Hearing Voices of Disaffected Catholics: Anybody Listening?

The following are comments from Bilgrimage in the past several days.  Most of them are from a single thread.  They're comments made by Catholic women and Catholic men, some of whom have had it with the Catholic church, others of whom say they are hanging on by a thread.  And that the behavior of the U.S. Catholic bishops and their co-belligerents in recent weeks is making the option of cutting the tiny thread of affiliation seem ever more attractive.

I know the stories of a number of these fellow Catholics in a glancing way, due to what some of the contributors have shared on this and other blogs, or in email exchanges with me.  I don't know any of the contributors personally.  Others writing in these threads are responding to these brother and sister Catholics, lamenting the loss of their gifts when events like the current partisan political belligerence of the U.S. bishops and their co-belligerent "liberal" supporters finally succeed in driving them from the church.

The comments below have been running through my mind ever since they were posted on this blog.  They've stuck in my head because they reflect, many of them, conversations that go on inside my own head.

I, too, feel near the point of total alienation.  As I've indicated in recent days, in my case, the sense of alienation is much stronger due to the behavior of the "liberal" co-belligerents who signed on with such uncritical alacrity to the bishops' ugly partisan "religious freedom" crusade than to the behavior of the bishops themselves.  With the latter, I have long since given up, for the most part.

The behavior of the former group deeply troubles me.  I have been in touch with some of these co-belligerents by email in the past several days.  They are not, many of them, troubled in the least by the bishops' refusal to accept a compromise the bishops demanded--and got.  And then the bishops changed the terms of their demands . . . .  And, as I say, this troubles or chastens some of their co-belligerents not in the least: they're in it for the long term, whatever the bishops say.

They're in it for the warfare.  Even when the cannon fodder happens to be fellow Catholics and fellow human beings.  Or perhaps especially when some fellow human beings and Catholics happen to be in the line of fire.

Some of these co-belligerents have signed onto this crusade because they have long since been convinced that a just-fertilized zygote is ontologically equal to a human person, and that any technology that thwarts or even possibly thwarts the implantation of a zygote is tantamount to murder--to murdering a baby.  These co-belligerents have signed onto the anti-contraception cause because they believe in a slippery-slope argument that contraception leads to a cavalier attitude towards the conceptus which leads to partial-birth abortion, which leads to the murder of the elderly and infirm, etc.

And what's rather remarkable to me as I consider these arguments is the obvious cold-heartedness of these pro-life brothers and sisters to the actual, right-in-front-of-their-noses real human lives of fellow Catholics who are increasingly alienated from our church, because we find the "pro-life" movement in key respects anything but concerned about protecting human life in all its dimensions.  And we're baffled by the disproportionate weight and emotional response that the bishops' "pro-life" co-belligerents ask us to give to a just-fertilized zygote.  When they so frequently show little to no concern for the real lives of post-birth human beings, from the moment of birth to the grave.

Others who continue the co-belligerence with whom I've been in touch in recent days continue to be attracted to the clouds of abstract words that, in my view, so often appeal to groups of people who have the time and energy to split hairs, to count angels dancing on the heads of pins, because they occupy privileged social locations and don't have to deal with the real-life quandaries that often occupy the attention of their less privileged brothers and sisters.  To this set of co-belligerents, many of whom happen to be white heterosexual males (did I mention "privileged social locations"?), it appears to me that the voices of Catholics like those speaking in the comments below or like me don't count and never will count.

Because the clouds of abstract words count more.  And so these co-belligerent Catholics can invest amazing amounts of time and energy in parsing details about how the health insurance system works, about the degree to which the bishops cooperate directly or indirectly in evil when any of their money is commingled with money that pays for the grave evil of contraception, etc.

While they have no time or energy at all to hear the voices of one Catholic after another walking away from the church in dismay.  And no time or energy at all to examine their own social locations, their own power and privilege, which create the preconditions for the dislocated (and let's face it: ultimately meaningless) abstract rhetoric that never connects to the real world and the real lives of human beings in pain--which is purportedly why we're having all of these conversations in the first place.

One conclusion I've reached as I listen to the bishops' co-belligerents continue their support of the bishops' belligerence even now, after we all now have every reason in the world to understand what the bishops have always intended with their belligerence: if any of these "liberal" Catholics ever again seeks to convince me that he or she understands my experience as a gay person or a gay Catholic, I'll immediately stop listening.

Because I know better.  I've learned a crucial lesson by their behavior in this belligerent crusade for "religious freedom" that is, at its very core, a crusade against gay and lesbian human beings.  You don't sign onto a war planned and carried out by "holy" men against your fellow human beings and Catholics who happen to be gay, and then retain the right to tell me you understand, love, or support gay persons.

As Jamie Manson notes in the article to which I linked yesterday, one of the central reasons the U.S. Catholic bishops have mounted their bogus crusade to protect a "religious freedom" that is not and has not been under attack is to maintain that individual Christians who object to non-discrimination laws requiring them to treat gay citizens in the same way they treat other citizens be granted a "conscience exemption" to discriminate.  

And so those "liberal" co-belligerents who are helping the bishops wage war are helping the bishops wage war against gay people.  They are buying into crusade they share with a religious right that has been deeply toxic in American culture and politics and which is, as Manson rightly notes, deeply anti-feminist and deeply anti-gay.

And you don't get the right to claim to be liberal and tolerant and loving towards those who are gay when you make common cause with those intent on inflicting massive pain on us.  It's the people you hop into bed with who define your identity.  Those are the folks you love.

Meanwhile, here's what folks are saying on a single blog, and for the most part, on a single thread on that blog, about their growing disenchantment with a church whose leaders can behave this way, and many of whose supposedly most enlightened spokespersons in the media and academy can go right along with the belligerence, with seeming gusto:

Searcher: 

As an empathic, inuitive, yet objective and analytic, woman, I have chosen to leave the church, having been forced out by gossip and inuendo and broken confidences.

Bronxirishcatholic: 

I see no trace of love in the institutional Catholic church, or in the evangelical churches that it has come to mirror in the past generation.  The results are all over American society, in everything from bullying young gay people to suicide, to predatory business ethics, to cheering the deaths of innocent people for lack of health insurance. ??The last threads of the umbilical cord are slipping away for me, and I'm becoming more and more comfortable with letting it happen?

Kate: 

Thank you Bill for articulating the issues surrounding the Church vs State  re contraceptive coverage.  Not since the 70's have I felt so betrayed by my male 'liberal' colleagues (and NCR).    You brought some understanding to the issue [forgiveness may have to wait a little longer :)].

Claire:

Godde bless you for this, Bill! 

Twenty years ago or so I took a graduate class in Business Ethics and was surprised that Jesus in fact was not part of the ethical system proposed (Aristotle was). I felt very frustrated with the absence of 'love' in it. Then my psychology teacher, may he be blessed forever, suggested that I read Carol Gilligan's book. Ahhhh... 

Your view of the whole approach of the Catholic hierarchy rings absolutely true. I usually find myself on the periphery, at the ultimate margin of the Roman Catholic Church. I must say that the bishops these days are doing a good job at cutting the last thread of this umbilical chord that keeps me in. 

Thank you again.  xoxo

Chris Morley:

It's such a waste that the Church keeps driving away its treasures, the compassionate, smart and life valuing people, female or male.  

No one deserves nasty words and privacy violations.

Crystal: 

I'm sorry you have had those experiences - I can understand why you wouldn't want to comment there anymore.  I was just thinking today how when I first started blogging years ago I had a lot of Catholic blogger friends - now only a couple.  Sometimes I wonder if I even count as Catholic anymore, not going to church now and not having much of a community online.  I'm glad I can come here to your blog to visit.

Is anyone in the Catholic community listening to such voices, I wonder?  I suspect they're legion, if one cares to listen.