Reading the Signs of the Times: If the Bishops Are the Good Guys, Then . . .

"Hold the bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other"--attributed to Karl Barth.

Here's how things appear to me lately:

1. One day, you wake up and you read in the paper that a music minister at a Catholic parish in Charlotte has just been fired because he married his life partner in another state. 

2. A few days later, you open your paper and read that a priest at a Catholic parish in Maryland has refused to give communion to a lesbian at her mother's funeral. 

3. Before that news is even cold, you then read that a music teacher at a Catholic school in St. Louis has happened to mention his plans to marry his same-sex partner of 20 years, and he now finds himself without a job.

As all of this is going on, the U.S. Catholic bishops are involved in a well-funded and expensive nationwide battle to "protect" Catholic "religious freedom," in which a core assertion the bishops are  defending is that they and Catholic institutions must have the "right" to override laws prohibiting discrimination in the workplace and in provision of services to the public.  The bishops, whose political lobby is second on the list of faith-based political lobbies in D.C. in terms of the money it spends to engage in politics, are spending lavish sums of money donated to their church by lay Catholics with the expectation that the money will be used for works of mercy and upkeep of churches and schools--they're spending these lavish sums of money to attack the rights of a minority community and to remove rights anywhere that this minority community has succeeded in gaining legal protection.

In one state after another--Minnesota, Washington, Maine, you name it--they're working around the clock to block the civil rights of gay citizens or strip those rights away when rights have been accorded to gay citizens.

And as all this goes on, the moment the bishops sound an alarm to rally the troops to their side in the battle for "religious freedom," "liberal" Catholics who write articles about how they care about the Catholic church's teaching that all human beings deserve basic human rights rally to the side of the bishops.  When the bishops prove those "liberal" Catholics fools by taking the crusade for "religious freedom" way, way beyond what their "liberal" co-belligerents ever thought they were endorsing--when the bishops begin to argue for the "right" of Taco Bell to break non-discrimination laws whenever Taco Bell's faith-based conscience demands this right--the bishops' "liberal" co-belligerents not only lack the dignity and grace to admit they were wrong.

They double down on their defense of the bishops.  They tell us that His Eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan and the bishops he has led into war are "good guys at heart."  They tell us that, oops!, the bishops may have overplayed their hand just a wee bit, but who on earth could have imagined that surprising thing would have happened?  

They tell us that the Obama administration--yes, they actually write this kind of stuff--is responsible for the current "lacerating fight" in the American Catholic church, which puts omniscient, objective Catholic "liberals" in the horrible position of having to choose sides between right and left, a horrible place to find themselves, when liberals prefer to sit on the fence and let the powerful trample on the weak while clucking their tongues about lapses of civility and infringements of abstract human rights that never touch the lives of the tongue-cluckers themselves.

Here's how I see it, these days: everything I've written on this blog for several years now about how the Catholic center has willingly, gleefully moved to the political and religious right as the center of power in American culture shifted in that direction is being proven correct--in spades--in the current election cycle. When the Republican party could not possibly move further to the right, and when "liberal" Catholics continue to find every way possible to bash their progressive brothers and sisters while making every excuse in the world for Santorum, Gingrich.

And the bishops.  

Who are "good guys at heart."  The bishops who are leading the "religious freedom" crusade that results in #1, #2, and #3 above: 1) a Catholic music minister who exercises his civil right to marry his partner per civil law finds himself fired, no questions asked; 2) a grieving Catholic daughter who approaches the communion rail at her mother's funeral finds herself denied the Eucharist, no questions asked; 3) a Catholic teacher in a Catholic school who intends to marry his partner of 20 years finds himself with no job, no questions asked.

Everything I've written for some years now on this blog about the powerful Catholics of the intellectual and media center, who claim to speak for all of the rest of us as they mediate Catholic ideas and Catholic opinions to the public sphere, turns out to be gospel truth.  Even now, those powerful centrist Catholic media and academic spokespersons are perfectly capable of watching all of the above happen without turning a hair.  They're perfectly capable of watching all this misery unfold in their church--misery directed against brother and sister Catholics--and even still they gladly defend the bishops who have set this evil into motion.

Even now they continue defending the bishops, forfeiting as they do so any claims at all to intellectual credibility or, what counts more, to any bona fide pastoral concern for their brothers and sisters against whom the bogus "religious freedom" war is being waged.  And forfeiting their claims to any bona fide pastoral concern for the hordes of other Catholics now leaving the Catholic church because they've had it up to here with the pretense of calling these men and their anti-gospel behavior Christian.

How does all of this make me feel?  Not so joyful.

The clear message to me and many other Catholics from our centrist confreres remains no different now that the bishops have shown their hand in a crystal-clear way, no different than it has been for a long time:

Get lost. 

You don't count. 

You bring these problems on yourself by refusing to be hidden and silent. 

You're making us uncomfortable by forcing us to choose sides (i.e., by forcing us to admit we have sided all along with the rabid right). 

If you had done it our way--aiming at objectivity, seeing both sides--you wouldn't be in the mess you're in now. 

Just go away and let us write about human rights without having you clamoring over our shoulder to have your mess of a life noticed.

How does all of this make me feel?  Not so certain that the brand called Catholic means much at all that is redemptive, inclusive, loving, or healing in our culture today.

Not any longer.