Contraception Debate Aftermath: Teachable Moment for American Catholicism (If We Choose to Listen and Learn)

While Arianna Huffington reminds Huffington Post readers that there's more to be discussed in the world of politics right now than contraception (and that the made-up controversy about contraceptive coverage in Catholic institutions came along conveniently just as news was breaking of the Obama administration's  success in stimulating economic recovery), we of the tribe Catholic continue dusting madly away at our old tried and true shibboleths.

Talking on and on.  About the bishops.  About a birth control debate that was really over and done with in the late 1960s.  The websites of several of the leading Catholic journals in the U.S. right now are full of statements about these issues, ranging from Michael Sean Winters's latest navel-gazing analysis of who he might vote for when and if (as if anyone continues to care a whit about what Winters thinks after he's disgraced himself by his behavior in this debacle), to a special interview with His Eminence Cardinal-Elect Dolan by John Allen in which His Eminence says that he and his brother bishops aren't Obama haters and he's all for "dialogue" and a "posture of openness."  John Allen's report doesn't say that His Eminence's tongue caught fire when he uttered those lies, but it must be noted that Allen was talking to His Eminence long-distance--and so Allen couldn't have seen Dolan's tongue as His Eminence spoke so blandly and glozingly of his commitment to dialogue and the "posture" of openness.

And then there are the reality-based articles, the ones that contribute something substantial to the discussion.  Because they aim at telling the truth.  Because they envisage a Catholicism in which everyone's voice counts, and, in particular, the voice of those shoved to the margins.  And because they care about what the ugly capitulation of the centrist powerbrokers who claim to speak for all of us to the bishops' partisan agenda is doing to our church--how it has significantly fractured American Catholicism in recent weeks and will continue to drive more of us away from the church.

As always, Jamie Manson tells the truth when she notes that, no matter what compromise is offered them, the bishops will not be satisfied.  As she notes, immediately after the Obama administration compromised on the HHS guidelines, the bishops moved the goalposts, embarrassing all the morally vacuous centrists who had gone to bat for them and declaring they're fighting for the right of any individual who objects to non-discrimination laws on grounds of conscience to exercise that right under canons of religious freedom.

As Manson notes, the bishop's current crusade is solidly grounded in an anti-gay, anti-feminist ideology and political agenda shared with right-wing political and religious ideologues that hasn't been difficult for anyone with eyes wide open to see for some time now--and so, as I have been doing, she observes, "Why members of liberal Catholic groups and the liberal Catholic media couldn't see this remains a mystery."

Also writing at NCR, Joe Ferullo has the dignity to admit he was wrong when he went to bat for the bishops because he believed their religious-freedom smokescreen.  Now that the bishops have made their real game plan clear, Ferullo says that he blames himself and "everyone like me" for having been deluded by the bishops.  

And, as he notes, we're all part of the problem in the American Catholic church to the extent that we sit by in silence as the bishops unilaterally claim the voice of the church and speak on our behalf, when a large percentage of us don't agree with them when they mount partisan holy wars like the one they've currently mounted.  And while we watch increasing numbers of fellow Catholics walk away from our church because they've had it with the misrepresentation of the gospels and core Catholic beliefs by the bishops.

Their misrepresentation of the gospels and core Catholic beliefs: as Joan Walsh notes at Salon, the bishops' overtly partisan response to the compromise offered by the Obama administration makes them impossible to defend, because this response completely elides over all the important aspects of Catholic teaching about which they remain silent as they press their sexuality agenda with monomaniacal focus in the public square: 

I’ve written repeatedly that my inability to quit the Catholic Church entirely comes from the fact that its social teachings formed my social conscience, and to this day some of the people doing the most good for the poor and the excluded are devout Catholics. But the bishops are impossible to defend. Today, they are working on behalf of the Republican Party.

Walsh links to Andrew Sullivan's statement following the bishops' declaration of their real hand after the Obama administration offered them a compromise.  As she notes, Sullivan maintains that while Catholics need Jesus, what they get from the bishops is the Pharisees instead.

Noting that the bishops had planned this current campaign against the Obama administration months ago, and that their plan always envisaged a refusal to compromise, he writes, 

But ask yourself: where were they on a much more fundamental cause for Catholics: universal healthcare? Were they anything like as vocal? 

Where were they when the Bush administration was practizing and authorizing the torture and abuse and robbing of human dignity of terror suspects? The Pope never obliquely mentioned these categorical evils when visiting the US and cozying up to the war criminals in the Bush administration? 

Where have they been on tackling climate change - a sacred obligation for Catholics according to the Pope they follow so fanatically? 

Why so utterly fixated on sex, especially the sex lives of women and gay men? Why so utterly indifferent to the whole range of public policies which Catholic orthodoxy has strong views on?

And Ken Briggs argues at NCR that what has just happened in this public debate has been a victory for the American Catholic laity, who have displayed a "collective conscience" in this debate that puts the bishops and their behavior to shame.

As I read these and the many other articles now pouring out about these issues, what catches my attention is the following: Jamie Manson is absolutely correct to zero in on the mysterious inability of many high-profile liberal Catholics to see what the bishops have been about all along--right up to the point when the reverend gentlemen showed their true colors as they were offered the compromise they had demanded.  And Joe Ferullo makes an important (and graceful) admission when he blames "everyone like me" for having been blind to who the bishops are and what they're about.

Put these points together, and couple them with what Walsh, Sullivan, and Briggs say about where the weight of Catholic teaching and Catholic conscience really lie (and this is not where the bishops are--they're not with the weight of the tradition at its best, with the conscience of Catholicism at its best), and we have a teachable moment in American Catholicism right now.  If we choose to listen and learn.

Quite simply, this is a teachable moment about the blindness of our commentariat class, of those who represent us in the media and claim to speak on our behalf to the public square in tandem with the bishops.  It's a teachable moment about the inability of our centrist media powerbrokers to see what hasn't been mysterious or veiled at all to large numbers of their fellow Catholics for quite some time now--so that the only conclusion one can reach about these centrist spokespersons for the Catholic tradition is that they don't see, either, their fellow Catholics who have been bloodied (the word is admittedly hyperbolic, but also, I would argue, apt) by the current pastoral leaders of the church for some years now.

I'm talking about survivors of clerical sexual abuse.  I'm talking about gay and lesbian Catholics.  I'm talking about women.  I'm talking about all those the pastoral leaders of the Catholic church have marginalized and treated as subhuman in recent years, while their centrist allies in the media and academy have sat by in silence--even as they claim to be defenders of human rights and experts at parsing what it means to be authentically Catholic.

The reason so many members of the powerful centrist Catholic media commentariat have been blind to the real agenda of the bishops and the real humanity of the brother and sister Catholics the bishops are bloodying in the name of that real agenda is, quite simply, that they choose to listen only to "everyone like me," as Joe Ferullo notes.  They listen to other powerbrokers.

They listen to the bishops but not to their brother and sister Catholics the bishops have shoved to the margins.  And this is to say that, in many cases, they listen primarily to other men, since the centers of media, economic, and governmental power in the U.S. remain primarily in the hands of men.

Of men who are to a large extent either heterosexual or heterosexual-posturing and also white.  "Everyone like me" translates, sociologically speaking, to white, male, and heterosexual or heterosexual-posturing, when we're speaking of those who wield power in our society and in the governing sector of the Catholic church.

Listening only to a tiny circle that wields power (or imagines itself as holding all the power in its hands) blinds us.  It assures that our perspective will be truncated and our vision of important aspects of the social reality of the body politic will be occluded.  Power (or the illusion that we are powerful) makes us comfortable, complacent, unable to see nuance and to understand the complexities of the social world those excluded from power see with much more acuity.  Because they have no choice except to negotiate the complexities of that social world on a daily basis, in order to survive . . . .

Standing outside the comfortable, complacent, blind center of power also enables (or forces) those excluded from the power center to see that what appears unambiguously good to those who wield power often has strong shadow sides easily apparent to those excluded from power centers.  When tribal leaders dust off the shibboleths and brandish them to start a new holy war because our tribe cannot, of course, do anything unholy, those shoved outside the power centers almost always know in their bones that hell is about to break forth.  

And that it is going to break forth in the name of what is good and holy.  Because powerful tribal leaders (and their tribalist followers) who imagine their tribe is capable of doing only good always inflict significant harm--predictably, on the disempowered--precisely when they are most blindly convinced that they are motivated solely by the good.

As I say, we're at a teachable moment in American Catholicism after what the bishops have done in recent weeks.  If we choose to listen and to learn, that is.  That teachable moment can yield fruit, however, only if those who have claimed to speak for all Catholics in the circles of power finally begin to acknowledge the presence in their church catholic of many Catholics who are not just like themselves.

And if they finally begin to listen respectfully to the testimony of these brother and sister Catholics who are not just like themselves--and who have never had the luxury of letting ourselves be deluded about who the bishops are and what their real agenda is, because that agenda has, from the outset, comprised suffering for us.  Suffering inflicted on us deliberately by the bishops in the name of God.

To a great extent, the future of the American Catholic church--the question of whether it even has a future--depends on the willingness of the centrist powerbrokers who claim to speak on behalf of all brother and sister Catholic to open their circles of conversation, finally, to the brothers and sisters they have colluded with the leaders of the church in marginalizing.  Even as they've claimed to understand and represent catholicity in a uniquely sage way.

If that doesn't happen, and if those who occupy the circles of power don't begin to show real and active concern for their brothers and sisters shoved to the margins, what they'll soon be hearing instead will be, as Fred Clark predicts in the article to which I linked on the weekend, silence: "The silence of empty pews. The silence of the empty spaces left behind . . . ."