The posting I just uploaded ends with the observation that, for growing numbers of American Catholics, the behavior (and lives) of the bishops who are our pastoral leaders no longer proclaim the gospel to us. To the contrary, they threaten to occlude our hearing and reception of the gospels. Our pastoral leaders have become, in significant respects, countersigns to the gospel we hear proclaimed in our churches each Sunday.
And so our problem now is figuring out what to to with the gap between who the bishops are and what they do, and the gospels that are the ground of our faith as followers of Jesus. In a posting yesterday at his blog site, Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong asks if the U.S. Catholic bishops have any inkling that what they are doing in the public square--most recently and glaringly through their manufactured political war over bogus issues of "religious freedom"--is killing their church.
(I've just linked to Bishop Spong's posting at his site, which requires registration and, if one remains a member of the site, eventually a payment. Frank Douglas's Voice from the Desert site helpfully provides the whole text of Bishop Spong's posting, and with apologies to Bishop Spong and thanks to Frank Douglas, I'm also linking to VFTD).
Bishop Spong's analysis makes two important points that Catholics in general and the U.S. Bishops in particular would be well advised to hear:
1. The bishops' anti-gospel political behavior is radically harming the Catholic church in the U.S., a large percentage of whose members are (for gospel reasons) unwilling and unable to follow the bishops' lead as they attack women's rights to basic health care and try to undermine the constitutional rights of gay and lesbian persons;
2. The bishops' anti-gospel political behavior is harming the Catholic church in its witness in the public square, since a large percentage of the public recognizes that the right of religious groups under canons of religious freedom to believe and practice what they choose to believe or practice does not translate into a right to undermine the human rights of others and fracture the common good.
As Bishop Spong notes, inevitably the choice of the U.S. Catholic bishops to mount a showy, belligerent partisan political war around issues of contraception and LGBT rights will place the bishops (and Catholics in general) in the spotlight as debate about various public issues takes place in this election cycle. If proof of Bishop Spong's claim is needed, I offer Howard Schweber's article about the Catholicization of the American right at Huffington Post today.
Schweber's article demonstrates that the picture of "Catholics" now forming in the mind of many American citizens is not a pretty or positive picture--and this is largely due to the political behavior of the U.S. bishops (and their co-belligerents in the beltway commentariat) and a powerful handful of Republican Catholic political leaders whom the bishops never criticize, while they keep a laser-like focus turned on Democratic leaders.
As Schweber notes, one of the ironic results of the choice of the U.S. Catholic bishops to ally themselves (and the American Catholic church) politically with the religious right in recent years is that they--and Catholic politicians such as Gingrich and Santorum--now have stronger support among right-wing evangelicals than among Catholics themselves. A sizable percentage of American Catholics are outright embarrassed by the bishops' political behavior and have distanced themselves from this behavior.
But increasing numbers of right-wing evangelicals, who find the patriarchal authoritarianism of the Catholic church as enacted by the bishops a conservative ideal, actively welcome what Schweber calls the "Catholicization of the American right." As Schweber notes,
In this metaphorical sense, the "Catholic" political style is strongest among evangelical Protestant voters, not actual Catholics. The eagerness of Catholic bishops to jump into a fight over contraception, for example, does not reflect that attitudes of their parishoners, but it gets strong support from evangelicals. Similarly, in one recent poll more than two-thirds of Catholic voters supported some sort of legal recognition of gay couples' relationships, with 44% favoring same-sex marriage; in very sharp contrast, an outright majority of evangelical voters said there should be no legal recognition of a same-sex relationship.
In political terms, the evangelical Protestant Right has become Catholicized. They do not see Catholicism as a religion very different from their own because it leads to the same positions on the battlefield, call it Fortress GOP. It is a political worldview that is singularly well suited to negative politics. Who cares whether your guy is actually a bit of a nut-case or has some sleaze in his history if he will defeat the forces of darkness? Liberals tolerate venality in their candidates if they believe they will do good; "Catholic" conservatives tolerate venality if they believe their candidates will defeat evil. (Ironically, all of this has moved the American religious Right in the direction of becoming more and more like a traditional European right-wing political movement, rather than a populist movement in the American Jacksonian tradition.)
And if Schweber's analysis is correct (and I think it is), then what does it portend for the politics of the U.S. bishops and the image of the Catholic church, as they continue to cement their alliance with right-wing evangelicals, that the latter group keeps on standing out among all other segments of the American population not only for its exceptionally strong resistance to gay rights and same-sex marriage, but also for its opposition to interracial marriage.
It's almost as if the bishops (and the Vatican) have a secret recipe unknown to the rest of Catholics, which calls for making the Catholic church appear to be as culturally marginal, as impervious to progressive change, and as anti-gospel as possible, in the beginning of the 21st century, isn't it? Assuring that large numbers of Catholics for whom the gospels mean a commitment to the human rights of everyone walk away.
And that the "Catholic" church, which will have succeeded in rebranding itself as a male-dominant right-wing heterosexist patriarchal club more appealing to conservative evangelicals than to real-life Catholics, will remain their little club. A male-dominant right-wing heterosexist patriarchal club catering to the needs and interests of the bishops. But to no one else in the Catholic church.
And damn the consequences for the rest of Catholics.
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