Maureen Dowd stands James Joyce's famous description of the catholic church--"Here comes everybody"--on its head in an op-ed statement this past Sunday, and Michael Sean Winters goes ballistic in response, with predictable over-the-top rage (remember his column on President Obama and the HHS guidelines, in screaming capitals resurrecting the Dreyfus affair: "J'ACCUSE!"?). Michael's constant, recurring meme about Maureen (and uppity women in general: he's recently attacked Professor Anthea Butler of the Department of Religion of University of Pennsylvania, too) is that Dowd is stupid. She doesn't know from stupid, Michael insists; she doesn't know what Michael and other beltway insiders with direct pipelines to the bishops know.
As I say, this is a recurrent theme in Winters's attacks on any woman who dares to disagree with his buddies in the USCCB clerical club--as if, in many of his NCR columns, he's simply taking dictation as said buddies sit around the table after their female "help," who prepared the meal, have cleared the table, lit up postprandial cigars, and begun to swap stories about how damnably hard it is to keep the church--their church--under wraps these days. Because of those mouthy, uppity, pretend-to-know-something gals.
Hence the stupid smear that Winters reserves especially for MoDo and other uppity women (ambiguity fully intended with the word "stupid" in the preceding sentence).
And as I think about all of this, as I try to listen to the Spirit at a volatile, unpredictable moment in American Catholic history in which Michael's cigar-club, women-vilifying buddies are poised to do singular harm to the United States in the 2012 elections, and to the entire planet insofar as what happens to America affects the rest of the world for weal or for woe, I'm convinced Maureen Dowd has framed the discussion very correctly. We're living through a moment in American Catholic history in which, as she writes, the bishops want to shrink the place named Catholic to an all-constricting place of impossibly tiny proportions.
A tiny, dark closet. An island whose shoreline recedes each time any new wave laps the shore.
That's the place the bishops (and centrist apologists for the bishops like Michael Sean Winters) now want to define as the place with the name Catholic: a here-comes-nobody kind of place. Easy to control. But without much future. Precisely because it's easy to control. And places that have a future have the opposite problem: they're bursting with creativity and spirit that's hard to channel and control.
That's what gives them a future, assures that they have a contribution to make to the rest of the world. Creativity. Spirit. High-powered thinking that engenders more high-powered thinking in a synergistic catholic cycle.
Step back a moment from the colossal, cruel stupidity that now frames the Catholic bishops' response to contemporary culture in the U.S., and which is driving them to hinge the future of their church on an increasingly desperate and cynical attempt to throw the 2012 elections to the Republican party by any means possible, and the question any thinking, faithful Catholic cannot help raising right now is what is going to happen to the Catholic church, and its claims to represent catholicity, when or if the bishop succeed in standing athwart history and shouting Stop! in the coming elections.
What will be the long-term consequences of the short-term victory the USCCB and its super-rich right-wing handlers and centrist apologists will gain by throwing the elections through the Catholic swing vote in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan--the sole prize on which they now have their eyes, for which the whole shock-and-awe freedom-summer demonstrations are now being rolled out?
I can't imagine those long-term consequences can be good. Not for the nation, not for the whole world, but especially not for the Catholic church and its claims about its catholicity. Two articles in the past few days to which I'd like to draw readers' attention to bolster my argument here. I won't rehearse all that these articles say. I'll encourage readers to read them carefully.
Both point to the theological struggle that underlies the current tensions between the pastoral leaders of the Catholic church and many members of the Catholic community, theologians, lay folks, and religious women included. Both suggest that if this struggle is resolved in favor of the tiny dark closet or shrinking island definitions of Catholicism, the Catholic church is in for a very difficult time in the future--because it will have undercut its fundamental self-definition to such an extent that many thinking, educated, and morally sensitive people will have no choice except to distance themselves ever more decisively from the suffocating little closet and the eroding minuscule island.
The first article: Angela Bonavoglia's "American Nuns: Guilty as Charged" at The Nation this week. Bonavoglia's thesis: the LCWR is guilty of the charges that the Vatican is leveling against it--of focusing on the "exercise of charity" rather than meekly and obediently toeing the bishops' and pope's party line when it comes to lambasting the gays and women using contraceptives; of wanting to foster "dialogue" between various religious groups and about issues the Vatican has declared off-limits.
And this is a theological struggle that has gone on ever since Vatican II ended, when religious women took the lead in implementing the reforms of the council and became a lightning rod for a hierarchy that, even as the council finished its business, immediately began seeking desperately to rein in the spirit of reform the council had let loose in the church. Immediately began seeking desperately to rein in the Spirit.
The theological struggle running through the life of the Catholic church since that time is a struggle about the definition of religious authority, and the nuns find themselves dead-center in that struggle--ironically, precisely because they were obedient to what the Second Vatican Council instructed the church to do. And so Bonavoglia writes,
Much work by Catholic feminist theologians has undermined the hierarchy’s claim to absolute authority in matters of faith and morals. Feminist theologians have re-envisioned God. They reject the one-time, one-place, men-only view of revelation. Like Johnson, they see Mary as assertive, autonomous, and strong, her decision to bear the Messiah between her and God. They claim Eve as human, not evil, and hold Adam responsible for his own Fall. They demand an inclusive church and liturgy. They work across faith lines toward a truly ecumenical world.
Second article: at the University of Oxford's Practical Ethics website, Professor Tony Coady writes about "The Crisis in the Catholic Church."* For Coady as for Bonavoglia, the Catholic church has been involved after Vatican II in a theological struggle whose fulcrum point is found around the concept of authority--the authority of the people of God, whom the council recognized as constitutive of the church, and the authority of the leaders of the church, who are a component of the church but not the church in toto. But who are now premising the future of the whole church on maintenance of their authority, power, and privilege, insofar as these run up against the sensus fidelium of the people of God.
Coady writes,
There are more and more voices within the Church urging the revisiting of the total ban on abortion but they are not being listened to by the authorities. In this they face the same wall of disapproval and potential sanction that confronts many other serious dissenting voices on other rigorist bans, such as those on contraception, divorce, clerical marriage, homosexuality, women priests, and most matters involving human sexuality. The fact is that the Catholic Church’s authorities do not want their arguments and rulings on these issues contested because they have been backed into a corner. This is a corner where admission of failure and mistake is seen to carry too many costs. One cost is the painful psychological adjustment required to revise one’s clerical self-image as a certain kind of authority. This image portrays bishops, and especially the Pope, as custodians of transparent, cut and dried, divinely sanctioned, eternal truths which they proclaim decisively about a vast range of human activities to a compliant lesser clergy and laity. The image requires historical naivety, scriptural simple-mindedness, theological crudity and a lack of sensitivity to experience. Its grip is bolstered, of course, by an understandable fear that openness to change will betray those millions who have been compliant to the old narrative for so long and will involve a disloyalty to what the hierarchy sees as God’s charge to them. It would also require a dramatic and initially painful change in the ecclesiology that has dominated the Church’s self-presentation to the “outside” world for several centuries and helped create a reactive and mostly hostile attitude to so much in the modern world. Church structures steeped in a lost world of monarchical, absolutist sovereignty, secretive processes and male domination will have to be renovated to make them more consistent with the profound insights of the ideals of liberal democratic governance, even if those ideals are frequently betrayed and ignored in practice in the democracies that openly profess them. It is understandable that those who believe that the current image and structure of the Church is somehow divinely ordained are reluctant to embark on such a journey. Less laudably, resistance to serious change is supported by anxiety about loss of power and about decline in the influence of the institutional offices and structures within which the lives of so many bishops, clergy and religious have been given meaning. These latter factors, of course, were also prominent in the disgraceful reaction of the institutional church for so long to the sex abuse offences of clergy and religious. But the abuse scandal has shown that closing ranks, cover-ups, and stubborn resistance to admitting mistakes and failure are poor substitutes for facing facts and for changing attitudes.
I've provided snippets of articles that have much more to offer than the snippets included here indicate. I hope readers will please read both articles in their entirety.
Both make arguments that deserve serious consideration. Both, to my way of thinking, reinforce the point Maureen Dowd makes in her essay this past Sunday, which has so infuriated Michael Sean Winters: namely, that the Catholic church is not co-extensive with what its current dismal crop of "pastoral" leaders choose to think, say, or do. And insofar as it imagines itself as co-extensive with those gentlemen, its future is hardly bright.
It's constricted, indeed, and it's growing more constricted every day, as the bishops betray the moral insights of many, many members of their flock and engage in overtly partisan political theater designed to bring down a political administration they are desperate to bring down for short-term gain. For their short-term gain.
Because they imagine another political administration that will be beholden to them and their super-rich handlers will grant them more leeway in covering up the abuse crisis and their crimes in managing that crisis. Because they suppose that if they collude in the current rapacious intent of the 1% to tear apart the already fragile and already assaulted structures of American civil society and American participatory democracy, they will be given a king-making role in the creation of whatever uglier political-cultural successor is now, through the efforts of the 1%, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
Because, ultimately, they are tragically short-sighted, having made themselves tragically short-sighted by their refusal to listen to anyone except members of their all-male postprandial cigar clubs. Because they are tragically short-sighted in having defined half the human race, solely due to the gender of that half of the human race, as less rational and human than they themselves imagine themselves to be.
And so the the stupid half of the human race should be consigned, the bishops and their groupies also imagine, to tasks like cleaning their houses, laundering their clothes, preparing their meals, and clearing their tables, while the brilliant half should, of course, lead their church from . . . victory to victory?
Or to some other place altogether, one has to wonder. As one also wonders whether those doing the cooking, scrubbing, washing up, and laundry might not do a far superior job of managing a church and making it shine brightly with the values Jesus proclaims in the gospels than the postprandial cigar club is managing to do.
*Thanks to Jim McCrea for emailing this article to me and others.
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