Vis-a-vis another recent news item about which I blogged a number of days ago--the sentencing of the Pussy Riot group in Moscow for "hooliganism driven by religious hatred and offending religious believers": I find Gillian Kane's article at Religion Dispatches today situating the feminist rock group's trial against the backdrop of the campaign of Russian Orthodox leaders to block human rights movements at an international level instructive. Kane reports that the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox church have been lobbying at the United Nations to enshrine "traditional family values" in human rights statements, and to block U.N. initiatives that, in their view, work against such values.
Not unsurprisingly, Kane also reports that right-wing religious coalitions in places outside Russia, including the U.S., have been making overtures to the leaders of the Russian Orthodox church to draw that church, which has historically been somewhat removed from Western currents of culture and politics, into their international coalition to defend "traditional family values" against organizations like the U.N., which promote definitions of human rights that these right-wing organizations reject (e.g., when human rights definitions defend the rights of gays and lesbians or promote women's autonomy).
And so, Kane concludes, it's hardly surprising that the focus of the Moscow trial was on how the young women who staged a controversial theatrical prayer in Moscow's cathedral this past spring have "sinned." It's not surprising, given the growing political alliance between Russian Orthodox leaders, who wield enormous influence in Russia, and right-wing Christian groups in other places, that the three women were placed in a glass cage during their trial and lectured to about how "feminism is a mortal sin."
I'm not surprised, either, by the reaction of some leading American Catholic centrists to the Pussy Riot prison sentence, though I am perturbed at the unseemly tittering of some of my academic-degreed confreres when three young women have just been sentenced to two years in prison for daring to pray in an unconventional way in a cathedral. There are all kinds of things I'm inclined to say about this tittering, but since I can't write that book in the space of a blog posting, I'll limit myself to the following talking-point responses:
1. In their response to the Pussy Riot conviction, leading Catholic centrists once again reveal their real agenda as they claim the controlling center space of the American Catholic conversation: this is to ridicule anyone to the left of their center whose ideas they find alarming.
2. Catholic "feminists" of a centrist orientation have long played the game of pretending that they advocate for women's rights in church and society, while keeping real feminists to the left of them firmly in their marginalized places in the Catholic conversation.
3. Given the obvious theological depth of the three young women's action and their response to their conviction, as exhibited by their closing statement in the Moscow trial (the first link above points to that statement), the attempt of leading American Catholic centrists to ridicule the group, its name, its agenda, its criminal conviction, seems more than a little morally and intellectually shallow. It seems downright Philistine, when the three young women in question have put their lives on the line to advocate for women's rights within their religious tradition and their society--and when they are far more well-read and well-informed than those tittering at them in Catholic centrist circles in the U.S.
4. This tittering about the prison sentence of three young Russian Orthodox women seems wildly misplaced when one considers that the very same Catholic centrists who are doing the tittering also love to make polite noises about how concerned they are that the Catholic church in the U.S. is bleeding members at an alarming rate. Do they really imagine that a large percentage of those now walking away from the Catholic church are not young members who are tired of the way in which Catholic leaders attack women's rights, while leading Catholic centrists give those leaders cover?
5. Above all, what the tittering of leading Catholic centrists about the conviction of the members of the Pussy Riot reveals is something I've pointed to over and over on these pages: while bashing those to the left of center, Catholic centrists willingly ally themselves with right-wing political and religious groups, and they move right along with these groups to more and more toxic right-wing stances as these groups move the conversation rightward.
This has been exceedingly destructive to the American Catholic church, because the tittering class are also the controlling class: they occupy controlling positions in the American Catholic academy and media. And they are bringing the Catholic church into disrepute in the public square, by trivializing the American Catholic conversation, by narrowing and parochializing it, and by driving away much-needed voices that would make the conversation more meaningfully catholic, if they were permitted a seat at the conversation table.
The graphic--the Pussy Riot group in a glass cage during their Moscow trial--is a photograph of Alexander Zemlianichenko, AP.
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