Fred Clark on the (Non-Existent) Moral Authority of Those Promoting Anti-Gay NC Amendment

Fred Clark is not very much impressed with the moral authority of those who spearheaded the "victory" of Christians over "the evil" in North Carolina yesterday:

It’s ugly, stupid and deeply immoral. It’s supported by liars, by racists, by Neo-Nazis and by the Catholic bishops — none of which is the sort of authority that decent people can turn to for moral advice.

Ouch.  For us Catholics, I mean.  Finding ourselves lumped together at this point in American history with liars, racists, and neo-Nazis.

There seems to be a story of spectacularly squandered moral authority and spectacularly compromised moral leadership here, given that many Catholic clergy and religious were active supporters of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.

And yet, under the leadership of the last two popes and the bishops they have set into leadership positions in our church, we find ourselves--and who can argue with the rightness of this judgment?--lumped together now with racists and neo-Nazis.

Something seems to have gone altogether wrong with us Catholic folks of late.  At least, at the top leadership levels of our church.  Which seems to have a life of its own (if one can call an institution steered by dead hands alive) quite apart from the wishes and views of many of its adherents.  

If we could only put our fingers on what that is--what has gone wrong at the top--and begin fixing it, we might get somewhere, we Catholic people who care about the future of our church.  For starters in diagnosing what's wrong, I'd like to resurrect an open letter that Mary Gail Frawley-O'Dea wrote Bishop Peter Jugis of Charlotte, one of the leaders in the drive to pass amendment 1, a few years ago.  I cited this letter in a posting in 2008.

Frawley-O'Dea informs Bishop Jugis that the pro-life ethic touted so strongly by the current crop of Catholic leaders would compel more respect if said Catholic leaders began to act as if "the life of ALL of God’s little ones" counts for the bishops of the Catholic church.

That's certainly not the message that Bishop Jugis and his fellow bishop of Raleigh have just given the citizens of North Carolina, when it comes to the lives of their brothers and sisters who happen to be gay--or to any family in North Carolina in which a brother, a sister, an aunt, an uncle, or a mother or father happens to be gay.  

And for more wisdom from Mary Gail Frawley-O'Dea about what's spectacularly wrong at the top levels of the Catholic church--about what absolutely has to be fixed if top Catholic leaders are to salvage any shreds of moral credibility in contemporary culture--see her recent statement at National Catholic Reporter, which argues that these leaders are now caught in a "series of manic episodes" in which they appear compelled to "execute perverted power plays" against those they need to cast as enemies.  

A powerful and exceedingly wise statement.  If only ears that claim to listen might hear.