As the work week ends, some valuable commentary on Catholic-themed news that has caught my eye in the past several days:
At Religion Dispatches, Sarah Morice-Brubaker wonders what would happen if the Girl Scouts investigated the USCCB. She points out that two of the key players in the investigation are Oakland bishop Salvatore "Gays-Front-for-the-Devil" Cordileone, who apparently believes women can't handle math and science, and Chicago bishop George Rassas, whose own superior, Cardinal Francis George, has publicly admitted Rassas has a truth-telling problem. As in, he has withheld information about abuse allegations in investigations of the abuse crisis in Chicago, according to a 2008 deposition of George.
Morice-Brubaker suggests that the Girl Scouts might have a thing or two to teach both venerable Catholic gentlemen:
Girl Scouts USA has, after all, developed significant programming to encourage girls to pursue their interests in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The website even calls girls “natural scientists”! Moreover, when faced with abuse disclosures from scouts, Girl Scout volunteers are instructed to “tell her you believe her” and “report the suspected abuse to the local agency designated to investigate such cases.” As such, the actions of Bishop Cordileone and (if Cardinal George is correct) Bishop Rassas suggest that they may not share these Girl Scouts values. I suspect those are values that many of the Girl Scouts’ constituents probably also hold dear.
At Commonweal, Grant Gallicho thinks carefully about the recent announcement of Steubenville's right-wing Catholic school, Franciscan University, that it intends to drop student health coverage due to the Obama administration's HHS guidelines, and finds aspects of the decision . . . curious. For instance, why drop health coverage for students now, when the guidelines (from which Steubenville is likely to have religious exemptions in any case!) don't kick in until 2013--well after the fall 2012 elections in which the right-wing Catholic vote is essential to GOP plans, that is to say?
And how can Franciscan know, as its public statements claim it knows, what its premiums will be in 2013 (the decision to drop student health coverage is premised on claims that the premiums will skyrocket under the new HHS guidelines)? And if the Steubenville decision is driven, as it claims to be, by the wish to protect students from attacks on their Catholic moral principles in the area of contraception, then why not drop faculty coverage, too? Don't the faculty deserve the same protection?
Hint: when you think Steubenville, think politics. Think right-wing politics. Think right-wing Catholic politics, as in "GOP = God's own party and Democrats = devil." This is a purely political decision driven by the need to stage right-wing Catholic theater in the period leading up to the election, in the hope of driving more conservative Catholics to the polls in 2012 to vote for God and God's party in the coming elections. And against Mr. Obama.
When you think Steubenville, think, "1997 Shepherd award recipient, Bernard Cardinal Law"; think, "1998, 2007, and 2011 honorary degree recipients, Anthony Cardinal Bevilacqua, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, and Raymond Cardinal Burke"; think, "1999 and 2000 honorary degree recipients, Thomas S. Monaghan and Francis P. George." Think politics. Think American Catholic church as Republican political machine. Think highfalutin' ecclesiological claims (if church = clerics) and perfunctory ethics-lite nods in the direction of Catholic social teaching.
At National Catholic Reporter, Robert McClory thinks about how families handle what happens when Father loses it. McClory uses the daddy-going-crazy analysis to probe what's happening to the Catholic family right now, as the reform of the reform kicks into aggressive hyperdrive, fueled by frenzied behavior coming from deeply neurotic places inside the fathers who rule the church.
He concludes,
The church's credibility in the eyes of many, many Catholics has become so thin you can practically see through it, as the church sheds members at a record pace. The institution is like a deeply troubled parent obsessed with a rage for order, and is thus in grave danger of permanently harming himself and the members of the family. If this were a real human family, its responsible members would be gathering together to consider the kind of help "Dad needs." And at minimum, wouldn't there be some urgent discussion of a possible intervention before matters get worse?
And he's absolutely right. Though, sometimes, by the point at which a family decides to do that intervention for toxic foaming-at-the-mouth crazy Daddy, it's too late. Not only has he gone totally around the bend, but more than one family member has distanced himself decisively from crazy Daddy and co-dependent enabling family, to get out of the way of the insanity, threats, bullying, and violence.
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