I've gone back and forth in my head about whether to comment on Phyllis Zagano's latest piece at National Catholic Reporter chiding her fellow Catholics who refuse to walk lock-step with the U.S. Catholic bishops in their current attack on the Obama administration. I've hesitated to write any more about this topic, because it has been hashed to death on one blog site after another--this one included--and I suspect many readers are as thoroughly sick of the discussion as I myself am. And continuing to talk about these matters only gives legs and further publicity to the shameful, dirty, decidedly anti-life and downright dangerous (for the whole planet and everyone on it) pro-Republican politicking in which the bishops and their epigones of the Catholic center are now involved.
I've also hesitated to criticize Zagano (though I emphatically did not agree with the analysis of her previous NCR piece on Planned Parenthood) because I respect her and her commitment to her positions. She also once sent me an email thanking me for mentioning her work in a posting I did here, and loyalty to even the most tenuous friend or acquaintance counts very high on my list of virtues.
I find I can't remain silent, though, after I've digested what Zagano has to say. I don't want to remain silent because the argument she develops in her recent NCR statement strikes me as what is likely to be the standard justification among many American Catholics for lining up behind the bishops now in a tribalistic, we-vs.-them way, and it deserves attention precisely as the standard justification that will appeal to many Catholics who are well-acquainted with and unperturbed by the tribal defense mechanisms that have long kept Catholics of a certain ilk in line, obeying implicitly, refusing to ask difficult questions, think critically, or engage respectfully critical viewpoints that contest or complicate their taken-for-granted presuppositions.
At a fundamental level, Zagano assumes that Catholics have to line up behind the bishops vis-a-vis the HHS guidelines because the discussion is really all about abortion and not contraception or even religious freedom. And abortion is, for her as for many Catholics, a non-negotiable. Opposing abortion in any and all forms--including, she insists, the form of preventing the uterine implantation of a fertilized zygote, as with the "morning after pill"--is unquestionably good. It's incumbent on Catholics. Every other value must fall by the wayside as we think about the incalculable value of an innocent human being, even an innocent human being that is a just-fertilized zygote.
These are non-negotiable presuppositions, and they're also presuppositions not even to be discussed as we line up behind our bishops--a point to which I'll return in a moment, since I consider it an important underlying component of the way in which many Catholic intellectuals of the center continue to be willing to walk lock-step behind the bishops and the Vatican.
Zagano's central argument, however, is a version of one that has cropped up in previous threads here as Catholics who think in the same tribal way Zagano thinks have occasionally logged in to challenge the positions I think through in my postings here. This is the "they-may-be-bastards-but-they're-our-bastards" argument about the bishops.
Zagano freely admits that the bishops have lavishly squandered their moral credibility and have richly lost their right to claim to be compelling pastoral leaders. But we must line up behind these bastards who happen to be our bastards. Because it's all about abortion, remember. Not contraception. Not religious freedom. Not anything else except an innocent tiny baby that has no one else to defend it. Abortion is the hidden elephant in the living room in the HHS discussion, and we have to hold the line because if we don't, the next line we'll be asked to hold is the line at which we're being challenged to pay for abortions.
And it's at this central point that I find it impossible to understand Zagano's logic or the logic of all the other Catholic intellectuals and media spokespersons who predictably line up behind our bastard bishops when they issue battle cries like the politicized, anti-Obama battle cry they're now issuing. What I don't think Zagano et al. see very plainly at all is that the bishops' credibility as moral spokespersons and pastoral leaders isn't damaged in a general way--by their gruesomely immoral response to the abuse crisis, for instance, as Zagano wants to argue.
It's damaged in a quite specific way in the area of pro-life teaching. Many of us have parted company with the bishops because we're pro-life. We find it impossible to give any credence at all to what the bishops have to say about issues having to do with the value of life because the bishops (and those who walk lock-step behind them) have, in the view of many of us, long since forfeited the right to claim that they are working to promote the values of life in the world today.
To take one among many cases that might have been cited here: how do any religious leaders (and educated, purportedly morally sensitive people who defend them) possibly imagine that they can be thought of as pro-life when we in the U.S. have been living through an epidemic of suicides of young people who are gay or gender-questioning in recent years? And when the pro-life bishops and their educated defenders are simply silent about this phenomenon?
When studies demonstrate that, in the view of a large percentage of the American public, the churches and their leaders are implicated in this phenomenon of epidemic suicides of gay or gender-questioning teens? When the ugly, non-affirming things the churches and their leaders choose to say if they ever do deign to open their mouths about these issues have life-or-death implications for young gay human beings? Does the question of the value of human life somehow disappear when the human being whose value is being weighed in the scales happens to be gay or lesbian? Are only pre-born human beings, including just-fertilized zygotes, of inestimable human value?
And when the same men telling us to defend life at all costs are working as hard as possible these days to make the lives of same-sex couples and their children as difficult as can be imagined, how is it possible, I continue to ask myself, to call these men pro-life in any way that makes any sense at all?
Or when they implicitly tell us over and over that only the party that defends the wider availability of contraception (which prevents abortions) is anti-life--which means, implicitly, that we're to defend and vote for the party whose leaders tell us they have no concern for the poor? The party whose leaders blatantly promote the economic and social interests of wealthy elites who have produced such massive economic suffering these days that it's impossible to imagine how this political party could ever, with its current outlook and agenda, be tagged "pro-life." A party that has long stood for militarism and that has promoted war, whose leaders have defended capital punishment.
And when the bishops never encourage Catholics to engage in mass civil disobedience as Republican leaders promote capital punishment, and never make this issue a not-to-be questioned, non-negotiable shibboleth by which to judge whether a particular political party is "pro-life" . . . .
How is the Republican party pro-life in some obvious, self evident "Catholic" sense that obviously and unquestionably counters the "anti-life" stance of the Democratic party (a party whose lack of strong commitment to a consistent ethic of life already demands attention, it goes without saying, among Catholics concerned to promote a consistent ethic of life)?
The reason the bishops and their educated defenders can get away with promoting such sloppy, ill-considered arguments, I propose, is that they continue to cling to tribal definitions of Catholicism that don't require those making these arguments to listen carefully to countervailing evidence--to obvious evidence that immediately problematizes their claims.
Their approach to discussion of issues they regard as non-negotiatble is to close rank and define everyone else out of their conversations. Their approach is to tag all brother and sister Catholics--even when, as in the case of contraception, we're talking about more than 90% of fellow Catholics--out of their conversations and to define them as defectively or inadequately Catholic, insofar as they refuse to close rank and walk lock-step with the magisterium re: the narrow range of issues it has defined as non-negotiable.
And how is that pro-life, I wonder: to assume that a large percentage of your fellow Catholics are vulgar, culture-bound majoritarians who aren't adequately Catholic and have nothing of importance to add to your elitist, self-congratulatory, closed-circle minoritarian conversation, insofar as they resist your coercive approach to issues you've decided to declare off-limits and non-negotiable? How is it possible to call yourself pro-life while pretending that brother and sister Catholics who don't belong to your elite "Catholic" circle just aren't even there in the room? That they have nothing to offer, no perspectives to be considered, no countervailing viewpoints worth discussing?
Zagano does note--and this seems significant to me--that the bastard bishops behind whom we have no choice except to line up in their current political crusade have not effectively communicated the values of life to most Catholics, at this point in the history of the church. What she means, though, is that a majority of American Catholics do not stand with the magisterium about the issue of abortion because they haven't been sufficiently well-educated about the issue. She appears to think most American Catholics have simply not been well-informed about the intricacies of topics like how the morning after pill works, uterine implantation and fetal development, etc.
But I'd propose that there's another plausible way to read the refusal of most American Catholics to go along with the bishops (and Zagano and her crowd) on these issues. Instead of assuming that all these brother and sister Catholics are lazy, uneducated culture captives who don't understand Catholic values and the ethic of life, what about considering the possibility that they have conscientiously rejected the church's position on issues that, for Zagano and the bastard bishops, are non-negotiable? And that they've done so for reasons that seem morally right and compelling to them, and deserve attention in Catholic conversations that expect to convince the culture at large of the value of life?
And, further, what about the possibility that the failure of the bastard bishops to teach the values of life to Catholics living in American culture at present has more to do with who the bishops are and how they model the values of life, than with questions about when the zygote attains the ontological status of a human person? Teaching, I became convinced when I tried to be a practitioner of that demanding art, has more to do with who one is than with what one says, if one does it well and expects to succeed at the art.
Perhaps the failure of the bastard bishops to teach the values of life has everything to do with their own failure to live those values in any compelling way, and little to do with their failure at expert catechesis in the area of contraception and abortion. To be specific: perhaps it has everything to do with their failure to embody the kind of loving respect for every human being in the world that is at the very center of any compelling ethic of life, and not with their failure to get out the word about what the morning after pill is all about.
When I look at the mug shots of some of
Insofar as I understand Catholic spirituality, it revolves around love. And love comprises respectful attention to those who are different--particularly to those on the margins who are different. And a willingness to stop, listen, engage, and include. Teaching does not rely on the tactic of choice of the current regime ruling the church--coercion--if it expects to be effective. It most certainly does not choose coercion over respectful engagement of varying opinions when what the teacher hopes to impart are moral and spiritual values. Teaching that expects to be effective in those areas decisively and on principle sets coercion aside and enters the fray of risky conversation with the fellow human beings one hopes to teach--and to learn from.
In the final analysis, perhaps Zagano and the many other Catholics of the center who have defined me and other Catholics like me out of the conversation are right after all. Perhaps I'm simply not Catholic in any meaningful sense at all. I say this because, if they can continue to look at the faces of the current crop of pastoral leaders of the church and see bona fide pastoral leaders and exemplars of Catholic spirituality at its best, I may just not understand what it means to be Catholic.
Or a follower of Jesus.
Because I'm certainly not seeing what they're seeing. And I am not sure any amount of coercion can make me see what, for me, is simply not there in the
For a footnote to this statement, see this posting from later the same day.
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