Fascinating to watch the centrist Catholic men who have most vociferously assisted the U.S. Catholic bishops stage their faux war against the Obama administration now deal with the compromise the president has offered the bishops. Michael Sean Winters tussles with the problem today at National Catholic Reporter, as does his friend and fellow beltway Catholic commentariat figure E.J. Dionne at Truthdig.
For Winters, the discussion continues--predictably--to be framed in win-lose terms. And so he's unhappy that the president seems to have scored points with his accommodation, when it's leaders of our tribe, the bishops, who should always come out as the big winners in any battle designed to display Catholic clout in beltway circles and the culture at large.
Both Winters and Dionne want to argue that the central point in their and others' belligerent reaction to the HHS guidelines has been to protect all the wonderful things that Catholic organizations do throughout the U.S., to keep these organizations free of government intrusion that would limit their ability to continue performing works of mercy. And so both argue that "Catholics" were almost unanimously united in the battle to protect Catholic religious freedom vs. the Obama administration, since we all realize how much good (i.e., the good that Catholic institutions do) is at stake in this battle.
Curiously, both also explicitly engage the term "tribalism," which seems to have entered the conversation now in a significant way as a defining term of the discussion. And both flatly discount any tribalistic motivation in their contributions to the discussion, though Winters's rhetoric about what "we Catholics" think, want, or do always reeks of a bellicose win-lose tribalism when he imagines (as he perennially does) that "we Catholics" are under attack by secular society--as recently as this weekend, when he told Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times,
I think they misjudged that no matter what people think about contraception, that’s an internal Catholic debate. Catholics do not like interlopers.
If those sentences aren't the very definition of tribalism, then I don't know what tribalism is: we Catholics live on our own tribal reserve. Butt out of our internal debates and get off our reservation. Even when your own health care needs are at stake in these debates because you happen to work for a Catholic institution though you're not Catholic. Our tribal rules dictate that we deny you access to contraception because Humanae Vitae was, you understand, prescient. (But never mind that 98% or our tribe don't follow the dictates of this prescient document.)
And then there's this in both Winters's and Dionne's summary of what has just taken place in that "internal Catholic debate" about the "prescient" teaching of Humanae Vitae and women's access to birth control as a matter of basic health care: Both summaries attribute all opposition to the "Catholic" stance in the debates to secular liberals.
All Catholics were with Winters and Dionne (and the bishops) in opposing the Obama administration's initial decision, both men suggest in their statements today. The only people supporting the Obama administration were non-Catholic secular liberals who are tone-deaf to Catholic values.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this summary seriously distort what has just taken place in the American Catholic conversation about these matters? Haven't we just gone through several weeks of debate in which large numbers of Catholics disagreed with Messrs. Winters, Dionne, and the bishops? And did so vocally on Catholic blog sites, including the NCR site where Mr. Winters holds forth?
And so do those brother and sister Catholics simply not matter at all? We should write them out of the conversation altogether, because they don't agree with Winters, Dionne, and the bishops?
Winters and Dionne have ended up in an exceptionally unhappy place now, it seems to me. The place at which they've ended up is one that defines Catholicism in such a narrow and exclusive (and male-dominant: this cannot be overlooked) way that it effectively writes out of the Catholic conversation a large percentage of American Catholics who have taken a very different position than these men took vis-a-vis the HHS guidelines.
Winters and Dionne relegate all those brother and sister Catholic, with their informed consciences and alternative viewpoints, to the "secular" side of the scales. These fellow Catholics are implicitly defined as sub-Catholic, as defectively Catholic, as not even part of the conversation because they don't happen to agree with Winters and Dionne.
This way of framing what has been taking place in American Catholicism in this debate is deeply toxic for the American Catholic church. Not only does it write large number of fellow Catholics out of the conversation by identifying "the" Catholic position about these issues with the position of a group of elite men who wield power in beltway media circles.
It also underestimates and overlooks the considerable damage the bishops and their elite powerbroking male co-belligerents have just done and continue doing to all those brother and sister Catholics who are being written out of the conversation. And to Catholic women in particular . . . .
The implicitly misogynistic summary Winters and Dionne now want to offer us of the important conversation that has just taken place in American Catholicism does not even see, to both men's discredit, the extent to which a growing number of American Catholics are seriously alienated from the church and its leaders--and now, quite specifically because of the bishops' attempt to use the health care of women as a weapon in the culture warss
Sadly, I can only continue to conclude, as I read Winters and Dionne this morning, that they and other tribalistic Catholics, preponderantly white men, who have just leapt with such alacrity to the bishops' defense as the bishops have been behaving indefensibly are significantly blinded by the power they enjoy in their positions as official spokespersons for "us Catholics" in beltway circles. These powerful men aren't seeing or hearing the pain of many Catholics--notably women, but also large percentages of progressive Catholics who do not share their sanguine view of the bishops' politics and theology--they've just implicitly excluded from the Catholic conversation.
As I've noted in previous postings, these ritual enactments in which the centrist beltway powerbrokers of American Catholicism inform all brother and sister Catholics to the left of themselves that they're not adequately Catholic have become a predictable feature of American election cycles in recent years. These rituals are designed to keep the American Catholic church skewing center-right politically and theologically, even when large numbers of American Catholics trend to the left of center in terms of politics and theology.
The price we pay for this toxic behavior on the part of our powerbrokers is increasingly high. In the discussion of contraception and religious freedom we've just walked through, it's a price of pretending not only that many fellow Catholics have no place in the conversation that defines Catholic identity in the U.S., and that their pain and disaffection are non-existent.
It's also the seriously damaging price of being asked by our official tribal spokespersons to pretend that a church and its leaders can do only good. When many of us can see clearly with our own eyes--and so why can't these powerbroking men see this, too, I wonder?--that our tribe can also do noteworthy harm. Most predictably when it gets itself revved up into belligerent tribal mode and appeals to the worst atavistic instincts of the tribe as it mounts wars against the surrounding culture . . . .
Tribes can most certainly do good. They can also do serious harm. And as a social impulse, the atavistic tribal impulse to close ranks, lock arms, and assert that our tribe and its leaders only do good is almost always a precursor to serious harm inflicted on someone.
Nor does it take rocket science to learn about that harm and how it's inflicted and on whom it's inflicted. But to do that, Messrs. Winters and Dionne would have to invite into the conversation the very brother and sister Catholics they've just written out of it--e.g., gay and lesbian Catholics, women, progressive Catholics in general. And they'd have to listen respectfully to the testimony of these Catholics about the shadow side of our tribe's works of mercy. And they'd have to let that testimony count, at last, in the "official" conversation that defines American Catholic identity.
But I'm not going to hold my breath until this happens.
The graphic is Mike Luckovich's "Flock This Way" cartoon from Truthdig yesterday.
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