E.J. Dionne on U.S. Bishops' Squandered Opportunity (and Me on Liberal Blindness)

E.J. Dionne argues that the U.S. Catholic bishops squandered a premier moment of unity in American Catholicism, when Catholics across the spectrum, including liberals like him, stood with the bishops in their resistance to the attempt of the Obama administration to have religiously based institutions cover contraceptives in healthcare plans.  The tea-party response of not a few bishops to the reasonable accommodation the administration offered the bishops has convinced many Catholics, he writes, that the bishops are more about Republican politics than about moral teaching:

Opposition in the church to extreme rhetoric is growing. Moderate and progressive bishops are alarmed that Catholicism’s deep commitment to social justice is being shunted aside in this single-minded and exceptionally narrow focus on the health care exemption. A wise priest of my acquaintance offered the bishops some excellent questions about the church. 

“Is it abandoning its historical style of being a leaven in society to become a strident critic of government?” he asked. “Have the bishops given up on their conviction that there can be disagreement among Catholics on the application of principle to policy? Do they now believe that there must be unanimity even on political strategy?”

And I ask all over again, and will keep asking, why has it taken liberal Catholics like Dionne so long to see what the bishops have been about all along with their spurious religious liberty crusade?  No, Mr. Dionne, "all" Catholics in the U.S. were not with the bishops when they first went after the Obama administration.

For many of us, it has been perfectly obvious for quite some time now who the bishops are, what they're doing, and what they intend.  For some of us, there has been no opportunity for fatuous liberal self-deception, because the episcopal whip stripes are across our own backs.

For survivors of clerical sexual abuse and those who stand in solidarity with abuse survivors, for gay and lesbian Catholics, for many Catholic women with eyes wide open: the bishops have not been about proclaiming what is central to our Catholic tradition--love, justice, and mercy--for a long time now.  We have known from the outset that "religious liberty" is a semaphore for "my right to discriminate with impunity against you."

And we've known that the USCCB is purely and simply a political animal, a well-funded political lobbying body, and not a body promoting and exemplifying the Catholic tradition at its best.

Why has it taken liberal Catholics so long to begin seeing what many of us have seen for some time now?

If we could begin talking honestly about that question--if the liberal centrists would begin talking to someone outside their cloistered, parochial, power-infatued centrist enclaves (where the bishops also hold forth)--we might begin to get somewhere productive, for a change, in the American Catholic church.