A Reader Writes: Did Vatican 2 Happen?

A very astute reader of this blog left a wonderful response to my posting yesterday about Bobby Jindal’s response to President Obama’s recent address to the nation (here). Two other astute readers have added valuable replies to that response.

I’ve been thinking all day about the points these readers are making. It strikes me that there’s something very important about the questions this thread is raising, and they deserve extended conversation. I do not have all the answers to the significant questions the reader who began this thread is asking.

So I’d like to offer this space as a space for further discussion of the reader’s response. My hope is that by doing this, I will open a conversation to which many voices contribute. My own perspectives here are limited and partial, and need other perspectives to complement them.

First, here’s what Brian has to say:

In the last decades of the 19th century and first decades of the 20th century, the Episcopalian Church (Anglicanism in the USA) grew by 300%. I read this stat in Nicholas Lemann's book, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy.

Responding to the many waves of mostly non-Protestant, Eastern and Southern European immigration that America welcomed in the late 19th century, it seems that many white Americans were looking for some conservative, respectable institution with cultural gravitas that would serve as a redoubt for "American" values or, in a variation, "Anglo-Saxon Civilization". In this way, the ECUSA, which was known as "the Republican Party at prayer" back then, became the spiritual home for the Establishment.

My feeling is that throughout the 1990s and up until late, this phenomenon has been happening on a smaller scale in the Catholic Church in the US.

Let us consider some well known converts to Catholicism in the USA in recent years:

the late Richard John Neuhaus (not as recent, but deserves mentioning), Senator Sam Brownback, reporter Richard Novak, former Governor Jeb Bush (brother of you know who), conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham, Governor Bobby Jindal, Fox News Supply-Sider Lawrence Kudlow(!), one-time Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, and the sleazy ex-literature professor Deal Hudson, now a full time GOP booster... oh and (drumroll please) this Easter 2009, Newt Gingrich will enter the Catholic Church.

Basically, they're all GOP activists and operatives who, other than opposing abortion, don't seem to espouse the Catholicism I was taught. I don't know much about Jeb Bush, but, well, he's got some baggage, let's just say that.

Most of these names are found within or around the Beltway in DC. I've read that one of the biggest sources of these right-wing conversions is the Opus Dei center in DC, where a priest named C. John McCloskey works. It seems to me that these converts have retained their authoritarian nature, apparently seeing nothing but good in throne-and-altar politics where people know their place. Oh, and they've expanded their "liberal bias in the media" agitprop to include "anti-Catholicism in liberal media/politics".

Is the Catholic Church in the USA to become the new "Republican Party at prayer"? On the bright side, there are too many people of other stripes already involved in the Church for it to become an establishment sect (fingers crossed).

Furthermore, it's unfortunate that bishops like Chaput, most prominently, are basically the personal chaplains for these new converts.

Is my analysis incorrect? I'm just wondering why all these right-wingers are deciding that the Catholic Church is the church for them. Did Vatican 2 happen at all?

In response, Carl notes the ties of beltway politicians and some of the right-wing Catholic groups named by Brian to money. And Colleen suggests that there’s a “sort of Trojan horse strategy” at work in the conversion of these neoconservative political figures to the Catholic church, as their former allies in the evangelical religious right go up in flames (many of them) in various scandals.

I think Brian and the respondents are onto something. And I think this phenomenon of right-wing political leaders crossing the Tiber deserves analysis.

Brian’s insights are powerful:

▪ “GOP activists and operatives who, other than opposing abortion, don't seem to espouse the Catholicism I was taught.”

▪ “Found within or around the Beltway in DC.”

▪ “Authoritarian nature, apparently seeing nothing but good in throne-and-altar politics where people know their place.”

▪ “Did Vatican 2 happen at all?”

Here are some initial points that strike me as I try to deal with the question Brian is raising here:

▪ With regard to progressive social movements, I shy away from the pendulum-swing explanation of history, in favor of action-reaction theories. As I’ve stated on this blog, in my view, the project of Vatican II has deliberately been stalled by strong reactionary forces within the church—and strong reactionary political groups have colluded with that reaction because they do not want the Catholic church to have a progressive face in social movements.

▪ What happened culturally with the 1960s was a moment of opening to a future that some powerful groups within our society (and in the churches) did not wish to entertain. In particular, there was exceptionally strong resistance within the churches to the emergence of women onto the stage of history as free agents and actors, rather than taken-for-granted decorative stage props reflecting the refulgent glory of preening heterosexual males (or males capable of convincing us that they are heterosexual).

▪ A counter movement occurred following the 1960s, in which the political and religious right cooperated to close the door to the future that had been opened in the 1960s.

▪ I have enormous respect for Bishop Geoffrey Robinson and his book Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church. One aspect of his analysis of Vatican II does not persuade me, however. He speaks of a pendulum movement in which reaction to Vatican II was necessary, in order to correct the out-of-control movement that had taken place in the church after Vatican II.

▪ I have a different memory of the period after Vatican II. The Catholic right have been adroit about developing a spurious discourse of outrageous liturgical violations and kooky cultural practices following Vatican II. I do not remember such developments—not anywhere to the degree to which they are “recreated” in the discourse of the Catholic right.

▪ What I observed was a deliberate throttling of the Council and its reforms, a deliberate murdering of the spirit of hope that the Council engendered in many Catholics, and an iron-fisted, draconian return to the fortress church in which those who did not like what was taking place were invited to leave the church.

▪ One anecdote to demonstrate the process I’m describing here: in the mid-1980s, I was invited to write an ethics textbook for a graduate program in lay ministry sponsored by a Catholic university. When I wrote the textbook, the director of the program told me he had sent the draft to bishops and theologians all over the nation, and had gotten glowing reviews (except from one theologian)—including from most bishops who had written in response.

▪ Several years later, as Ratzinger’s restorationist agenda emanating from the CDF with the blessing of John Paul II began to have a strong chilling effect on Catholic universities across the U.S., I received a request from the same lay ministry program (now under a new director) to re-write the ethics textbook. I was told that it no longer adequately reflected the consensus of the best Catholic moral theologians writing today. In particular, I was told to incorporate John Paul II’s writings as much as possible into my text, especially “Splendor of Truth.”

▪ I labored for months on the revision, receiving back letters of single-spaced critiques, page on page, from a Jesuit appointed to read and comment on the text as I composed it (there had been no such censor when I wrote the first edition). These focused almost exclusively on sexual ethics, and on homosexuality in particular.

▪ My point? Within less than a decade, a textbook used in a graduate lay ministry program sponsored by a Catholic university had become problematic; it had moved from being an outstanding representative of the best Catholic thought on fundamental ethical issues, to being flawed—especially in what it had to say about sexual ethics. Nothing in the text itself had shifted, except that I flooded it with deferential quotes from John Paul II. The shift took place outside . . . .

▪ This movement from the mid-1980s into the 1990s corresponded with my finding myself without a job in any Catholic theology departments, after I was given a one-year terminal contract with no disclosed reason in the early 1990s at the Catholic college at which I taught. Steve and I have now been permanently outside the Catholic academic world--as in unemployed and apparently unemployable--for over a decade now.

▪ In the same period, one theologian after another (all certainly more important than me—in mentioning myself and Steve, who suffered the same fate, I’m pointing to a wide trend emanating from Rome) was removed from his or her teaching position, silenced, pushed out.

▪ As this went on—a very important point to make—there was hardly a peep on the part of the Catholic academic community in the U.S. There was not the strong movement of outrage and reaction one would expect from scholars. The academy, the center of the American Catholic church, was part of the problem—and, a fortiori, the liberal center was very much part of the problem, because it demonstrated no solidarity at all with theologians being robbed of their vocations in this period, no concern for the effects of this movement on the lives of those subjected to this shameful treatment.

▪ Why that lack of solidarity? Liberals want to be on the winning side. As the reaction set in (a point I want to insist on: it was deliberate and was manufactured from the center of the church; the pendulum did not swing of its own accord), what constituted the center moved ever more to the right.

▪ Consequently, there is a generation of American Catholic thinkers and commentators—our intellectual class of the center—who have grown up in a culture and religious milieu in what is considered centrist is well to the right of center. Whereas I remember the “installation” of John Paul II and Reagan by powerful groups of resistance to the movements of the 1960s and to the open door those movements created for us, this generation of centrists takes for granted that John Paul II and Reagan are admirable, praiseworthy role models for church and society who came on the scene through their own merits and dominated things through the force of their personalities and ideas.

▪ In part, they take this for granted because the religious and political right has succeeded for several generations in dominating political and religious discourse to such an extent that they have made the unthinkable thinkable, and have mainstreamed right-wing ideas that were once on the margins of church and society.

▪ Brian mentions Richard John Neuhaus. He is a shining example of the movement—the deliberate, cultivated, calculated movement—I am describing. I have written extensively on this blog about the Institute on Religion and Democracy. Since its founding in the early 1980s, that group has worked without cease to undermine progressive movements in mainstream American Protestant churches, and to shut the door to the progressive moment represented by the 1960s (culturally and politically) and Vatican II (religiously).

▪ Interestingly enough, though IRD targets non-Catholic churches, among its most influential founding members were Neuhaus and Michael Novak. It has always had a sizeable Catholic presence.

▪ Groups like IRD are predominantly concerned with the economic implications of some of the progressive movements of the 1960s. What they are combating, as they drive wedges into mainstream churches regarding the role of women and gays and lesbians in the church, is the social application of the gospel in a way that critiques the prevailing ideas of neoconservative capitalism.

▪ Because of their appeal to wealthy economic elites, groups like IRD are extremely powerful and well-funded, and have strong clout in our government. They attract the kind of politicians Brian is discussing. They are part and parcel of the cultural move that has been bringing those political (and economic—Erik Prince comes to mind) leaders into the Catholic church.

▪ What do these new converts to Catholicism see in the Catholic church? They see, in part, an institution that does not intend to critique their neoconservative economic ideas or practices. They inhabit a closed inner circle of the church impervious to the economic critique of traditional Catholic social teaching. They see an institution whose rich, powerful intellectual traditions have been co-opted (in their circle, at least) by a “Catholic answers” approach to religious truth that banalizes and trivializes and ultimately betrays the tradition—though they are very loud in their claim that they alone represent the tradition.

▪ These groups have been adroit about disseminating their soundbyte “Catholic answers” everyplace they can, about claiming the center for their eccentric, politicized, a-traditional theology, and about silencing and marginalizing critical voices. They appeal to authoritarian political activists who front for wealthy economic elites.

▪ They gleefully assisted in the dumbing down of the American Catholic church through their assault on the catechetical movement that sprang up following Vatican II, and through the imposition of a catechism now regarded not as a starting point for theological reflection or for study of the tradition, but as an instant-answers approach to catechesis that has robbed a generation of Catholics of the tradition, while convincing them that knowing the answers constitutes better catechesis than ever occrred in the past.

▪ And as they carry on in this way, there have not been powerful resistance movements within American Catholicism—certainly not (and this is shameful to me as a theologian)—in the theological community, and not in parish life, which has been gutted by the restorationist movement, on the whole, with the complicity of bishops appointed by the previous pope and the present one, and parish priests who are increasingly of the John Paul II generation.

Others will perhaps see things different, and I welcome responses. As I note above, my perspective is limited and partial. I was not part of the Reagan revolution. I have never been persuaded by any aspect of neoconservative ideology, whether in religion or politics. My understanding of Catholicism militates against that ideology in a fundamental way, and always has done so.

So I do not reflect (or perhaps even fully understand) the perspective of those who were infatuated with John Paul II and Reagan and have made a gradual journey away from neoconservatism when its flaws became too glaringly apparent to ignore in the Bush presidency. I have always seen John Paul II and Reagan as the religious and political face of one cultural movement, which was all about shutting doors and following the lead of William F. Buckley when he said that the obligation of conservatives is to stand astride history and shout stop.

But history cannot and does not stop, and the obligation of believers (it seems to me) is to participate in the movement of history and try to influence it to positive goals . . . .

Dandling Babes and Weeping Jesus: The Bishops Continue Talking

Another news flash from the U.S. Catholic bishops: poor of the nation, you have found a friend! It’s the men who run the U.S. Catholic church. The U.S. Catholic bishops just released a statement expressing their solidarity with those hurting financially.

"Solidarity at a Time of Economic Crisis" states, “We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. We are all in this together.”

Poor of the land, the bishops are in it, too! The bishops are in it with you! The bishops are in it with us (speaking here from the vantage point of an unemployed theologian, you understand, one without any health benefits.)

I trust that what the bishops say about their solidarity with the poor of the land will be heart-warming news for struggling Americans, because this statement comes from those who are, after all, not without resources. They come from men positioned not just to talk, but to help. Resources aplenty, in fact: rings, episcopal palaces, fine artwork and good china and cutlery by the truckload.

Mind you, the bishops don’t exactly say that they intend to translate their resources into actual physical assistance to families in need. In fact, they tell their “hurting, anxious or discouraged” brothers and sisters that they’ll pray for us.

But they surely wouldn’t have spoken of solidarity if they didn’t mean solidarity, would they? Real solidarity, the kind that that comes with a price, and demands our own involvement in addressing the needs of those with whom we are in solidarity.

So, poor of the land, those now struggling to make ends meet, hope is on the horizon: hie thee to the nearest episcopal palace. You’ll find solidarity there. Rings and artwork aplenty, waiting to be hocked or sold as a statement of solidarity with you. Hurry fast, before they give it all away in their haste to be in solidarity with the wretched of the earth.

+ + + + +

Meanwhile, key bishops are working hard to spin the election of Barack Obama as all about the economy and not about values (as if the two are ever distinct!) (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/11/obama-was-elected-on-economy-not-on.html). Both Cardinals George of Chicago and Cardinal O’Malley of Boston have recently made statements suggesting that the mandate the new president has received touches on economic rather than “values” issues such as gay marriage or abortion.

In that special land that only bishops occupy, one suspects, the bishops are now whispering among themselves about the need for people of faith to assure that the new president governs from that mythical “center-right” perspective so beloved of mainstream media types. And bishops. And the evangelical theocrats, with emphasis on “right” rather than “center.”

Get us out of the economic mess. But for pete’s sake, leave our “values” alone!

Look for more of this nonsense—a lot more—in coming days, from all those with whom the bishops have allied themselves in recent years around “values” issues that are somehow distinct from economic ones—you know, the issues that the current administration was somehow supposedly pursuing while it let the economy fall to shambles. The issues about which we have never seen any movement in the direction the bishops want, while they keep telling us to vote for those who at least talk about the issues. Even if they do nothing about them.

I couldn’t—God help me—avoid thinking of U.S. Catholic bishops and their failed leadership—today when I read Chris Hedges’ “Forget Red vs. Blue” essay at Alternet. Especially his chilling conclusion,

The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying.

Reading that makes me wonder what kind of Catholic values we’d see at play in the public square if the bishops had given priority in recent years to teaching people to think, make sound moral judgments about complex issues, dissenting when good critical judgment and common sense tell us something is wrong, separating truth from lies, dealing with nuance.

Instead, they have followed the authoritarian path, have supported a catechetical approach of spoon-feeding “truths” and “Catholic answers” to the flock, have suppressed theological inquiry and all dissent about “non-negotiable” issues. And have colluded with political leaders who never in the slightest degree intended to serve Catholic values.

Meanwhile, with sign upon sign indicating that American Catholics are, on the whole, so fed up with this betrayal of pastoral leadership that most of us are simply no longer listening, the bishops promise to challenge Mr. Obama. (As they challenged his predecessor, you understand.)

Oh, and in really important news that zings to the heart of the leadership crisis and pastoral needs of the flock, they have passed a new proper of the seasons and spent time debating the use of the word “gibbet” in the liturgy. And since it’s never inappropriate to dandle babies when one wants to divert attention from failed leadership, they have also decided to bless babies—in the womb and out of it.

Just not getting it . . . . Surely Jesus weeps.

The Churches and Fascism: The Other Side

Interesting reminder last night of the path some churchmen* took during the Nazi period, which provides a model for us today different from the one provided by those who blessed fascist leaders. Last night, we happened to watch Claude Berri’s 1967 film “The Two of Us” (Viel homme et l’enfant).

As many readers already know, it’s a classic memoir of life in occupied France, told through the eyes of a little Jewish boy evacuated to the countryside to live with an elderly Christian couple who are unaware that they are hosting a Jewish refugee. The charm of the film has to do with the interaction between the gruff, anti-semitic “grandfather” smitten by the little boy desperately trying to hide his identity even from his hosts.

One scene in the film spoke strongly to us. It could easily be lifted out of the Pétain years and used as a parable for contemporary Catholics as they discern political choices.

It’s a Sunday homily in the parish church. The grandfather has gone unwillingly, aware that the local priest doesn’t share his anti-semitic views.

And sure enough, the priest chooses to preach on the response Jesus demands that his followers make to the scenes of hatred and murder unfolding all around them. He tells the parishioners that it is entirely anti-Christian to make judgments about whom God loves and whom God rejects.

That’s God’s work, the priest says. It’s God’s job to sort the tares from the wheat, and the measure God uses is far different from the one we ourselves use. In fact, God has a particular love for those who are oppressed, no matter where they’re found or who they happen to be.

Including—and especially—the Jewish people, since, after all, Jesus was a Jew, wasn’t he? God looks at the world at each period of history, the priest informs his parish, to identify those most in need of love and acceptance. And it’s the obligation of Christians to do the same, over and over, in new cultural settings and new time-frames.

Why a parable for the contemporary church? Obviously, because a significant proportion of church members have been expending so much energy—and continue to do so, even now, when far more serious substantial issues face us and demand our creative responses—deciding who’s in and who’s out. Who belongs and who doesn’t.

Who’s worthy to sit in the pew and who isn’t. Who’s the true Catholic (or evangelical, or fill in the blank) and who’s the false one. Who should receive communion and who ought not to do so.

This is what the culture war and the wafer wars have been all about: human beings taking it on themselves to mind God’s business and do the sorting of the wheat and the tares here and now, in the muddled circumstances of history. And these are the hate-filled impulses on which fascism feeds. This is why I see the churches inextricably involved with the rise of fascism—or with preventing its rise, in the way in which they deal with the impulses of hatred right within their own walls.

The parish priest in the film is completely correct to challenge the root of the fascist impulse—the willingness to give way to hatred, and on that basis, to begin dividing people into worthy and unworthy. The willingness to use coercion and power to consolidate the division of human beings into worthy and unworthy. The readiness to lie and bully when all other means have failed, to cheat and steal and call this righteous behavior when we imagine we’re doing it in the name of God.

When some people of faith (like the parish priest in the Berri film) can see so clearly that these options are anything but consonant with the basic ethical tenets of all world religions, why does the fascist option keep attracting other people of faith (like the German bishops depicted in the photo accompanying yesterday’s posting about discernment)? This is a complex question, one that would take page after page of careful analysis to answer.

But one obvious answer that leaps off the page immediately—and deserves attention, in the context of the religio-political debates currently underway in the United States—is this: in the Catholic context, there’s been a fateful and malicious retrenchment in the period following the Berri film, which was made in the era of Vatican II. That was an era in which the church spoke about positive dialogue with the contemporary world, and about retrieving aspects of theology and ethical thinking that had fallen by the wayside in the period in which the Catholic church was in complete, closed, defensive reaction to modernity.

Within the context of the dialogue Vatican II invited with the modern world (a dialogue Pope John Paul II and his chief advisor Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, largely shut down), a promising new approach to moral theology, but one rooted in biblical and patristic thought, began to develop. This approach stressed the formation of good character as the goal of ethical life, rather than—as the Catholic tradition had stressed in its period of reaction to the modern world—a focus on individual acts as good acts or evil acts.

The moral theology that began to develop after Vatican II, but was quickly squelched by the top pastoral leaders of the church, noted that character is more fundamental than acts. Produce good people, and good acts will follow.

The exclusive focus on acts as the center of the moral life runs the risk of keeping people woefully immature, when it comes to making moral decisions and political decisions that involve moral judgments. At its worst, it produces a churched population that looks for some answer book—a catechism, a bible—to provide all the answers it needs as it makes moral judgments. And, it should be noted, some answer book as authoritatively interpreted by church leaders . . . .

The churches, especially in the American context, all too often keep their adherents in a state of moral infantilism, through their focus on the rightness and wrongness of this or that act, as proved by selected texts of catechism or bible, interpreted exclusively by church leaders. This approach to the moral life (and to the application of the moral life in the political realm) yields simple-minded sloganizing that all too quickly degenerates into a hate-filled division of everyone into the right and the wrong, the good and the bad, the in and the out, the true believer and the false believer, the blessed by God and the despised by God.

In other words, it paves the way for the kind of leaders that rose to power very quickly in Nazi Germany. One of the painful lessons the churches ought to have learned in that period is how important it is to prepare people carefully to make political decisions on some moral basis that goes beyond sloganizing, pandering to hateful social movements, and resorting in the most simple-minded way to religious authority figures to tell us what is right and wrong.

Forming people of good character who make sound moral judgments is far more difficult than telling people to do this and that. Helping people develop character, helping them to come to sound ethical decision making within their own lives, using their own minds and consciences, is much more difficult than handing them catechisms and bibles and telling them to do x and avoid y.

I hold the American Catholic bishops responsible for helping to foster such immaturity in moral decision making among American Catholics, that many of us simply cannot see the way in which we have sold out our most fundamental values in the elusive pursuit of "the" pro-life candidate. We’ve needed much more from them as pastoral leaders in the past several decades, we who still identify, however tenuous the connection has become, as Catholics. While we’ve needed religious education to allow us to gain adult maturity in moral decision-making, we’ve been spoon-fed. We’ve asked for respectful dialogue and have been handed Catholic answers.

And the fruit of this approach to the moral life has been so exceedingly bitter that, with their abdication to the religious right, Catholics have practically forfeited any claim to have something of importance to say to the public sphere, in a period in which making ethical moral judgments about political issues has perhaps never been more imperative. Fascism—telling people what they must do, forcing them to do it if they refuse, and pandering to hate—is certainly a lot easier and a lot less messy.

But, oh, the price, when we give in to it!

*Men, because most churches have historically excluded women from key leadership roles.

Benedict's Visit: Drawing Lines or Opening Arms?

This has been a week of travel, in which it has not been easy to be online frequently. Given this, and since I’ve fulfilled my major task for the week—to send an open letter to Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker of the United Methodist Church’s Florida Conference—I want to end this work week with a brief reflection on some news stories that have caught my attention this week.

I’m, of course, following the news of Pope Benedict’s trip to the U.S., to the extent that I can do so without easy internet access. I am heartened that Benedict has met with survivors of clerical sexual abuse. I’m reading Bishop Geoffrey Robinson’s Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church (Dublin: Columba, 2007) now, and am persuaded by his argument that the abuse crisis is the most serious challenge the Catholic church has faced since the Reformation. I’m also persuaded by his contention that, had the pope addressed this crisis forthrightly, with transparency, from the time it broke as an international news story in 2002, we would be much further down the road of healing than we are now.

That being the case, Benedict’s meeting with survivors is a symbolic gesture of great importance—about which, more in a moment. If reports are correct which say that Benedict has also distinguished between pedophilia as the problem to be addressed, and homosexuality in the priesthood, then I am further heartened by what Benedict is accomplishing on this pastoral visit.

There have been strong forces within the church that wished to use gay priests as a scapegoat in ugly image-management attempts to sweep the abuse crisis under the rug. Archbishop Wilton Gregory has made that argument explicit, claiming that the church doesn’t have a pedophilia crisis but a homosexuality crisis in its priesthood. If Benedict has, indeed identified pedophilia as the problem to be addressed, and has distinguished between pedophilia and homosexuality, then he has made a valuable contribution. The crisis will not be resolved by scapegoating gay priests. It is a crisis of abuse of power first and foremost, and must be resolved at that level—not at the level of sexual orientation, which has nothing at all to do with its genesis or prevalence.

My posting yesterday reflects on Hilary Rosen’s recent comparison between Benedict and Desmond Tutu in a Huffington Post article. As I state in that reflection, in my view, if the churches truly want to reach the minds and hearts of people in the 21^st century with the gospel and to address social needs around the world, they cannot continue to attack gay and lesbian human beings.

The attack on a group of human beings already subject to social stigmas in many places in the world undercuts the churches’ proclamation of the good news. It undermines the churches’ attempt to be a beacon of hope for justice everywhere in the world. The church cannot participate in injustice and at the same time convince people—thinking people—that it stands unambiguously and everywhere on the side of justice.

Benedict himself has called for investigation of seminaries in the U.S., to weed out gay candidates for the priesthood. Not only will such a witch-hunt not “solve” the abuse crisis (which is about abuse of power first and foremost): this is a radically unjust attempt to manage the crisis and the public image of the church by scapegoating gay priests.

Impression management will not resolve the problem of abuse. Scapegoating a marginalized group of human beings will not resolve the problem. The problem has everything to do with misuse of clerical power, with a system of clericalism that accords a vastly disproportionate share of power and privilege to clergy rather than laity in the Catholic church.

Until that problem is addressed honestly, forthrightly, with transparency and full accountability, the abuse crisis will not go away. Though Benedict’s symbolic measures this week have been for the good, in my view, they are only a first step: as Geoffrey Robinson argues so cogently, dealing with the crisis before us now will require radical re-thinking of the role of the papacy, of clericalism, and of how power is used (and misused) in the Catholic church. It will require dialogue that permits the laity to have a voice, and, in particular, that brings to the table groups that have been rudely shoved away, including gay and lesbian believers as well as theologians silenced by Benedict himself when he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Acting as head of that Congregation, Benedict unleashed a monster, and he must now confront that monster if he wishes to bring healing to the church at this moment of crisis. Some of the most talented and forward-thinking minds in the church—including Charles Curran—were silenced by Ratzinger at a point in the history of the church when we most need their contributions to move beyond the abuse crisis.

In addition, under the papacy of John Paul II, both John Paul and Cardinal Ratzinger allowed some groups of Catholics in the United States to present themselves as the sole “orthodox” voice of Catholicism. These Catholics want the church to speak with a unitary voice on their “non-negotiable” issues. They want the church to read all dissenters out. They prefer a church of the holy few rather than the unwashed many—a Donatist church rather than a truly catholic one. They want the church to speak with their unitary voice, and to be their church.

They also wish to see the Catholic church explicitly aligned with one political party, the Republican party. To a great extent, they have turned the church in the U.S.—or tried to do so—into a political machine to serve the needs of the Republican party.

As E.J. Dionne says in his superb new book Souled Out, which I cited in a previous blog posting, this alliance of right-wing interest groups in U.S. Catholicism with the Republican party reached its nadir in the 2004 elections, when some bishops did all but stand on their heads to coerce Catholics to vote “right”—that is, to vote Republican. Some bishops were willing to take the entirely untraditional and theologically insupportable route of using the Eucharist as a political weapon in the 2004 elections. These bishops threatened to deny communion to Catholics who did not endorse their list of “non-negotiable” issues.

And, though these bishops hotly insisted that voting Republican was voting for life, they were conspicuously silent when the administration they told Catholics to elect betrayed all Catholic pro-life values in its response to Hurricane Katrina. They have been much more muted in their criticism of the tremendous assault on pro-life values in the Iraq War than they have ever been about abortion.

The recent Pew study shows about a third of American Catholics having walked away. Many of us have done so, I would submit, because we can no longer stomach the politicization of a tradition that has a much richer perspective on the interface of religion and politics. It is our very commitment to Catholic values—the broad range of values that vastly exceed the tight little list of “non-negotiable” issues—which causes us to distance ourselves from the church insofar as it is the Republican party at prayer.

Until the church deals with the monster it has unleashed by politicizing Catholic faith at this point in history, by allying Catholicism with a narrow political option in the Western world—until it deals with the connection between that attempt to bully all believers into lockstep thinking and voting, and the system of clericalism, it will continue to bleed members. And those who walk away will include individuals and groups whose contributions are crucially needed if the church is to be truly catholic, as well as to meet the significant challenges of transmitting its fundamental beliefs and values to the postmodernist culture of the 21st century.

If Benedict really wants to begin dealing with the deep roots of the abuse crisis, he needs to begin making clear distinctions between the endorsement of a single political option, which betrays the richness of the church’s tradition, and an approach that recognizes that the church brings a wide range of values to political life, which need to be applied in diverse ways in different cultures. Benedict needs to stand against the misrepresentation of “the” Catholic position in the American political sphere by some groups of American Catholics who want to use their “non-negotiables” as a litmus test to rule the rest of us out of their church. Only then will many of us take seriously what he has said and done this week about the abuse crisis.

A case in point: in my travels this week in the American heartland, I have found that many Catholic homes have gotten a recent mailing from Karl Keating of Catholic Answers. The mailing has to do with the upcoming World Youth Day in Sydney. In flaming bold red letters, it opens by announcing to Catholic families that their young people will be preyed on by homosexual activists at this international Catholic event. It calls on those receiving the flyer to donate so that they can keep Catholic youth safe in Sydney.

Mr. Keating’s letter characterizes gay and lesbian persons as “sinister.” He says that gay and lesbian persons are intent on “recruiting” Catholic youth. Mr. Keating waves the battle flag of intrinsic disorder. He states, “These people [sic] practice what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls ‘acts of grave depravity’ that are ‘intrinsically disordered’.” “These people” have chosen an immoral “lifestyle” and are not entitled to “special civil rights.”

These people? These human beings? These brothers and sisters in Christ? These people?! What Catholic values does that phrase represent, I wonder?

What to make of such a letter? Many of us might shake our heads and dismiss it as just another example of the ugly propaganda of the religious right.

I think letters like this deserve more attention, however. In the first place, this is a vile political screed masquerading as a religious statement. It is a screed that employs hate speech. It fuels social violence against a group of people identified as the sinister Other. It trades blatantly on ugly insupportable stereotypes of gay and lesbian human beings as sexual predators targeting the young.

The letter deserves attention as well because its mailing coincides with the visit of Benedict to the U.S. The timing of this letter can hardly be coincidental. In the same week that heartland Catholic families are glued to their t.v. sets watching Benedict, hearing news of his attempt to address the abuse crisis, they are reading a foul missive from a right-wing Republican activist group purporting to speak on behalf of “the” Catholic church, attacking a group of stigmatized individuals.

E.J. Dionne’s Souled Out notes the mysterious way in which Keating’s Catholic Answers group suddenly found funding to create a Catholic voter guide in 2004—a voter guide calling itself the Catholic voter guide, which overtly endorsed the Republican candidate. Attempts to track the money funding this politico-religious venture have not been successful, though Dionne notes that there are strong indicators that the funds came directly from the Republican party.

In the week that Benedict comes to try to bring healing to the U.S. church, one Catholic group in the U.S. sends out a hate-filled screed blanketing the American heartland, seeking to use gay and lesbian human beings as objects in a political game designed to bring Catholic votes, once again, to the Republican party. Pope Benedict, if I may be so bold as to address you, you have work to do: the healing we need is much deeper than symbolic gestures, however noble and good those gestures are as a first step.

To find healing that goes beyond the symbolic level, we need a church in which people of good will are once again free to speak their minds, to follow their informed consciences, to talk and pray together about very serious issues that cannot be resolved by top-down coercion, by crozier-shaking and excommunications, by threats of hell and damnation, or by allying the church with a single political option. To deal with the wounds of our church today, you must deal with some of what you yourself set in motion in the period in which you headed the CDC.

Even if you yourself have broken with that crozier-shaking style now that you have become pope, there are powerful groups within the Catholic church, as well as bishops, who continue to try to bully and coerce rather than to persuade and love. Thank you for giving signals, in your meeting with survivors of clerical abuse, that a much more pastoral, more thoughtful, more nuanced, and above all, more loving response is required on the part of a church that truly wishes to retain the loyalty of those targeted by the attack dogs that have been unleashed in the church in recent years.

We must move beyond the insider-outsider lines that try to create a church of the pure and washed, of true believers who happen to be all Republicans. I find the contention of Cardinal John P. Foley that “good morals, like good art, begin by drawing a line” absurd both on the face of it, and as a theological proposition (see Ian Fisher and Laurie Goodstein, “Hard-Liner with Soft Touch Reaches Out to U.S. Flock,” NY Times, 13 April 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/us/nationalspecial2/13pope.html). Foley uses this analogy to characterize the approach of Pope Benedict, the drawer of lines that define what is and is not Catholic, who is or is not inside the church.

I can think of all kinds of good art that is non-linear, that does not require drawing a line. And in my reading of the gospels, Jesus was all about transgressing social and religious lines that made some people insiders and others outsiders, some folks more human than other folks. The life and ministry of Jesus was about abolishing the lines that suggest that God loves some people more than others—or does not love some people at all.

The central Christian symbol is a set of lines that undercut and transgress a unitary line—a cross. If one wishes to meditate on the role of lines in Christianity, and if one takes this symbol as his or her starting point, then one might arrive at the conclusion that, in its core significance and at a fundamental level, Christianity challenges the drawing of any line that makes one group the inside group and other groups outsiders. The vertical line is cut across by the horizontal one, at the very heart of Christianity.

Rather than being about a single line that shows who is in and who is out, Christianity is about two lines that stretch the single line to its limits—about one line that crosses over the other, so that there is never a single, excluding line, but a pair of lines representing the open arms of a God who embraces every single human being. An effective papacy would take this symbol as its starting point . . . .