Phyllis Zagano Offers Advice to Disaffected Catholics: My Response

Writing at National Catholic Reporter, Phyllis Zagano is the latest in a string of Catholic commentators to lament the ad the Freedom from Religion Foundation recently published in the New York Times.  I discussed the reflections about the ad (positive and pastorally engaged ones, in my view) of theologian Tom Beaudoin at America's "In All Things" blog several days ago.  As I noted in that posting, quite a few Catholic commentators are now up in arms about the ad, which invites disaffected Catholics to leave the Catholic church.  This defensive response is a typical response of the tribal-thinking enclaves of both the Catholic center and Catholic right to initiatives such as the FRF ad, and these critics of the ad have been talking once again about anti-Catholic bias in the American media and the New York Times, in particular.

As I noted in my reflections on Tom Beaudoin's analysis, however, 

[N]ot one bit of that misplaced defensive rage is going to alter the fact that people are walking away in droves, and that they are doing so precisely because they have come to the conclusion that the Catholic church is now an abusive spouse and they are the object of the spouse's abuse.  In fact, all the misplaced defensive rage will accomplish is only to alienate more fellow Catholics. 

And so it is hard to read this defensive rage as truly catholic in its orientation and concerns, and much easier to read Beaudoin's proposal--let's look at what's happening, ask why it's happening, and see how we might respond to it--as authentically catholic.

And this continues to be my angle of approach to the FRF's invitation to disaffected Catholics to leave the Catholic church.  Phyllis Zagano responds to the ad by encouraging Catholics who have begun to think we've had it to stick with the church and remain burrs under the bishops' saddles.  She writes,

No matter whether disaffected Catholics join the atheists or the Methodists or some other group or denomination, the result is the same. By removing their burrs from under the bishops' saddles, they slow the ride toward further discussion. These disaffected might heed the advice of John Wesley, who asked his fellow Methodists in 1784 not to split further with the Anglican church that still sheltered them: "Do not rashly tear asunder the sacred ties which unite you to any Christian society." 

Good advice, I'd say.

While at first blush this appears to be a reasonable recommendation, I'd like to ask the following: how would Zagano's recommendation to disaffected Catholics appear if we decided that the admonition about not tearing asunder the sacred ties holding the church together is addressed to the bishops, and not to the large and increasing group of Catholics who have walked away from the church  in one way or another in recent years?

I find Zagano's advice less than coherent when I think about precisely why many Catholics are walking away.  And that why is the bishops themselves--what they do.  What they stand for.  Who they are.

The FRF folks chose to publish their ad at precisely this moment for an obvious reason, after all: they chose this moment because the bishops have, in recent weeks, seriously (and further) alienated many Catholics (and many American citizens) by their overt partisan politicking in a "religious liberty" crusade attacking women's access to contraception--which Zagano herself has repeatedly endorsed.  Many of the Catholic commentators I read are now further disaffected, and extremely so, due to the bishops' unsavory attack on survivors of clerical sexual abuse and the organization SNAP.

There is, in other words, a context to both the FRF ad and to the growing disaffection of large numbers of American Catholics.  And it's naive, and perhaps even downright duplicitous and less than pastoral, not to mention that context as one encourages fellow Catholics to stick with the church through thick and thin.

That context has everything to do with the very bishops Zagano has been defending in her support for the bishops' bogus "religious liberty" crusade.  But for many of us, it is the bishops themselves who are tearing asunder the sacred ties of the church and driving Catholics from the fold.  

And any sound pastoral concern for those of us who are disaffected Catholics cannot gloss over this problematic or pretend it's not there.  This is particularly the case when one equates the FRF, as Zagano does, with a "bag of tricks" that "includes birth control, gay rights, marriage equality and embryonic stem cell research."

The implication of this statement is that support for birth control, gay rights, marriage equality, and embryonic stem cell research belongs on the secular and irreligious side of a ledger of which Catholics represent the other side.  We Catholics.  Those anti-religious secularists.  Who support birth control, gay rights, marriage equality, and embryonic stem cell research.  Which we Catholics can't and don't support.

But for many of us who are Catholic and now disaffected, those items belong solidly on the Catholic side of the ledger.  And the refusal of the bishops and their centrist apologists to recognize that fact, and to recognize us as fellow Catholics worth embracing or at the very least, worth talking to respectfully, is driving many of us from the church--because we do not see our core moral values, rooted in the gospels and Catholic social teaching, reflected in what the bishops (and their apologists) are doing, thinking, and teaching.