Not All Bishops Are Krazy

Bishop Gregory Hartmayer of Savannah offered what is, I believe, the best response of any Catholic leader to the recent decision of the United States Supreme Court regarding the constitutional right to marry to those in same-sex unions.  The bishop draws a clear line between marriage in the Civil Law and the Catholic Church’s teaching on the Sacrament of Matrimony.  He also reminds us of the absolute necessity of meeting those with whom we disagree on this or any other issue with civility.  He sets forth the faith of the Church regarding matrimony with the Gospel mandate for charity.  Good going Bishop Hartmayer.  May Pope Francis give us more bishops who can put difficult issues in a Christian perspective.  Here is what the Bishop wrote:

“Each U.S. Supreme Court decision that has ever been rendered has resulted in deep disappointment for some and vindication for others. If we all agreed on the outcomes of divisive cases, there would be no reason for the Court ever to convene. This most recent decision is no different.

“By the same token, every court decision is limited in what it can achieve; again this one is no exception. This decision does not change the biological differences between male and female human beings or the requirements for the generation of human life which still demands the participation of both. It does not change the Catholic Church’s teaching regarding the Sacrament of Matrimony, which beautifully joins a man and a woman in a loving union that is permanent in commitment and open to God’s blessings of precious new life.

“The Catholic Church will always maintain that marriage is a vocation of a man and a woman to faithfully commit themselves, through sacred vows, to a life shared until death which pledges them to complement one another in their development as husband and wife and to be co-creators with God in the procreation of human life.

“This decision of the Supreme Court is primarily a declaration of civil rights and not a redefinition of marriage as the Church teaches.

“However, this judgment does not dispense either those who may approve or disapprove of this decision from the obligations of civility toward one another. Nor is it a license for more venomous language or vile behavior against those whose opinions differ from our own.

“This Court action is a decision that confers a civil entitlement to some people who could not claim it before. It does not resolve the moral debate that preceded it and will most certainly continue in its wake.

“The moral debate however must also include the way that we treat one another – especially those with whom we may disagree. We are all God’s children and are commanded to love one another. In many respects that moral question is at least as consequential and weighty as is the granting of this civil entitlement.

“This decision has offered all of us an opportunity to continue the vitally important dialogue of human encounter especially between those of diametrically differing opinions regarding its outcome.

“This decision has made my task as bishop more complex as I continue to uphold the teachings of my Church on the Sacrament of Matrimony and the equal transcendent dignity of every human person.”

Time For San Francisco Bishops To Kiss

Bishop Marc Andrus
Episcopal Bishop of
California

Well, San Fran Archbishop Cordileone pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of reckless driving (he had been arrested for DUI, a charge commonly reduced for first-time offenders) on October 1, three days before his installation in Saint Mary’s Cathedral, San Francisco.  Present outside the cathedral (where admittance was by invitation only) were the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a troupe of transvestites who favorite rig is nun-drag—dressing up in the pre-Vatican II style wimples and veils.  (Lots of super-orthodox Catholics would love to see those habits, just not on gay men.) The good “nuns” were protesting the new Archbishop’s public opposition to legalization of gay marriage, but even if he approved of same-sex marriage they would have been there anyway.  They never miss a Catholic party.  And who says there is a vocation shortage?  Somebody is just not recruiting the right folks.  Also outside the cathedral was a delegation of the neo-Catechumenal Way, a conservative movement within the Church, with banners thanking the new Archbishop for “teaching the truth about the family.”  The neo-Cats are an interesting group and we should do some entries on them so that you know more about them. 
One person who was not inside the Cathedral was Bishop Marc Andrus, the Episcopal Bishop of California.  Bishop Andrus had arrived late for the service and was not seated.  There are conflicting reports that the Bishop had been asked to wait until the liturgical procession had entered the cathedral and then would be taken to his seat among the VIP ecumenical and interfaith guests or whether he had been refused seating all together.  The first story sounds more credible but in any event he “left in a huff.”   To be honest I don’t know why he had bothered to come to the installation.  Catholic bishops never attend the consecration of installation of their Episcopalian colleagues—they send some junior-grade monsignor as their representative.  This would have been the perfect occasion for bishop Andrus to send Dr. Jane Shaw, the Dean of Grace Cathedral or one of the woman canons to represent him and score a point or two about the role of women in the Church.   

I am not as quick to discount Bishop Andrus’ account of being treated with less civility than due a bishop, even one of another denomination.  Bishop Andrus had written a somewhat barbed public letter “welcoming” Archbishop Cordileone to San Francisco.  While affirming areas of common interest, the Bishop admonished the Archbishop to remember his constituency and their special characteristics.  He also made it very clear that those Catholics who found Cordileone’s Catholicism a bit too narrow would find a friendly home in the Episcopal Church.  Here is part of his letter:

In working together with the Archdiocese of San Francisco, however, I will not change my course with regard to the full inclusion of all people in the full life of the church. I hope that public disagreements can be handled respectfully and that criticisms of public statements may be met with mutual respeect. Some Catholics may find themselves less at home with Salvatore Cordileone's installation and they may come to The Episcopal Church. We should welcome them as our sisters and brothers.
Even as we welcome those who may join us and look for ways to work with our Roman Catholic siblings in the faith, we will not be silenced in our proclamation of God's inclusion. Our ecumenical partnership should be founded in our following Christ and shared service. It is our Christian duty to take stands in public or from our pulpits when others - especially those of our own faith - are in error and trying to suppress the rights of others who, too, have been created in God's image.

Well of course Bishop Andrus welcomes refugees from Cordileone’s Catholicism.  Without disaffected Catholics and the occasional social-climbing Methodist, there would be no Episcopal Church. Although a firm supporter in the ecumenical movement, I think a little tension on the local level between Catholics and Episcopalians is a good thing.  The Episcopal Church is not just “Catholic Lite” and the more clear the differences between us—superficial differences to be sure, there being “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all” (Ephesians 4:5-6)—but important differences none the less, the more faithful we each are.  I think we Catholics stand as a reminder to our Anglican and Protestant “siblings” of the Tradition handed down and they stand to us as a reminder of the radical freedom granted by the Gospel that transcends the Law.   Without our voice, there would  be only moral chaos; with only ours Christianity would revert to the religion of the Pharisees. So you two bishops, kiss and make up and get on with the work of the Gospel.      

 

 

"The Pill" --and a World Gone Upside Down

Paul VI--the Pope who decided

against the Pill in his encyclical

letter, Humanae Vitae

Someone recently brought to my attention an essay on “how the Pill changed everythying.”  George Weigel was the essay’s author but at first I could not remember that and so I googled  “the pill changed everything.”  Lots of articles came up, most in praise of the Pill and its changes to better the lives of women.  Weigel’s article was not so generous in its laudatory remarks about contraceptive pharmaceuticals.  I personally have mixed feelings about the effects of the Pill, but my primary purpose as a historian is to note them and let the reader make his or her own judgments.  That is not to say that I am objective—no one is every truly objective and every historian has his or her bias, especially on an time as crucial to our modern world as the Pill.  We need to be aware of our biases and to try to be as transparent about them as we can—or at least to let our readers be aware of them so that the reader can compensate in making his or her evaluation.

      Ironically the main scientist in developing “the pill” was John Rock, a Catholic obstetrician and gynecologist.  Rock wanted to develop a method of contraception that worked within the Catholic Church’s concept of using the natural fertility/infertility cycle so that women could make a choice in becoming pregnant while remaining sexually active.  To be honest, Rock had always pushed the boundaries in regard to birth control.  Actually, as a scientist and academic (he was a professor at Harvard) he did not support Church teaching on contraception.  As early as 1931 he signed a petition advocating the legalization of birth control (which at that time was illegal in Massacusetts) and in 1949 he co-authored a book teaching methods of contraception.  Moreover he was a pioneer in the fields of freezing sperm and of in vitro fertilization.  He was, however, a practicing Catholic, he had founded a clinic to teach the rhythm method, and he attended Mass and received the sacraments regularly.  His motivation in developing the Pill was to make available a means of contraception that worked within the boundaries of Catholic moral teaching—i.e. a “natural” method, a method that employed the feminine fertility cycle to cause or avoid pregnancy.  

     Well, the Pill did cause a stir when it first became available in the’60’s and the Church had to consider it independently of previous papal teaching which condemned contraception that did not follow “natural” methods.  The Pill, with its interdependency on the ovulation cycle, was a complex issue that had not been anticipated by previous papal teaching.   Shortly before his death, Pope John XXIII convoked a commission to study the issue.  Paul VI enlarged this commission to 58 members, including married persons, men and women, in addition to scientists, theologians and bishops.  That alone was a remarkable choice—not for centuries had laity been given such a significant voice in developing Church doctrine.  In 1966 the commission issued its report to the Pope suggesting that hormonal contraceptives might be acceptable.  A minority of the commission who disagreed issued a report forwarding a contrary argument.  In the end, Paul VI went with the minority report. 

     I am not anxious in this entry to write about Humanae Vitae. We will do that at some other time.  What I am writing about is the Pill.  Even though the Pill was rejected by the official levels of the Catholic Church, it has been embraced by Catholics and non-Catholics alike.  All studies show that at least in the developed world there is no substantial difference in the percentage of Catholics who use the Pill (or now other means of contraception) than in the general population.  But contraception is only part of the consequences of the Pill.

     The Pill became the occasion where Catholics began making their own decisions regarding everyday questions in their lives rather than unquestioningly following Church authority.  I don’t think it was just the Pill.  There were other questions of the day in which many rank and file Catholics were not willing to follow the lead of the hierarchy but were starting to think for themselves.  The Church’s embracing of a fairly radical “social justice” agenda in the 1960’s put the hierarchy ahead of the average American lay Catholic when it came down to questions of economic justice, peace, and even civil rights.  As Catholics climbed into the ranks of the professions and rose into economic and political power, their opinions became quite independent of the magisterium.  Even today on questions of distributive justice or of the death penalty most American Catholics reject Church teaching  

      But even more serious than encouraging Catholics to think independently of the Church’s magisterium, the Pill has broken the connection between sex and reproduction and this has made us redefine the purposes of sex.  This affects not only questions of family planning, but of the very nature of sexual relationships. Americans—and probably most people in the developed world, no longer acknowledge that there is an inherent connection between sexual intimacy and reproduction/ family life.  This works various ways.  With sex and reproduction no longer two sides of the same coin we are not only very open to in vitro fertilizaiton or even surrogate parenthood, but genetic engineering.  At the same time that we are willing to create life by design, we have lost our scruples about destroying life that is somehow or other defective or even superfluous.  And then, since we have changed the nature of sexual relations from essentially reproductive to purely recreational, we are far more encouraging of non-committed sexual relationships.  We now find that the majority of American households are “non-Traditional” and in this we are “behind” Europe.   Only a generation ago the heir to the British throne had to marry a woman who had no previous sexual experience.  That same heir’s son was able to live with his fiancée before their marriage without any social stigma.  But then the Brits have always been loony.  More to the point, here in America there is no social stigma whatsoever to a couple’s living together before marriage and the attempts of some clergy to require couples to live apart for six months before the wedding leads only to deceit and ridicule.  And then there is the issue of same-sex couples and—since sexual intimacy is no longer linked to reproduction—why not?  

     Traditional Christian morality has been turned upside down by “the Pill.”  Now, despite the tone of the above paragraph, I am not sure this is all bad. That is not to say that I agree with the new morality—because I don’t.  It isn’t morality at all. It is just making one’s life choices without much moral reflection.  But the situation invites us to construct a moral framework from the ground up.  In fact, the situaiton not only invites us to give serious thought to today’s complex questions and to build anew a moral framework on the foundation of the Gospels, but it requires us to do so.  The old answers aren’t working.  It doesn’t mean that the new answers will be all that different, only that they must be rethought and expressed in ways that are consistent with the modern sciences—both the physiological and social sciences—if the Gospel is to have credence in our contemporary world. 

More on The Catholic Church and Same Sex Marriage

Cardinal Spellman presides at the Marriage of
Edward (Ted) Kennedy and Joan Bennett
November 29, 1958

In our last post we spoke of the issue of Gay Marriage because New York State, despite the protests of the State’s Catholic Conference and the Catholic Bishops in New York, passed the recognition of Same Sex Marriage into Law.  Governor Andrew Cuomo is not exactly the paragon of Catholic Laity for a number of reasons in his personal life; nevertheless there was pressure on him as a Catholic to veto the Bill.  He did not, of course—he was one of the strongest supporters of legitimizing Same Sex Marriage.  There are those in the Church who think that Catholics should oppose the recognition of Gay Marriage in civil law because such a “marriage” is not a marriage at all.  Perhaps what needs to be considered is the difference between the legal recognition of a marriage in the civil law and the theological recognition of Matrimony according to the norms of Christ and his Church.  This is not an artificial distinction in any sense.  Two people come to the parish office and wish to marry in the Church but not civilly.  There could be a sound reason for this.  Perhaps one or both parties are in the United States illegally and they do not want to draw attention to that fact by applying for a civil license.  Perhaps by entering into a legal marriage, one or both parties might lose certain pension or Social Security benefits which they need to survive.  There can be other reasons as well, but as long as no ecclesiastical impediment exists, a priest or deacon is free—in the eyes of the Church—to witness and bless their entering into the Sacrament of Matrimony.  Legally there is no marriage; in the eyes of God and the Church, there is.

Let us consider another situation.  A couple, one of both of whom are Catholics, marries in front of a Justice of the Peace or a Protestant minister.  Perhaps one or both have a previous marriage which is not annulled.  Perhaps they have been cohabiting and the priest has refused to marry them until they separate.  Perhaps the bride is pregnant and the priest has declined to marry them, unsure that the marriage is being entered into freely and with mature discernment.  Perhaps a non-Catholic partner has insisted in marrying in his or her Church.  Perhaps they simply wanted a “garden wedding” rather than the required Church service.  There are all sorts of reasons that people marry outside the Church.  The Catholic Church does not recognize that marriage as a sacramental bond but, at least in practice, it does recognize it as a reality in civil law. 

Divorce is a tricky issue.  Until the sixteenth century marriage and divorce were subject to religious authority, and only in a secondary sense to civil law.  In medieval Catholic Europe there was no such thing, strictly speaking, as divorce for the Christian majority. Traditional rabbinic law permitting divorce governed the Jewish minority.  While we say that there was no divorce for Christians, we must be careful how we nuance “divorce” for ecclesiastical annulments, especially those granted by the Holy See, often functioned as divorce in as that they permitted one spouse to leave another and remarry.  An example of this would be the dissolution of the Marriage of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine.  The marriage was “annulled” on a pretext of kinship—and all royal marriage had sufficient kinship to use this claim—but in fact the marriage simply had gone sour and each was anxious to marry someone else.  Louis married Constance of Castile; Eleanor Henry of Anjou who became Henry II of England.  Popes, or sometimes (as in the case of Eleanor and Louis) synods of bishops regularly dissolved marriages for causes real, alleged, or totally fictitious but always political.  Royalty was seldom denied their “annulments” and when we eventually look a the case of Henry VIII we will see that the only reason he didn’t get his annulment from Katherine of Aragon is that it interfered with Medici politics.  But that is a later story. 

Most common people in the Middle Ages did not bother with a religious wedding.  Peasants in particular simply came to some sort of agreement—financial and personal—and took up life together.  From the thirteenth century on more and more townspeople went through a church blessing because it was fashionable, a copying of a ritual more common among the “bluebloods.”  And when such marriages failed, the husband (and sometimes the wife) would just “take up” with a new partner without any formal to do.  It may surprise you to know that marriage in the presence of a priest was not required until the 1917 Code of Canon Law.   

With Luther and the other Reformers marriage did not make it into the category of a Sacrament and in fact came to be regarded primarily as a civil contract.  In Protestant societies this permitted marriage to slide from ecclesiastical jurisdiction to the authority of the Civil powers.  In seventeenth century England and its colonies, divorce became an established legal procedure.  It was not easy to obtain—adultery was the most common cause for it to be granted—but it was neither impossible nor uncommon.  It was simply an established legal reality in the American Colonies (and later States) and the Catholic Church never had to resist its legalization, except perhaps in Louisiana. That was not true everywhere.  In Catholic Italy, Divorce was prohibited by the Lateran Concordat of 1927 between the Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See.  It was approved by a referendum in 1974 despite the opposition of the Catholic Church.   Ireland had a similar story.  At the insistence of the Irish hierarchy, the 1937 Constitution prohibited it; in 1995 a referendum overturned that Constitutional provision.  Malta—again against the opposition of the hierarchy (though not vast numbers of ordinary parish priests) just approved civil divorce in May of this year.  Today only the Vatican itself and the Philippines are Catholic countries that make no provision for civil divorce. My point here is that the Church has gradually lost control, even in Catholic Countries, of marriage.  Marriage is a civil relationship, defined and governed by civil law.  Matrimony is a distinct reality with theological meaning and defined by the very Tradition of the Church.  Once united, they are now distinct and subject to different authorities. 

It is strange that the Catholic Church does not object to marriages that are not matrimonial except in the circumstances of same-sex unions.  If two non-Catholics, one or both of whom have been previously married, wish to get married, the Catholic Church has no objection whatsoever even though, by Church teaching, that relationship is nothing more than an adulterous union. One or the other of such a couple be an employee of the Catholic Church there is no objection to paying spousal benefits even though the Catholic Church sees that relationship is inherently sinful.  In fact, there are many Catholics who are in invalid marriages and who work for the Catholic Church as secretaries, maintenance and facilities personnel, health professionals, business managers, program administrators, social workers, and countless other positions and the Church pays spousal benefits.  Let both partners be of the same sex, however, and it is a very different story.   No person who knows our Catholic Tradition will say that the Church is wrong not to recognize same-sex marriages from a religious perspective, but there is an inconsistency when the Church recognizes the civil legal character of “sinful” unions between a man and a woman but not the civil legal character of a union of two members of the same sex.   The Church has every right to define Matrimony as the union of one man and one woman; but marriage is a contract in Civil Law and Catholics, like everyone else,  can have their opinions and vote their prejudice—that is the prerogative of all citizens in a democracy—but civil marriage is determined by Civil Law and not religious doctrine.

What we probably need to do in this age where “Traditional Marriage”  is collapsing among Catholics at the same rate that it is collapsing among the general population, is to undertake a genuine “Defense of Marriage” not by excluding same-sex couples but by developing means to assist traditional Catholic families to grow more deeply in their commitment to God, to his Church, to one another, and to their children.  Let society deal with those whom it recognizes as married; let us as Catholics and Chrisitans try to minister more effectively to those members of our Church who need guidance and help in making their relationships true Sacraments, true outward signs of the Love of God for his people and the Love of Christ for his Church. 

Same Sex Marriage: Did the Church Always Disapprove?

Saints Sergius and Bacchus, a seventh century icon
in which historian John Boswell interprets the placement
of Christ to be the pronubus (or best man) at a same
sex wedding. 

New York State has just joined the list of States approving same sex marriage.  Twenty years ago, I don’t think anyone saw this concern coming but now it is an issue which is not going to go away for the foreseeable future.  The Catholic Church has taken a strong stand against the legalization of Gay Marriage and it seems obvious that this is consistent with our tradition.  But, at least from a historical perspective, the issue may not be so simple. 

John Boswell, an exceptionally talented historian, wrote Same Sex Unions in Pre Modern Europe (Random House, 1994) arguing from his exhaustive research that the Catholic and Orthodox Churches blessed same sex unions from late antiquity until well into the early modern period.  His interest in this subject arose from a seventh century Icon of Saints Sergius and Bacchus.  Boswell interprets the icon as a marriage icon in which Christ is standing as the pronubus, the man who stands behind a marrying couple in the Orthodox ceremony holding the marriage crowns.  This is equivalent to the “best man” or “supporter” in our western marriage ceremonies.  It is a curious interpretation.

Boswell made his name as a historian with an earlier book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press, 1980) in which he investigated the long history of how homosexuality was viewed by the Christian Church from apostolic times through the Medieval period and how those views shaped social attitudes towards same-sex relationships. 

John Boswell was himself gay and Catholic—a convert to Catholicism who became a very devout practitioner of the faith.  He was a devout Catholic who attended mass daily and who did not rebel against the Church’s teachings on homosexuality but who did want the Church to reexamine and refine its teaching in the light of current knowledge.  He died of an AIDS related illness in 1994 at the age of 47.  As a historian he was an enfant terrible—while still in his thirties achieving an unparalleled reputation as a talented and meticulous scholar whose incredible ability with languages, ancient and modern, opened archival material beyond the reach of even most good historians.  A Harvard graduate, he chaired the history department and taught at Yale.  Revered and loved by his students and all who knew him he was a gentleman and a scholar.   What can one say about the quality of his work?

I had read Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality as a graduate student.  Boswell had not only taught my professor but directed her doctoral dissertation.  She was a great admirer of his—as indeed were most (if not all) of his students.  I probably should reread the book today.  Boswell was an incredible linguist.  I, for my part, cherish my Greek as a distant but useless memory; my Latin—on the other hand—is pretty good.  When it comes to other ancient languages—Syriac, Coptic, even Hebrew—well, truthfully, I have never studied them and will not be as pretentious as those who with some scrap or other of linguistic knowledge will presume to evaluate Boswell’s work.  For evaluating Boswell’s uses of sources, I can only use the Latin.  To be fair, indeed to be profoundly respectful, towards John Boswell, he always put the citation in the original language in the footnote with a translation for the student.  I did find that at times, even frequently, the Latin citations were well translated but any ambiguity was translated in favor of his thesis.  In other words, sometimes when I looked at the Latin text, I thought to myself: “yes, it could mean that; but it doesn’t have to.”    He didn’t fudge his Latin translations, but neither did he always warn the reader that the citation might not be as strong an endorsement of his thesis as he implied. If he did this with the Latin, I suspect he did it with other languages as well.  And as he did this frequently, I am not sure he always proved his point.  On the other hand, the University of Chicago Press does not print history books whose arguments are questionable; Harvard does not grant the doctorate to students whose language skills are faulty; and Yale does not hire shaky scholars.   Bottom line, I do not always agree with Boswell, but one has to take him seriously. 

As to his book,   Same Sex Unions in Early Modern Europe—if my Greek is but a distant memory, don’t expect me to be able to work with Old Church Slavonic.  I don’t have a clue about Slavonic, old or new.  And again—Syriac and the variety of near-Eastern languages—not a word do I know.  Some of the medieval French, English, or Italian I can handle.  And again, I find the Latin to be biased.  It has been several years since I last read Same Sex Unions, but I was not convinced.  On the other hand, one has to admit the possibilities—especially given the vast number of same sex alleged Marriage Rites that Boswell uncovered that there could be something here.

When Boswell published Same Sex Unions there was a flurry of reviews, pro and con, but they tended to be more polemic—pro or con gay marriage—than substantive reviews.  The problem is that there are few scholars with the linguistic abilities to evaluate Boswell’s interpretation of the vast array of documentary sources cited.   

Among other archives where John Boswell found his sources was the Vatican Archives and Library.  He had to obtain access to the material by deceit as Vatican officials knew his reputation as a “gay historian” and would not facilitate his use of documents that might establish the thesis that the Church had once blessed same-sex unions.  This is surprising as the Vatican Library and Archives are usually most helpful to scholars, even scholars who are known to be challenging Church teaching.  The Church, at least at the highest academic levels, does not fear dissent but normally seeks to engage it in scholarly conversation;  Boswell's thesis, however, apparently was too hot an issue to allow for conversation.   Boswell arranged with a Jesuit scholar who was working in the library at the same time that he, Boswell, would ask for the documents the Jesuit needed and the priest would ask for the documents regarding same-sex marriage rituals; they then would exchange materials and do their respective work.     

Boswell wrote a third book, The Kindness of Strangers: Child Abandonment in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (University of Chicago, 1988).  This book is particularly interesting, not for its content (though it is interesting and well written) but as a contrast to his two books with Gay themes.  Here I found no ambiguity in his use of sources.  In that regard—his objectivity—it might be considered his best book. 

Well, since ambiguity might be considered the theme to today’s entry, and I seem to be rather ambiguous myself on how to interpret Boswell’s thesis that the Church has, in the past, not only approved but blessed Gay unions, what does all this say about the history of Same-Sex Marriage?  I have to say that I don’t consider the thesis proved, but the existence of scores of these rituals in both the Eastern and Western Churches in late antiquity up through the Renaissance, the similarity of these rituals to known heterosexual matrimonial rites, and the explicit mentioning of the partners “sleeping together” (to be taken in the literal and not the euphemistic sense) certainly does not close the door on the possibility that at various times and places in the past same-sex marriages were blessed with Church authority.  That does not mean, of course, that the Church should today—or even could in the future—do the same.  Doctrine develops—which means it changes—and we are not bound to the past but called to respond faithfully in the present.  There are  other things which the Church once approved—the death penalty for example—that it no longer condones and there are things it condones today that it once condemned (the loaning of money at interest).  Gay Marriage will be a political “hot potato” for some time to come but it is an understatement to say that it is unlikely that the Catholic Church might someday sanction it.  Nevertheless, at least from a historical perspective, the issue may not be as black and white as some might declare it.