Questions of Religious Authority in Catholicism Today: Wild Reed and Queering the Church

Finally, today, I want to note discussions on two of my favorite blogs, Wild Reed and Queering the Church, to which I have been meaning to draw attention for some time. These discussions of scripture and tradition, and the role of binding religious teachings and religious authority in establishing the meaning of scripture and tradition within Catholicism, link to discussions of these same issues on Bilgrimage.

I haven’t blogged about these discussions at Wild Reed and Queering the Church, since the thread of interconnecting postings at these two blogs that I want to recommend now began while I was out of the country. Though I contributed to the discussions as much as I was able while I was traveling, my lack of constant access to the internet (and time to think and write) as I traveled prevented me from posting about these discussions.

Now I’d like to do so—to draw attention to both blogs and this interconnecting thread as a treasure trove of information and insights about the role of the magisterium in Catholicism today, and how different believers view that role. The comments sections of these postings contain lively debate, to which I want to draw readers’ notice. It was in some of those sections that I was able to contribute to the discussion while traveling.

The postings I want to recommend are Michael Bayly’s “Catholic Challenge” and “Treasure and Dross” at Wild Reed, and Terry Weldon’s “Magisterium and Me” and “Magisterium and Scripture” at Queering the Church. These postings are treasure troves of information about questions of authoritative teaching in the Catholic church, as well as snapshots for how different groups of Catholics today appropriate and understand religious authority.

"Charity in Truth": Some Preliminary Reflections on Benedict's Encyclical

In case readers are wondering, I’m not ignoring the pope’s recent encyclical Caritas in veritate. I was out of the country when it came out, and without a reliable internet connection as I traveled.

So I didn’t begin reading it in earnest until my return to the U.S. last week, when I was able to download a copy of it. Since I happened to be in Germany at the time, I did read interesting summaries and analysis of it in the German press when it appeared, summaries far more intellectually challenging than anything I have yet to read in the American press.

I should be perfectly honest and state from the outset—as a preface to anything I might later write about the encyclical—that encyclicals just don’t do it for me. I read them; I study them and have taught them. I value what they have to say, within certain limits that have everything to do with the historical conditioning of any church document.

Like many American theologians, I have wondered about the obliviousness of most American Catholics to the venerable social teaching of the Catholic church, as this has been articulated in encyclicals and pastoral letters. I have been amazed, in particular, by the refusal of those American Catholics who have set themselves up as the chief guardians of orthodoxy in recent decades to listen to this social teaching, at the same time that they loudly profess themselves to be more Catholic and more Roman than the rest of us.

But encyclicals just don’t do it for me. If I’m seeking spiritual enrichment—and I often am, when I turn to a theological text, more than I’m seeking intellectual stimulation—I’d far rather read Meister Eckhart or Teresa of Avila, Johann Baptist Metz or John Dominic Crossan, or for that matter, Audre Lorde or Mary Oliver. And the gospels.

Encyclicals don’t convey transformative truth to me, and that’s the kind of truth I hunger for when I read theological or spiritual texts (or politically transformative ones or soul-changing literary works). And that presents something of a problem for anyone reading a text that calls itself “Charity in Truth,” with its many self-conscious echoes of John Paul II’s encyclical “Splendor of Truth.”

I’m finding Caritas in veritate particularly hard slogging, because the text is, frankly, such a mess. It’s a compendium of just about every theological aperçu Benedict has had, in a long, distinguished career as a theologian and Vatican official. As a compendium, it never moves in a straight, clean line, but moves in circles, back and forth, engaging over and over some of the movements and tendencies in church and society that have preoccupied Benedict for decades now.

It’s a rough beast slouching somewhere to be born, then—and I do not intend to belittle the document in making that observation, but to note the hermeneutical problems that anyone who tries to take the document seriously will encounter from the outset, if she or he reads it with due attention, particularly to the manifold context(s) it’s seeking to engage.

It’s a valuable document, because it sets the record straight about an issue that many American Catholics (and the mainstream American media) simply refused to face during the pontificate of John Paul II: this is the critique of unbridled capitalism that runs very strongly through the thinking of John Paul II and his successor. It is simplistic and dishonest to reduce the work of these complex thinkers to a single anti-modern, anti-communist reflex. The American media sought consistently to do that with John Paul, and got away with it, because the text of the pope’s defeat of communism which dominated American media discourse about John Paul II, a text that consciously and deliberately obliterates his critique of capitalism, outshone any other aspect of his papal reign.

With Benedict, it’s going to be harder to ignore the critique of unbridled capitalism, for a variety of reasons. One is historical: the neo-conservative moment has been eclipsed by something else now struggling to be born in Western history, something rightly critical of the excesses of a “conservatism” that was not ever conservative at all, but which basked in warm, fuzzy, hypnotic and totally false nostalgia while it enabled one of the most a-traditional, anti-conservative periods of ruthless economic rapacity in world history.

Another reason I think Benedict’s critique of unbridled capitalism will receive more of a hearing than John Paul II’s similar critique did is that Benedict has, unfortunately, failed to dazzle people either inside or outside the church, as the charismatic John Paul II dazzled. And that lack of dazzle may well work to Benedict’s advantage, when it comes to this encyclical.

Let’s face it: there hasn’t been much of a narrative line to Benedict’s papacy, thus far, other than one of constant resistance to this and that. Fairly or unfairly, the media have been adroit about depicting Benedict as a constant naysayer, and, for whatever reason, he and the coterie of Vatican advisors with whom he’s chosen to surround himself have not been conspicuously successful at countering that media narrative. Indeed, they’ve acted again and again in ways that lend credence to this simplistic narrative.

So when Benedict does say something that’s not merely no and again no, and when he says it substantively and brilliantly, I believe people are inclined to listen. They want to find some hook on which to hang this papacy, which otherwise has the feel of an interim papacy everyone's merely enduring until a dazzling successor to John Paul II comes along. I suspect that Caritas in veritate may well turn out to be that hook, the defining moment of Benedict’s papacy.

One other very surface, top-of-the-head impression—and I reserve the right to change my mind about this as I read further in the text: it strikes me that Benedict’s choice to focus on the theme of love in truth is an indirect but quite deliberate attempt to correct an impulse in the church that he himself played a huge role in setting into motion. This is the impulse represented by John Paul II’s Veritatis splendor —or, more precisely, by how “Splendor of Truth” came to be used and read in many Catholic circles, notably in the United States.

I remember when Veritatis splendor came out. I remember the effect it had on the life of the church, in theological circles, on my own life. I have blogged about that. As I noted in a previous posting about this topic, in the latter part of the 1980s, I was asked by a graduate program in lay ministry at a Catholic university to write a textbook in ethics for this program.

The program was the Institute for Ministry at my alma mater, Loyola of New Orleans. I wrote an introduction to Catholic ethical theory for this program in the late 1980s, and when it was finished, was told by LIM’s director that he had sent it to bishops across the nation, and had gotten glowing reports about it back from almost all dioceses.

When Veritatis splendor came out, however, this introduction to Catholic ethics, which had just been reviewed by bishops across the nation and found to be solid and orthodox, suddenly became problematic. I was asked to re-write the text, incorporating huge chunks of Veritatis splendor as much as possible.

I did so. I labored hard on the revision. This request came just after a Catholic college in North Carolina has just given me a one-year terminal contract, while refusing to disclose why I was being given a terminal contract after I had just had an extremely positive annual evaluation. When that college's leaders lied to me after I appealed for the reason for my terminal contract and when the abbot of the monastery that owned the college colluded in the stone-walling, I resigned.

So I needed the money I would make by revising this ethics text, frankly. And I needed even more desperately some assurance that I still had a place somewhere in the church, that my vocation as a theologian still counted for somebody somewhere in the Catholic church.

The experience of receiving the terminal contract just as Veritatis splendor was coming down the pike, and of being asked to revise an introduction to ethics that I had written only a few years ago, because it was suddenly problematic in light of Veritatis splendor, was a watershed experience for me as a theologian. In fact, after these experiences, I never again found any place at all in the Catholic church to follow my vocation as a theologian. Nor did Steve.

One door after another began to shut—to slam—in our faces, and we found ourselves on the outside looking in, first as theologians and then as Catholics. Loyola's Institute for Ministry chose not to hire me to teach in its program any longer, though I had previously been an academic advisor to the program, had written one of its textbooks, and, exceedingly hurtful, was an alumnus of Loyola.

The message that Steve and I began receiving persistently from every Catholic institution with which we came into contact at this moment of our vocational lives, the message that we were not welcome anywhere, had everything in the world to do with Veritatis splendor, and with its rubric of truth.

Truth as weapon. Truth as a sword to cleave the faithful from the unfaithful, to drive the unwashed and impure out of the community of the washed and pure. Whatever John Paul II (and Ratzinger) intended with this encyclical, the practical effect for many Catholics—for many Catholic theologians, particularly those writing about ethical issues—was devastating. This encyclical was used as a blunt instrument to bludgeon people into submission, and if we failed to submit, to drive us out of communion.

I did revise my ethics text, but it appeared that even my alma mater now found my work as a theologian—my Catholicity itself—lacking. To the best of my knowledge, the revised text was ditched and not used in the program after I labored hard to produce it. As I labored for months at the revisions, I found that one chapter alone, the chapter on sexual ethics, was suddenly problematic above all—an ironic finding, when I had been assured only four or five years ago that the text had passed the muster of almost all bishops in the country, as a sound and faithful introduction to Catholic ethics.

And the sticking point now, with the promulgation of Veritatis splendor was, above all, the question of homosexuality. I revised. I labored. I dumped huge sections of Veritatis splendor into the revised text. But nothing sufficed. Though I had written the previous text as theologians normally write texts nowadays, depending on the community of my peers to help me evaluate and critique the text, this time around, I was appointed a censor, a Jesuit whose field was not even moral theology.

Every chapter in my revised text pleased him, except the chapter on sexual morality—and the section of that chapter that could not receive his imprimatur was the chapter on homosexuality. Every time I tried to produce a revision to this chapter that sought to hold in tension the venerable Catholic teaching about the primacy of conscience and the magisterium’s condemnation of homosexual acts, I received page after page of single-spaced notes that essentially commanded me to do what in conscience I could not do: write a chapter which told students the Catholic church condemns homosexuality, and leave it at that. No nonsense about conscience, and no hermeneutical questions about the scriptures that forbid homosexuality.

The point I want to make with this story is simple: John Paul II’s teaching about truth, behind which Ratzinger stood always in the background, has translated, in American Catholicism, into something that is not adequately Catholic. It has translated into witch hunts and the reduction of a fine, complex, ancient tradition, particularly in the area of ethics, into an anti-intellectual set of formulas that are used not to provoke thought or to invite discourse designed to help us fathom and internalize the tradition. These simplistic, anti-intellectual formulas are not intended to help us immerse ourselves in the transformative Truth Who is God. They are intended to separate the saved from the unsaved.

The truth we’ve ended up with is not transformative at all. It’s nothing like the biblical notion of truth—of God as the ultimate truth, Whom we must encounter in transformative love, and with Whom we must grapple in the darkness of faith. It has no adequately Catholic sense that religious truth operates on a complex variety of levels, and that not every formula is equally central to the life of faith. It completely overlooks the hierarchy of truths, placing all "truths" in the church at the same level, trying to impose all of them on everyone, as if all are revealed, infallible truth necessary for salvation.

The notion of truth that has come to prevail in American Catholicism following Spendor veritatis is formulaic, simplistic, catechetical in the worst, most mindless, sense of that term. It convinces no one. It cannot convince, because it is not designed, as religious truth must be, to reach the heart. It betrays the tradition. It is a weapon used to make the church less, rather than more, catholic.

And I believe Benedict now sees this, and wants to address what happened when he and John Paul II put that particular weapon into the hands of uneducated bishops and layfolks who welcomed the weapon to mount a vicious purge in the church, a purge all about trying to force everyone possible to dance to their political and ideological tunes. I think the pope is now trying to reconnect what ought never to have been separated, if we want to call ourselves Catholic and orthodox: love and truth.

And I suspect that this move comes too late, for many of us . . . .

The Rock from Which We Are Hewn: Remembering in the New Year

And one final reflection—again, one arising out of my experience of a restless, dreamy night with last night’s full moon. As I tossed and turned, I thought of a new year’s reflection written over a century ago on new year’s eve, several nights past the full moon as 1889 turned into 1890.

The author of this reflection, Dr. Wilson R. Bachelor, was a brother of my great-great grandfather. I have come to know this figure from the past rather well, because I have a copy of a diary he kept from the time his family moved from Tennessee to Arkansas in 1870, up to his death in 1903. I also have copies of a scrapbook Wilson Bachelor kept for many years, into which he pasted both handwritten and published essays of his, along with news items, journal articles about world religions and medical issues, and so forth. And I have a number of letters he wrote to members of my family over the years.

From these and other sources, I have come to know this man as an interesting philosopher of the American frontier. He settled on what was still the rather wild western frontier of Arkansas when he moved his family here in 1870. His homeplace near the town of Ozark was not far south of Fort Smith, Arkansas’s gateway city to the wild west.

I imagine that he chose that part of the state because he was an ardent Republican who had been a Unionist in the Civil War. Though he lived in Hardin County in West Tennessee—a slaveholding part of the state that tended to the Confederate side—he took the side of the North and exiled himself and his family to Kentucky for part of the war, to protect the family from reprisals from neighbors of the other side. Following the war, the federal government made him physician in charge of the building of the national cemetery at Pittsburg Landing, near which he lived.

Dr. Bachelor’s diary is full of plaintive passages he wrote on cold winter days, when he sat alone in his study, longing for conversation with someone, anyone, about the topics that interested him: Shakespeare; Victor Hugo; Dickens; the scriptures of the world religions; the relationship between science and religion; free thought, with the questions that committed agnosticism raised about religion as a foundation for morality. He was one of those staunch late-19th century true believers in science. In his view, the hardshell fundamentalist religion he saw all around him on the frontier was impossible to swallow when one took its retrogressive views about science into consideration.

Wilson Bachelor’s rejection of the religious options of his time and place led him to be a religious seeker. His diary and scrapbook suggest that he read with surprising avidity and range in the holy books of the world religions. He appreciated their witness—their witness to values he held dear, such as truth, justice, and mercy. One of his diary entries notes with pleasure that he and his sole intellectual companion in the wilderness, a Dr. Graham for whom he named a daughter Pauline Graham Bachelor, had gone to Fort Smith to attend a Catholic liturgy. Both men appreciated the poetry and music of the Mass, though neither could accept the doctrines of Catholicism. Music was Dr. Bachelor's life blood. His diary is full of notes about evenings of music in which his children, most of whom played multiple instruments, and he sang and played music into the night.

Dr. Bachelor ended up a religious skeptic, someone who decided that it was impossible for human beings to know the ultimate truths many religions claimed to convey to their adherents. While he continued to value the religions of the world and their holy books for their moral witness, he publicly espoused free thought. And he found himself censured in his community for doing so.

The following essay is one he had published in some unknown newspaper as 1890 began, and clipped and saved in his scrapbook. It illustrates very well his belief that one can be a religious skeptic and remain a morally engaged human being. He entitled the piece “Come and Gone”:

The Old Year is passing away. The moon that has shined beautifully for several nights is now (midnight) obscured with wintry clouds. Everything looks sombre and sad. Perhaps it is as it should be, a fitting representation of the death of the Old Year.

My reflections are in keeping with the scene. I see a vast concourse of peoples of all ages from the smiling babe to the bent form of old age. The millionaire, the beggar, the dainty queen of wealth and beauty, the factory girl with hands hardened with toil. This procession, the Niagara of humanity, is moving on to the Silent Ocean of the future.

Brothers, sisters, we are not permitted to stand and gaze on the passing caravan. We are now already in the column. All going one way. We look behind us, still they come. We look before us, they disappear into the Ocean of Eternity. We will soon be there. The Buddhists say those who die are incarnated and live again in other bodies. The Christians say the good live in a celestial paradise, and the bad in darkness and despair. The Agnostic tells us he don’t know. But there is one thing we do know; we know we are now living.

Then with the New Year let us commence anew. Let us be better men and women than ever before. Let us work for right—and join hands in charity with everyone that loves and suffers. If we don’t all believe alike, let it not prevent us from doing our duty to our fellow man. Then with a determination to devote our lives to Justice, Kindness and Mercy, we welcome the New Year 1890.

Though I haven't ended up in the same religious and philosophical position in which this relative from the past ended, I do take his point about religion. As the hounding of Roger Haight becaused of his christology that seeks point of contact with other world religions suggests, religion is capable of a hardening of boundaries that closes us off to the witness of religious traditions other than our own. And that closing off does not strengthen our moral commitments. Rather, it undermines those commitments.

So as the new year gets underway, I listen with a certain sympathy to the new year's thoughts of a relative of mine from the past, who also spent nights looking at the full moon. And thinking about God. And about justice, kindess, and mercy, and the claims those virtues make on our lives, regardless of what, of if, we believe.

Approaching Holy Stories: The Harlequin and the Burning Nandina

Steve tells me that I talk in my sleep. He goes to sleep hours after I do most nights. As a result, he gets to hear me babble one nonsense question after another, issue imperatives in fluent gibberish that seem to have shreds of sense about them, but which fracture the logic of our everyday lives.

I have no idea what I’ve said to him until the next morning, when he reports the utterances to me. He has to write them down to remember them. Last night, though, I had the rare experience of actually hearing myself sleep-talk. We had gone to sleep with Flora, the mother corgi, between us, Valentine and Crispen, her half-corgi pups, in their usual spots at our feet. Flora is not a cuddler. She normally spends a few minutes with us and then heads for her pallet at the foot of the bed or on the footstool off the bed.

It’s a corgi thing, apparently. Her predecessor Braselton aka Brassie did the same. They’re sweet dogs (well, Brassie was peculiar though lovable), but not gushy with their affection. They want you to be clear about who is really doing whom a favor, in this symbiotic human-canine relationship.

For reasons unbeknownst to us, Flora decided to grace us with her presence into the night last night. Until the sleep-talking incident. Which went like this, as well as I can recall it:

Me: Steve. C. is next to me with his head raised, watching F. She’s on the pillow.

Steve: Nmmhn.

Me: Steve. Are you awake?

Steve: No. Are you?

And here’s the strange part. Though I “heard” that conversation clearly, and can remember it word for word, I wasn’t awake—not, that is, until Steve asked me if I were awake.

At which point I shot awake with a vengeance, puzzled that “I” could have been talking in my sleep, have been aware of doing so, have heard what I said—and still have been asleep. A disturbing recognition, since it undercuts our—my—pretensions to control, my oh-so-assured sense that there’s a me inside, who knows, chooses, acts. Who controls.

What awareness of dreaming does for us, I think, is show us that there are others inside us. Others who do the controlling. And who are beyond “our” control.

There’s that capering harlequin self who inducts us into dreamscapes. His job is to outwit us, to outwit the self that wants to maintain the illusion of control. She or he has to do that subversive thing when the controlling ego self goes to sleep, in order to get us to see what we actually saw in waking (in “real”) life, but whose significance we didn’t catch.

Dreams force us to take another look at what we see with our waking eyes, and yet don’t see enough. The way he twisted his ring as he assured me of his love for me. The frozen, disdainful way she held herself away from the table as she told us she values our work. The mottled snake skin that covered half of her face as she lied to me, her face turning yellow with envy under the mottled snake covering.

The sly, capering harlequin dream master inside all of us exposes us, whittles away our pretensions, whisks the covers away. And forces us to see. To become aware. To choose awareness over unawareness.

Dreams are, it seems to me, another form of awareness. One that moves at a tangent to “real”-life awareness. One that takes the same material we encounter and process in our everyday lives, but whose significance we don’t adequately sift while awake, since that material often comprises recognitions we do not wish to entertain, and which would disrupt our "normal" lives with their revelatory import, if we let them inside our minds as we go about our business.

And somewhere inside these recognitions is, it seems to me, a key that unlocks the significance of holy stories. Holy stories are far less like descriptions of the flat realities we encounter everyday, and far more like the dreamscape to which the harlequin leads us when our ego-minds switch off.

Holy stories do not describe what is scientifically true. The do not say what is factually verifiable. Instead, they subvert the assurances of our everyday perspectives on the world. They force us to recognize what is going on all around us, but what we refuse to see, because our ego selves want to remain encased in a hard shell of illusory control.

To the extent that we approach holy stories—and religion in general—with the presupposition that holy stories and religion are all about reinforcing our dominion over the world, we will be disappointed. To the extent that we expect holy stories to mirror our need for control, to make us comfortable in a world of which we fatuously imagine we are the master, we will find ourselves perplexed. We will remain an outsider to the real significance of holy stories and of faith.

To the extent that we are willing to slip, fall, slide down the tunnel of dream vision into a landscape simultaneously familiar and totally alien, where we exercise no mastery at all, we will begin to understand what holy stories are all about. The mind is a terrible thing to lose. But it’s only in losing it—in losing its pretensions to understand and control—that we will begin to approach the holy burning at the heart of the holy story. Which peeks out at us everywhere in daily life, but whose fiery presence in the nandina we cannot acknowledge until we let ego sleep, because, well, fire burns.

On Catechisms: Vs. Fundamentalist Attempts to Capture "the" Truth

A regular contributor to the National Catholic Reporter café blog has recently asked me to respond to questions about the Catholic catechism (see http://ncrcafe.org/node/2016 and http://ncrcafe.org/node/2040). I’ve been talking to this contributor for some time. After I published my posting entitled “Love. Period.” on this blog, and then uploaded it to the NCR café, this conversational partner mounted an attack on my reading of Catholic sexual ethics, and began to post pieces of his own defending what he regards as the only defensible Catholic approach to sexual ethics (see http://ncrcafe.org/node/1816 and http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/love-period.html).

Essentially, my dialogue partner continues to cite the catechism as if it is the final answer for things Catholic, the source for the Catholic truth. Thomas (the username of the person with whom I’ve been talking at the NCR blog) maintains that some acts are and will always be intrinsically evil.

He includes in that list homosexual acts, masturbation, and the use of artificial contraception—that is, any genital sexual act that is not open to the possibility of procreation. I have asked Thomas to reconsider his strong emphasis on intrinsically evil acts as the key to the moral life. In my reading of moral theology, an emphasis on acts alone cannot ever yield a complete picture of moral behavior. One must place an act within the context in which it occurs, and one must take into account the intention of the person(s) doing the act.

I think it is more productive to talk about moral norms that have to be applied in various situations, taking the intention of the one applying them into account, than to talk about acts in isolation from their situation and intention. I think it is very difficult to identify acts that are always, everywhere intrinsically evil—particularly in the realm of sexual morality.

I also find Thomas’s method of argumentation circular, and thus not convincing. When challenged to support his claim that some acts are always intrinsically evil, he states that the Catholic church defines some acts in this way, and so these acts must be intrinsically evil. When I ask him to explain how the church arrives at this position, to explain it to me in a way that shows me why rational people who apply their conscience to difficult moral situations should stop using reason and conscience and simply do as they are told by the church, Thomas points me to the catechism itself as “proof” that the church has spoken and the case is closed. In other words, he justifies the universal, unquestionable validity of what the church teaches by pointing to a summary of Catholic teaching produced by . . . well, the same institution whose word we’re supposed to accept without question in the first place.

Thomas is now asking me and other contributors to NCR discussions to respond to questions he’s raised about the Catholic catechism. I’ve been mulling over Thomas’s challenge to answer his questions about whether the rest of us read, know, use—and, implicitly, accept (no questions raised, no interpretation needed)—the catechism.

It’s impossible to answer Thomas’s questions in the limited space allotted on a public blog such as the NCR café site. There are many ramifications of Thomas’s questions that go beyond their seemingly benign surface, and a full response requires a comprehensive look at those ramifications, as well as a frank recognition that Thomas is asking these questions to entrap Catholics who do not toe his line, the line he identifies with “the” Catholic position on issues.

It’s important to provide a full answer to Thomas’s questions because, as with many Catholic political activists allied with the religious right today, Thomas wants to marginalize voices such as mine, which read the Catholic tradition differently than he does—or than he believes the catechism does. Thomas’s last response to a posting of mine implies, in fact, that I am not a Catholic.

It interests me that right-wing Catholics are choosing to use the catechism as a political weapon—as an answer book that contains all Catholic truth, which can then be used as a sword to divide the flock into true and false Catholics, for political reasons. I’m not surprised that this is going on. Right-wing political groups have laid the foundation for this use of the catechism in recent years by funding absurd Catholic answers websites and Catholic answers journals, as well as Catholic voter guides, all of which hammer the rich tradition of Catholic theology, belief, and thought into tiny, rigid “answers” that support the political outlook of neo-conservative activists.

The more this method of corralling the Catholic vote and assuring that it is predictably Republican falters—and there are some strong indicators that it is not working so well in this election cycle as it has done in recent ones—the more adamant and angry those promoting the Catholic answers approach become. The fascist tendency that runs always just beneath the surface of Catholicism is very evident in their use of the catechism today. As they sense that they cannot any longer command all Catholics to toe their political line, they step up the insistence on the catechism as the ultimate arbiter of Catholic truth (indeed, of all truth everywhere). These right-wing Catholic activists demand that those who do not accept catechetical teachings in the most literal and fundamentalist way possible should absent themselves from the church and renounce the name Catholic.

Unfortunately, this attempt to divide the sheep from the goats prior to the eschatological judgment is not receiving the strongest possible reception in Rome itself. The last election was a kind of dark kairotic moment for the American Catholic church, in which some bishops (notably in Charlotte, South Carolina, Atlanta, St. Louis, and Omaha) used the Eucharist as a political weapon to try to bully their flocks into voting Republican.

These bishops called for turning away from the Eucharistic table any politician who supports abortion (see http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_36_40/ai_n9778533). In one case in South Carolina, a lay member of a parish who approached the communion rail wearing a Kerry button was denied communion.

This repugnant political use of the central Catholic sacrament rightly outraged many Catholics, including some bishops. Recently, when he met with a group of priests during his vacation, Pope Benedict told his brother priests that he had been more severe in the past, but that he now sees that the pastoral way of approaching the Eucharist is to invite anyone to partake of it in whom there is even the tiniest spark of faith (www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=8442). Prior to being made pope, Benedict (as Cardinal Ratzinger) gave communion even to non-Catholics, including the head of the Taizé movement (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_41_41/ai_n16100686).

This is the authentic catholic tradition. This is catholicism at its best. At its best, when it is true to what the word “catholic” actually means, catholicism invites everyone to the table, excludes no one, recognizing that the Lord who sets the table is the sole judge of the hearts of those who come, and honoring the Lord’s invitation of all sinners. This authentic way of being Catholic is, unfortunately, a way of being Catholic that infuriates those who want the church to use its sacraments and its teachings—above all, the catechism—as political weapons to whip dissenters into shape and to assure that voters choose the one political option they believe is justifiably Catholic.

As I’ve thought about what I’d like to say to Thomas in response to his questions about the catechism, I’ve been thinking about why I so radically depart from his reading of the tradition and of the catechism. I’ve been thinking about why I simply cannot buy into the Catholic-answers approach to the catechism, the use of the catechism as a tool to bludgeon dissenters over the head with, or as a sword to divide the flock into a tiny cadre of true believers and all the rest of us, the vast majority, sinful slobs who just can’t cut muster.

To be specific, I’ve been thinking about wisdom—or, perhaps better, Wisdom. There’s a venerable tradition in Judaism and Christianity that sees the entire spiritual life as a journey towards Sophia, Wisdom. There’s a whole genre of literature within the Jewish scriptures (and strands of it run through the Christians scriptures as well) describing how one sets out on the path to Sophia (and yes, Sophia is a female name, and there are longstanding currents in scripture and Christian tradition equating Her with the Holy Spirit).

Ultimately, I reject the way Thomas and other right-wing Catholics are trying to use the catechism for political reasons today, because it is not wise (in my view). This use of the catechism does not place us on the path to Wisdom. It does not do so for the following reasons:

• It is never wise to limit truth to a single source.

• It is never wise to assume truth can be locked into a book, any book.

• Truth is never like a set of answers—a set of things—to be pulled out of a bag we alone own, and produced as if on cue when it’s demanded.

• It is never wise to assume that one’s own understanding of truth is The Truth.

• It is never wise to believe that we can control and manipulate truth.

• Truth is not like that: it has the upper hand, if it’s truth.

• We know when we have met truth, because it overwhelms us: it moves us; it shatters us; it points us to revision of how we see things, and to transformation of our lives.

• Truth speaks from many different mouths, in many different voices.

• Because truth speaks with many mouths and in many voices, what it has to say can never be packaged into a single, univocal package.

• Those who hear truth hear contradiction, tension, yin and yang, yes and no.

• Because truth points to mystery beyond our control, when we meet it, it invites us on a journey—on the path to Sophia/Wisdom.

• We lose our sense of balance, control, assured place, when we set out with truth on the path to Sophia.

• Truth controls us, not vice versa. This is why truth can never be shut up in a book that we own and use to our own ends.

• Truth is never complete in this life. No one possesses it utterly and completely.

• Truth is eschatological. It is a horizon. It is ahead of us, not behind us.

• Wisdom demands that we listen especially to the voices we (personally, in our social institutions, in our churches) exclude because we don’t want to hear the complacency-shattering truth they tell.

• Truth comes far more often from those at the bottom of the social order than those at the top; those at the top have a vested (and self-serving) interest in limiting what can be seen and in controlling “truth,” while those at the bottom see the wider picture, including inconvenient realities those at the top try to hide.

• Truth demands willingness to foster community, respect for complementarity, and respect for many different perspectives.

• Truth demands justice, the attempt to create a social order in which those whose voices are extinguished, silenced, muffled, distorted, finally have the chance to speak.

• Truth and justice point to a table at which every voice has a place. No one can have a voice without bread, work, the social place and social respect that having a job, access to healthcare, etc., provide.

Thomas, if you happen to read this posting, please let me know if I have answered your questions about the catechism to your satisfaction.

The Truth Thing: Religion, Politics, and Owning God's Word

Sometimes I have to go on a fast from religion. To save my soul.

More precisely, sometimes I have to get away from religionists in order to preserve my sanity and safeguard my ability to love. Which is what religion is supposed to be all about, isn’t it—practical compassion? And so isn’t it tragic in the extreme that encounters with religious people often result in the loss of our ability to love?

It’s not religion per se that’s the problem. And it’s not religious people who are the problem, in and of themselves. It’s many people who claim to be the purest and most faithful representatives of their religious tradition—the loyal defenders of its poor embattled honor—who chafe my heart and soul. God help me, but I just don’t see in many of these honor-upholding religionists the depth (and humanity) of authentic spirituality and religious observance.

They’re everywhere these days, such religionists. Back on 13 May I blogged about how they suddenly show up on the conversation café of the U.S. Catholic weekly National Catholic Reporter right before major elections. There, they appear in clusters, using the rating system to vote each others’ postings up, joining together to pick at tiny grains of “error” or “confusions” or “misstatements” in the postings of progressive café participants. These religionists clearly see themselves as on a mission to unmask error and impart the Truth.

They are linguistic police, intent on torturing language to make it yield what language cannot and will never yield: absolute truth. Dialogue is impossible with such watchdogs of orthodoxy, since they already have the truth. Since the process of dialogue is premised on the notion that no one owns truth, that we are all involved in a collective search for a truth that transcends each of us, dialogue is oxymoronic when anyone enters the conversation circle claiming to own the truth.

When it is clear to me that religionists are playing linguistic games to try to corner those engaged in authentic dialogical pursuit of the truth, I sometimes just bow out of the conversation. There’s no point wasting energy trying to play such games with people who are either insincere about their real motives or oblivious to those motives, when the pursuit of transformative truth is so critically important to our political process, our culture, and our churches right now.

I wonder about the psychology of these self-proclaimed owners of the Truth, of divine truth? I wonder what motivates an Iris Robinson, for instance, to attack gay human beings while claiming that her one and only motive is to defend the Word of God?

Robinson has been in the news lately for remarks she has made—as a Northern Irish MP and wife of the First Minister Peter Robinson—defending her belief that gays can be “cured” of their “affliction” through psychotherapy. When her statements were challenged, she did a Sally Kern and dug her heels in deeper, stating repeatedly (in a BBC interview I have just watched on the internet) that she is just repeating the Word of God, defending the Word of God, transmitting the Word of God to those of us who don’t have it.

To be specific: the Word of God she is now transmitting is that, like murderers, gay people can be redeemed by the blood of Jesus. If the poor things want to. If they only acknowledge that they are in the same category as murderers, and admit their need to be washed by the blood of Jesus and freed of their heinous sin.

What strikes me about the Iris Robinsons of the world (and my right-wing political activist co-religionists at the NCR café) is their astonishing assurance that God speaks to them. Directly. Their breathtaking certainty that they have God’s word. And that they can impart it to the rest of us. That they have a divine mission to inform us of the error of our ways and lead us to the Truth (their truth), so that we may be redeemed, as they are redeemed.

Frankly, though these folks use the phrase Word of God so glibly, it’s hard for me to fit God into the equation here. And though they talk so freely about the Truth, it’s hard for me to find much truth—in the transformative sense that religious truth is all about—in their cut-and-dried utterances about what God wants for others.

Never mind that the Word of God (as in the Judaeo-Christian scriptures: and I’m sure this is what Iris Robinson means in using that phrase) nowhere talks about gay people needing to be redeemed by the blood of Jesus. Iris Robinson’s word is “homosexuals.” The bible never uses the word “homosexual.” Nor does it ever speak of homosexuals needing to be redeemed by the blood of Jesus.

It couldn’t do so, since the word (and the psychological concept of innate same-sex attraction to which it refers) wasn’t even coined until the very end of the 19^th century. When a translation of the Jewish and Christian scriptures talks about “homosexuals,” you can be sure that a Jewish or Greek term with a hazy meaning has been identified with a modern psychological term that could not have been in the mind of the biblical writers, since the term and the concept to which that term refers were not anywhere in the mental universe of those writing the scriptures. When you encounter the word "homosexual" in any translation of the Jewish or Christian scriptures, you can be sure that you're dealing with the retrojection of a modern idea (and, often, of modern prejudices) into an ancient text.

You’d think that knowing we’re dealing with ancient texts written in languages few of us can read would produce just a smidgeon of humility in those who profess so confidently to have “the” Word of God for the rest of us, wouldn’t you? You’d think that before any Christian would use the Word of God as a weapon to bash those who don’t love “appropriately” or “according to God’s design”—phrases that also drop from the lips of the truth police these days, when they talk about gay people—he or she would at least feel obliged to do a bit of study about these matters.

If Christianity is all about not doing harm and not inflicting pain, especially on people who are already hurting, you’d think that those who profess to walk in the way of Jesus would want to be damned sure of the rightness of their claims to own the Truth, before they use the Truth as a weapon to bludgeon others. Wouldn’t you?

It’s this horrendous reduction of religious truth to a weapon, a thing, to instrumental status, that makes me want to flee from religionists these days. The reductionism is particularly apparent in the perfervid rhetorical climate of an election cycle, particularly in this nation with the soul of a church, where religious and political truth claims so often intersect.

I find my co-religionists of the religious and political right on the NCR café—and many religionists representing other fundamentalist belief systems, with whom they have made common political cause these days—woefully ill-informed about what we mean, when we speak of religious truth. The truth to which religious traditions point is never an object. It cannot and must not be objectified, because claiming to own the Truth is implicitly claiming to own God.

And God cannot be owned. It is God who owns us, in the deepest and most authentic sense of religiosity in the world religious traditions. It is God’s truth that reaches into our lives and grabs and transforms us—not the other way around. Divine truth remains always outside human grasp, because it is intended to move us profoundly, to compel us on a faith journey centered on practical compassion, not to become an object we can use reductionistically to protect ourselves from conversion and conversation.

Religious truth as “the” truth, as the weapon we use to bludgeon others into submission, is simply not religious truth. It is political ideology masquerading as the Truth. It is a form of idolatry.

Unfortunately, in a nation in which religion wields such cultural and political power, but in which many of us (including many of the most religiously fervent of us) have an extremely limited knowledge of religious history, religious ideas, and philosophical understandings of religious truth claims, we are likely to continue to see religious truth reduced to political fodder by those who claim, with Iris Robinson, that they are merely defending the Word of God. That is, we are likely to see this tragic abandonment of authentic religious truth, culturally and politically transformative truth that is discovered only in a shared dialogic journey, insofar as those of us interested in truth in our political process don’t press religionists to think rationally about the truth claims they are pushing on the rest of us, as a way to control our lives.

And insofar as we don’t press them and the rest of our culture to talk about those truth claims in respectful, open dialogue in which their truth claims are submitted to the light of day and to sweet reason . . . .

And, above all, insofar as we allow religious adherents who claim to own the Truth to keep engaging in behavior that is so obviously anything but an authentic witness to transformative religious truth . . . .