The Gaming of the Shrew

Sorry for the hiatus.  Sometimes life just gets out of control and needs time and focus to bring it back.   Sure you understand. 

We were looking at Pope Francis’ visit to the United States and I was only going to do one more entry on that topic—focusing on the papal liturgies in New York and Philadelphia—and move on, but then came the news about the Pope’s meeting with Kentucky refusnik, Kim Davis, the county clerk who gained a certain notoriety for refusing to issue any marriage licenses in her county rather than violate her conscience and issue licenses to same-sex couples.   Both Davis advocates and opponents took what they wanted from the papal meeting and in the end it’s ambiguity only puts a drag-sail on the high-flying mania Francis generated among Americans of every political, philosophical, and religious category. 

Of course, during the actual span of the Pope’s visit, there was no word from either Ms. Davis or the Holy See about this visit and it was only after the Pope was back in the Vatican that Ms. Davis’ legal team announced the visit and spoke of the Holy Father’s “encouragement” of Ms. Davis and her “cause.”  Ms. Davis is represented by Liberty Counsel which is affiliated with Liberty University Law School, part of the conservative Christian empire established by the late Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg VA.  Liberty Counsel is known for advancing an anti-homosexual agenda, considering laws that target “hate crimes” to undermine the civil liberties of Americans to “follow their conscience.”  In other words, Liberty Counsel is anxious to protect our supposed rights to exercise our various prejudices as long as our intolerance is an expression of our (Christian) faith.  (Whaaaat?  Which Gospel are we looking at here?)  The Southern Poverty Law Center only this week—and in part because of the manner in which it is handling the Kim Davis case—labeled Liberty Counsel a “hate group,” describing it as  “Liberty Counsel is a legal organization advocating for anti-LGBT discrimination under the guise of religious liberty”. Ms. Davis’ advocates have claimed that the invitation to meet the Pope came from the Holy See, notably the Papal Nuncio, and petitions are circulating for the removal of Archbishop Carlo Maria Vignano from his diplomatic post for “interfering” with a domestic political case.  However, sources in the Vatican Secretariat of State claim that while the invitation came from the Holy See, it came at the initiation (through third party channels) of Ms. Davis defense team.  In other words, Ms Davis and/or her legal team initiated the request for her to meet the Pope so that the opportunity could be used as an endorsement of her position in refusing to issue marriage licenses rather than issue licenses that would be used for same-sex marriages.  Supposedly the Holy See was furious that the meeting—which all had agreed would be confidential—was leaked to the press and felt that the Davis meeting undermined the Holy Father’s broader message of acceptance and inclusion to all people regardless of particularities in their lives.  The Pope, in the same gathering, had met and embraced a former student who presented his same-sex partner to the Holy Father. 

So what do we make of it? 

Well, there were any number of gaffes in the papal visit and while this is a bit more head-liner material than some others, it really doesn’t—I think—merit much attention.  The Pope met with all sorts of people during his visit.  He seemed to cover the bases well there.  Furthermore, while he might not have been well briefed on the complexities of the Davis case, there is a certain argument to be made for “conscientious objectors.”  People need to have the right to be faithful to their moral or religious values without being penalized for it.  Of course, conscientious objectors don’t serve in the army precisely because their religious beliefs would bar them from performing their military duties.  In the same way, if a county clerk is unable to perform the duties and responsibilities of his or her office for religious or moral reasons, they need to resign from that position rather than refuse required and legitimate service to the citizenry.  You really can’t have an entire county where it is impossible to obtain a marriage license.  Francis made good use of his talk at the White House to stand for authentic Religious Liberty.  It is a pity that Ms. Davis’ legal defense team wanted to push the boundaries of that principle to defend the indefensible.  It was a bit of cheap theatre to engineer a meeting with the Pope to give their cause some credibility.  In the end, however, Francis will be able to brush it off as a lesson to be learned in American legal slickness and Kim Davis continues to look more and more the desperate and angry shrew.   

A Liberal With A Troubled Conscience

Auschwitz: citizens cannot claim the

defense that they didn't know what

is going on around them

I know that I appear to be leftwards leaning in my views, but I must admit that I find myself wrestling with the issue of for whom to vote for President next month.  One of my regular readers sent me the following link to an essay by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic outlining why he won’t vote for Obama. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/why-i-refuse-to-vote-for-barack-obama/262861/

Mr. Friedersdorf, a conservative leaning journalist who has moral issues with the Republican Party,  advocates in this article voting for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for President, admitting that Johnson won’t win but proposing him as a candidate who represents a more moral choice than either Governor Romney or President Obama.   I am no Libertarian and I don’t expect to vote for Governor Johnson but the article does capture some of my moral dilemma about voting for Mr. Obama.  Four years ago I saw Mr. Obama as better representing my Catholic weltanschauung.  (Just so you don’t have to look that up, it means something like but not precisely “worldview.”  Perhaps one could say “my philosophy” but that doesn’t quite capture it either. )  As a Catholic I struggle with the “every-man-for-himself” (gender biased language preserved intentionally) philosophy of the Republican Party and articulated so wonderfully (in every sense of that word) by Vice-Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin.  (Poor Paul Ryan is just so turgid after Sarah’s histrionic enthusiasm.)  (I guess it is also ironic that it was Governor Palin who articulated the “every man for himself” thinking of the Party.)  Pardon me, I am using far too many parentheses and derailing my train of thought. 

In any event, I believed—and still do—that the Democratic Party better represents our Catholic understanding of the inter-dependence of members of our society.  I believe that we are our brothers’ (and sister’s) keepers and that we have responsibility towards one another both on a personal and collective level.  In line with Dignitatis Humanae I also believe that Freedom of Conscience is a God-given right and that there should be a firewall between religious doctrines of any and all religious bodies and the civil law.  (Gosh, maybe I am a libertarian!  No, it is just a coincidence in this particular point.)   I believe that people of any, all, or no religion should bring their religious and philosophically inspired values to the public forum but that laws ultimately be based on consensus rather than specific doctrine so that the freedom of conscience of minorities not be compromised.  I also find that the Democratic Party better captures and respects our Catholic understanding of the rights of labor and better favors human rights in accord with Catholic teaching especially in matters of immigration.  Also—and admittedly this does not apply to either 2008 candidate Obama or 2012 President Obama—what opposition there is (and we need far more) to the Death Penalty and to the proliference of handguns and semi-automatic weapons  in our society comes from the Democratic side of the aisle.  As pointed out in a previous posting, I profoundly disagree with the Democratic Party on the question of abortion “rights.”             
But I am troubled about more being wrong in the Obama administration than the question of protecting the lives of the yet-to-be-born.  Mr. Friedersdorf’s article raises issues for me—particularly about the effects of how our wars are being fought—that trouble me.  I am currently reading (for the second time) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  There can be no doubt that from 1936 through 1945 the average German-in-the-streets knew that things were going on that were fundamentally immoral.  They may not have known the details but evil on that scale cannot be totally hid from public consciousness.  They knew in 1933 that it was wrong to deprive people of positions in public service and education and the professions because of their ethnic identity.  They saw by 1938 that their government was not protecting certain citizens and their properties from mob violence.    They noticed by 1940 that neighbors were disappearing.  And certainly large numbers of them—people who saw cattle-trains crammed with Jews, who signed contracts for Zyklon B,  or designed crematoria ovens designed to dispose of thousands of bodies a day, or lived in villages from which you could see the smoke and smell the burning corpses—knew that beneath the alles in ordnung of the Reich with its on-times trains and famous Gemütlichkeit something very evil was going on.  And the change I wanted four years ago was because in the America of Cheney-Rumsfeld I knew there were things going on that were fundamentally immoral.  I may not have known specifics but I saw the potential for evil in aspects of the “Patriot Act.”  I knew that Sadaam’s “weapons of mass destruction” was no more than an invented lie to justify a war that would give the fat-cats tied to the administration a chance to enrich themselves.  I knew that Cheney was a chicken-hawk who had avoided serving in the military during Viet Nam but who was anxious to send a new generation of Americans to kill and be killed and I knew that he was only one of many in the Bush administration with those yellow feathers.    (I also have never served in the Military but I was opposed to sending Americans to Vietnam in its day and Iraq  in ours.  Chicken I may be, hawk I am not.)  I knew that there were innumerable civil rights violations of American citizens and aliens (legal and illegal alike) in the Bush era.  And I wanted change.  What troubles me about Mr. Friederdorf’s article is that while I do believe that we have taken steps towards a more moral society under the current administration, I know that there are still things fundamentally wrong, fundamentally evil, going on in our name.  I don’t think there is an easy answer on how a Christian might vote this year.  As for how a Catholic might vote, Bishops like John Myers and Bill Lori are quick to do the moral analysis for us and save us the trouble of thinking.  God bless ‘em. 

There Is A New Edition of the Spanish Inquisition--Right Here in the USA



Is this to be the "new look" of

American Catholicism?

 The following article by Michelle Boorstein appeared in the Washington Post last week. 

Kathleen Riley knows her beliefs on the male-only priesthood and contraception put her at odds with leaders of her church. But as a fifth-generation Catholic who went to a Catholic school and grew up to teach in one, Riley feels the faith deeply woven through her. So when her Arlington parish asked for volunteers last summer to teach Sunday school, she felt called by the Holy Spirit to say yes.

A year later, the 52-year-old computer scientist feels the same spirit calling her to say no.

Last month, Riley joined at least four other Sunday school teachers and resigned from her post at St. Ann’s parish after a letter  arrived at her home requiring her — and all teachers in the Arlington Catholic Diocese — to submit “of will and intellect” to all of the teachings of church leaders.

Although the St. Ann’s teachers represent a tiny fraction of the diocese’s 5,000 Sunday and parochial school teachers, the letter went out to parishes just as classes were finishing for the summer and diocese officials says they do not know how many teachers have received it.

The Arlington Diocese, which includes nearly a half-million Catholics across northern and eastern Virginia, is one of a small but growing number that are starting to demand fidelity oaths. The oaths reflect a churchwide push in recent years to revive orthodoxy that has sharply divided Catholics.

Such oaths are not new for priests or nuns but extend now in some places to people like volunteer Sunday school teachers as well as workers at Catholic hospitals and parish offices.

One in Baker, Ore., reiterates the sinfulness of abortion and says, “I do not recognize the legitimacy of anyone’s claim to a moral right to form their own conscience in this matter.” One in Oakland Calif., requires leaqders of a grop doing outreach to gay and lesbian Cagtholics “affirm and believe” official church teaching on marriage, hell and chastity.

The Arlington “profession of faith” asks teachers to commit to “believe everything” the bishops characterize as divinely revealed, and Arlington’s top doctrine official said it would include things like the bishops' recent campaign against a White House mandate that most employers offer contraception coverage. Critics consider the mandate a violation of religious freedom.

The Arlington Diocese is considered among the most conservative in the country and was the next to last in the nation to say girls could serve at the altar.  Teachers must give the new oath in front of a priest.

“The church is foremost a communion, not a building,” said the Rev. Paul deLadurantaye, Arlington’s head of education and liturgy. “And the church’s teaching is meant to be a service, not to coerce or oppress. . . . This is just to say the church is a reliable guide, more reliable in these matters than what I read elsewhere. There’s something more transcendent than just my own judgment.”

Diocesan spokesman Michael Donohue said the letter was sent to parishes this spring in response to Pope Benedict XVI’s direction that churches worldwide celebrate this year’s 50th anniversary of the start of Vatican II in various ways, including those that “profess our faith in the risen Lord.”

He said the oath is meant to be a positive sign to parents and called it uncontroversial.

“I can’t imagine there are many [teachers] who have issues with the church’s teachings on faith and morals,” Donohue said. Asked about polls showing that the majority of American Catholics use artificial contraception, forbidden by church doctrine, he said he “found it hard to believe” that anyone who had concluded that a church teaching was wrong would want to teach it.

But for some, particularly more liberal Catholics, the oaths are an alarming effort to stamp out debate in the church at a time when it is bleeding members and clergy in the West. They note that church leaders’ views have changed over the centuries on various subjects, including contraception. 

“I’m just shocked, I can’t believe they’re asking me to sign this,” said Riley, who said she may keep her own children out of the parish education program in the fall. “The bishops are human, and sometimes their judgment is not God’s judgment. We always have to be vigilant about that. The Holy Spirit gives us the responsibility to look into our own consciences.”

The pastor and director of religious education at St. Ann’s parish did not return requests for comment, but Riley and others said about 20 teachers attended a meeting last week that the pastor held for people with questions about the new oath.

Riley and others said St. Ann’s is considered a community that deliberately doesn’t focus on such hot-button issues as abortion and same-sex relationships on which Catholics, like Americans generally, are divided.

“It’s an oasis of humanity,” said Rosemarie Zagarri, a history professor at George Mason University who also resigned last month from teaching at St. Ann’s.

Zagarri said the oath was a “slap in the face” to Catholics who have remained active and close to the church despite controversies.

“Although I fully understand the authoritative role of the Catholic hierarchy in defining the teachings of the faith, in my view only a person who is willing to abandon her own reason and judgment, or who is willing to go against the dictates of her own conscience, can agree to sign such a document,” she wrote to Arlington Bishop Paul Loverde.

“This is not in the spirit of what people go to a Catholic church for, which is community and a loving, welcoming environment. It’s exclusionary, a suppression of dissent, let’s all line up and be the army of God,” Zagarri said in an interview for this article.

To others, the oaths are an inspiring correction after a period when they think Catholic teaching has been watered down.

“The bishops have been appointed by the pope to let us know: This is the path you should be following,” said Kerri Polce, 31, who teaches at the Cathedral of St. Thomas More in Arlington and says she has no problems signing the oath. “If you’re struggling with something, fine, don’t teach.”

Loverde, who called for the oath, was not available for comment. Catholic bishops have broad authority in their dioceses, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said there is no churchwide requirement for such oaths.

Some experts said the oath embodies the intense struggle in Catholicism today to define what makes someone a true follower. What teachings are core? What authority do laypeople have?

The Rev. Ronald Nuzzi, who heads the leadership program for Catholic educators at the University of Notre Dame, said many bishops “are in a pickle.” They want Catholic institutions to be staffed by people who not only teach what the church teaches but whose “whole life will bear witness.”

Nuzzi said he keeps a photo on his desk from the 1940s that shows all the German bishops in their garb, doing the Nazi salute.

“I keep it there to remind people who say to do everything the church says, that their wisdom has limitations, too.”

More on this in future entries.  Rich material for us to consider. 

Freedom from Religion and Freedom of Religion III

The Tomb of Pope Leo XIII in the
Basilica of Saint John Lateran

The United States, including its Catholic citizens, was very committed to the principle of the Separation of Church and State.  The papacy was very committed to the idea that the Catholic Faith should be established by law in every nation and that other religions—and especially heretical “cults” (aka Protestants) should be proscribed.  Two trains running down tracks ultimately destined to collide.  

     The collision was to be a long time in coming however.  In a world without modern communications the American Republic was no more than a vague idea to the Papal Court.  Until the final decades of the nineteenth century, basically until people began to accustom themselves to the transatlantic cable, the American Church in its day to day operations was all but independent from Rome.  John Carroll had deliberately held communications with the Holy See to a minimum and his successors in the American episcopacy followed suite.  It was pointless to involve Rome in local decisions—before steamships for a letter to go to Rome, be considered by a congregation, and come back was at least a six month process and could easily take twice that long.  Whatever decision was needed was long past its time before the Holy See could respond.  And frankly, European bishops were no more inclined to surrender decision making to the Roman Curia were jealous of their own authority in their own dioceses.  That only began to change with the collapse of the Papal States in 1870 when the popes needed to consolidate their religious authority to compensate the diminution of prestige at the loss of the Papal States.  It was after Vatican I—and the fall of Rome to the Italian Monarchy that same year—that Rome really began to take note of the American Church and it was startled to see how “American” (i.e. non-Roman) it was.  This came to a bit of a head with Leo XIII’s 1895 Encyclical Latter, Longinqua Oceani, in which the pope declared  that the Church “ would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.”  Such favor and patronage, of course, is in direct contradiction to the United States Constitution which declares in its first amendment that “Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion…”   Leo further admonished the American Church that while it might have to live with the idea of separation of Church and State at least until a Catholic majority could correct the situation, it “would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced.”  In other words, the American situation of the separation of Church and State is not an ideal but an anomaly.

     It could have been worse.  Leo was, unlike his predecessors, not opposed to Republics per se.  To the rage of conservatives he encouraged French Catholics to give their support to the Third Republic which replaced the Second Empire after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.  Conservative Catholics in France wanted to restore the Bourbon monarchy and while Leo wold have preferred that, he conceded that the Republic was acceptable.  Catholicism had always seen monarchy as the ideal, the thought being that civil government should be along the lines of Divine Government and so just as God governs the world, a monarch should govern the people.  Forget this Vox Dei Vox Populi idea—it is dangerous to Church and State alike. (Vox Dei Vox Populi is Latin for The Voice of God [is found in] the voice of the people.  You can see why Popes who consider themselves the Vox Dei don’t like that idea.) 

     Fortunately it took a long time to bring this pot to a boil, but to a boil it was to come.  An American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray, was teaching at the Catholic University in Washington DC.  The experience of Christians of various faiths cooperating against the Third Reich in the years before and during World War II convinced Father Murray that the traditional anti-ecumenical policies of Catholicism and the resultant Catholic isolationism was an obsolete and a dangerous policy in a world haunted by totalitarianism.  He further came to believe that, despite the admonition of Leo XIII in Longinqua Oceani,  religious freedom as outlined in the First Amendment to the American Constitution was an ideal that should be embraced in the twentieth century.  In these ideas he was far ahead of his time—too far ahead of his time for many of his fellow Catholics who saw the ethnic and religious ghettos into which the Catholics of the early twentieth century had retreated as essential to preserve the faith.  Teaching with Father Murray at Catholic University was Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton, one of the most arrogant and acrimonious junior grade prelates the Church has known in its long history of arrogant and acrimonious prelates.  Monsignor Fenton was editor of the American Ecclesiastical Review.  Fenton despised Religious.  Fenton despised anyone who he considered beneath him and his monsignoral dignity him which more or less included the human race as a collective.  He was probably also a bit jealous of Murray and his popularity.  Fenton reported Murray to the appropriate Roman dicasteries and the redoubtable Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, head of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, who silenced Murray and prohibited him from speaking or writing on the topic of Church/State relations.  These were the final years of the papacy of Pius XII who that year had suffered from a hiatal hernia requiring surgery and whose health went into a steady decline during which more and more of the papal prerogatives were assumed by curial officials such as Ottaviani.  Pius’s successor, John XXIII convoked an Ecumenical Council with the express purpose of opening the Catholic Church up to the ecumenical movement which had long been prohibited it by Popes such as Pius XI whose encyclical Mortalium Animos condemned ecumenism as undermining Catholic doctrinal hegemony.  Ottaviani insured that Fenton would be on the various commissions that were preparing the Conciliar agenda and it was planned by Ottaviani that no serious doctrinal shift, especially as regards ecumenism or freedom of conscience would be submitted to the bishops.  When the bishops assembled in the autumn of 1962 for the first session of the Council, however, they would not accept the conservative agenda, however and demanded that the schemata for the council prepared by Fenton and others be abandoned and a new agenda drawn up.  It was at this point that Francis Spellman, the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, rescued John Courtney Murray from the obscurity to which Fenton’s accusations had reduced him and brought him to the Council as Spellman’s personal theologian.  Here Murray had his revenge on his reactionary foes as the Council in its decree on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, enshrined the basic principles of freedom of conscience and the very doctrine that Leo XIII had said should not be spread from America to the rest of the world became a universally recognized principle in Catholic teaching.  Eternal Rest to Joseph Fenton, Alfredo Ottaviani, and Leo XIII.  One of those three, despite his fear of freedom of conscience, is probably a saint.  It wouldn’t be Fenton or Ottaviani.