and both of whom are committed to fidelity and open to the transmission of life) is also in the Church’s competency, though no one should be surprised when non-Catholics take a different understanding, especially when it concerns their marriages.  But it is not in the competency of the Church to declare that Catholics must hold that the civil law should enshrine its doctrines or its moral stances in the civil law.  It is not the role of the civil law to incorporate into its code the doctrinal or moral teachings of any particular religious body.  That is not to say that members of a particular religion should not be free to evangelize within their society to win a consensus of the citizenry to their point of view but few people want the opinions of any particular religious group to be imposed on a disagreeing citizenry.  In other words, my read on this issue is that while we Catholics are bound to a particular doctrine on Matrimony,  we have no obligation to support laws that impose that understanding on the larger segments of our society. A Catholic cannot be compelled to vote against a candidate or a party that supports a different understanding of marriage than that which the Church teaches.  In fact, the Catholic Church in the United States has always accommodated itself to civil marriages that do not meet its doctrinal norms and Catholics have not been punished in any way for upholding such laws.  Catholic judges not only issue decrees of divorce but often preside at marriages in which one or both parties have been previously married.  Catholic judges and other Catholic civil officials sometimes preside at marriages of Catholics who are choosing not to marry in the Church.  Why is this only a problem when the marriage is between two parties of the same sex?  Why do we want to hold Catholics to a different standard of behavior in this question?  Is it bias?  It could be.  Is it pandering to certain pressure groups?  It could be.  Is it—like the “Fortnight for Romney”—a less than subtle political endorsement?  It could be.  The one thing it is not is influening the Catholic-in-the-Pew whom the polls show are in disagreement with the Bishops on this and many other issues.  I am not saying that the bishops are wrong, I am only observing that the sheep aren’t following.  There is a need to rebuild Episcopal leadership in the Catholic Church from the ground up.   

But there is still the question of whether those who disagree with the Church’s teaching itself—not only with the matter of enshrining the Church teaching in civil law—should refrain from Holy Communion.  That is for next time.  

The Need to Keep a Cool Head Beneath the Mitre

Would someone tell His Grace

of Baltimore that we use wine,

not Kool Aid for Holy Communion

 A friend of mine, a layman, had dinner the other evening with his bishop.  He and the bishop are close personal friends and Michael says that it is a break in the prelate’s cycle of loneliness to have a few drinks and supper with him.  I am sure it is.  This friend is a warm and sensitive fellow and I would guess that the bishop gets the personal affirmation that is often lacking or, is suspect when it comes from the clergy.  Being a bishop is a lonely career.   I gather from Michael’s remarks to me today that the topic of conversation was much to do about the “crisis” of religious freedom.  This particular bishop is a good man but—and maybe because he is a good man—simple, even naive.  I don’t mean to say that he isn’t intelligent; he is bright enough but he lacks a critical analytical mind.  And I know from some of the statements he has made in talks and in the diocesan newspaper that he has drunk the Kool-Aid being served out by Archbishop Lori and a few others about how our religious freedoms are under attack by the current administration.  I do think that we need to be vigilant about our freedoms but I am enough of a historian to know how in the past demagogues have fanned prudence into paranoia and good citizenship into totalitarian regimes.  (I am currently re-reading William L. Shirer’s classic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.)  

The following article appeared in the news a week or two back. 

PITTSBURGH (AP) — A southeastern Pennsylvania Church and a youth pastor are facing criminal charges for a mock kidnapping of a youth group  that was meant to be a lesson in religious persecution.   

The Glad Tidings Assembly of God in Middletown and 28-year-old Andrew David Jordan  of Elizabethtown were charged Friday with false imprisonment and simple assault, said Dauphin County District Attorney Ed Marisco 

The church staged the event in March. Mock kidnappers covered the teenagers' heads, put them in a van and interrogated them. Neither the young people nor their parents were told beforehand that it wasn't real. The mother of a 14-year-old girl filed a complaint with police.

"This is a sad case for all those involved," Marisco said, adding that while the church's and Jordan's intentions were not necessarily harmful, "they in essence terrorized several children."

What is this fascination with religious persecution?  Whether it is a misguided youth minister trying to impress on his church’s young folk that they may have to stand up for their faith someday or an entire conference of Catholic Bishops sounding the tocsin that our liberties are being stripped away by the Obama administration because employees of Catholic institutions are being given access to contraceptives we need to dial back on the paranoia.  I am not saying that we should not be vigilant about our liberties but I am saying that it is nothing less than criminal (not to mention seriously sinful) to yell “fire” in a crowded theater just because the concession-booth lady turned up the flame under the tea kettle.   Our society is losing all rationality as it continues to polarize into two opposing factions and the Church’s mission is to reconcile the divisions not compound the panic by exaggerated and unfounded accusations.  There was a day in American history when the Protestant citizenry believed with all their heart that we Catholics were out to rob them of their religious liberties and impose Catholicism on them against their will.  Their fears were not without basis as until 1965 Catholic doctrine did indeed teach that when we Catholics became the political majority we had an obligation to establish the Catholic Church as the official religion of the American people and proscribe other worship.  But American Catholics were good citizens who disregarded their Church’s demands on them to overturn the civil liberties granted by our Constitution and confined the authority of the Church to its proper sphere—faith and morals.  We knew that the magisterium was wrong when it came to the question of religious liberty and, indeed, at Vatican II with the Decree Dignitatis Humanae the magisterium came around and corrected its mistaken view.  And today too we need to use our own prudential judgment in political matters.  While we must agree with the Church on questions of doctrine and moral values, and while our politics need to be rooted in our moral principles, we must insist on the sovereignty of the individual conscience in how those values are applied to concrete political decisions. While we do that, however, we should not portray situations with exaggerated claims that we are being “persecuted” when the civil law is not being tailored to our views.        

Religious Liberty--For What Purpose 2?

Yesterday I wrote about the stinging critique of the Christian Churches by Frederick Douglass for their failure to speak up for the enslaved in the debate over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.  Douglass claimed that the Churches in the United States had betrayed the religious freedom with which our Constitution had endowed them (and other religious groups) by focusing only on their freedom of worship while not using that freedom to speak up on behalf of those held in human bondage.  And are we American Catholics not engaged in the same travesty of Religious Freedom today when we scream that the Obama Administration is attacking our Religious Freedom by giving the employees of our Church institutions access to contraception and sterilization?  Note: not that the we are being forced to pay for or provide services to which our faith objects—such services must be provided to our employees without cost to us by the insurance companies themselves—but that our employees are being given access to them at all.  (The insurance companies have agreed to provide these services at their own expense as they are far more cost-effective than pregnancy-coverage.)  Meanwhile, while we are protesting in the name of religious freedom that employees of our schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, social-service centers, administrative offices, etc are being provided these services if they so request (no one is forcing anyone to use contraceptives or undergo sterilization), Cardinals Burke and Levada and Law and Archbishop Lori are decrying our Religious Sisters for being “overly concerned” with Social Justice issues.  “Overly concerned” about justice!  How can you be “overly concerned” about justice?    How can you be “overly concerned” about abused women and children?  How can you be “overly concerned” about immigrants who live in fear of being deported to countries where their lives are endangered?  How can you be “overly concerned” about senior citizens who are living in fourth-floor walk-ups without air conditioning in this 99° heat?  And—and here is the rub—how can you be “overly concerned” about 44,000,000 Americans—children, old people, women, diabetics and the other pre-existing conditioned, fathers of families, single parents etc. who don’t have health care?  Hey, you purpled eminences with your long silk trains—and you too Carl Anderson with your ostrich plumed hat and silly cape and sword—somebody here is straining the gnat and swallowing the camel and it ain’t the good sisters!  This was the very sort of abuse of religious freedom that Frederick Douglass decried a century and half-ago.  This isn’t about religious freedom—it is about license; license to enforce your opinions on others while not taking responsibility to lift the weight of the cross from the shoulders of the suffering! 

I saw photos yesterday of crowds outside the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington protesting the “Fortnight for Freedom.”  “Fortnight for the GOP” read one sign; “The Bishops don’t speak for me” read another.   These weren’t young radicals or disgruntled LCWR nuns.   These were  middle-aged men and women—the very sort of people that were raised to follow the Church loyally.  And follow loyally they do—for when the bishops abdicate their responsibility to speak the gospel and allow themselves to shill for political agendas—of the right or the left—they are no longer leading the Church.  Perhaps were the bishops the voice for the poor, for the oppressed, for victims as they were in the years after the Council they would have some credibility left.  Their own failure, however, to speak the truth in the recent scandals and then, like the priest of the gospels who walked down the road turning away his face from the man beaten by thieves and left for dead (Luke 10:31), to walk silently by the pressing issues of our day while piously prating about their “Religious Liberty” being endangered by Obamacare has exposed them for mere Pharisees. They worry about the washing of cups and saucers and neglect weightier matters of the Law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness (Matt 23:23).

Now this is not to say that there is not a problem with Obamacare.  There is and we should not ignore it.  As I pointed out in the entry for this past June 8^th—educational, medical, and social services are as much a part of the Church’s mission as is worship and to exempt houses of worship from the provisions of the Affordable Care Act but not schools, universities, social service centers, etc.  is to impose an understanding of the Mission of the Church with which the Catholic Church doctrinally disagrees. Such a definition as to what is our mission potentially limits our freedom to accomplish that mission. The government should not have the authority to tell the Church what is the proper role of the Church.  On the other hand, Churchmen should not abuse the freedoms given by our Constitution to impose sectarian beliefs and values on the larger society.  Christ never gave to his Church a mission to make or to change laws.  Our mission is to change hearts.  We need to bring our society to a change of heart, a job which our bishops seem particularly inept at doing.   

Fortnight for Romney

I was amused and surprised the other evening when a friend of mine referred to the “Fortnight for Freedom” as the “Fortnight for Romney.”  Amused because he said what any number of us have been thinking; surprised because he is a committed and pretty main-line Catholic.  But then I think a lot of main line Catholics are wondering in what direction our leadership is going. 

     Another friend, a convert and very devout, called me today and brought up the subject of the Fortnight for Freedom and then the LCWR.  He too was uncomfortable with the message as it is coming from the pulpit in his parish and sensed that the “party line” is somehow out of step with the values of the Gospel.

       And I have been uncomfortable all along with what has been going on under the current “leadership” of our bishops.  To begin with, I never understood the opposition to Health Care.  Ok, Ok, I get the part about abortion and concern about health care covering abortions, but ever since the 2008 campaign the bishops were opposed to the idea of health care itself.  They weren’t just saying that we need to make sure that the package doesn’t promote abortion or euthanasia; they were going after the very idea that our society should provide health coverage for every individual.  You know, I went through eight years of Catholic Grade School, four years of Catholic (ok, Jesuit) High School, a BA from a Catholic (ok, Jesuit) university, and a Master’s degree in Theology—I always thought that it was one of the goals of our Catholic faith to make sure that everyone had access to good health care—as well as education, shelter, and food.  I mean, I read Mater et Magistra, Gaudium et Spes, Popolorum Progressio and a bunch of other magisterial documents about the kind of world that is consistent with our Catholic Faith.  Duh, what was the problem with health care?  I never got that back in 2008.  The goals, if not all the particulars, of Obamacare seemed consistent with our Catholic values—at least more consistent than leaving people without access to health care.  I am still confused on this.  Somewhere the “Church” took a turn in the road that I must have missed.  I mean the Obama project was flawed—but not essentially.  It seemed to me that it was a goal we could have worked with. 

         And I understand that regardless of the provisions of Affordable Care Act, the Church cannot in conscience provide contraception and sterilization to its employees.  And it doesn’t have to.  I am not happy, as I have written elsewhere, that President Obama got into this morass with the Church, but I think his solution solves the problem.  The Church does not have to provide objectionable services.  Period. And while I agree the Church should not have to provide the services, if the bishops don’t want people to have access to these services no-how, no-way, well, that is not reasonable.  Yes we Catholics believe that these procedures contradict the moral law—but there is no moral consensus in our society about contraception and we have no right to impose our view on others, especially when we are a minority.  (Though I do not believe that, other than in egregious circumstances, even a majority has a right to impose a doctrine or moral precept on society until the society comes to a consensus on the matter.  For example, I do not want to the Christian minority in Egypt or Iraq subject to sharia law even though the majority of citizenry in those societies hold to sharia law.)  So when we Catholics scream that our “freedoms” are threatened because we cannot block access to health-care covered contraceptives for employees in our institutions, I say: “get over it.”     
        Let’s be honest, for once, your Excellencies—the bottom line of this “Fortnight for Freedom” is nothing less than a rally against the Black Guy in the White House.  It is the leadership of the Church in the United States allying itself with the worst right-wing elements of our society in a Tea Party Frenzy to make the face of America look more…more…more…well, like “us.”  I know that sounds harsh, but our bishops went merrily down Karl Rove’s road of manipulating conservative religious groups to defeat John Kerry in 2004.  In the hopes of making headway against abortion, many of the bishops discarded any other moral concern.  And it was no better four years ago.  And this is just another reason why the leadership has lost its ability to genuinely lead.  There was a day when the Catholic Bishops were heard on moral issues.  Reagan s*** in his drawers when the Bishops published their 1983 pastoral letter condemning the Arms Race and the 1986 letter on economic justice required a change of under-clothing as well.  People listened to the bishops then but their moral voice has since been squandered due to the sex abuse and financial scandals as well as their pandering to the political right.  Maybe it is just as well that the Bishops are speaking up against social justice; it might actually help the cause.  But meanwhile, the voice of the Church today, at least the voice we are listening to, are the “nuns on the bus.”    Here I am fifty-some years later and once again I am say: “Yes, Sister.”