Yet Another Bishop Who Has Something Worthwhile To Say About Supreme Court Rulings

Archbishop Blase Cupich 

In my previous posting, I commented on the excellent response of Bishop Gregory Hartmayer of Savannah to the Supreme Court decision on Same Sex Marriage.  Now another Bishop has spoken out intelligently in response to both the Affordable Care Act and Same Sex Marriage decisions of the Court.  Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago is in Rome to receive the pallium—the yoke-like stole that a metropolitan archbishop wears as a sign of unity with the successor to Saint Peter, the Bishop of the Church of Rome.  (We used to say “Pope” a lot, or “Roman Pontiff”, but the current occupant of the Chair of Peter likes the more ancient title, the Bishop of Rome.)  Being out of the country and busy about a lot of ceremonial things, Cupich could have dodged the bullet about the Supreme Court ruling on Same Sex Marriage but he chose to weigh in on both last week’s Supreme Court decisions and he did a great job by choosing not to be a gracious loser (which is better than a lot of his more vituperative  confreres did) but by putting a Christian spin on the decisions while clearly maintaining Catholic doctrine.  What is particularly significant about Archbishop Cupich’s response is that it comes from the exact time of his being shown to be in direct union with the Pope (aka The Bishop of Rome) and thus with the Universal Church.  Let’s hope that Pope Francis gives us more bishops of Cupich’s kind to lead the Church in these times when religion (in general) and the Catholic Church (in particular) is trying to carve out for itself a new place in the public life of our society.  Archbishop Cupich is the sort of Bishop who can give the Church a credibility that some of his predecessors and confreres have so wantonly squandered. 

This week the Supreme Court of the United States issued two rulings with particular meaning for the Catholic Church.

In the first, the Court preserved subsidies for the 6.4 million low-income Americans who depend on them to purchase health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. We have issues with provisions of that legislation and will continue to advocate to preserve our religious freedom. However, we understand that for millions of individuals and families, most of them the working poor, this decision preserves access to health care and the promise it offers of a healthier, longer life.

In the second decision, the United States Supreme Court has ruled that two persons of the same sex have a constitutional right to marry each other. In doing so, the Court has re-defined civil marriage. The proposed reason for the ruling is the protection of equal rights for all citizens, including those who identify themselves as gay. The rapid social changes signaled by the Court ruling call us to mature and serene reflections as we move forward together. In that process, the Catholic Church will stand ready to offer a wisdom rooted in faith and a wide range of human experience.

It is important to note that the Catholic Church has an abiding concern for the dignity of gay persons. In fact, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.” (n. 2358). This respect must be real, not rhetorical, and ever reflective of the Church’s commitment to accompanying all people. For this reason, the Church must extend support to all families, no matter their circumstances, recognizing that we are all relatives, journeying through life under the careful watch of a loving God.

It is also important to stress that the Supreme Court’s redefinition of civil marriage has no bearing on the Catholic Sacrament of Matrimony, in which the marriage of man and woman is a sign of the union of Christ and the Church. In upholding our traditional concept of marriage, we are called to support those who have entered into this sacred and loving bond with God and each other.

This will be especially important for the members of our own Church as we walk together, respectful not only of the political demands of equality, but above all else, guided by the higher claims of divine revelation. Our aim in all of this will be to hold fast to an authentic understanding of marriage which has been written in the human heart, consolidated in history, and confirmed by the Word of God.

No Blood On Christian Hands: Down the Rabbit Hole

Last week President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast issued a sobering reminder to us Christians not to paper over our own history of violence done in the name of religion. 

“Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ, And in our home country, slavery, and Jim Crow, all too often was justified in the name of Christ."

I can’t believe the outcry over this perfectly obvious statement.  In fact, the situation is much worse than the President described.  The Crusades and Inquisitions (there were more than one, though the President was probably, like most who are inadequately schooled in history, referring to the Spanish Inquisition of 1478-1834 which is the most notorious) are only the tip of the iceberg in Christian violence.  

As I just remarked, President Obama often displays a lack of precise historical knowledge—but then he is not a historian and for a non-historian he is far more knowledgeable in the field than the majority of his critics and certainly those who fault his remarks about Christians doing violence in the name of Christ. 

One idiot, someone by the name of Tom Hoopes, cited Cambridge historian Jonathan Riley Smith that the Crusades “were a defensive war.”  Now Professor Smith is a leading authority on the Crusades but either Mr. Hoopes quoted him out of context—something he has been known to do before with other sources (Mr. Hoopes is a journalist and a professor of Journalism at a small Catholic College in Kansas) or Professor Riley-Smith is slipping into his dotage.  A defensive war means that you are fighting to defend your own homeland.  The Crusaders, drawn from what is today France, England, Germany and other European lands were attempting—initially with success—to seize lands in 11^th, 12^th, and 13^th century Syria-Palestine.  That is in no way defensive.  And of course there were the Albigensian Crusades—which were a series of wars fought by Catholic knights (and the occasional prelate) with the blessing of the Papacy against those cities in what is today the South of France to root out the Albigensian heresy to which many of the citizens of those cities and towns subscribed.  Not only were the battles bloody but when victorious, the Crusaders put those heretics who would not return to the Church to death in cruel and inhuman ways.  And there were the Crusades in the Baltic where the Teutonic Knights came into what is today Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania to impose—by force and often with death—Christianity on the local population to up to that point subscribed to their worship of various ancestral gods. 

And don’t forget the Inquisitions—often linked to those Albigensian Crusades but not limited to them.  The most notorious, of course, is the Spanish Inquisition of 1478-1834 in which historians estimate about 5000 people were executed (out of about 175,000 who were brought to trial in one form or another) for a variety of “crimes” ranging from abandoning the Christian faith, Unitarianism, secret practice of Judaism or Islam, Witchcraft, Bigamy, Sodomy, Protestantism, and Blasphemy.  Of course the Spanish Inquisition was only one of several inquisitions in Catholic Europe.  The Pope had the Roman Inquisition (which was one of the more mild inquisitions though it too on occasion executed people for religious reasons.  Giordano Bruno is the most famous of those so executed but his theological aberrations were possibly a cover for his allegedly being a spy for Elizabeth’s England.)  The Portuguese had their own Inquisition.  France had it Chambre Ardente for the trial and execution of heretics.  And ol’ Henry VIII executed his share of Protestants—some with the help of his Chancellor, Sir Thomas More—both before and after his break with the papacy. 

I recently did a series of postings on the history of Christian anti-Semitism in France that can be traced back at least to the Merovingian period of the seventh century, though admittedly we don’t—as far as I have been able to find—have any record of Jews being put to death at that period.  By the time of the Crusades however the slaughter of European Jews by hysteric Christian mobs was somewhat commonplace in Europe.  There are several episodes of Rhineland Jews being massacred by knights and their accompanying mobs in the wake of Pope Urban’s call for the First Crusade.  At the same period there were episodes in England of Jews being killed and their homes burned.  In 1279 approximately 300 Jews were executed for suspected “coin clipping”—the practice of shaving the gold along the edges of a coin.  The expulsion of Jews from many European countries (England 1290, France 1306, Spain 1492) undoubtedly saved many Jewish lives as periodic violence against them in many areas of northern Europe where they remained, particularly in what is today Germany and the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands from the 12^th through the 18^th centuries. (Such violence did not end in the 18^th century and the worst episode of course is the Holocaust of the 20^th century, but the direct influence of the Church (or Churches as Lutherans and Calvinists also played a part) in encouraging such violence waned under the Enlightenment secularism of the Prussian and Austrian Crowns. 

Much of the Christian anti-Semitism that fueled the murder of Jews in the medieval period was rooted in legends and wild stories of Jews murdering Christian children to use their blood in Jewish rituals.  This is the so-called Blood Libel. In some cases, such as that of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln (Little Saint Hugh to distinguish him from the great bishop of the same name) the child victim of a murder attributed to the Jews was venerated as a Saint and a Martyr to keep the animosity alive.   There were also stories of Jews stealing consecrated hosts for the purpose of desecration.  And there were stories and legends of Jews poisoning wells to kill off Christian populations. 

Then there were the slaughter of Catholics by Protestants and of Protestants by Catholics during the Reformation.  And the Wars of Religion.  And the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of August 1572 in which probably 10,000 Huguenots (French Protestants) were killed by Catholic mobs.  Pope Gregory XIII had a solemn Te Deum sung in thanksgiving in the Sistine Chapel and ordered frescoes of the slaughter to be painted in the Vatican’s Sala Regia, the Pope’s formal audience hall. 

I could go on, of course, but the point is made.  When it comes to Christian violence and Christian violence done with the sanction of the Church, President Obama was generous in his remarks.  It has been far worse than he ascribed.   History will treat the President more kindly than his critics.  He will be remembered for his Health Care Reform, for the economic recovery from the economic “recession” (read “depression”) he inherited from the previous administration, the elimination of Osama bin Laden, and his support for Veterans. He also will be remembered as the first openly post-Christian president, and that demands a clarification I need to do in a future post.  He won’t be a great president but he will, in fifty years and once we get over the shock of having a non-white person in the White House, be remembered as one of our better presidents.  His foes (not those who disagree with him but those who have made him to be their enemy), for the greater part, will be remembered for their subtle—and for some, unconscious—racism that clouded their judgment and remind the rest of us of just how evil prejudice can be in sowing civil discord. 

I can tell that this final assessment will evoke a certain response and advise readers now that I will be selective in posting responses.  

Of Popes and Presidents

Looks pretty friendly to me 

So President Obama met with Pope Francis at the Vatican this morning and the Catholic blogosphere has lit up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve with the krazies saying that the President looked “chagrined” and “uncomfortable” as he met the Pope.  The photos tell quite a different story with the President in his usual strong stride and ear-to-ear smile.  And then there are conflicting stories about how the conversation went with the White House stressing points of agreement—immigration reform and checks on economic disparity with the wealthier growing wealthier at the expense of the poor who are growing poorer as we as seeing more and more people slide downhill from the middle class into the poverty range.  Catholics unhappy with Obama are quoting Vatican sources saying that the Pope “chastised” the President over Obamacare and issues of religious freedom.  Whatever, but it ended with everyone smiling and with the President inviting the Holy Father to the White House. 
What actually happened was a very cordial meeting.  These meetings are always cordial.  The Pope played Good Cop to his Bad Cop Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin.  That is the way these Vatican meetings go.  The substance meeting is with the Secretary of State.  That is where there is hard talk.  The papal meetings are all about everyone behaving in the sand-box and getting along.  And the fact of the matter is the Pope and President agree on far more than they disagree on.  Even Obamacare.  The problem of the Holy See with Obamacare is not universal health coverage.  Popes have spoken about the “right” to health care being a universal right.  Italians—and Argentines and French and Canadians and English and Dutch and Norwegians and just about everyone else in the developed world—take universal health care for granted.  The Church’s problem is making the Church pay for coverage for procedures and medications that the Church believes to be intrinsically wrong.   There would be no problem with Obamacare if Catholic institutions were not required to provide coverage for contraception for their employees.  I hate to be cynical, but the bishops wouldn’t be complaining about individual Catholic employers having to cover their employees—they just don’t want to do it.  I will give them credit that I believe their reservation isn’t economic, that it is a genuine moral objection.  And I am anxious to see what the Supreme Court does with the issue.  I think the Obama administration was foolish not to back down on this one, at least as far as the Church is concerned.  But to be honest, the fight is no longer about contraception coverage.  It is an opportunity for the secular left to take a couple of swings at the Catholic Church.   The Administration doesn’t want to appear to back down to the Church’s demands and look like it is caving in in front of its base in the various left-wing lobbies that want to use this issue to slam the Church.  And of course our bishops fall right into that trap.  When will they learn to identify the real issues and respond to them rather than to react to the red flags with which they are taunted by those groups who are angry with the Church over women’s issues, gay issues, or just angry because some nun whacked their knuckles with a ruler in the sixth grade back in 1962?
C’mon guys, get on the Francis bandwagon.  Get out there in front for immigrants.  Seize the moral high-ground.  Talk about the millions who are trapped in low-income jobs with the consequent challenges to education, diet, health-care, and human dignity while some people in our society make 462 times the annual salary of their average employee.  I am no fan of the communion-wars but If you want to refuse politicians or rainbow sash folk communion, refuse it to anyone who makes more than five times the average annual salary of his workers.  Tell your communicants that discrimination against people based on their legal status is a sin.  And for heaven’s sake, let the gays march in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade—and come down the cathedral steps and shake their hands.  If Jesus could drink from the bucket of the Samaritan woman, you can be seen chatting with a LGBT person.   And, perhaps most of all, remind us that the Church says that health care is a human right and that if not Obamacare, we still need to do something to make sure that each and every person here—legally or illegally—have access to good health care.  Be a Christian and stop prostituting yourself to the selfish interests of the worst elements in our society.    I guess I wouldn’t make a good pope –I don’t always play nice.  But maybe Secretary of State. 

I Was Sick and Imprisoned and You Ministered to Me

I recently switch insurance companies.  It had nothing to do with Obama Care.  I have had a change of employment and that means a change of coverage.  I had a great policy before.  I never had a deductible or a co-pay.  My new policy is good—but not that good.  And so last Saturday I went to the drugstore to pick up my medications.  I had a co-pay of 157.00.  It came as a shock after my years of just saying “thank-you” and moving on.  I have no idea what those same meds would have been had I not had insurance but this bring us the necessity—the absolute necessity—of having universal health care.  And it brings up my puzzlement at why our bishops are so opposed to universal health care.

Yes, I understand that from a Catholic perspective there are problems with the Affordable Care Act, but those problems are fixable—or would be fixable if our bishops had not lost their credibility over opposing universal health care per se. I can’t help but wonder if their opposition to the Affordable Care Act is not because of the moral murkiness of coverage for contraceptives and other procedures that are contrary to Church doctrine, or if their objection isn’t that as employers they don’t want to be saddled with having to provide good health coverage to all Church employees. 

And while we are on the subject of objection to providing coverage for contraception, I am amazed at the hypocrisy of employers in the private sector who are arguing that it is against their conscience to provide health care that includes contraceptives.   How many of these men practiced contraception in their own marriages?  Not all, I am sure, but more than didn’t if the national polls are any indication.  Moreover, I really don’t see it as the moral high-ground that an employer determines the conscience-choices for his employees.   I may be cynical but this isn’t about conscience—it is about indifference to the needs of the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters.  Minimize expense, maximize profits—regardless of the human cost 

No, I have good insurance.  I can see my doctor when I need to.  He has me doing many preventative therapies to forestall serious health issues from which I could suffer.  I think the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters deserve good health coverage too.  If we had been honest from the beginning and embraced the idea of universal health coverage we would have had the political leverage to come to honest resolve on this issue of contraceptive coverage.  But having sold out to forces political and medical establishment—the bishops’ credibility is in huge disarray.  And to try to peddle this off as a crisis in “religious liberty” is about the most cynical move one could make. 

Several years ago I found myself sitting across a lunch table from Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, retired auxiliary of Detroit.  Gumbleton was named a bishop in 1968 and was one of the great Paul VI bishops—an outspoken advocate for the poor and the disadvantaged.  I asked Bishop Gumbleton what had happened that so many bishops today lacked this social conscience.  His response was interesting.  “The bishops at the time came from families where the father was a bricklayer, an electrician, a garbage-collector.  They understood the centrality of the Church’s social teaching because it gave their families hope.  Today most of the bishops—their fathers were doctors or lawyers.  They come from the rising middle class and they see the world through the lenses of privilege.” 

Last week Pope Francis sent a message to the American bishops about the type of man he was recommended for the episcopacy.  Let’s hope this will make the difference that we as a Church need.   

Of Wendy Wagner, Barack Obama, and Paula Deen

St Patrick's Church of Irleand (Anglican)

Cathedral, Dublin

I am anxious to get back to the issue of Anglican history but history happens faster than one can chronicle it and there are several items in the past week that I want to address before we go back to what I think will be the most fascinating chapter of Anglican history—the separation of the Church of England from the Roman Communion.  As we have seen the Church of England does not begin with Henry VIII but is an ancient institution going back to the Roman occupation of Britain, perhaps as early as the end of the first century in the common era.  And we have seen that the term “Anglican Church”—Ecclesia Anglicana in Latin—was used for at least three centuries before  Henry VIII ascended the throne.  But I digress.  I want to bring up the fabled bugaboo of the wing-nuts, the right wing wing nuts that is, President Obama.  The crazies are after him for “decrying” Catholic Schools in Ireland and calling for them to be abolished.  Of course, this has nothing to do with the facts, but then the crazies don’t need facts when they have opinions.  Just ask Wendy Wagner of Leesburg Virginia who says that she doesn’t hesitate to tell people how they need to think.  Ah yes—“don’t think for yourself—we’ll do your thinking for you.”  Whether is a dyspeptic matron from Loudon County or a corpulent Cardinal from Rome, no thank you.  God gave me a brain and I will think for myself.  It is I who will stand before the Judge of the Universe some day and be quizzed on my record; it is I who must make the decisions since it will be I who bear the responsibility.  But I digress.
When the President spoke in Belfast last Sunday, June 17^th, he said:

“There are still wounds [in Northern Ireland] that haven’t healed, and communities where tensions and mistrust hangs in the air.” … “If towns remain divided – if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs – if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.”

Northern Ireland has come a long way since President Clinton mediated the “Good Friday Peace Accords” of 1998.  Sectarian violence has receded and Catholics have been given a more proportionate share in the economy as well as government and social services.  But prejudice, anger, and hatred still simmer below the surface.  And the separate schools do not help but provide reinforcement for the stereotypes and intolerance that still run through Northern Ireland society. 

You will notice that the President challenged not Catholic Schools but sectarian schools—Catholic or Protestant—in Northern Ireland.  Don’t compare the situation in Ireland—North or South—to the American experience of Catholic Education.  The Republic of Ireland, which does not include the six counties of “Northern Ireland,” has an excellent system of public schools.  It does not have “parish schools” as we have had in the United States and what Catholic Schools there are, are what we would call “private schools”—rather upper crust and select—and inclusive of students from a variety of religious backgrounds.  Unlike American public schools, there is room for religion in the public school curriculum.  The vast majority of citizens in the Republic are Catholic.  Until the recent scandals the vast majority were devout Catholics.  But the Catholic Priest, Church of Ireland (Anglican) Minister, Methodist and Presbyterian Parson all have access to the school where their congregants study to teach religion to their respective students.  Such public schools put Catholic and Protestant youth on the same teams rather than pitting them against one another.  Friendships are formed across denominational lines.   And the political, social, and economic tensions that continue to divide the Catholic and Protectant communities in the North have long vanished in the South. 

It is a bit of a canard to go after President Obama for “attacking” Catholic Education when he did nothing of the kind.  But then the voices raised against him are the same voices that decry his administration’s lead on health care , immigration reform,  same-sex marriage,  and other contemporary issues. And the dissatisfaction with these policies more often than not is, like this flap over Northern Ireland, based on faulty facts and distorted simplifications.  It becomes obvious over a period of time that the problem is not the issues, but the man.  And what is there about the man that excites such anger?  Hmmm.  The answer is too obvious to name, is it not, Paula Deen?

Real Threats to Religious Liberty

Cardinal Law--whose mishandling

of the abuse crisis may provide the

greatest danger to religous liberty

There is a lot of kerfuffle in some pulpits these days about a threat to religious liberty posed by the Affordable Health Care Act.  Personally, I think it is a red herring.  The Church does not have to pay one red cent to supply contraceptives to the employees of various Catholic institutions.  The insurance companies have to absorb the costs which they are willing to do as it is more cost-effective to supply contraceptives than to pay for pre-natal care and child-birth and the new children who will be added to policies.  What some Churchmen object to is that the Church has to permit its employees—Catholic and non-Catholic—access to contraceptives.  That is a very different issue and one which I think the Church just has to “suck up” and accept.  Having to provide contraceptives is one issue; trying to bar access to contraceptive care for others is another.  HaHJContraceptives may be morally wrong—and while the Church has a strong teaching on this point—there is no consensus either in our society or in the Church. The Church is not the magisterium.  The Church is the community of all the faithful.  And while the magisterium has given its teaching, that teaching cannot be said to reflect the faith of the Church.  This is not a theological blog and I don’t want to get into the theological issues about “reception of doctrine,” but from a historical perspective one can say that a teaching that is not accepted by the faithful does not persist in the “faith held by the Church.”  But I don’t want to get stuck on this point because I do want to move on to two items that we had better prepare for and which will provide a far more real threat to the Church’s freedom.

The first and less serious—only by comparison—of these threats will be the taxation of Church property.  Currently houses of worship, schools, charitable institutions such as hospitals and nursing homes, administrative offices such as chanceries, living facilities for religious such as monasteries, convents, and rectories are not subject to property taxes.  Trust me, that will change in the next thirty years—or at least efforts will be made to change that as localities become more and more anxious to increase their income without putting the burden on businesses and private ownership.  I also would not be surprised to see that while religious—nuns, monks, friars, brothers—are not normally subject to income tax as their income goes not to them personally but to the communities to which they belong and those communities are registered charities, that at some point the religious orders themselves will be taxed for the income of their members and for other income that comes to them through bequests, donations, investments, etc.  I am not saying that this should happen but it is inevitable that some of the forces in our society that are opposed to religion—not simply Catholicism but religion in general—will challenge the tax-exemptions of religious organizations.

The second danger which is far more perilous is the probability that the traditional respect for the secrecy of the confessional will be challenged legally.  This is due in part, in great part, to the poor handling of the sex abuse crisis by the hierarchy.  Ireland is already challenging the right of clergy to remain confidential in court.  Moreover, physicians, psychologists, counselors and others have been called to violate patient-client confidentiality.  When it comes to the secrecy of the confessional there will be no choice but for the clergy to take the consequences as no matter the law the secrecy cannot be abridged.  Do not doubt, however, that this will be a major issue within the next few years.  This isn’t about Obama and his “threat to religious liberty.”  It won’t matter which party is in power –this will be a decision of the courts.  Hopefully with such a strong presence of Catholics on the Supreme Court this danger will not be realized but I will be surprised.  Moreover, while I expect secularists to be part of the challenge to the Church and the secrecy of the confessional, I think liberals in general will see the threat to personal freedom that it would represent and in fact, I think conservatives will be a bigger danger to maintaining this important principle.