From the blogsphere, very significant commentary in the past several days on issues about which I've previously blogged:
At Hepzibah, Alan McCornick hits the ball out of the park all over again with a powerful deconstruction of the claims of San Francisco archbishop George Niederauer that the Catholic hierarchy is throwing a new Boston tea party to defend your liberty when it seeks to snatch rights (access to contraceptives in health insurance, the right of civil marriage) away from you.
As Alan points out, in the religious liberty game, everything depends on limits: your right to think and believe as you wish to think and believe comes up against an important limit in a civil society, when you assert a faith-based right to smash your fist into my nose--because God told you to do so:
Hiding behind religious authority is nothing new for the church. They tried it, world wide, in the priest abuse scandal. The secular world wanted the predator priests exposed and brought to justice. The hierarchical church wanted total control over how the matter was handled. For decades they had simply shuffled offender priests around from diocese to diocese, protecting the church from scandal. This control, they maintained, was their due as a religious institution. Gradually, the world has come to understand that since the church would not take care of its children, the state had to, and in one country after another, Germany, Ireland, the United States and elsewhere, this issue once framed as the Catholic Church’s right to care for the souls of its bishops was reframed as the right of the world at large to protect its children. Religious rights, it turned out, had its limits.
We are at that kind of divide once more. Where does the right of the Church to prolong its oppression and denigration of women (and LGBT people) on religious grounds end? And where does the right of women and gays not to be put down by the Church begin?
I like the fact that Alan connects the abuse situation in the Catholic church to the religious liberty claims bishops are now pressing in the American public square. As he notes, it has been precisely because the Catholic hierarchy claims the right to manage the internal affairs of the church as it sees fit, away from prying secular eyes, that we've ended up with a serious cover-up of clerical abuse in the Catholic church.
The court of public opinion has long since determined that the Catholic hierarchy does not have the unlimited right to "manage" the abuse situation simply because the hierarchy claims that this is an internal Catholic matter subject to unique Catholic beliefs that must be respected on grounds of religious liberty. And as he notes, we're now at the same point when it comes to the similar claims of the hierarchy that it has an unrestricted right to discriminate (and foster discrimination) in matters of women's and gay rights.
The claim to religious liberty has limits in a civil democracy. It is normed by the common good. When you claim that your religious views give you the right to punch others in the nose, you must expect pushback from those concerned about the common good.
Since many citizens think that allowing anyone to punch someone else in the nose to fulfill a divine command is corrosive to the common good.
And at Enlightened Catholicism, Colleen Baker offers equally incisive analysis of the current Rick mania--and, in particular, of the Rick mania of the Catholic hierarchy. Why, she asks, are the U.S. Catholic bishops suddenly so enamored of the Republican party and so determined to turn a blind eye to Rick Santorum's attack on core principles of Catholic social teaching?
It's about demographics and power, she concludes. Citing Jonathan Chait's "2012 or Never" article to which I linked yesterday, Colleen notes that the Catholic church is in serious competition with the New Apostolic Reformation for hegemony among Hispanic voters in the U.S. (and among Latin Americans and in Africa, as well).
Most of the money that is helping to fund the rapidly growing NAR around the world is American money. Hence the power-grab in which the USCCB is now involved: by becoming the "loudest moral voice in the U.S.," the USCCB reasserts its claims to Hispanic voters and to the Catholic populations of Latin American countries in which the NAR is making such large inroads:
Since various and sundry units of the NAR are wreaking havoc amongst the Catholic population in South and Central America and Africa, the Vatican gains even more if the USCCB can cement itself as the loudest moral voice in the US, because the US is where most of the money fueling the NAR is coming from. And one should never forget that Rick is not just closely connected to Opus Dei, he's also closely connected to The Family who is closely connected to the NAR.
In other words, the American Catholic bishops are silent about Rick Santorum's departure from many traditional themes of Catholic social teaching because the brand of evangelical Catholicism he preaches--right-wing American Protestant evangelicalism wrapped up in 13th-century Catholic natural law terms--represents a brand to which they themselves are highly attracted. Because it's an alternative, they imagine, to the brand of Christianity being peddled in Latin America and elsewhere by the NAR.
I think Colleen is very insightful here. And her proposal to us to frame the Catholic bishops' involvement in the current American election cycle in terms of global concerns of the Catholic hierarchy makes a great deal of good sense.
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