More Updates: The Maine Catholic Diocese's Battle vs. Gay Marriage, Virginia Foxx Still at It

And more updates: several weeks ago, I blogged about the surprising discovery that the financially strapped Catholic diocese of Maine has recently found major funds to spend as it tries to overturn Maine’s same-sex marriage law. While the diocese is closing churches with claims that it can no longer support these churches financially, it has somehow found $100,000 to support the drive to repeal same-sex marriage in Maine.

And the diocese seems curiously unable to account for where that anti-gay money is coming from. If it comes from donations of Maine’s Catholic parishioners, then the diocese seems to have some fancy explaining to do. Parishioners donate to their parish with the understanding—normally this is the case—that the funds they’re giving will go to the upkeep of parish buildings, support of the parish school, implementation of parish programs. Not to some political crusade the church is backing.

If the funds are coming to the Maine diocese from somewhere else—for instance, another religious body in another part of the country—then the diocese still has explaining to do. What does our democratic system of governance mean, when religious groups can shift money around from one region of the country to another, to impose their theocratic will on the citizens of states in which the religious group funding a political crusade doesn’t even have its headquarters?

These are questions being asked, for instance, about the Mormon church, after the archbishop of San Francisco, George Niederauer, invited the Utah Mormons to enter the California fray with a massive infusion of funds in the last election cycle, to remove the right of marriage from gay citizens of California.

I find I’m not the only person asking critical questions about the Maine story. Recently, Michael Bayly’s outstanding Wild Reed blog linked to an article by Michael Jones, communications director for the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, about the Maine story. Jones was previously communications director for Pax Christi USA.

Jones sees the decision of the Maine diocese to spend lavishly to roll back the right of marriage for gay citizens, while the diocese is closing churches due to financial problems, as a case of “misplaced priorities.” He’d like to tell Mark Mutty, director of public affairs for the diocese of Maine, the following:

Here’s a memo to Mutty: not only would some people say it’s misdirected to spend this type of money on denying rights to gays and lesbians instead of on initiatives for the poor, but Jesus himself would have likely said the same thing, too.

Indeed. The Catholic church gives itself a black eye when it talks out of one side of its mouth about the need to defend human rights, while out of the other side of its mouth, it calls on citizens to combat the human rights of a targeted minority. People tend to look at what we do and not what we say, when we preach.

Much Catholic preaching about the sanctity of life and human rights falls on deaf ears, when the church’s own track record in these areas is so abysmal.

And that’s a point that needs to be kept in mind, as well, by anyone assessing the record of Virginia Foxx, representative for North Carolina’s 5th Congressional district. Foxx was last in the eye of the nation back in April, when she tried to shoot down hate crimes legislation by arguing that the heinous murder of Matthew Shepard had nothing to do with the fact that Shepard was gay.

As I noted in a number of postings about this remark at the time, it’s an embarrassment to me that Foxx is a Catholic. A Catholic who appears to defend hate based on sexual orientation. And who has opposed S-CHIP legislation to provide health coverage for poor children, despite the support of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference for this legislation.

Well, Foxx is back in the news. Still running her mouth. Still belying Catholic values and Catholic principles in the name of, well, that western North Carolina Catholicism that her fellow Catholic congressman (and ideological bedfellow) from the neighboring 10th district, Patrick McHenry, once defined as “truer and purer” than Catholicism in the rest of the world.

Foxx was in the news lately for making the absurd claim that “there are no Americans who don’t have health care.” Now she’s back in the news with the equally bizarre claim that, in contrast to a Democratic health care plan, a Republican one will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.

I agree with Pam Spaulding. The voters of western North Carolina need to put this walking nightmare of a representative out of her misery and stop allowing her to embarrass their region by such appalling, ill-informed, deliberately inflammatory remarks. And as for Foxx’s claim to represent the truer and purer Catholicism that prevails in her neck of the woods, someone needs to send her a parcel of USCCB documents about human rights and health care. Right away. So she can at least inform herself when she spouts off about Catholic values.

Coerced Morality and the Pastoral Failure of the American Catholic Bishops: More Reflections in Light of Notre Dame-Obama Controversy

Two recent statements by influential thinkers in the American Catholic church deserve particular attention, it seems to me. The first is Thomas Reese’s “Memo to Bishops: Most Catholics Aren’t Listening” in Washington Post this past Tuesday (here). Thomas Reese is the former editor of America, who was forced out of that position when American Catholics of the right, who had the ear of Rome, appealed to then Cardinal Ratzinger, who was then head of the Vatican Congregation of the Faith, to silence him (here).

One of Ratzinger’s first acts as Benedict XVI was to have Reese removed from his position as editor of America.

In his recent WaPo statement, Reese tries to make sense of the fact that American Catholics are simply not listening to those bishops who continue the war against President Obama, even after they failed in their attempt to coerce their flocks to vote Republican in the last election.

I’m struck by an observation Reese makes about the root of Catholics’ refusal to listen to the bishops on this and other issues. He states:

I think part of the problem is that the bishops stopped listening and teaching and started ordering and condemning. With an educated laity it no longer works to simply say, "it is the teaching of the church." This is the equivalent of a parent shouting, "Because I said so."

The bishops must persuade and convince with arguments not by turning up the volume. When they resort to commanding and threatening punishments, people are turned off. Banning speakers, denying Communion, silencing theologians is a sign of weakness not strength. Censorship and violations of academic freedom come across as admissions that their arguments are not convincing and therefore the opposition must be silenced.

This observation dovetails (in my mind, at least) with something Douglas Kmiec says in a statement this week at America re: the open seat that David Souter is now leaving on the Supreme Court (here). Kmiec’s statement is entitled “The Case for Empathy.” Kmiec, readers may remember, is a Pepperdine University law professor who was a legal counsel for both Reagan and George H.W. Bush, but who broke with the Republican party in the last election to support Obama (here).

Kmiec makes a strong case for the appointment of a new Supreme Court justice who brings empathy to the court’s deliberations. I’m especially taken with his conclusion:

Empathy yields one additional lesson: law is no substitute for love. Yes, it is wrong when the Court usurps legislative function or when it disregards the structure of the Constitution that reserves appropriate questions to the states. Yet it is empathy that gives insight into where exactly no government—federal or state—should be involved. In times past, it may have been possible to count upon church or competing private institutions to maintain this boundary between what is public and what is private, but these independent sources of moral formation have also come to overly rely on the crutch of law’s coercion.

In the end, however, coerced morality is without meaning or lasting effect. In the words emblazed upon the New Hampshire license plate that will likely soon again adorn David Souter’s car, we are to “live free or die.” A judge with an empathetic understanding of the Constitution would grasp all that means.

Law is no substitute for love, and coerced morality is without meaning or lasting effect. If only the bishops who continue to try to hold the Catholic church in the U.S. hostage to the Republican party—and to its most rabid right wing, at that—could hear these wise, simple points. Really hear them.

People aren’t listening, because you can’t make them listen. Pastoral leadership is not about forcing people to adhere to what you dictate. It’s about leading, about pointing the way and helping others walk along that way.

The bishops’ coercive, dictatorial approach to the issue of abortion (and, since they have chosen to hinge everything on this, to the question of what it means to be a Catholic in the public sphere today) is an utter failure because this approach assumes that one can establish moral consensus by fiat.

Creating moral consensus by fiat always fails, and has to fail, because this approach treats human beings as objects in an area of life in which objectification is impossible. If morality means anything, it means that we human beings are moral agents and not automatons, persons endowed with mental ability to sort out questions of value, and with consciences to make judgments about issues involving values.

The morality-by-fiat approach undercuts what morality is all about, at its most fundamental level. One establishes moral consensus first and foremost by engaging in moral reasoning and deliberations of conscience with others. One does not establish moral consensus by standing at the head of the queue and commanding everyone else in the queue to line up behind you and do as you do.

For decades now, a large number of the American bishops have refused 1) to talk with their flocks and the public at large about moral issues, 2) to discuss burning moral issues in all their complexity, with respect for their nuances and for the conflicting data that make it difficult to arrive at clear moral judgments about these issues, 3) to permit those called by the Spirit and prepared by professional training—namely, theologians—to assist in building consensus about difficult moral issues to pursue their vocations, and 4) to face honestly and openly the numerous ways in which their own egregious moral lapses (especially in the crisis of clerical sexual abuse of children) undermine their ability to address moral issues compellingly.

As many bishops have engaged in all these refusals—which are, at a very fundamental level, betrayals of their vocations as pastors—they have simply commanded. They have sought to browbeat people into thinking and doing what is right—or what the bishops believe to be right.

And they have sought to extend that imperious, coercive approach to the public at large. One of the most curious statements Mary Ann Glendon makes in her recent letter (here) explaining why she is opting out of the Notre Dame commencement ceremony at which President Obama will be honored is this: she notes that Notre Dame has contravened a 2004 request of the U.S. Catholic bishops that Catholic institutions “should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles.”

Those who act in defiance: that is a telling phrase, and it is telling that Mary Ann Glendon chooses to quote it here. To me, it says a great deal about what is wrong with the morality-by-fiat approach of the bishops, and why that approach has failed so dismally.

On what grounds can one justly claim that a president who is not even Catholic has “defied” Catholic moral principles? The word “defy” is a loaded word. It implies that those who are defiant are choosing deliberately to act against regulations or principles imposed on them by some authority.

By what right, I wonder, do the American Catholic bishops claim such sway in the public sphere that they believe they can demand that a political leader who is not of their faith, whose moral outlook may well not reflect in every particular the principles or prudential judgments they want to impose on their flocks, should bow to their commands? This is undisguised theocracy, and I’m glad that Mary Ann Glendon lets us know that this is what the battle has been all about, all along.

At least now we know what we are dealing with: anyone who disagrees with not only the principles but even with the prudential judgments of the bishops—including non-Catholics—is defying them in doing so. The path to moral consensus is fiat, and when the attempt to dictate morality fails, force should be the next step.

This is a shoddy way to bring people to moral consensus. It is not working. It cannot work. The Catholic church in the U.S. is bleeding members today at such a rapid rate—particularly among the young (here)—because commanding people to do right, and then trying to force them to do right when they do not obey, does not lead to moral behavior: it leads to rejection of those who try to rule by fiat.

And who do not lead by example as they try to command: for instance, I am totally unpersuaded by the recent claim of Bishop Thomas Wenski of Orlando that his Mass of Reparation earlier in the week was a non-confrontational, apolitical act (here). I am not persuaded because Bishop Wenski has a history of making public statements—in the secular media—that are overt political statements and attempts to strong-arm Catholics in central Florida to vote Republican.

During the last election, he published a statement in a local paper (here) calling on Catholics in his diocese to continue the culture war against their gay brothers and sisters—a theme dear to the heart of the party for whom Bishop Wenski is clearly shilling with his “reparation” Mass and other public statements (here).

And once his side had lost, Bishop Wenski did not give up the battle, but continued publishing overtly political statements in the local secular media. Following Obama’s election, Wenski wrote another op-ed piece in a local paper which, under the guise of congratulating the new president, raked him over the coals regarding a Freedom of Choice Act that has never, in fact, even been on the table (here and here). Drumbeats for the faithful—beats on a war drum—to assure that Catholics in his area will continue to vote “right,” just as the Mass of Reparation this week clearly was . . . .

(The good bishop seems to have a little bee in his bonnet when it comes to gay people, by the way. The anti-abortion screed to which I’ve just linked contains a nasty little dig about gay rights and gay marriage, as did Wenski’s sermon at the Mass of Reparation, which was, again, ostensibly all about abortion, but managed to praise [here] the “courage” of the “convictions” of a beauty queen from California—that is, Carrie Prejean, the new darling of the religious right on the issue of gay marriage.)

With this level of “moral” discourse, and when the teaching of bishops is so clearly captive to one party and its economic movers and shakers, is it any wonder that people are no longer listening?

And when a bishop—in this case, Peter Jugis of Charlotte—does this (here) within days after a prominent member of his flock, Virginia Foxx, has characterized the claim that a young gay man was brutally murdered because he was gay as a hoax? Bishops standing against a bill to outlaw bullying of children on grounds of sexual orientation in North Carolina schools?

It boggles the mind. With such shepherds, is it any wonder that the sheep are no longer walking meekly behind?

An Open Letter to Virginia Foxx: Please Apologize for Denigrating Our Shared Faith

To build on what I posted yesterday about North Carolina Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (here): as my posting notes, on the House floor, with Matthew Shepard’s mother sitting across from her, this Catholic mother and grandmother stated that the claim that Matthew Shepard was murdered because he was gay is a hoax.

I wonder if Congresswoman Foxx has forgotten the circumstances of Matthew Shepard’s murder, how he was brutally pistol whipped, his facial bones cracked and his skull crushed, and then left to die hanging on a fence in the Wyoming countryside. It strikes me as strange that a woman serving in the United States Congress would not have read the abundant clear statements—including the testimony of Matthew Shepard’s murderers!—proving that Matthew Shepard was murdered in this atrocious way because he was gay.

I wonder, as well, how any mother and grandmother can be so conspicuously cruel in the face of the murder of someone else’s children—let alone a Catholic mother and grandmother who claims to value human life from the cradle to the grave.

For her statement on the House floor yesterday, Keith Olbermann awarded Virginia Foxx his Worst Person in the World award yesterday (here). An excerpt from his remarks:

There is no excuse for Congresswoman Foxx’s remarks. She is at best callous, insensitive, criminally misinformed. At worst she is a bald-faced liar, and if there is a spark of a human being in there somewhere, she should either immediately retract and apologize for her stupid and hurtful words, or she should resign her seat in the House. She is not worthy to represent this country nor any of its parties nor any of its peoples. She is our shame. And adding to our shame, she said all that as Matthew Shepard’s mother sat in the House gallery.

Is it fair to point to Virginia Foxx’s religious beliefs in a critique of her statement about Matthew Shepard’s murder? I think so.

Foxx herself has made a great deal of her Catholicism as the basis for her political viewpoints (though, in her heavily Baptist district of wester North Carolina, she has the reputation of being Baptist in North Carolina and Catholic in D.C.). Websites like One Nation Under God ("Proudly Bringing Faith Into the Public Square") tout Foxx’s Catholic identity and Catholic stands (here).

And Foxx has taken it on herself to lambast another Catholic member of the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for (as Foxx believes) betraying authentic Catholic values. Last August, Foxx was one of several Catholic members of Congress who sent Nancy Pelosi a letter (here and here) stating,

On the Sunday, August 24th, broadcast of NBC’s Meet the Press, you stated “as an ardent, practicing Catholic, [abortion] is an issue that I have studied for a long time.” As fellow Catholics and legislators, we wish you would have made a more honest effort to lay out the authentic position of the Church on this core moral issue before attempting to address it with authority.

Foxx et al. upbraid Speaker Pelosi for “mangling” Catholic doctrine, and announce that they are compelled to refute Pelosi’s “error.” They note Catholic teaching that all human life is sacred from cradle to grave:

In the interview, Tom Brokaw reminded you that the Church professes the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death. As stated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “Since it must be treated from conception as a person, the embryo must be defended in its integrity, cared for, and healed, as far as possible, like any other human being” (2274).

Foxx informs Speaker Pelosi that her “erroneous claim” about Catholic teaching on abortion “denigrates our common Faith.” She and her cohorts call on Speaker Pelosi to address the scandal they believed her to have caused, to correct her errors, and to apologize for misrepresenting church teaching and misleading fellow Catholics:

To reduce the scandal and consternation caused amongst the faithful by your remarks, we necessarily write you to correct the public record and affirm the Church’s actual and historical teaching that defends the sanctity of human life. We hope that you will rectify your errant claims and apologize for misrepresenting the Church’s doctrine and misleading fellow Catholics.

And since Virginia Foxx appears to think it important that Catholics correct other Catholics who misrepresent Catholic teaching and values in the public square, I’d like to apply the preceding observations to Foxx herself in the following open letter to Congresswoman Virginia Foxx:

Ms. Foxx: you are absolutely correct when you note that Catholic teaching emphasizes the sanctity of human life—all human life—from conception to death. This means, of course, that the Matthew Shepards of the world have sacred worth: those children and grandchildren of someone else, about whose murder you can speak so callously, have sacred value. They are of inestimable worth in the eyes of God.

As with any murder, their murders cry out to God, who calls on us to build a world in which the sacred worth of every individual can be respected. In either lying about or unintentionally distorting what happened with the murder of this child of God, you have caused me and other Catholics “scandal and consternation.”

Will you please now “correct the public record” and “affirm the Church’s actual and historical teaching” about the sacred worth of every human being—yes, including gay and lesbian human beings? Will you also please “apologize for misrepresenting the Church’s doctrine and misleading fellow Catholics” in what you said on the House floor yesterday?

Please do not claim to have been misinterpreted or to have misstated your point. You have represented yourself as an exemplar of Catholic values and Catholic truth. What you said yesterday on the House floor “denigrates our common faith.” I am asking you specifically to address your betrayal of authentic Catholic teaching about the sanctity of all human life, in your remarks about Matthew Shepard’s murder.

Thank you for listening to my appeal to you as a fellow Catholic interested in what Catholics have to contribute to the public square. I feel sure that your financial backers with business connections—e.g., representatives of Anheuser-Busch brewing company (here)—some of whom are also fellow Catholics, will be happy to have you correct your misrepresentation of Catholic teaching and apologize for the scandal and confusion your remarks have caused.

Virginia Foxx as a Representative of Catholic Values: Porcine Moral Reasoning

In a posting several days ago (here), I noted that when I look at the gap between what George W. Bush did in setting a system of torture in place, and what the United Methodist Church teaches about issues of justice and peace, I am deeply troubled. I also noted the discrepancy between what the United Methodist Church teaches about homophobia and heterosexism, and the behavior of some of its own institutions and members.

I ended that posting by noting that as I call on my Methodist brothers and sisters to hold their co-religionists accountable for the gap between their rhetoric and the reality of many Methodist lives, I also pledge myself to hold my Catholic brothers and sisters similarly accountable.

This posting is about Catholic accountability. Today on the floor of the U.S. House, North Carolina Representative Virginia Foxx, a Catholic, stated that the claim that Matthew Shepard was killed because he was gay is a "hoax" (here).

Catholic mother and grandmother Virginia Foxx made this statement while Matthew Shepard's mother sat in the House gallery listening. As Michael Rowe notes in the Huffington Post article to which I have just linked,

I'd like to imagine the feelings of Judy Shepard as the hate crimes bill named after her murdered son passed the House in the presence of the woman whose contribution to the passage of that law was to attempt to besmirch his memory with ugly distortions.

But judging by Congresswoman Foxx's preposterous comments earlier in the day, I doubt she felt much besides a peevish sense that her side lost one more battle in what they like to call "the culture war." I rather suspect that calling bigotry and hate by their proper names is still news in Mrs. Foxx's private, personal, dark corner of North Carolina, where it's clearly still a cold October night in Laramie in 1998.

Virginia Foxx exemplifies what the American Catholic tradition has become in its most "morally porcine" variants, to use another of Rowe's phrases: willing to lie in order to defend "moral" points; eager to defend hate and violence when these are practiced against our "enemies"; and gleefully capable of claiming to defend family values while attacking someone else's children, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles.

It matters to me that Virginia Foxx is Catholic, and, as a Catholic, is capable of making such an atrociously false and morally obtuse statement about Matthew Shepard's murder. It matters even more that she defends hate while claiming to represent my religious community and its values. In just about every way I can think of, Virginia Foxx's consistent defense of big business and militarism, and her attacks on gay and lesbian persons, represent the antithesis of authentic Catholic values.