The Bridge-Building Metaphor, the LGBTQ Community, and the Catholic Church: You Want to Build a Bridge to THAT?!

As a metaphor, the image of building bridges from the LGBTQ community to the Catholic church and vice versa does not work for me. A primary reason it does not work: it's not clear to me what is "over there," on the church side of the bridge. 1)

— William D. Lindsey (@wdlindsy) February 20, 2018

Church of England's Choice to Accept Female Bishops: What Will Be the Effect on the Roman Catholic Church? Some Musings

As the Church of England votes at long last to accept women bishops, Catholic News Service, the USCCB's Pravda, is already (and predictably) complaining that this decision will impede ecumenical relations between the Roman and the Anglican churches. Interestingly, the New York Times today carries both an article by Stephen Castle noting that the step the Church of England is now taking will help move society in the direction of gender equity, and a lament by Cadence Woodland noting that the decision of the top men in the LDS church to crack down on open conversation about women's issues has led to the closing of what had been called "the Mormon moment," a moment of seeming openness to free discussion of women's and gay issues.

In the News: Obama and Marriage, Catholic Church's Welcoming Problem, Jim Wallis and Sojourners Again

As the week ends, a selection of articles from the week's news that have caught my eye:

Advent Reflections: Models of Pastoral Leadership and the Future of the Church

One of the interesting aspects of looking back through one's old journals, papers, letters--any written work into which one has poured one's heart--is how we discover that our current preoccupations are far from current.  They're only the latest upward flow of lava out of a volcano whose molten source is almost always much deeper in our souls.

News Roundup: Recent Articles of Significance to Religion-Culture Debates

This is one of those posts in which I try to gather links to articles and blog postings that have impressed me in recent days. Several of these offer perspective on issues about which I have blogged here in the past few weeks.

First, Jeremy Hooper at Good As You posted a link yesterday to new analysis of the Ugandan situation by Rachel Maddow at MSNBC. In the clip, Rachel speaks with Andrea Mitchell, focusing in particular on the role of the American religious right in creating the Ugandan situation, in which gay citizens of that nation may face the death sentence for being gay. Necessary viewing for those who continue to monitor what’s happening in Uganda.

Second, Karen Occamb reports at Huffington Post yesterday that American Foundation for Equal Rights, the group sponsoring the federal legal challenge to prop 8, has set up a new website. As she notes, it’s full of useful information for those interested in equal rights for gay citizens of the U.S.

Note that those seeking to keep prop 8 and its ban on same-sex marriage in California in place are now trying to ban televised coverage of the Olson-Boies case against prop 8. California law permits such coverage.

The trial begins 11 January, and until noon Friday (8 January), presiding Judge Vaughn Walker is accepting letters regarding televised coverage of the case. Please consider going to the Courage Campaign website and signing a petition on behalf of televised coverage.

It always strikes me as ironic (and telling) that many of those fighting tooth and nail to deny gay people our human rights claim that they are engaged in a preeminently moral struggle. And they so commonly want to hide their identity. As if their crusade is dirty work and not an ethically admirable crusade worthy of inspection by light of day.

Democracy works best when its deliberations take place in the light.

Third, I also highly recommend by a posting yesterday at Enlightened Catholicism by my colleague Colleen Kochivar-Baker about Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion. Colleen’s posting links to a website for the Charter for Compassion.

I’m struck, in particular, by the Charter’s call for people of faith and of good will

to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate.

I’ve written before on this blog about how, as I try to find my own spiritual path, I look for those shining threads running through my experience, my inmost self, and the world around me. This statement will become a shining thread for me in the new year.

It is a statement that desperately needs to be heard, as some religious groups (and powerful political and economic groups) misuse the scripture to make the lives of some brothers and sisters susceptible to violence, suffering, and even death. I’ve noted previously on this blog a statement that will remain with me throughout my life, a statement made by a student in an undergraduate introductory ethics class I was teaching back in the latter part of the 1980s.

I had asked the class what norms they could formulate to help us know when interpretations of scripture had departed significantly from what scripture is all about. A young woman in class raised her hand and said, “The bible is always misused when it’s misused to harm others.”

I can’t think of a clearer, more apt, and more on-target norm for reading the scriptures accurately.

Fourth, I want to make note of a valuable, insightful article by Frank Cocozzelli to which I intended to link when I wrote my piece on Niebuhr and President Obama several days ago. With the birth of the new Open Tabernacle blog, my attention has been divided between this blog and Open Tabernacle, and I haven’t yet commented on Frank’s article.

Frank’s article is entitled “Reclaiming Capitalism Through Principles of Distributive Justice,” and was published by the Institute for Progressive Christianity last year. It explores the confluence of three streams of thought in American Christianity, all of which converge in their critical analysis of unbridled capitalism and their call for people of faith to create a more equitable and compassionate economic system than the one now in place. The three streams are the social gospel (represented by Walter Rauschenbusch), Christian realism (Reinhold Niebuhr), and Catholic social teaching (represented by Father John Ryan). For those wanting more (and admirably nuanced) information about Niebuhr and his significance in American culture, and politics, I highly recommend this article.

Finally, I find Tony Adams’ wry (and slightly wicked, in the best sense of that word) take on the canonization of Pius XII and how those of us critical of this step might best get the Vatican to listen to us wonderful. For theological wisdom wrapped up in humor (something I don’t do well at all, and a gift I envy), read his story of the longstanding . . . connections . . . between Eugenio Pacelli aka Pius XII and Francine Spellman of New York.

Readers Write: The Abuse Scandal Goes to the Heart of What Is Wrong with the Church

And one more posting this evening that involves a dialogue sparked by a previous discussion. This discussion occurs in the thread following my posting a week ago arguing for the rationality and informed coherence in discussions of religio-political issues. Several thoughtful readers replied with thought-provoking comments about the abuse scandal in the Catholic church--that is, the scandal caused by the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clerics, and by the cover-up of this behavior by church authorities.

Since significant discussions on threads following a blog posting are often overlooked by readers, I'd like to lift that discussion out of the comments section of last week's posting and offer it here in a separate posting.

Terry: It is abundantly clear that this entire abuse scandal goes to the heart of what is wrong with the modern Catholic Church: the dogmatic insistence on excessive, centralized power, and totally unrealistic criteria for entry to the priesthood. We are driving away or excluding from the clergy precisely those people who would be most valuable in framing sensible pastoral care on sexuality: sexually active and responsible straight men, out gay men, and women. Instead we welcome and protect the sexually frustrated and closeted, immature men who have been unable to integrate their sexuality, of whatever flavour, into their personalities.

In researching and writing my own series of posts on this topic at Queering the Church, I have reached two key conclusions: I agree with many of the right wing critics that part of the problem of the secrecy and cover-ups is that too many influential clergy feel the need to protect each other for fear of exposing the myth of clerical closet, of exposing the high proportions of clergy, both straight and gay, who are ignoring the rule. A rule that is not widely kept is not worth maintaining, and brings the entire authority into disrepute.

The victims are not just the individuals, girls and boys, women and men, but to some degree, the entire church which is damaged. The creation of a healthy church requires that we all treat as a priority finding appropriate ways to respond to the mess. "Appropriate" here does not include settling for financial reparations alone, nor the shameful attempts to deflect the blame by scapegoating the "homosexuals". We must insist that the church take responsibility for its own institutional culpability, and begin dismantling its own assumed power structures.

Colleen: Terry I agree with your assessment, but if the 'we' doesn't include a significant number of clergy and hierarchy willing to admit to the system and commit to changing it, 'we' will get nowhere.

VOTF sure seems to prove that fact.

Bill: I agree with you, Terry, that the pastoral authorities of the church have shielded (and even promoted) clerical abusers of minors because doing otherwise would open the can of worms called celibacy. Many priests are simply not living the vow of celibacy.

Unfortunately, the trade off for the illusion is that the church accepts in ministry many men who are ill-equipped psychologically to live not only generous, fruitful lives of ministry, but generous, fruitful adult lives, period. The system by its very nature fosters stunted psychological growth.

One has to wonder whether the church likes it that way. The immature and psychologically ill-equipped are, after all, more manageable than the mature and psychologically whole. Since the church places such a premium on authority, obedience, and control, it positively invites into its inner governance ranks people who enjoy giving orders and/or being ordered about.

The real elephant in the living room is, to my way of thinking, the clerical system itself--the assumption that the ordained have a separate (and exalted) status within the body of Christ; the belief that the ordained should have rights denied to the laity. Until we confront that system and begin to look at it critically through the optic of the gospel, I don't think much will change, and we will see a continuation of the abuse (and the cover-up).

Church at the Crossroads: Reflections as Gene Robinson Becomes a Bishop

As I've been going through my journals from the past several years, I've happened on a reflection I wrote in June 2003, as Gene Robinson was made bishop. I seem to have sent this to one of the centrist Catholic publications in the U.S., and, as usually happens when I offer those journals pieces for publication, I received it back.

It still seems pertinent, though, and now that I have this blog, I can share these reflections with others without having to resort to the powerbrokers at the center who have never seemed quite interested in the point of view of many of us shoved to the margins because we're gay or lesbian.

Here's my essay:

On June 7, 2003, New Hampshire Episcopalian clergy and laity nominated the first openly gay bishop in the nation, the Rev. V. Gene Robinson. On June 5, at a news conference in Boston, Rev. Robert Hoatson of the Catholic archdiocese of Newark announced that he had been fired the preceding day from his job as director of two Catholic schools in Newark.

Hoatson viewed the firing as retaliation for appearing two weeks earlier at a press conference in Albany, in which he called for legislators to enact more stringent laws protecting children from sexual abuse. A June 5 Boston Globe article quotes Hoatson to say, ''It appears that the crisis is not getting better. I believe it is getting worse, and I am not sure that we have been straightforward and honest with the victims . . . and with society in general.''

Is there any connection between these two stories? I believe there is. They point to two opposing views of what it means to be church in the 21st century. The stories are signposts to two very different futures for the church, futures that depend on and enact two radically different ecclesiologies.

To gay Christians in general and gay Catholics in particular, the moral depths to which some of our bishops appear to have sunk in their (mis)handling of the sexual abuse crisis comes as no surprise. We have known for some years now that a number of our pastoral leaders are capable of being morally bankrupt; we have known that they can lie to the public, use gay (and other) human beings as pawns in political games as though we are subhuman and without basic human rights, and represent themselves as ultimate moral arbiters while betraying the central tenets of Judaeo-Christian morality.

We have seen bishops who have been most intent to protect and promote pedophiles fomenting hatred of gay people through their utterances and through opposition to gay-rights ordinances in their jurisdictions. We know, too, that some of our bishops have their own secrets, and that some of the bishops who have been most vocal about denying gay people basic human rights are themselves closeted gay men.

We have long since discovered that the pastoral leaders of our church are able to look the public in the eye and not tell the truth. We have seen bishops obstruct justice before now. What is happening in the sexual abuse crisis comes as no revelation to us. It is old news.

For some time now, as we have encountered the demonic face of religion in the behavior of many of our pastoral leaders towards us, many gay Catholic have pleaded with the church to be church—to realize the vision of church enshrined in Jesus’s proclamation of the reign of God. We have asked for the church to function as a healing space in a society that savages outcasts of all sorts.

We have called on our pastors to engage us in honest and open dialogue, rather than evading our questions and using image management spin-control techniques to make themselves appear tolerant and compassionate while their actions belie their words. We have begged priests and bishops to remember that the invitation Jesus issues to his banquet table is one issued to all, not merely to the sanctified and prosperous.

Even while we have been putting such questions to our bishops—usually ineffectually, it seems, since we have been conspicuously ignored and treated as though we have no right to expect answers to our questions—many of our bishops have been promoting and protecting sexual predators, using funds donated by faithful parishioners to silence victims with no accountability for their use of these funds, and obstructing justice. The vision of church that emerges from such behavior is a horrifying one. It is a vision of a church more interested in power than in service, in image than in substance.

It is an ecclesiology that betrays, at fundamental levels, the ecclesiology of the Christian gospels. It is a church of clerics against laity, of an elite club that will defend its privileges at all costs, closing ranks if one of its own is under attack. This is a church in which clerical vocations count more than lay ones, and in which Vatican II’s retrieval of the venerable ecclesiology of church as people of God is mocked and rolled back.

The church today stands at a significant crossroads. The nomination of Gene Robinson and the firing of Robert Hoatson represent forks in a road. One fork leads to healing and justice, to a recovery of a vision of church in which all are equally called and equally welcome at the Lord’s table. The other leads to a vision of church in which raw power trumps transparency, in which image management counts for more than living the gospel honestly and forthrightly, and in which the mighty of the world wield greater influence in the body of Christ than do the least among us.

When the fanfare about the sexual abuse crisis is over, which road shall we find that we have taken?

Augustine and Croaking Frogs: America Magazine on Sectarian Catholics

America has just uploaded to its website an editorial entitled “Sectarian Catholicism” (here), and it’s a fine statement—a powerful one. It notes the strong parallels between the situation of U.S. Catholicism today and African Catholicism in the period in which Augustine confronted a purist group, the Donatists, who declared themselves the only right and true church, and implicitly excommunicated the rest of the church.

Augustine strongly opposed the notion that a group of ideological purists who refused a place in their church to anyone outside their small circle constituted the church. He notes that the church is to be like Noah’s ark, with representatives of every species brought inside. (This is an idea that, by the way, ought to compel churches and their pastors to assure the presence of gay and lesbian persons in the churches.)

In City of God, he also writes (here and here) that none of us will know with certainty whether we are among the saved or the unsaved until God’s final winnowing at the end of history. In fact, he says, some of those now most confident that they alone are the saved may well discover in the end that they have not been among the saved at all.

Augustine stressed the catholicity of the church: its obligation to reach out to and include everyone, its welcome to sinners and not merely to the pure and the righteous. As America suggests, while claiming to be more authentically traditional and more truly Catholic than anyone else, some contemporary American Catholics have constructed a tiny, defensive little shell of church that is very much like what Augustine decried in the Donatists, while he sought to defend the notion of catholicity.

And, for these smaller-purer church types, what seems to count in the final analysis, even more than doctrine, is political loyalty—loyalty to their party, and to their ideological interpretation of what that party stands for:

For today’s sectarians, it is not adherence to the church’s doctrine on the evil of abortion that counts for orthodoxy, but adherence to a particular political program and fierce opposition to any proposal short of that program. They scorn Augustine’s inclusive, forgiving, big-church Catholics, who will not know which of them belongs to the City of God until God himself separates the tares from the wheat. Their tactics, and their attitudes, threaten the unity of the Catholic Church in the United States, the effectiveness of its mission and the credibility of its pro-life activities.

These sectarian Catholics have radically impaired the American Catholic church and now threaten its viability by attacking, in particular, those called by the Spirit to help the community remember, understand, and transmit its beliefs and core values to subsequent generations. They have targeted Catholic thinkers, theologians, and universities that foster careful study and interpretation of our beliefs and core values. They have selected a handful of rigid, intellectually bankrupt Catholic colleges and universities as the only "truly" Catholic schools left in the nation, because these schools have been willing to sell themselves lock, stock, and barrel to the Republican party and its wealthy promoters.

In the view of the editors of America, the Vatican itself is now concerned about the damage these politicized sectarians are doing to the American church. America notes that, while some bishops and a significant proportion (though by no means a majority) of American Catholics wish to punish Notre Dame for inviting the president to its commencement, Pope Benedict has twice reached out to Obama, met with and maintains ties to Nancy Pelosi, and participated in a ceremony to honor New Mexico governor Bill Richardson after he abolished the death penalty, though Richardson does not toe the official Catholic party line about the politics of abortion.

The subtext of the America editorial is that the church in the U.S. is in serious trouble, unless it can disengage itself from the highly politicized, sectarian, ideological purists who have dominated it for some decades now. This group of Catholics, who have come to believe that they alone own the church and that it must conform to their narrow agenda, refuse to relinquish control even after the most recent elections showed that they are by no means in the majority in the American Catholic church. They continue their use of destructive slash-and-burn political tactics designed to drive thoughtful, non-ideological fellow Catholics away from the church.

And if they continue unchecked, the handwriting on the wall is clear: the American Catholic church will not have a bright future. As my posting on this theme yesterday notes (here), one in ten American adults is now a former Catholic, and four times as many Catholics are leaving the church as are now entering it.

This is a church in crisis, and that crisis will only deepen in years to come. What those who take heart in the finding that 68% of American Catholics remain Catholic do not note—and apparently do not wish to note—is the sharp demographic gap in the current Catholic population. The 68% remaining Catholic are aging Catholics.

And they are not being replaced by younger Catholics. The decline among younger Catholics continuing their affiliation with the Catholic church even into early adulthood is precipitous. And it is growing. And it will grow rapidly, if the Catholic church in the U.S. continues to permit itself to be identified with the Republican party, and, even more, with the right wing of that party.

The internet has been abuzz the past several days with articles noting that Republican groups are meeting to address the decline of the Republican party. Some of these articles state that Republicans are perplexed that they have so quickly achieved minority status and appear now headed to an even more marginal place in the nation’s political life.

I’m perplexed in turn when I read that. Just as I’m perplexed by the seeming inability of some of the pastors of the American Catholic church for some time now not to see where the church is headed: to demise. How can people not see what is right before them, and how can they not adapt when their present course is clearly leading to their annihilation? To my eyes, it has been very clear that the future of the nation does not lie with right-wing political and religious extremists, and that the future of the American Catholic church does not rest in the hands of those groups, either.

I’ve always thought that true pastoral acumen and real religious insight gives the pastor or the believer a feel for the future, an ability to see the direction in which the Spirit is moving. To my way of thinking, the inability of many of the leaders of the American Catholic church to see the cul-de-sac into which they have been leading the church for some time now is a strong indicator of lack of pastoral acumen, and/or a failure to listen carefully to the Spirit.

And the upshot is now that, through their blind captivity to people who have not sought to and are incapable of building a viable future for our nation, the leaders of American Catholicism have already alienated millions of us who once thought we might find a spiritual home in the church. As a postscript here, I'd like to add a note for readers who may be picking up the conversation on this blog only in recent days, and who may think I'm an active, practicing Catholic who is arguing that it is possible for one to remain Catholic while accepting oneself as a gay or lesbian person.

I'm adding this postscript because of some questions readers have sent me by email—very welcome questions. To those new to the blog, I'd like to note that I'm someone who has found himself pushed outside the Catholic church by the sectarian process the America editorial is describing.

This has much to do with the fact that I'm gay and have lived my adult life with another gay theologian. The church has not made a place for us, and does not intend to make a place for us. We have been made to know we are unwelcome in a number of ways, but most clearly of all by the refusal of any Catholic institution to provide us with a place in which to pursue our vocation as theologians. People have to eat in order to live. The church cannot tell people it welcomes them when, at the same time, it excludes them from economic life.

As numerous postings on this blog indicate, I have come to the conclusion that it is almost impossible for any openly gay person to remain in healthy contact with the Catholic church today. I do admire those who manage to maintain that contact, and I think that they are doing a valuable service both to the gay community and to the Catholic church by struggling to exist within an institution that is, on the whole, destructive of gay souls and gay lives.

I have also become aware, through my experiences in a United Methodist institution, that the dynamic of exclusion and destruction I am describing is not limited to the Catholic church. It runs through many Christian churches today, in their approach to gay and lesbian persons. The churches are, on the whole, the least safe place in American culture today for those of us who are gay and lesbian. To their shame . . . .

I do, however, continue to write about the churches, their ties to the political realm, and gay issues, because I think that it is impossible for anyone who is gay or lesbian in the U.S. to ignore the churches and their effect on our culture. In this nation with the soul of a church, that effect is considerable, and for the LGBT community, it is often horrendous. We ignore churches and church life at our peril.

Finally, as with many LGBT persons though not all of us, I think that spirituality is a component of a healthy human life. I do not think that spirituality is confined or has to be confined to any particular religious expression. I understand those who turn their backs on religion altogether, when the face that religious groups persistently show us is a cruel, demonic one. I also think it is possible to find within the religions of the world, and within the Christian churches, authentic expressions of spiritual life that can nurture us as gay persons, though we have an obligation to sift through much of the heritage of religions and churches and combat whatever is destructive to us and others in that heritage, as we seek the authentic components.

On Being Catholic Today: Living Amidst Tumbling Walls

And, as a counterpoint to what I just posted about grim data that for two years now have noted that one in ten American adults is now a former Catholic and those who have left the Catholic church in the U.S. outnumber those joining it by four to one: I’d like to offer readers an exchange I recently had by email with a friend of mine.

My friend is a pastor—Catholic. He writes me (!) to ask for pastoral advice, for advice to him as a pastor trying to offer guidance, hope—something; anything—to his parishioners at a time of increasing apocalyptic hysteria among some American Catholics, while the things that concern him as a pastor, truly apocalyptic things, go unnoticed by many of his hysterical brothers and sisters.

My friend writes:

I'm at a loss as to how to "live as responsible Catholic planetary citizens" and how to frame a spirituality for this age of anger and unrest, as our planet is deteriorating, jobs are vanishing, our economic situation is becoming more and more dire, as our kids turn to gangs and drugs as schools fail them, while fear is rising and nuclear capability is expanding. I don't know how to "think in depth" about the issues, or even to pray about them. Yet, it seems to me that religious leadership should be helping people orient their thinking toward this larger context...and not only "in this larger context", but also with the "urgency" that current world circumstances seem to press on us.

I don't know if I'm just being an "alarmist," but it seems that world issues are deteriorating rapidly. As fast as Obama tries to hold out hands of friendship, the fabric that could hold those gestures and give them substantive meaning seems to unravel . . . . And I watch the hysteria in our own nation over a simple handshake! I've never been one to think in "apocalyptic terms," and I'm still not...but, I am concerned in ways I haven't been before.

Am I making sense? And do you have advice for me? I have an interesting congregation, a collection of amazing competence and awareness, but I think we are all "stuck," not knowing how to read, think pray and live toward spiritual depth that can enrich a planet. To say we are woefully lacking in leadership is to be charitable!!! This Pope is doing nothing to help us frame our consciousness and our spirituality, nor, certainly are the American bishops, who seem to be mentally deficient and spiritually empty. What say you? Do you have advice for me in working with a congregation?

And I respond:

I share very much your feelings and your analysis of where we are--and as a result, I'm not sure I have a lot to offer by way of practical advice. I feel the same sense of being stuck and of seeing no leadership at all from the top of the church.

I blogged this week on my Bilgrimage blog about the growing strength of an absolutely crazy apocalypticism in American Catholicism. This was recently articulated (in my view) by Bishop Robert W. Finn in his call for war with our "enemies"--and they seem to be just about the entire world, except for the religious right. His call for war is chock-full of talk about Satan. I suspect he represents a large group of right-wing Catholics who have gone off the deep end with Obama's election, and who are now rumbling about war, Satan, and the blood of Jesus.

And that's truly scary to me. As you say, we live in a world that already has apocalpytic overtones, and one would expect some message from the church other than an even crazier form of apocalypticism than the kind we meet in our everyday lives. But that message is just not there. In my opinion, Benedict is and always has been a polarizer, even back to his years in the Holy Office.

I do take tiny hope in the fact that he has so alarmed many European bishops--especially in Germany and Austria--by his off-the-wall statements that some of them, and some Vatican officials, appear to be distancing themselves from Benedict and his program. Two days ago, L'Osservatore Romano posted an editorial that actually sort of praises Obama, and is causing hot angry feelings among American right-wing Catholics, who want Obama to be depicted as the devil.

My guess is that some of those Vatican folks are seeing now the end results of these years of courting the Catholic right, as the American Catholic right goes off the deep end with rhetoric like Finn's about Satan and war and blood, and they're justly afraid of what they've effected over the years. Maybe we'll finally see a bit of movement from the top in a saner direction.

But meanwhile, there are millions of Catholics just lost in the wilderness. Richard McBrien wrote about this in a column at NCR this week. He speaks of the grief through which many of us are living, as we see Vatican II and its vision of church completely dismantled. And he also talks about where that leaves ordinary Catholics who are not especially ideological, but who want a church home that's not some kind of frightening sanctuary for a premodern world.

I don't know if any of this helps. I suspect I'm just echoing back to you your own concerns. Lord knows, Steve and I seem to have lost our way in the church--or, to be accurate, we feel the church has offered no way at all to us. So we're in the wilderness as a more or less permanent condition.

And so it goes, Anno Domini 2009, 1 May: as I wrote another friend today by email, "Of course, as we've seen for some time now, the walls of the institutional church are crumbling and they need to crumble. But seeing that doesn't really tell folks how to live in the meantime--except to avoid having the walls fall on your head!"

And that’s perhaps the best advice I can give to anyone seeking some sane or graceful way to live in connection to the Catholic church today: be prepared to walk in the wilderness, and as you walk there, avoid the walls that are crashing down. Don’t let them fall on your head.

They sorely need to fall. And if God has not totally abandoned the church, fall they will. Sadly, as they do fall, don’t expect much pastoral help, wisdom, or even compassion from the shepherds of the church. That’s not what brought most of them to the top—compassion, wisdom, or pastoral intent.

And the walls wouldn’t be tumbling or need to tumble had they been doing their job.

And sometimes the best way to build what is really significant and will endure is to let what is rotting and irrecoverable fall down, so that what is new can arise out of the ravaged foundations.

The Catholic Right as Republican Mouthpiece: Frank Cocozzelli's Analysis

As an appendix to my discussion of the Catholic right's capitulation to the political right--its subordination of Catholic belief and values to extreme-right political ideologies--I'd like to point to a source that readers interested in these themes may wish to read.

Frank Cocozzelli, Director of the Institute for Progressive Christianity, has done yeoman's work for years now tracking and exposing the Catholic right. His ongoing multi-part series on the Catholic right at the Talk to Action website is must-reading for anyone concerned about collusion of nasty right-wing money and the Catholic right, and the effects of that collusion on our political process. A chronological listing of all his articles and postings at that site is here.

In a 6 Sept. posting last year, Cocozzelli specifically addresses Martino and his "transparently factious" and overt political attempts to "unduly influence the American political process" (here and here). Some select quotes from that article:

Outside of a handful of issues such as abortion, stem cell research and LGTB civil rights, Palin has little in common with the Vatican and substantially less with the majority of American Catholics. But this narrow band of commonality will nevertheless be the pretext on which Catholicism will be defined [by the Catholic right], for political purposes as almost solely about abortion.

Some such as Bishop Charles Chaput of Denver are downright belligerent about it. Chaput has said that Senator Biden should refrain from Communion because of his stance on abortion rights and Bishop Joseph F. Martino of the Diocese of Scranton (Biden's birthplace) has made it clear that he would deny Senator Biden Communion because, in his words, "I will not tolerate any politician who claims to be a faithful Catholic who is not genuinely pro-life." . . .

When members of the Catholic hierarchy and their allies resort to such tactics, they cease being a legitimate voice in a ongoing debate and instead become transparently factious entities seeking to unduly influence the American political process. Such behavior is the difference between contributing to the national discourse and trying to dominate it. . . .

In short, Chaput, Martino and other such strident clergymen have a severely limited understanding of "pro-life issues." . . .

As I wrote this piece I searched in vain on for any evidence of just one demand by Bishops Chaput or Martino that universal healthcare be provided to all Americans. If they have publicly advocated for universal health care, they must have hidden it well, since my research turned up nothing from either of these otherwise high profile prelates. When I linked their two names to "universal healthcare" all I could find were endless pronouncements on banning abortion and euthanasia.

As Cocozzelli's analysis here demonstrates, what is driving Chaput, Martino, and their supporters in the American Catholic church is not so much the desire to outlaw abortion, as the drive to impose one political viewpoint and one political party on all Americans, in the name of "orthodoxy." The overt, grotesque use of the episcopal office and the sacraments to try to whip Catholics into line--into a political line--has not ended with the election of Obama.

Indeed, it is only beginning. In coming weeks, particularly with the choice of Governor Sebelius as the Health Secretary of the new administration, we can look for this strident, politicized, divisive behavior on the part of the Catholic right to be stepped up. And for many more attempts to grandstand with cooked-up stories about the "decline" of Catholicity in American Catholic universities, as they seek to planted these false reports everywhere they . . . .

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 . . . .

Lent and the Tears of Things: A Meditation on Mourning and the Spiritual Life

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt . . . .

I have been struggling with sadness lately. I continue struggling with sadness as Lent begins. I’d like to reflect on sadness today as a theme for this season of preparing the heart to receive more of God.

The particulars of the grief are perhaps not so important as its facticity: its simply being there as a universal human experience, with which we must cope and of which we struggle to make sense in our spiritual journeys. One root of my current bout with melancholy is our discovery that one of the two pups we rescued through an animal shelter in the winter before last is apparently seriously ill.

Our two little brother dogs have never been separated from the time of their birth, so, of course, I worry about the pain inflicted on one if the other dies. I also struggle with watching a tiny, innocent creature (he’s not yet even two years old) so full of life and mirth begin to endure the torments of cancer. The mother inside me wants to hold him, cuddle him, and croon away the pain.

I lie down to nap, and wake up with that line from Jonah ringing in my head—the divine statement near the end of the book, in which God tells Jonah that if Jonah grieves for the gourd vine that has wilted above his head, Jonah’s grief is but a shadow of the compassion God feels for all the citizens of Nineveh whom Jonah scorns. And for their animals . . . .

I have always loved that affirmation of a divine compassion that encompasses our brothers and sisters in the animal kingdom, over whom we have long thought it our right to exercise lordship. If God’s love is so broad, then surely our hearts need to expand to encompass more of those we exclude from the scope of our compassion.

I’m morose these days, too, after I have finally completed my work on the first stage of a project I’ve discussed on this blog before. I’ve just written an article that will, I hope, eventually turn into something more substantial. It sketches the history of a branch of my family that crossed the color line in 19th-century Mississippi and Arkansas—the story of a white planter who lived his entire adult life, almost fifty years, in a marital relationship with a woman of color by whom he had six children whom he acknowledged and to whom he left his property.

I say “marital relationship” because this couple could not marry, of course, in the 19th-century South. Their being together, their having a family together—their very love for each other—was regarded by the vast majority of their fellow citizens as immoral, disgusting, illegal, something to be scorned and outlawed. The fact that they were able to maintain a family life at all under the conditions with which they coped is remarkable in itself—a manifestation of grace, it seems to me.

As Arkansas moved towards enacting legislation (it passed in February 1859) that demanded the immediate expulsion of all free people of color in the state—if they did not leave, they would be returned to slavery—these parents managed to get their children north, to see them well educated and set up on farms. All three of the children (three had died young) married into white families with strong abolitionist ties, with strong ties to churches that supported abolition. One of these families was closely related to Harriet Beecher Stowe. The families of these children of color crossed the color line from that point forward.

But they suffered. The oldest son, who had married first and who lived apart from his siblings—who continue to appear on the census as mulattoes in some decades, while he is always white on the census from the time of his marriage to a white woman—did not return home for over thirty years. He did so finally in the months before his mother’s death. He could not do so, as a biracial man living white in the North. He was susceptible to violence if he returned South.

The letters of his parents are full of laments over the years, as they endure separation from their children: sunt lacrimae rerum. They want to see their children. They tell their children of their love for their sons and daughter. The letters state over and over that their mother sighs for her children who have been exiled from her.

When the father of the family died in 1883, he left his considerable landholdings in south Arkansas to his youngest son. That son returned from the north to live on and farm the land. And in 1899, as he was riding horseback on his land, he was shot in the back, killed instantly. A mysterious black man whom the newspapers call “General Washington” was charged with the crime.

It is hard not to believe this was a lynching in which a hapless black man was framed for the terrorist murder of a man of color whose white father had dared to leave land to him, and who returned from the north to live on that land. In the week in which he was murdered, there were multiple lynchings of black men all across south Arkansas. The 1890s were a reign of terror for black citizens—unbelievable horror—in which the state enacted laws to disenfranchise black voters, to return African-American citizens to quasi-servitude.

And as this happened at the governmental level, lynchings escalated—violence as a tool of repression designed to put black folks back into “their places” as government and law created a legislative framework for such humiliation, for the denial of rights and of justice. Reports from this decade say that hundreds of black citizens were fleeing the state, taking steamboats north as quickly as they could to escape the reign of terror.

And so I feel a well of sadness inside me as I think about this story. I have pictures of these people. Their eyes are sad—the eyes of the children sent north. The eyes of the daughter, in particular, are pools of sadness. Her letters constantly employ the word: sad, she writes, heavily underscoring the word.

It is painful to know that your humanity is the same humanity others enjoy and celebrate, but is not regarded by others as humanity equal to theirs. It is painful to be told that a part of yourself, of your God-given nature, is unacceptable, is beyond the pale, is to be parsed and controlled and put into its place by laws.

It is painful to know that these attitudes not merely exist, that they are not only enshrined in longstanding custom, but that they have the force of law. It is exceedingly painful to think that a majority of your fellow citizens not only agree with your dehumanization, but that they believe that their majority opinion captures the divine mind: that might makes right.

It is painful to me to know that these racial attitudes have persisted into my own lifetime, to discover how little I know of the draconian history of my own state—in its gory, ugly, inescapable details—vis-à-vis treatment of a racial minority by the majority to which I belong.

It is also exceedingly painful to live my own version of the preceding story, as a gay man whose humanity is demeaned and even denied by large numbers of my fellow citizens. Who put the name of God into their mouths as they legislate against me—as my foreparents did when they legislated against people of color and their families and their loves. It is painful to be told that majority rule makes for right when the decisions of the majority clearly contravene the most elementary canons of human decency—not to mention the most fundamental moral insights of the world’s religions.

I have experienced a particular kind of pain—a kind that runs across the skin and scalds it—in the past few days as I have read comments about gay lives by the arbiters of taste, the knowledge class, on centrist Catholic blogs. I cannot believe what I am reading. I cannot believe that educated people can say such things, and apparently not think seriously, ever, about the effects of their words on real human beings who are their brothers and sisters in Christ.

It is painful in the extreme to read discussions of the theology of James Alison that are prefaced by considerations of his “errors”—when no such preface ever finds its way into the discussions of the theology of any non-gay theologians, of any ideological stripe, on these blogs. It is painful (and ludicrous) to read that Alison’s “error” lies in his attempt to combine the gospels with bacchanals. James Alison. Bacchanals.

Can someone making such an absurd comment even have read Alison’s complex, thoughtful, anything-but-bacchanalian theology? Why would anyone's mind even go there—to the bacchanal—when they hear the name of James Alison? Why do our brothers and sisters persist in distorting our real lives to such an astonishing degree, as they entertain salacious fantasies about who we are and what we do that they would not entertain about other human beings?

Why do they not invite us in and let us talk, so that they can hear our real voices and have those fantasies decisively dispelled?

It is also exceedingly painful to read the clownish remarks of other centrist American Catholics on these blogs, in which they defend the choice of Catholic institutions to fire and/or deny rights to openly gay employees. With a straight face, these arbiters of opinion in the American Catholic church seek to argue that gay employees in Catholic institutions represent the “face” of the church to the public, and so the church has a right to enforce its moral positions by firing such persons when it chooses to do so.

I have worked at Catholic colleges in which this tawdry little argument has been advanced to justify ongoing abuse of gay employees. And those justifying it were divorced Catholics who were dating other divorced Catholics. And in some cases they were unmarried Catholics living with other (but—all-important point—heterosexual) unmarried Catholics in an intimate relationship. And in many cases, they were Catholics who were, one had to assume, using artificial contraception, since they were not producing a child every year and a half or so.

What would have been outrageous to them—and should have been outrageous to them—the decision of their employing institution to delve into the secrets of their bedrooms, was not considered outrageous at all, when it came to gay employees. Their personal lives were off-limits. One did not, and should not, make assumptions about those personal lives that went beyond what those living these lives chose to share.

But these same advocates of Catholic morality did not choose to extend the same decency to their brothers and sisters who happened to be gay. Nothing was off-limits. The most lurid imaginings possible regarding our sex lives—our bacchanalian sex lives—were perfectly defensible, since Catholic morality, the face of the church, was at stake.

How can educated people entertain such arguments and not recognize that they are engaging in discrimination of the grossest sort? That their concerns are not about upholding Catholic sexual morality in all its intricate detail, but in excluding gay human beings from their circles?

And that’s what it’s all about, in the final analysis: exclusion, pure and simple. While the occupants of the inner circles at the center of the American Catholic church fire up their cigars to celebrate their triumphs (yes, they do talk this way, unabashedly and without a hint of awareness of what cigars mean, of their use as symbols of heterosexual male exclusion and domination), many of us stand outside in the cold, looking in. And those celebrations are, to all appearances, as shamefully unaware of our exclusion—and our existence—as I find I have been, when I examine in detail the history of racially discriminatory legislation and actions in my own home state.

In fact, to some of us, it begins to appear that the cigars and cocktails are actually in celebration of our exclusion. That the victory being toasted is a victory over us, and the heterosexual manhood being asserted is asserted at our expense.

And so Lent. And sadness. I have pondered for some years now the insights of Thomas Moore regarding the place of mourning in spiritual life. There is a wisdom in what Moore says against which I rail, but which I have to try to find ways to incorporate into my own soul-making process.

Moore notes that we skim the surface of experience, by denying the place of sadness in our lives. We do anything possible to avoid confronting our mourning. We rant and rave—and I am exceptionally good at that. We cast blame: ditto. We tell ourselves we are not sad.

Because we do not want to go there. We do not want to go to the place to which mourning takes us. We do not want to go down into those dark, chthonic depths in which the roots of sadness reside in our souls.

We do not want to die.

Lent is a time to remember that things are full of tears. A time to remember that in the midst of life, we are in death. A time to go into the depths of our own sadness and simply be there, with the sadness, with the mourning.

Because that journey to the depths is a precondition to our participation in the healing of the world. In which life and death constantly tango together, and the practical compassion that changes things in the lives of others arises out of my willingness to come to terms with the depths of sadness in my own soul.

The Smaller, Purer (Leaner, Meaner) Church Rattles Again: Martino's Back

Martino's back. And with a vengeance. You know, the Scranton, Pennsylvania, bishop who made a big splash during the presidential election last October when he stormed into a parish where the faithful were discussing the obligations of Catholic citizens. Martino shut the discussion down, stating, "There is one teacher in this diocese, and these points are not debatable” (here).

The points to which Martino was referring were principles for Catholic voters in “Faithful Citizenship,” a document issued in 2007 by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. When he shut down that parish discussion last October, Martino brandished “Faithful Citizenship,” announcing, “No USCCB document is relevant in this diocese. The USCCB doesn’t speak for me. The only relevant document . . . is my letter.”

As a number of sources including Whispers in the Loggia (here) are reporting the past several days, Martino rapped Sen. Bob Casey of the Scranton diocese early this month for voting against reinstatement of the so-called Mexico City policy.

And now this week, Martino has inveighed against the decision of Misericordia University to invite openly gay speaker Keith Boykin to give a presentation at the university. Martino expressed his "absolute disapproval" of this decision and opined that the Sisters of Mercy-owned institution is "seriously failing in maintaining its Catholic identity" because, well, did I say it?, Mr. Boykin is gay. Openly so.

And the latest: Martino's auxiliary John M. Dougherty has informed several Irish-American associations in the diocese that Martino will shut down the cathedral during the St. Patrick's celebrations this year if the groups include any elected officials supporting abortion rights in the St. Pat's parade. Martino also threatens to withhold communion from any such officials involved in the St. Patrick's festivities.

Martino's hard-line approach failed to sway Catholic voters in his diocese in the November presidential elections. The diocese's central county, Lackawanna, voted nearly 2-to-1 for the Democratic ticket.

Oh, and as Rocco Palmo notes at the end of his discussion of Martino's latest pastoral overtures, late last month, the Scranton diocese announced that the falling numbers of priests in the diocese and straitened resources are forcing the diocese to close almost half its 209 parishes.

What's wrong with this picture? The smaller, purer church is definitely meaner, for one thing. And also definitely leaner.

And"pastoral" leadership of the ilk of Martino doesn't seem to be producing any noticeable renaissance in his church, despite the loud protests of Catholics of the right that the agenda of the purer and truer church is filling pews, seminaries, and religious houses.

Readers Respond . . . .

As I blog here, it occurs to me that I don't invite suggestions about topics to discuss--and perhaps I ought to do so. In the past two weeks, I've had the refreshing experience of having a score of folks contact me through the email feature on my profile page. These include some people with whom I've lost contact over the years, and with whom I'm very glad to renew acquaintance. They also include some people I'm honored to have reading the blog, and whose feedback I appreciate.

In the comments section on the blog, my recent posting about the effects of the restorationist movement on one American Catholic family provoked interesting responses, and I'm thinking of doing a follow-up to that posting. In particular, I want to engage a question some of those comments implied, about how extensive the influence of this movement actually is in the American Catholic church.

All of this to say: I always welcome feedback and value it. One can have the impression, when blogging routinely, of talking in an echo chamber in which the only voice sounding is one's own. That's a disconcerting impression. Comments and feedback help correct me and point me in directions of interest to readers. I'd dearly love to know, for instance, what the sudden readership this blog has picked up in places like Rome want or expect to hear from me . . . .

And as I talk about recent postings on this blog, it occurs to me to mention two outstanding reflections on Vatican II that have appeared recently on the Queering the Church blog, and which provide a valuable counterpart to what I've said on that subject. They're (here) and (here).

Standing on the Promises: Mormons and Catholics Say, Mormons and Catholics Do

Remember how, in the wake of prop 8’s victory in California, leaders of the LDS church assured us (here) that, in blocking gay marriage, they did not want to roll back civil rights for gays? That they would even consider civil unions for gay couples?

On 5 November, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that Elder L. Whitney Clayton of the LDS Presidency of the Seventy had stated that Mormons wanted to reach out to their gay brothers and sisters battered by the LDS spearheading of prop 8 and “heal any rifts caused by the emotional campaign by treating each other with ‘civility, with respect and with love’” (here).

Around the same time, Cardinal Francis George, head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote to the new president, Mr. Obama, saying, “We stand ready to work with you in defense and support of the life and dignity of every human person” (here). This despite the fact that the Catholic bishops had supported the initiative to remove the right to marriage from gay citizens of California . . . .

We also received reassurances in December from Catholic Archbishop George Niederauer, who actively solicited the involvement of the LDS church in the prop 8 battle in California, that his support for prop 8 did not represent “an attack on any group, or . . . an attempt to deprive others of their civil rights” (here). Archbishop Niederauer assured us that, even with the removal of the right to marriage, “same sex couples who register as domestic partners will continue to have ‘the same rights, protections and benefits’ as married couples.”

Well, guess what? It appears that something has gotten lost in the . . . transmission . . . of those church dignitaries' noble ideals regarding human rights, to those who make the laws respecting said rights. As of this week, every initiative to assure the rights of gay citizens of Utah has been turned back by the Utah legislature (here) and (here). The bills are not even making it out of committee—bills to prohibit discrimination against gay citizens in housing and employment, to allow adoption rights to gay couples, and so forth.

One more initiative remains in Utah: a bill to protect the right of same-sex partners to each other in the hospital, bequeath property to each other, and make medical decisions on each other’s behalf. Given the track record of these bills standing on the promises of Elder Clayton and the Mormon church, I don’t have strong hopes that this one will make it through, either.

What’s going on here? Well, as I’ve been writing for some time now, these promises by leaders of the religious right regarding respect for the human rights of gay persons are smokescreens. They’re lies. The ultimate goal of the religious right is not to outlaw gay marriage while respecting other rights of gay citizens. It is to roll back all human rights for gay citizens, everywhere in the nation, whenever this is possible.

As I wrote last November,

The goal of these initiatives against gay marriage is to roll back as many rights as possible from gay citizens. We who are gay would be foolish in the extreme if we did not recognize that this is the game plan of those using gay lives and gay human beings to make political points . . . . [T]he ultimate objective of those using gay persons in these ugly political battles is to tell us that we are unwelcome, and should return to the closet in order to make our fellow citizens comfortable (here); see also (here).

This is why, in my view, all American citizens concerned about the protection of the human rights of any of us ought to be interested in the recent ramping up of the assault on gay citizens by the religious and political right, about which I have been blogging. As Pam Spaulding reports today, the Washington Blade published an article about this development yesterday, noting that “[a]nti-gay conservatives are increasing their rhetoric and activities . . .” (here) and (here).

In my view, we haven't begun to see all that the political and religious right are capable of, in this regard, in 2009. Times of economic downturn are times in which toxic political groups seeking to undermine democracy adroitly fuel fires of social anxiety, and work up animosities against groups easily targeted to further their anti-democratic campaigns. It's time to keep our eyes wide open.

Some Notes on the Meaning of Church in Light of Benedict's Rehabilitation of SSPX (2)

A week ago, I posted some notes (here) on Vatican Council II. I wanted to look back at that council in light of the choice of the current pope, Benedict XVI, to rehabilitate a group who reject that ecumenical council, the Society of St. Pius X. As that posting promised, I also want to append to that initial discussion some reflections about the practical implications for the church today of the different ecclesiological paths represented by Vatican II and those in reaction to the council.

My previous posting argues that ecclesiology (how we are to understand and talk about the church) is fundamental to Vatican II. When John XXIII convened this council of the entire church (that’s what the term “ecumenical” means; these councils are thought to represent the Spirit’s direction for the entire church), he sought to return to ancient ecclesiologies that had been discarded in the church of the Counter Reformation and the modern period. In his view, the time for defensive reaction against modernity was past. The church needed to retrieve its ancient ecclesiologies in order to engage the world redemptively and dialogically, and not merely by way of constant condemnation.

My posting notes that the church of the Counter Reformation and modernity was primarily a church in reaction: first to the Protestant Reformation, and then to the rise of modernity, with its sovereign nation states, scientific worldview, emphasis on human rights (including the rights of women), and historical-critical methods for interpreting the Bible. The church of this period envisaged believers as prey to destructive, godless currents of thought from which they had to be protected.

The church of the Counter Reformation and the modern period closed ranks, drew into a fortress, pulled the drawbridge up over the moat, and hurled down threats and anathemas against the entire modern project. Its leaders preached to the laity that absolute, unquestioning obedience was the primary virtue. Without total obedience, the church could not effectively combat the threat of modernity.

The church of this period stressed what it called the deposit of faith, the doctrinal inheritance the church transmits from generation to generation, based on scripture and tradition. The deposit of faith was thought of in objectified terms as a body of “truths” that had to be safeguarded and transmitted to the faithful, and which it was the duty of the faithful to receive with unquestioning obedience and intellectual assent, if they hoped to be Catholic and to achieve salvation.

A single philosophical tradition, neo-Thomism, an adaptation (and bastardization) of a richer Thomist tradition from the medieval period, became the authorized language for presentation of these “truths”—almost as if that philosophical language and its formulas were part of the deposit of faith itself, and not to be questioned. Faith, in this tradition, came to be understood primarily as something the mind does—intellectual assent—rather than as something that the whole person does, mind, soul, heart, and body, through giving oneself to God. The notion of faith that prevailed in the church of reaction to modernity stressed the willingness to accept “truths” handed down by the church in approved philosophical formulas, rather than the personal relationship of the believer to God which is central in biblical understandings of faith.

This approach to church life—constant enmity towards the world, with a heavy emphasis on “truths” captured in neo-Thomist philosophical formulas, and the obligation of the faithful to assent to and defend those truths—went hand in hand with the understanding of the church as a perfect society, something I noted in my previous posting. The church of the perfect society was above all orderly and unified: from top to bottom, through rules handed down from its absolute monarch through his henchmen in each local church, the bishops, and their representatives at the parish level, pastors. The perfect society model of the church rests on the presupposition that if one removes any aspect of that top-down approach to church life—pope safeguarding the deposit of faith, handing its truths down to bishops, who oversee the transmission of those truths by priests to the faithful—the entire system would fall apart.

With its movement back to the much more traditional ecclesiologies of the Christian scriptures and the patristic era, that is precisely what happened, in the minds of those who had everything invested in the perfect-society model, with its top-down leadership style. Their strong push against Vatican II is rooted in a belief that everything has fallen apart in the Catholic church, insofar as it began to question the perfect-society ecclesiology and to make changes in its institutional life reflecting its critique of that model.

This is to say that those attacking Vatican II have refused, at a fundamental level, to give up the attack on modernity—even in this period in which influential cultural commentators insist we have moved beyond modernity to postmodernity. In their worldview, the world remains a dark and sinful place to be combated and overcome. Contrary to Vatican II, which for the first time in Catholic history began to speak of the Protestant churches as churches, valid Christian communions led by the Spirit, from whom Catholics can learn, those resisting Vatican II continue to insist that the Catholic church has exclusive ownership of the truth and Protestant churches are threats to the unity and purity of Catholicism.

The fundamental impulse of those rejecting Vatican II is to continue to close ranks, weed out dissenters, and fight—from within the fortress, where truth reigns and everything is in perfect order, insofar as each member of the church assents to all truths in the deposit of faith. This is a fight pitched directly against the key ecclesiologies that Vatican II retrieved from ancient tradition: the images of the church as the pilgrim people of God and the body of Christ.

Certainly those images were not absent from ecclesiological thought before Vatican II. But they were subordinated to the image of the perfect society, and their implications were not adequately explored, since they could not be explored as long as the perfect-society model prevailed. When those gathered at Vatican II made the fateful decision to move away from the perfect-society ecclesiology, with all that this implied about the church’s relationship to the world and how the church organizes its inner life, a simultaneous decision was made to give primacy of place to the images of the church as the people of God and the body of Christ.

And that’s when the trouble began. It is well-nigh impossible to synthesize the perfect-society model with the people of God model of church. One metaphor stresses order and control; the other stresses communion and participation. One privileges top-down leadership and unquestioning obedience to the leader on top. The other emphasizes the presence of the Spirit in each believer and the need for each believer to seek God in her or his own pilgrim journey.

The implications of these two ecclesiologies for the inner life of the church—for how it views itself, preaches about itself, organizes itself—are starkly different. If the church took seriously what Vatican II says about the church as the pilgrim people of God (and I would argue it has not yet done so, due to powerful resistance to Vatican II in its leadership circles), the entire way the church structures itself would have to be revised at a very fundamental level.

For instance, the top-down approach to transmitting the deposit of faith would have to give way to a more participatory, communal style of discerning the Spirit’s voice in the church. The latter approach need not imply the abolition of pastoral leaders, of those designated within the community to listen carefully to the voice of the Spirit in the entire people of God and then to formulate the significance of what the Spirit is saying for all.

But what would have to change is the autocratic, anti-democratic style of the church’s leaders, a style rooted in the imperial traditions of the Roman Empire and not in the gospels. What would also have to change is the assumption that the ordained members of the church (clerics) should have special power and privilege among the people of God—and that the people of God should be powerless objects in an institution in which only the ordained can exercise power.

I am emphasizing the question of where clerics fit in the scheme of things because, in my view, much of the hidden reaction to Vatican II in the church today—the hidden attempt to continue the perfect-society model inside the shell of the people of God model—arises out of clericalism. Since Vatican II, the Catholic church has been stuck—deliberately arrested in its attempt to come to terms with that council and its ecclesiology—because of the determination of powerful groups at the center to maintain the clericalist system within the church.

These powerful interest groups know full well that if the system that provides power and privilege to clerics and denies it to the rest of the people of God were questioned at a fundamental level, everything in the church would have to change. Their resistance to Vatican II is fueled not merely by a resistance to the Council’s retrieval of the people of God ecclesiology, or to modernity: it is fueled by resistance to any attempt to critique the clerical system that is integral to the perfect-society model.

In the way the crisis of clerical sexual abuse has been handled by the church's leaders—from Rome down to the level of national bishops' conferences and of individual bishops—we see the handwriting on the wall: that crisis is rooted in clericalism and can never adequately be addressed unless we examine honestly the horrific price the whole church pays for keeping this system intact. But both the Vatican and prominent leaders of most national churches adamantly resist this critique and any attempt to delve into the damages clericalism has inflicted on the church. Their response to the crisis—shielding priests, blaming and revictimizing victims of abuse, playing hardball with lawyers and courts, lying and refusing the disclosure of information sought by the public and the legal system—is all about their intent to hold onto the clericalist system. At all costs.

To a great extent, the resistance to Vatican II in many sectors of the church represents a preferential option for clericalism—for a continuation of the clericalist model in church life, for a continuation of the special power and privilege clerics enjoy in the church, and for the continued subordination of the laity to the clerical elite. Those combating Vatican II—both overtly, as in SSPX, and covertly, from the center of the church, where the reforms mandated by the council have been checkmated by the restorationist agenda—are willing to wager the future of the church on the continuation of clericalism. At all costs.

They are willing to subordinate the church and its future, in other words, to a mutable, historically developed polity and system of structuring the church, that (in the view of many observers) gives unjust power and privilege to the clerical elite. This is—ultimately—why a tacit decision has been made among the ruling sectors of the church to edge out millions of Catholics in the developed nations of the world, who were energized by Vatican II's retrieval of the people of God ecclesiology. This is why church leaders continue to ally themselves with movements that have strong ties to fascism, including Opus Dei, the Legionnaires of Christ, and SSPX, while battering theologians who explore the implications of Vatican II and pushing millions of their brothers and sisters who find hope in the council out of communion.

This is, in the final analysis, what Benedict’s smaller, purer church is all about. It is not merely a church that preserves essential features of the perfect-society model in the shell of Vatican II. It is a church that absolutely resists any and all critiques of clericalism, and above all, any institutional changes that will concede something to critiques of clericalism. It is a smaller, purer clericalist church, in which historically conditioned understandings of the priesthood and its place in the church have been elevated to the status of unchangeable doctrine. Benedict welcomes SSPX because, in key respects, even with its rejection of Vatican II, the ecclesiology of that schismatic group is closer to Benedict’s than is that of millions of Catholics of the post-Vatican II era.