Ruth Krall, Moral Corruption in the Religious Commons (1)

Theodore Rombouts, (1597-1617), "Christ Driving the Money-Changers from the Temple" (i)

My house shall be called a house of prayer

But you have turned it into a hideout for thieves.
(Mathew 21: 13, Good News Translation)

This essay is the sixth in a series of essays Ruth Krall has generously offered us on Bilgrimage, under the series title "Recapitulation: Affinity Sexual Violence in a Religious Voice." This link will point you to links to each previous essay in the series. In her "Recapitulation" series, Ruth addresses what she sees as the he endemic nature of sexual abuse of followers in religious contexts and contexts offering spiritual guidance. From the outset, Ruth's latest essay on moral corruption in the religious commons announces its theme:

If it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village to repeatedly enable sexual abuse of that same child. This is so whether she lives inside secular society or he lives inside a deeply pious religious and worshipping community.

Ruth's essay "Moral Corruption in the Religious Commons" follows. Because the essay is rich and long, I'll be sharing it in several installments, of which this is the first:

Franklin Graham's Response to Students Walking Out on Mike Pence at Graduation: Quintessence of Christofascism

Diane Winston, "A Pence Presidency Would Give Margaret Atwood's Dystopian Vision a Run for its Money": 

Commentary on Evangelical Leader Mike Pence and His Role in Trump's Administration: "Bobblehead," "Willingness to Lie for Trump Knows No Bounds"

Rolando has pointed us in a rcent comment to some valuable analysis of the role being played by vice-president Mike Pence — a noted "Catholic evangelical" leader infamous for promoting "religious liberty" attacks on LGBTQ citizens of Indiana when he was governor there — in carrying water for Donald Trump as Trump seeks to stonewall investigations of his administration's Russian ties. Here's Richard Cohen's take on this noted "Catholic evangelical" leader:

Barbara Blaine Tells Story of SNAP's Founding, St. Louis Priest Attacks SNAP, Discussion of Yoder's Legacy Continues: New Notes on Abuse Crisis

This week, National Catholic Reporter is publishing a week-long series of articles looking back at the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic church. I highly recommend this series to you. I was particularly moved by hearing Barbara Blaine's story of how she (and others) came to found the group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. I'm not sure I had ever heard all the details of her own painful, liberating story — certainly not in her first-person narrative.

John Howard Yoder's Story at Notre Dame University, and the Continuing Damage That Heterosexism Does to Catholic Institutions

Yesterday, I noted that Catholic culture (at an official level) remains irredeemably heterosexist, and has gotten even more so in response to the movements for women's and LGBT rights in the 20th and 21st century. I predicted that the upcoming synod on the family will only cement into place more firmly than ever the trend to heterosexism — to the domination of women by men and of homosexual people by heterosexual ones — in Catholic institutions.

New Ways Ministry on Catholics Responding to Anti-Gay "Religious Freedom" Laws: Bishops Continue Advocating for "Right to Discriminate" Laws

At the New Ways Ministry blog, Bondings 2.0, today, Bob Shine summarizes various Catholic responses to the anti-gay "religious freedom" laws in Indiana and Arkansas:

Mr. Obama and the Golden Rule: Morality Depends on Moving Beyond Words to Actions

I have persistently suggested that (e.g. here and here), by remaining silent regarding one of the key human rights issues of his presidency—the denial of rights to gay citizens in many areas of American life in general, and the denial of the right to marry in particular—Mr. Obama is eroding the moral foundations on which his platform of progressive change needs to rest, if it’s to be successful. And so I’m interested to read a number of recent articles whose analysis moves in a similar direction.

Commenting at Huffington Post on President Obama’s important Cairo speech this week, Aaron Zelinsky cites the following statement by the president:

There is also one rule that lies at the heart of every religion - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This truth transcends nations and peoples - a belief that isn't new; that isn't black or white or brown; that isn't Christian, or Muslim or Jew.

And hearing that statement (with which I wholeheartedly agree), I have to ask, “As the president makes this statement, does he mean to say that he would have done to himself what he continues to permit to be done to gay citizens of the United States, simply because we are gay?” If the president happened to be gay, would he want to be denied the right to serve his country in the military? Would he like to be devoid of any legal protection against discrimination in employment, housing, healthcare, in most states in the nation?

Would he rest easy with the denial of his right to marry the person he loves, to enjoy all the privileges and protections pertaining to marriage in our society? Would the president like to be told, when he begged to visit his dying spouse in the hospital, what Janice Langbehn was told at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami: that he could not see that spouse, because he happened to be in a homophobic state with homophobic laws? Would he like to be susceptible to violence solely because he was gay, and without any federal laws combating that violence, while laws exist to protect other targeted minorities?

Can one credibly say that one cherishes the rule that lies at the heart of all religions—do to others what we would have done to ourselves—when one has the power to speak and to act on behalf of many brothers and sisters whose lives are constantly affected by unjustifiable prejudice, and one does nothing? As Aaron Zelinsky notes, the president also cited the golden rule and Luke 6:31 in his Notre Dame speech.

But Luke’s gospel connects saying and believing to acting. Moral insight is inauthentic, it is meaningless, when it does not issue in action:

Here, Obama references Luke 6:31: "Do to others as you would have them do to you," which he also referenced at Notre Dame. Luke 6:49 is less supportive: "But he that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that without a foundation built a house upon the earth; against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell; and the ruin of that house was great."

Rachel Sklar makes the same point in another HuffPo post this week, this one discussing the president’s visit to Buchenwald. As she notes, the president’s appearance at this Nazi death camp site, and his unambiguous condemnation of anti-Semitic lies and Holocaust denial, was an amazing moment.

Sklar adds, however: “But moments must be followed up by more moments, and action.”

As Sklar notes, the brilliant Jewish thinker Elie Wiesel, who accompanied the president on his visit to Buchenwald, told Mr. Obama, "Mr. President, we have such high hopes for you... because you, with your moral vision of history, will be able and compelled to change this world into a better place." And the president replied, "I will not forget what I have seen here."

But what do these profound moral insights have to do with the world in which we live on an everday basis? What do they mean; what do they mean in the world beyond mere rhetoric? How will they issue in action?

Great. Awesome. Done. But now what? The Wiesel speech was all over the cable nets, and is burning up Twitter. The image of the kindly-faced elderly man with snowy-white hair blowing in the wind beside the solemn-faced U.S. President and German Chancellor was a great TV moment. But moments must be followed up by more moments, and action.

It is not enough to talk about human rights. It is not enough to bow to the grand aphorisms of the moral life and of human rights traditions. When one has the power to change things—the power to speak out, the power to set legislation into motion and to influence it, the power to abolish grossly discriminatory regulations with the stroke of a pen—and one does nothing, one is not reaching the threshold of an authentic moral life.

The test of the moral life is not what we say. It is what we do. The longer the president remains silent about one of the key moral challenges facing his presidency, the more he erodes the moral foundations on which his entire platform of progressive change needs to rest, if it is to be effective.

And what to make of the promises the president made during his campaign, which he now appears willing to break without any explanation at all? David Sirota asks that necessary question in a probing commentary at Salon this week. As Sirota notes, “It's true that politicians have always broken promises, but rarely so proudly and with such impunity.”

But. But,

We once respected democracy by at least demanding explanations -- however weak -- for unfulfilled promises. Then we became a country whose scorched-earth campaigns against flip-flopping desensitized us to reversals. Now, we don't flinch when our president appears tickled that a few poor souls still expect politicians to fulfill promises and justify broken ones.

The worst part of this devolution is the centrality of Obama, the prophet of “hope” and “change” who once said that "cynicism is a sorry kind of wisdom." If that's true, then he has become America's wisest man -- the guy who seems to know my kids will laugh when I tell them politicians and voters once believed in democracy and took campaign promises seriously.

Suggesting that others break promises, or that your predecessors have done so, is not good enough, Mr. Obama. We elected you because we hoped for better from you. We are a nation hungry for positive change, which puts the politics of cynicism behind us and places hope in the foreground.

And you are disappointing us.

As Jenna Lowenstein notes in an article at 365Gay this week, we are disappointed on moral grounds:

But what if instead of worrying about politics and power, Obama worried about moral authority? How he gained moral authority, how he can hold on to it, and how he can refuse to cede it in the face of small-minded bigots. Twice in the last few weeks, Obama has given speeches on the importance of remaining steadfast in our American ideals. First, when he announced his nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Obama emphasized a message of equal rights and social justice. Then yesterday, he delivered a speech to the Muslim world, much of which emphasized the necessity of holding on to moral authority at all cost.

President Obama is a smart guy. He knows what he’s doing is based on political calculation and not idealogy [sic], and he knows that’s not courageous. As Andrew Sullivan put it recently (and it drives me crazy to quote Mr. Sullivan), Obama seems to be acting on LGBT issues with “the fierce urgency of whenever.” And that’s just not good enough.

As the religious right has long told us, it’s about morality in the last analysis. It’s about the moral foundations of our society.

Unfortunately, the religious right’s claim to speak with moral authority has been definitively exploded, and its pretense to be the moral voice of our society has been resoundingly rejected by the American voters, who recognize that the moral center of our society lies not in stigmatizing minorities but in building a humane society for all.

One centered on recognizing the rights of all—because that is what people do, when they do unto others as they would have done to themselves. In continuing to belie this central principle of the moral life through silence about discrimination to gay and lesbian Americans, and in continuing to do nothing at all to combat that discrimination when he has the power to do a great deal, the president is eroding the moral foundations of his platform of progressive change, and is setting his presidency on a precarious footing.

Newt Continues His Reign: Eric Boehlert on Mainstream Media's Reliance on Gingrich for Catholic Stories

In my assessments of President Obama’s commencement address at Notre Dame this past weekend, I noted that the mainstream media continued its usual pimping job for the right in its coverage of this story. I also proposed that there is tremendous fear on the part of those who determine the slant of mainstream media coverage about letting the public know of the considerable support the president enjoys among a majority of Catholic voters.

My postings on this theme note that “the mainstream media have given a voice to a handful of extremists who receive attention out of all proportion to their numbers, attention that their tactics and positions do not warrant.” As I observed the reporting on the Notre Dame events, I concluded, “It's . . . clear that the owners of the mainstream media are going to keep on doing all they can to suggest to the public at large that American religious groups lean overwhelmingly right and resist movements for social justice and progressive change.”

In light of what I wrote about Obama and Notre Dame, I’m interested to read Eric Boehlert’s article today at Alternet, focusing on the mainstream media’s continued lionization of Newt Gingrich. As Boehlert points out, Gingrich is still quoted as gospel in the mainstream media, despite the fact that he has no constituency and no position of leadership in a major organization, was forced out of office ten years ago, has dreadful public approval numbers, and has not been re-elected to office.

Why, then, Boehlert asks, did the New York Times, UPI, and the Christian Science Monitor all turn to Newt Gingrich during the Notre Dame events for soundbytes about Mr. Obama’s purported betrayal of Catholic values? Why invent a story that wasn’t even there, of embattled Catholics at the barricades fighting Notre Dame over its choice to honor the president in its commencement ceremonies?

Well, part of the answer to that question, it’s clear, is that Newt Gingrich got the ball rolling on the manufactured Notre Dame “controversy” back in March. Within days after Notre Dame’s announcement that it had invited the president to campus, Mr. Gingrich tweeted, “It is sad to see notre dame invite president obama to give the commencement address Since his policies are so anti catholic values.”

And that’s the tweet that got the ball rolling, the tweet that framed the invitation as a show-down between the president and Catholic values. It was clear to me at the time this tweet went out that Mr. Gingrich, who is ever the political animal and careful in his calculations as he undertakes any strategy, was acting in collaboration with many others on the religious and political right, who had decided to use the Notre Dame events as one in a series of test cases of the new president’s strength and level of support.

Well-organized, well-funded, and powerfully connected cabals of those bitterly opposed to the new president are casting about for any way possible to expose a weakness in the president’s flank of political support. The Notre Dame events probed the president’s support among Catholics, and found it continuing to be strong—as it was on election day.

They also probed the continuing usefulness of abortion as the wedge issue that can most be counted on to move voters to the right. In my view, the reaction to the bizarre, over-the-top protests at Notre Dame have proven that most American voters—including and perhaps especially those at the center—are beyond weary of the nasty baby-killer rhetoric, and of the claims of men of the ilk of Randall Terry to represent the best in contemporary Christianity or contemporary Catholicism or contemporary anything.

This being the case, why do the mainstream media continue to fawn over Mr. Gingrich and to give a voice to the likes of Mr. Terry? Why do they allow those who can clearly no longer declare that they represent the prevailing viewpoint of their own religious communion to lay claim to the right to speak on behalf of that communion?

What hidden channels of money and powerful influence keep compelling our mainstream media, with their pretense to stand for objectivity and the pursuit of truth at all costs, to continue collaborating with the far right in the production of non-stories about non-events? Well, perhaps the channels are not so hidden, and that is surely part of the answer to this question. As my previous postings (here and here) on the thick ties between the Catholic right and various right-wing political groups demonstrate, in the final decades of the 20th century, the American Catholic right and its political allies worked hard (and adroitly) to corner the media market and gain control of media coverage of Catholic stories.

They did so by establishing a virtual media empire throughout the United States, buying up telecommunications organizations and establishing those organizations as “the” Catholic voice, always kindly at hand when the mainstream media need a Catholic soundbyte. These Catholic media outlets work hand in hand with the numerous, well-funded think tanks of the political right, many of them concentrated in the Beltway area, to assure that, when a story touches on Catholic issues, the media will call someone within their network for “the” Catholic position on whatever is being discussed.

The mainstream media—which have not always been conscientious about refusing lavish dinners, trips to “retreats” in exotic places, and other perks (aka bribes) from such think tanks—is now so thoroughly enmeshed in the network of interests and commitments represented by those think tanks, that it cannot easily extricate itself from their control. If we expect better coverage of many issues—including the interface of religion and politics—at this point in our history, we are going to have to turn to citizen bloggers for that coverage.

Which is to say, ourselves . . . . When a story can prove the dominant discourse so glaringly wrong as the reception of Mr. Obama at Notre Dame this weekend proved the religious and political right—and its mainstream media shills—wrong, we have no choice except to develop alternative channels of communication to get accurate information to the public. Particularly when the mainstream media are willing to stoop to the Newts of the world for “religious” news . . . .

Post Post-Mortem: Obama's Notre Dame Appearance

As I said earlier today, I realize we play right into the hands of those who are manufacturing the bogus Catholics-vs.-Obama meme, in continuing to discuss the president's appearance at Notre Dame yesterday. And I also said earlier today that I had wrapped up my commentary.

But the outpouring of published statements about what took place at Notre Dame yesterday--the vast majority of them from the right--as this day goes on demands attention. Go to Google news and look at the list of articles about Obama and Notre Dame, and you'll see what I mean.

I have several observations about this outpouring of right-wing vitriol (and outright lies) about yesterday's event:

• For any of us who watched coverage of the president's commencement address yesterday, and above all, how he was received by an iconic Catholic audience, it will be very difficult for this coverage to falsify our memory of what we saw and heard.
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• A lot of folks will not have watched, however, and this well-orchestrated spin campaign that continues to try to drive a wedge between Obama and Catholic voters will lead some citizens to think that Obama continues to be at odds with "the" Catholic positions on issues and with "the" Catholic voter.
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• These right-wing commentators who are pouring out dreck in the aftermath of Notre Dame are counting on their lies to taint and misshape the perception of many people who did not watch the commencement events, and who are accustomed to reading that "the" Catholic position conforms to the Republican agenda.
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• As I observed yesterday, the mainstream media continues to do its pimping job for the right, in its approach to the story of Catholic voters and Obama. Which suggests to me that there's a tremendous fear of letting the real story--namely, that a majority of Catholic voters support the president and do not buy the positions of the fringe right--out of the bag.
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• In that regard, it's grimly funny to read one piece after another in mainstream secular media outlets slamming the new president and going to bat for "the" Catholic position on abortion and other issues, when those writing these pieces have no interest at all in Catholic thought or Catholic values, except insofar as they can twist that thought and those values to bolster economic and political positions at odds with traditional Catholic moral teaching.
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• A case in point: Peter Roff of the "non-partisan" Let Freedom Ring institute (as his U.S. News and World Report bio proclaims) expressing shock and alarm at the president's "alarming violation of church-state separation." And doing so in that, well, that bastion of Catholic values and defender of embattled Catholic orthodoxy, U.S. News and World Report! Could anything be more richly ironic than this attempt of a writer for a secular journal to use said secular journal to lecture Catholics on what being truly Catholic entails, while decrying the president's attempt to address intra-Catholic issues as a breach of church-state separation?
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• And so why the fervent interest of one secular journal and newspaper after another in lecturing Catholics about what it really means to be Catholic, following Obama's speech? Because these political commentators and the economic elites they serve fear tremendously the resurgence of a Catholic voice in the public sphere, which is authentically Catholic and representative of the real views of a majority of American Catholics, regarding social and economic issues.
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• They have benefited for decades now from the captivity of "the" Catholic voice to the Republican party, and they are going to fight tooth and nail to keep that captivity going.
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• And we who recognize the unholy game that is being played here would be foolish to be naive about the economic and social power these folks have, about their ability to disseminate lies through the mainstream media, and about their willingness to play even dirtier than we have begun to imagine, in their attempt to combat the emergence of a new coalition of progressive people of faith at this point in our nation's history.

Circumventing the Bishops: Catholics in the Public Square in Light of Obama's Notre Dame Speech

The cooked-up controversy over President Obama’s appearance at Notre Dame is now over, and those seeking to undermine the new president in any way possible will move on to other matters—in particular, to attacks on his nominations for Justice Souter’s vacancy on the Supreme Court. In continuing the discussion of Notre Dame, one plays into the hands of those who engineered the media circus there in recent weeks. Their numbers were tiny, and they failed to embarrass Notre Dame. They embarrassed themselves.

Even so, these political engineers of destructive social turmoil did manage to capture the attention of the mainstream media, and to use their media shills as they have done for some decades now—to insinuate that there is only one possible Catholic position on social issues including abortion, and that anyone who disagrees with this anti-intellectual, highly partisan position is not a faithful Catholic. This in the face of the Vatican’s complete silence about the Notre Dame “controversy,” a recent editorial in the Vatican paper praising Obama, and the obvious warm, supportive reception that the Notre Dame audience gave the president yesterday.

And so we have no choice except to respond, when the ability of a rabid, destructive (but powerfully connected, to the wealthy and powerful) fringe group to command media attention and obtain media legitimacy continues. In what follows, I’d like to offer some wrap-up thoughts about President Obama’s Notre Dame appearance, to round out what I said in my preliminary top-of-the-head reactions yesterday.

The question with which the event leaves me is this: what are Catholics (and the public at large) to make of those U.S. Catholic bishops who continue to attack the new president on partisan grounds, using abortion as their rationale? In the first place, it strikes me that these bishops have now thoroughly discredited themselves.

They do not deserve to be listened to—not as moral authorities. The alacrity with which a number (but far from all) American bishops snapped to and lined up in military formation as right-wing fringe groups began beating the anti-Obama, anti-Notre Dame drum, completely undermines the claim of these bishops to be credible moral teachers.

I know one of the Texas bishops who was among the first to snap to. I know him personally. I have followed his career for years, even before he became a bishop. I have had no choice except to do so. He has done some very destructive things to people I love. I have had to try to figure out how a man of the cloth who claims to walk in the footsteps of Jesus could behave as he does, while I stand in solidarity with my wounded friends.

In my considered judgment, after years of reflection, this man is not and never will be an admirable pastoral leader. He does not have what it takes to be a good pastoral leader. He is barely educated. He does not read broadly and has never read broadly. He is not thoughtful; he is not a listener. He does not listen because his world contains no nuance. It is black and white, and the lines that demarcate black from white have everything to do with his advancement in the hierarchy.

He is a careerist, a shallow, anti-intellectual yes-man who carefully tests the winds before he acts, and then commits himself only when he thinks that in doing so, he will advance his career in the church. He is willing to do cruel, anti-Christian things to those under his pastoral authority, if it means advancing his ecclesiastical career.

He is, sadly, like not a few of the American Catholic bishops, and, in particular, like a large number of the bishops appointed by the late John Paul II. These men do not and cannot offer compelling pastoral and moral leadership to the church, because they are not themselves compelling pastoral and moral leaders.

And so I do not understand—in fact, I am completely baffled by—Michael Sean Winter’s “C minus” grade for Mr. Obama’s speech yesterday . Mr. Winters argued that “the speech handed the President’s opponents plenty of ammunition and showed the extent to which the Obama White House is tone deaf to Catholics and our concerns.”

Really? Did Michael Sean Winters and I hear the same speech, see the same audience reacting to the speech? I would have thought that the reaction of the audience yesterday amply demonstrated that many Catholics—in fact, the vast majority of those in the audience—do not at all think the president is “tone deaf to Catholics and our concerns.”

In my judgment, the reaction of the audience showed exactly the opposite: namely, that a majority of American Catholics are eager for precisely the kind of leadership Mr. Obama offers, insofar as that leadership moves us beyond the frustrating, heading-nowhere roadblocks of those who want to continue the ineffectual culture war, the screaming across barricades, the grotesque display of baby carriages full of dolls splattered with fake blood (and the closed eyes and silence when “pro-life” leaders support capital punishment, lead us into wars on the basis of lies, and ignore the needs of millions of citizens for health care and other necessities of a fulfilling life).

In other words, the majority of Catholics—who, after all, voted for the president, continue to support him, and supported Notre Dame in inviting him to the campus—simply refuse to go where the bishops, many of them, want to take us under the new administration. And yet, Mr. Winters argues,

We hoped the speech would set the stage for a rapprochement with the Catholic hierarchy, if not with Catholic Republicans who have no interest in seeing a good relationship between the President and the leaders of the Catholic Church develop.

Note the royal “we” here. It hovers behind the previous observation, too, about how the president is tone deaf to Catholics and our concerns. For whom is Michael Sean Winters speaking with his “we Catholics”? If not for the Notre Dame audience yesterday, if not for the majority of Catholics who voted for and continue to support the president, then for whom? Who are “we Catholics” who share Mr. Winters’s judgment that the president failed to reach out to the hierarchy yesterday and threw our concerns overboard?

Mr. Winters concludes,

While I am sure the President thought he was doing his best to be respectful and even solicitous of Catholic sensibilities, he failed to find the language and the logic that might have laid the foundation for building a better relationship with the Catholic hierarchy. It was a lost opportunity.

I do not intend to attack Michael Sean Winters in this posting. Indeed, his subsequent posting at America re: the Notre Dame speech shows him having second thoughts about what he said initially in his C-minus rant about the president’s failure to be “respectful and even solicitous,” and to reach out to the hierarchy.

I highlight these judgments because, in my view, they reflect an entirely wrong-headed approach to Catholic concerns and the public square, which has to be discarded if we hope to move ahead. As I’ve noted in previous postings on this blog, Mr. Winters’s persistent “we Catholics” refrain is a very narrow category of analysis, one that hardly reflects the rich diversity of American Catholicism, and the variety of political, moral, and theological positions that can legitimately call themselves Catholic at this point in history, in the United States.

Mr. Winters’s “we Catholics” is invariably a test-phrase that separates the sheep from the goats, and in doing so, separates out a large proportion of us who are Catholic but who do not in any shape, form, or fashion share many of Mr. Winters’s preoccupations—neither his judgment that “we Catholics” all rest easy at the continued exclusion of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters from communion, nor his conclusion that Mr. Obama ought to appease a morally bankrupt set of bishops.

What the Notre Dame speech and the reaction of the crowd to it demonstrated to me is that the only way forward, if we want to see a viable reconnection of Catholic insights and Catholic values with the public square, is a way that marches resolutely around the bishops. Implicit in the approach of many centrist Catholics to the question of how Catholicism and the public square should connect are two presuppositions—and they are strong in Mr. Winters’s thought—that I suggest many Catholics do not share at this point in history, and which are counterproductive, if we really want to share our insights and values in the public square.

The first is the insistence that the bishops are the “authentic” voice of Catholic teaching about abortion, sexual ethics, and many other matters. And the second is the belief that there is some easily assumed, unitary voice, a “truth,” to be handed down by the magisterium, received by Catholics, and then brandished about as what “we Catholics” think and believe, when we engage the general public about issues that concern us.

These presuppositions have been central to the identity politics that has dominated Catholic political and cultural life in the U.S. in the neocon, neoCath period of our history. They have been so strong, so ruthlessly imposed on us by those on the political and religious right that even centrist Catholics like Mr. Winters have caved in to them, and want to craft our life as a church and our behavior in the public square around them.

And they are simply wrong. They do not reflect our tradition at its best. They betray significant, important aspects of our tradition and diminish our ability to be skilled, credible witnesses in the public square. They energize the worst among us and marginalize the best among us.

Though Winters critiques Mr. Obama’s insistence that faith goes hand in hand with doubt—a necessary and valuable insistence, because no one has the final answer, and people of faith proceed together towards a truth that transcends any one of us—that position is solidly rooted in Catholic thought. It is not Mr. Obama who departs from the Catholic center, in insisting on the need for dialogue, for careful thought, for humility in the face of a truth that transcends us all. It is Catholics of the neoCath generation who do so, in their conviction of some unimaginable Truth that can be captured in neat, ahistorical catechism statements, clutched in our little hands, and then waved about as something we own and no one else has, while we do battle against everyone else in the public square.

And this is, of course, where the bishops’ failure lies, and why they are not credible moral teachers, on the whole, today. Because they have refused to treat even their own flocks with respect, they can hardly convince the public at large to pay attention to their teachings about respect for life. Because they have refused to engage the people of God and the public at large in respectful, careful, thoughtful dialogue about complex issues that go beyond simplistic formulations of “the” truth, they have ended up being totally unconvincing, when they seek to define the debate about life.

It is impossible to convince people that one respects pre-birth life when clearly doesn’t respect post-birth life. The bishops’ refusal to engage even their own flocks in dialogue in which we all seek together a truth transcending each of us, bespeaks a shocking lack of respect for the lives, consciences, and real concerns, of the people the bishops shepherd. The bishops’ willingness not merely to tolerate with but to assist in creating a smaller, purer church of rabid ideologues, as millions of thoughtful, conscientious Catholics are written out of the church, speaks volumes about the bishops' lack of respect for life.

No, I cannot agree with Mr. Winters that, in order to convince us Catholics of his solicitude for our concerns, Mr. Obama needs to focus on “rapprochement” with the hierarchy, just as I cannot agree with Mr. Winters's insistence that the bishops are distinct from “Catholic Republicans who have no interest in seeing a good relationship between the President and the leaders of the Catholic Church . . . .” The American Catholic bishops and Catholic Republicans have long since come to be synonymous in the public's mind, and the bishops have worked very hard to clench that identification.

In doing so, they have unwisely linked the future of the American Catholic church to the future of a particular political party, one badly faltering now for entirely understandable reasons. As people become weary of that party's pretense to stand for what is holy, in the face of massive evidence of its betrayal of all that is holy, the future of the Catholic church in the U.S. depends, in my view, on the increasingly willingness of the people of God to ignore the bishops and follow the Spirit's lead, as the Spirit weaves Her fascinating way through the ruins the bishops have created, and builds anew.

Mr. Obama Shines at Notre Dame: Disparate Reflections on the Commencement Address and the Occasion

Some thoughts about President Obama's commencement address at Notre Dame today, which I've just watched live at MSNBC:

• The president was, as always, a master communicator. He manages to take a situation others have tried to load negatively against him, and masterfully turn it around.
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• His stress on dialogue, listening, collaborating for the common good, clearly struck many resonant chords with this audience, because that stress so strongly echoes important themes of Catholic social teaching.
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• This event was a big loss for the right-wing fringe groups who tried to leverage it into a loss for the president. They've come off looking like, well, fringe groups, and have succeeded in alienating further those in the center who took time to study their tactics this week.
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• Even though there were many strong indicators that these fringe groups did not represent anywhere near the center of American Catholic thinking on any issue, and had only minimal support on the Notre Dame campus, the mainstream media have done their usual shameful pimping job for the right all week long.
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• The mainstream media have given a voice to a handful of extremists who receive attention out of all proportion to their numbers, attention that their tactics and positions do not warrant.
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• Information about the sordid pasts (and therefore dubious credibility and motives) of some of the protagonists of the protests against Obama's appearance at Notre Dame has been nowhere to be found in almost all mainstream media coverage of the protests this week.
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• It's clear who owns the media and why media coverage tilts so grossly in one direction.
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• It's also clear that the owners of the mainstream media are going to keep on doing all they can to suggest to the public at large that American religious groups lean overwhelmingly right and resist movements for social justice and progressive change.
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• I'm also noticing in recent days how strongly the media coverage on the right is bashing women, as the right continues looking for useful wedges to undermine solidarity of progressive groups in the Obama era. Gays remain front and center in the wedge politics, of course, but the attack on Nancy Pelosi has been fierce and dirty, and I'm seeing right-wing news sites now throwing dirt at Diane Sawyer.
• 
  
• If we expect meaningful change, change that really makes a difference, under Obama, there needs to be a moment of fierce resistance in American culture to the influence of these right-wing fringe groups, whose primary purpose is to fragment progressives and keep the grossly rich in control. The fierce resistance needs to be directed, as well, to the apologists for the right (and their grossly rich lords and masters) in the mainstream media.
  
• 
  
• It would be far more to my liking if that movement of fierce resistance received stronger signals of support from the White House. I don't see that strong support coming, however. Mr. Obama and his chief advisors reflect the liberal philosophy that has come to dominate the Democratic party--namely, that the primary role of government is to balance competing interest groups.
• 
  
• If there is going to be a resurgence of progressivism under this administration, that resurgence is going to have to come from the public itself, insofar as citizens become fed up with the cultural, political, and religious stalemates the right has produced for us for too many years now, while liberals appease the right and refuse to stand up, or to imagine a truly democratic society.
• 
  
• Which is to say that the moral backbone of progressive change in the Obama era is going to have to come, I believe, from progressive groups themselves, and not from the president and his advisors. I believe the president himself has that backbone, though I also believe he is, in many respects, a classic liberal who is willing to ignore strong moral considerations as he engages in pragmatic balancing acts. And it seems increasingly evident to me that he has surrounded himself with advisors who, to an even greater extent, are tone-deaf to the moral underpinnings of the agenda of change they talk about, and willing at every turn to ignore those underpinnings as they tinker, try to anticipate the winds of change, and seek to remain on top through it all.

Notre Dame, Anti-Abortion Extremists, and the Pastoral Failure of the U.S. Catholic Bishops

Because the president's appearance at Notre Dame tomorrow is creating a media feeding frenzy this weekend, I want to reissue this 11 May posting today. As FOX news boldly lies to the public about what's taking place at Notre Dame, and as the mainstream media continue their usual shell game of legitimating extreme right-wing voices while disempowering even moderate left-leaning perspectives, it's important that bloggers struggle to put the truth out there:

I read about the activities of the “pro-life” extremists seeking to embarrass Notre Dame University for inviting President Obama to its commencement, and I am more than ever convinced that those staging such protests have little interest in cherishing life at all. That's not their game. That is not what this is about, the baby carriages filled with dolls covered in stage blood delivered to Fr. Jenkins’s door, the life-sized images of twelve-week fetuses placed at strategic locations around campus, the airplanes streaming giant photos of an aborted fetus.

This is about intimidation, about seeking to use fear, awe, shock as a technique to control others. It is about control, about a clearly identifiable sociological group who want to represent themselves as the voice of conscience for everyone, who sense that their control of others is waning, and who are willing to use fear as a way of reasserting their control. It is about a minority seeking to impose their will on the majority. It is about those who have for centuries claimed the right to write scripture and interpret scripture for the rest of us, continuing to assert that right in the face of claims that undermine the right.

It is about the bully’s fist smashing down on the face of the one whose subordination is proof of the bully’s superiority.

It is about men, straight or straight-identified men, out of control. It is about men sensing that the world has spun out of their hands, and determined to retrieve it, at any cost. Track groups organizing events like the Notre Dame protests back to their sources, and you’ll find 99% of the time men—and usually white men, at that—straight or straight-identified men, at the control panel, pushing the buttons, pulling the levers.

Certainly women of a certain sort often support these men and assist in their crusades. But women are seldom the movers and shakers who set it all into motion, the ones in the control room monitoring the buttons and levers. When women are involved in movements like this, they are far more often the legs of the movement, the ones out carrying signs, the ones being deployed and used by the men sitting at the control panel.

And connected to those straight or straight-identified men in the control room, though sometimes timid about avowing all their connections to these extremists, are many men of the cloth, many Catholic bishops. Bishops will seldom be seen pushing the buggies full of blood-splattered dolls, or hammering the nails to affix the life-sized pictures of aborted fetuses to light-poles. It would be unseemly, after all, to be seen wearing skullcaps and robes, sporting large episcopal rings, while doing such dirty work.

No, bishops do their work otherwise, on behalf of the men who sense that they are losing control and plan to bully us back into submission. They do it, for the most part, behind the scenes, through back-room deals and closed boardroom meetings with the rich and powerful—with the men who think they are losing control and are furious about it.

Admittedly, though, increasing numbers of bishops now believe it is imperative to break silence and speak out. And so we have the Finns and the Burkes, the Chaputs and the Martinos, about which I have written on this blog—men with skullcaps and robes and heavy episcopal rings now shouting out the war cries right alongside those pushing the buggies full of bloody dolls and hammering up the pictures of the fetuses. Demonstrating the battle lines and lines of alliance we have always known about, anyway, no matter how hard the bishops worked to disguise their ties to the men pushing the carriages full of bloody dolls.

Now we see bishops right beside them, as it were, telling us it’s all about life, protecting life, defending defenseless life in a society gone mad with lust for the blood of the unborn.

When we can see with our own eyes that it’s not about life at all: it’s about them, these men, these men who sense that their control is threatened and may be waning, and who are furious about that. And who intend to reassert control, no matter what it takes. Because the illusion of being in control is everything to them. Their self-worth is built around the fantasy that they control others—women, gay people, the wretched of the earth, the entire world. Bishops who have even created a false god in their own image, and who use that false glowering macho god to try to intimidate us into silence and submission.

For some time now, an interesting discussion has been going on at the margins of Christian theology, in which I have taken part as I have been able. This is a discussion about the need to look at what the teachings of religious groups do, as we analyze the truth-claims of those teachings.

In the past, it has been common to dissect teachings of religious groups philosophically, in order to determine if they are true or false: do they hang together; are they logically coherent; are they logical in and of themselves? And it has been common to look at the coherence between a particular teaching and the tradition and scriptures of the religious group: does this teaching faithfully represent what’s stated in the holy books of this religion; does it line up with what has been taught traditionally?

Now, there’s increasing interest in adding the new analytical tools of the social sciences to those used in the past to analyze religious truth, so that sociology, psychology, the human sciences enter the discussion alongside logic, scriptural study, philosophy, and study of the history and tradition of a religious body. The social sciences are, in particular, being used today to look at what a teaching does and not merely what it says.

This is an extremely important move in theology, and it’s one to which I have given my wholehearted support. This way of thinking assumes that part of the truth of any religious teaching lies in those affected by the teaching. How does it embody itself in their lives? What happens when it reaches real human lives? What do they understand the teaching to mean?

From this perspective, it is impossible to call a religious teaching true, when it is either wholeheartedly rejected by those to whom it’s directed, and/or when it has effects in the lives of those who receive it which completely contradict what the teaching is all about. This new sociological analysis of the doctrines of religious groups dovetails with a venerable insight of traditional Catholic theology stressed especially by the 19th-century theologian John Henry Newman, who argued that a doctrinal teaching cannot be true if it is not “received”—if it does not enter into the lives of the faithful in a positive and fruitful way, affecting their lives for good.

What the new sociological turn in systematic theology adds to that insight is this: if those who do “receive” a doctrine turn it into something entirely different than what it claimed to be when it was formulated by a religious group, then something is not right about the doctrine itself. It needs clarification, development, explication in which those who issue doctrines in the religious body continue in dialogue with the faithful, in order to arrive at a clearer understanding of the teaching.

As I use these sociological insights to examine what has happened with the “pro-life” teaching of the Catholic Church in the U.S., I conclude the following: the teaching itself is fundamentally awry, because it finds expression in far too many Catholic lives in a way that completely contradicts what the church claims to stand for, when it talks about the sanctity of life.

It’s simply not about life at all. I am not convinced, and a growing number of my fellow Catholics are not convinced. The public at large is not convinced. The “pro-life” rhetoric and policies of the American Catholic church have been a dismal failure. They may have intended to focus on respect for life. But they have ended up being about men, straight or straight-identified men, pushing baby buggies full of dolls smeared with fake blood.

The pro-life rhetoric and policies of the American Catholic church have ended up being about men. Men who fear the loss of control at all costs. Men for whom the most central reflex reaction that dominates every decision they make and everything they do is to assert control over those they despise—violently, if necessary—because their self-image is built around dominating and controlling others.

Men whose lives in no way convince me or others that they are concerned about life at all. Men who have not cultivated the maternal virtues of nurturing the young and the weak, healing the sick, tending the earth and making it flourish, creating a safe and welcoming space for others, building a community of homes in which everyone has welcome places throughout the land—because all life is sacred and deserves respect. Men who do not listen because listening is a womanly thing.

When I say “men,” I mean to include the American Catholic bishops, on the whole. They, too, have failed to convince me and others that it is life they are about, with their “pro-life” rhetoric. I do not see the concern for life in what they do, how they behave, above all, in how they exercise pastoral ministry in the church. I do not see a strong commitment to nurturing the young and weak, healing the sick, tending the earth and making it flourish. I do not see men who can listen, because they have judged listening to be a womanly thing and they are all about being men, big men, important men.

Above all, I do not see a strong commitment among many bishops to creating a safe and welcoming space for others, or to building a community of homes in which everyone has welcome places throughout the land. I see, instead, bishops who, while proclaiming that all life is sacred and is to be respected, lend their symbolic authority to the completely anti-Christian cause of opposing legislation to stop school bullying. Bullying of young human beings identified as gay by their peers, ignored and even tacitly justified by bishops who want us to imagine that they believe all life is sacred—bishops, who, in some cases, surely have family members who are gay and who must know the pain some of their relatives have lived through as young folks coming to terms with their sexual orientation.

I see bishops now fighting tooth and nail against any and all legislation that will strengthen gay homes and gay families, that will protect young people being raised by gay couples and allow them to lead secure and fulfilled lives—while those same bishops try to convince us that all life is sacred. I see some bishops doing all they can to make churches and even Eucharistic celebrations unwelcoming places for those who are gay or lesbian and for all sorts of other people, including, even, those who voted for Mr. Obama in the last election.

While trying to convince us that all life is sacred, and that we should take Catholic teaching about this seriously and build our lives around it. And that we should pay attention to Catholic teaching about life prior to birth because there is a continuum between fetal life and life after birth—all life being sacred and deserving to be cherished as a result.

The attempt of the American Catholic bishops to convince us to believe these teachings has failed. And it will continue to fail until the alliance with the anti-life extremist thugs is decisively repudiated, and until the bishops begin to engage those being taught in dialogue about what is being taught, and until the bishops themselves begin living the message. And begin helping to build a church that lives that message consistently, not piecemeal.

Otherwise, people will continue to turn away, and will have no choice except to do so, if they themselves really value life.

The Attack on Harry Knox Now Full-Fledged: Test of Obama Administration's Moral Foundations

Sometimes I don’t enjoy being right. It’s painful to look down a road and see what lies ahead, to realize that what lies ahead might be avoided if others saw and cared, and then to recognize that the pain will be inflicted, regardless. Seeing—and even speaking loudly and clearly—won’t change anything, until those with real power to change things decide to act. And I certainly do not have that power or anything approximating it.

Last Saturday, I posted here about the attempt of a particularly nasty group of right-wing Catholic political operatives to attack one of President Obama’s appointees to his President's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Harry Knox is in the sights of this right-wing group seeking to embarrass and undermine the new president in any way possible. Simply because he is a Democrat and they are Republicans, and have had the blessing of the U.S. Catholic bishops for some years now, as they proclaim the Republican party as the party anointed by God, the only legitimate political option for Catholics.

As my posting noted, this attack began with a 7 May Cybercast News Service article by Fred Lucas that accuses Lucas of being anti-Catholic. Cybercast News was founded by L. Brent Bozell III, who happens to sit on the board of the Cardinal Newman Society, the organization mounting the protest against Notre Dame’s invitation of President Obama to its upcoming commencement.

In other words, the attack on Harry Knox is one facet of a broader political plan of a group of hardcore right-wing Catholics to drive wedges between Obama and the Catholic church in the U.S.—to smear the majority of Catholics who voted for Obama and continue to support him as unfaithful Catholics, and to continue to (mis)represent the Catholic church in the U.S. as solidly Republican.

I’m sorry to have to report today that the smear campaign continues and, after I posted on Saturday, has become open and even more vicious. Yesterday U.S. News and World Report carries an open letter of the right-wing Catholic group to President Obama, calling on Obama to fire Harry Knox and threatening him if he doesn’t do so. The threat? The group will vilify Obama as anti-Catholic if he does not get rid of Harry Knox.

The name at the head of the list of signatories? L. Brent Bozell III. Also on the list: Patrick J. Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society. As the Good as You website notes today, Concerned Women of America has gotten in on the act, and has just issued a news flash lambasting Harry Knox for his purported anti-Catholic views and calling on Obama to remove Knox from his current position.

The position Concerned Women is taking would seem, on the face of it, to be a curious and even dangerous one for an organization founded and chaired by Beverly LaHaye to take, given the well-documented anti-Catholicism of her husband Tim LaHaye. The right-wing Catholics with whom LaHaye’s Concerned Women are allying themselves accuse Harry Knox of criticizing several of Pope Benedict’s statements.

But to my knowledge nothing Knox has said equals Rev. Tim LaHaye’s claim that Catholicism is a “false religion” and the pope a “false prophet”—claims well-researched in the Catholic.org article to which I have linked. In the 1970s, LaHaye pastored a church which sponsored an anti-Catholic group called Mission to Catholics which distributed pamphlets claiming that Pope Paul VI was the antichrist and the archpriest of Satan.

Strange, indeed, to find the anti-Catholic LaHayes now attacking President Obama for appointing an openly gay man to his Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and threatening to out that gay man and the president as anti-Catholic unless Obama removes the gay man from his advisory council! Do truth and consistency matter at all to these right-wing types, one wonders?

But, then, this attack on Harry Knox is clearly not about anti-Catholicism at all. It’s first and foremost about attacking Obama—by any means these folks can find, whether those means be fair or foul, based on truth or based on lies. And it’s about the usefulness of gays as political weapons.

Bozell et al. know that the new administration wants to tread very carefully in the area of gay rights. They know full well that gay people and gay causes are an embarrassment to the new administration, something that the administration wants to sweep under the rug as it pursues its "important" business. They understand that the verbal, but not-yet-demonstrated, commitment of the new administration to gay rights is the soft underbelly of the Obama administration and of its claim to stand for moral commitments that neoconservatives have trashed.

Bozell et al. also know that, though things are rapidly changing in the America of the Obama administration, a significant percentage of Americans—and a large percentage in churched circles—continue to resist the claims of their gay brothers and sisters to equal treatment under the law, and to full human status in the human community. Bozell et al. know that they can count on these Americans to view their resistance to gay persons as a moral enterprise, a moral obligation even, and to ignore the compelling moral claims of gay human beings to be treated as fully human.

And Bozell et al. are also counting on Mr. Obama’s willingness to compromise in this area, in order to appease these churched Americans who wish to justify oppression of a persecuted minority as a moral obligation, just as they wish to see torture as a moral act when the one being tortured has a face different from the one these churchgoers see every Sunday in their churches.

Bozell et al. want to undermine the new administration’s claim to stand on moral foundations with its agenda of change. And, with its silence and prevarication about gay issues and gay lives, the Obama administration has, unfortunately, done everything in its power to open itself to this ugly attack. As the new administration continues to cave in to the hard right in this area, I do not believe that a majority of American Catholics of the center—or of Americans of the center, in general—will speak out about this case, and will call on Mr. Obama to resist. Many Americans of the center are as willing as the new president is to choose silence rather than the moral thing to do, when it comes to gay issues and gay human beings.

Ultimately, they would prefer that we just go away, with our inconvenient questions and our inopportune expectations of justice and civility and our inconvenient gay lives.

My prediction? Sadly, I believe Mr. Obama will likely cave in on Harry Knox. I hope that this will not be the case. But as I have noted in previous postings on this blog, in my view, though things are getting better for gay Americans and are likely to continue to get better under the new administration (because the election of our first African-American president has released energies for progresssive change), the price gay Americans will in all likelihood pay for small cultural steps in the right direction is going to be one of several steps backward with each step forward.

Things will in all likelihood often get worse even as they are getting better. We are in a period of whiplash reaction now in which every victory for gay rights in our culture will be followed by one or more defeats at the hands of those who know they can continue to use gay people as objects in ugly political games, and that the majority will not speak out as this happens, will not grant the moral legitimacy of gay lives and gay rights, and will not definitively and decisively reject the claims of the hard right to be pursuing moral goals by bashing gay human beings.

And through it all, silence at the top. Silence in the one place where even the softest word of support would make a world of difference. Silence that translates into consent—consent for the most draconian and immoral uses of power against gay human beings by those representing themselves as moral agents even as they engage in patently immoral behavior.

And a willingness to compromise, which, even through the silence, speaks volumes about how the new administration really regards the moral claims—and the lives—of gay human beings. Because Bozell et al. are watching carefully, they know precisely where to strike now. Because they have, to a certain extent, been checked in their attempt to blow the Notre Dame commencement into a full-blown embarrassment for the new administration, they are out for blood now. They know where to strike to draw that blood—and they know full well whose human lives are dispensable, in their atrocious political games.

I predict they will succeed, in the case of Harry Knox. I predict he will be unseated, and will be the first in a string of gay martyrs produced by the new administration, as the administration continues to do what it regards as expedient, even if not right, in the case of gay human lives.

Conundrum for a Rainy Saturday: Links Tying Some Catholic Activists to Rhetoric of Hate

These are the people bringing you this, which includes this and this.

This man sits on the governing board of the people bringing you the spectacles mentioned above. Keith Olbermann has called this rabid right-wing Catholic political operative the worst person in the world.

This same political operative founded the news service that is bringing you this story, which is appearing on blogs with headlines like this one.

When one reads this headline and the article connected to it, one wonders what this and this have to do with this, and why this lets its name be hijacked by partisan purveyors of hate.

Coerced Morality and the Pastoral Failure of the American Catholic Bishops: More Reflections in Light of Notre Dame-Obama Controversy

Two recent statements by influential thinkers in the American Catholic church deserve particular attention, it seems to me. The first is Thomas Reese’s “Memo to Bishops: Most Catholics Aren’t Listening” in Washington Post this past Tuesday (here). Thomas Reese is the former editor of America, who was forced out of that position when American Catholics of the right, who had the ear of Rome, appealed to then Cardinal Ratzinger, who was then head of the Vatican Congregation of the Faith, to silence him (here).

One of Ratzinger’s first acts as Benedict XVI was to have Reese removed from his position as editor of America.

In his recent WaPo statement, Reese tries to make sense of the fact that American Catholics are simply not listening to those bishops who continue the war against President Obama, even after they failed in their attempt to coerce their flocks to vote Republican in the last election.

I’m struck by an observation Reese makes about the root of Catholics’ refusal to listen to the bishops on this and other issues. He states:

I think part of the problem is that the bishops stopped listening and teaching and started ordering and condemning. With an educated laity it no longer works to simply say, "it is the teaching of the church." This is the equivalent of a parent shouting, "Because I said so."

The bishops must persuade and convince with arguments not by turning up the volume. When they resort to commanding and threatening punishments, people are turned off. Banning speakers, denying Communion, silencing theologians is a sign of weakness not strength. Censorship and violations of academic freedom come across as admissions that their arguments are not convincing and therefore the opposition must be silenced.

This observation dovetails (in my mind, at least) with something Douglas Kmiec says in a statement this week at America re: the open seat that David Souter is now leaving on the Supreme Court (here). Kmiec’s statement is entitled “The Case for Empathy.” Kmiec, readers may remember, is a Pepperdine University law professor who was a legal counsel for both Reagan and George H.W. Bush, but who broke with the Republican party in the last election to support Obama (here).

Kmiec makes a strong case for the appointment of a new Supreme Court justice who brings empathy to the court’s deliberations. I’m especially taken with his conclusion:

Empathy yields one additional lesson: law is no substitute for love. Yes, it is wrong when the Court usurps legislative function or when it disregards the structure of the Constitution that reserves appropriate questions to the states. Yet it is empathy that gives insight into where exactly no government—federal or state—should be involved. In times past, it may have been possible to count upon church or competing private institutions to maintain this boundary between what is public and what is private, but these independent sources of moral formation have also come to overly rely on the crutch of law’s coercion.

In the end, however, coerced morality is without meaning or lasting effect. In the words emblazed upon the New Hampshire license plate that will likely soon again adorn David Souter’s car, we are to “live free or die.” A judge with an empathetic understanding of the Constitution would grasp all that means.

Law is no substitute for love, and coerced morality is without meaning or lasting effect. If only the bishops who continue to try to hold the Catholic church in the U.S. hostage to the Republican party—and to its most rabid right wing, at that—could hear these wise, simple points. Really hear them.

People aren’t listening, because you can’t make them listen. Pastoral leadership is not about forcing people to adhere to what you dictate. It’s about leading, about pointing the way and helping others walk along that way.

The bishops’ coercive, dictatorial approach to the issue of abortion (and, since they have chosen to hinge everything on this, to the question of what it means to be a Catholic in the public sphere today) is an utter failure because this approach assumes that one can establish moral consensus by fiat.

Creating moral consensus by fiat always fails, and has to fail, because this approach treats human beings as objects in an area of life in which objectification is impossible. If morality means anything, it means that we human beings are moral agents and not automatons, persons endowed with mental ability to sort out questions of value, and with consciences to make judgments about issues involving values.

The morality-by-fiat approach undercuts what morality is all about, at its most fundamental level. One establishes moral consensus first and foremost by engaging in moral reasoning and deliberations of conscience with others. One does not establish moral consensus by standing at the head of the queue and commanding everyone else in the queue to line up behind you and do as you do.

For decades now, a large number of the American bishops have refused 1) to talk with their flocks and the public at large about moral issues, 2) to discuss burning moral issues in all their complexity, with respect for their nuances and for the conflicting data that make it difficult to arrive at clear moral judgments about these issues, 3) to permit those called by the Spirit and prepared by professional training—namely, theologians—to assist in building consensus about difficult moral issues to pursue their vocations, and 4) to face honestly and openly the numerous ways in which their own egregious moral lapses (especially in the crisis of clerical sexual abuse of children) undermine their ability to address moral issues compellingly.

As many bishops have engaged in all these refusals—which are, at a very fundamental level, betrayals of their vocations as pastors—they have simply commanded. They have sought to browbeat people into thinking and doing what is right—or what the bishops believe to be right.

And they have sought to extend that imperious, coercive approach to the public at large. One of the most curious statements Mary Ann Glendon makes in her recent letter (here) explaining why she is opting out of the Notre Dame commencement ceremony at which President Obama will be honored is this: she notes that Notre Dame has contravened a 2004 request of the U.S. Catholic bishops that Catholic institutions “should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles.”

Those who act in defiance: that is a telling phrase, and it is telling that Mary Ann Glendon chooses to quote it here. To me, it says a great deal about what is wrong with the morality-by-fiat approach of the bishops, and why that approach has failed so dismally.

On what grounds can one justly claim that a president who is not even Catholic has “defied” Catholic moral principles? The word “defy” is a loaded word. It implies that those who are defiant are choosing deliberately to act against regulations or principles imposed on them by some authority.

By what right, I wonder, do the American Catholic bishops claim such sway in the public sphere that they believe they can demand that a political leader who is not of their faith, whose moral outlook may well not reflect in every particular the principles or prudential judgments they want to impose on their flocks, should bow to their commands? This is undisguised theocracy, and I’m glad that Mary Ann Glendon lets us know that this is what the battle has been all about, all along.

At least now we know what we are dealing with: anyone who disagrees with not only the principles but even with the prudential judgments of the bishops—including non-Catholics—is defying them in doing so. The path to moral consensus is fiat, and when the attempt to dictate morality fails, force should be the next step.

This is a shoddy way to bring people to moral consensus. It is not working. It cannot work. The Catholic church in the U.S. is bleeding members today at such a rapid rate—particularly among the young (here)—because commanding people to do right, and then trying to force them to do right when they do not obey, does not lead to moral behavior: it leads to rejection of those who try to rule by fiat.

And who do not lead by example as they try to command: for instance, I am totally unpersuaded by the recent claim of Bishop Thomas Wenski of Orlando that his Mass of Reparation earlier in the week was a non-confrontational, apolitical act (here). I am not persuaded because Bishop Wenski has a history of making public statements—in the secular media—that are overt political statements and attempts to strong-arm Catholics in central Florida to vote Republican.

During the last election, he published a statement in a local paper (here) calling on Catholics in his diocese to continue the culture war against their gay brothers and sisters—a theme dear to the heart of the party for whom Bishop Wenski is clearly shilling with his “reparation” Mass and other public statements (here).

And once his side had lost, Bishop Wenski did not give up the battle, but continued publishing overtly political statements in the local secular media. Following Obama’s election, Wenski wrote another op-ed piece in a local paper which, under the guise of congratulating the new president, raked him over the coals regarding a Freedom of Choice Act that has never, in fact, even been on the table (here and here). Drumbeats for the faithful—beats on a war drum—to assure that Catholics in his area will continue to vote “right,” just as the Mass of Reparation this week clearly was . . . .

(The good bishop seems to have a little bee in his bonnet when it comes to gay people, by the way. The anti-abortion screed to which I’ve just linked contains a nasty little dig about gay rights and gay marriage, as did Wenski’s sermon at the Mass of Reparation, which was, again, ostensibly all about abortion, but managed to praise [here] the “courage” of the “convictions” of a beauty queen from California—that is, Carrie Prejean, the new darling of the religious right on the issue of gay marriage.)

With this level of “moral” discourse, and when the teaching of bishops is so clearly captive to one party and its economic movers and shakers, is it any wonder that people are no longer listening?

And when a bishop—in this case, Peter Jugis of Charlotte—does this (here) within days after a prominent member of his flock, Virginia Foxx, has characterized the claim that a young gay man was brutally murdered because he was gay as a hoax? Bishops standing against a bill to outlaw bullying of children on grounds of sexual orientation in North Carolina schools?

It boggles the mind. With such shepherds, is it any wonder that the sheep are no longer walking meekly behind?

Cardinal Francis George on Notre Dame as Extreme Embarrassment: Who's the Embarrassment?

Cardinal Francis George, President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, characterizes Notre Dame’s invitation of President Obama as its commencement speaker as an “extreme embarrassment” (here):

“[T]he problem is in that you have a Catholic university - the flagship Catholic university - do something that brought extreme embarrassment to many, many people who are Catholic," George told the crowd.

But there is another problem here. As one of those many, many people who are Catholic, I find Cardinal Francis George an extreme embarrassment.

To my knowledge, Cardinal George has never responded to Voice of the Faithful’s 19 August 2008 appeal to him to step down from his position of pastoral leadership in the Chicago archdiocese (here), after a deposition the Cardinal made on 30 January 2008 revealed (here and here) that he had

1. Kept priests with known histories of sexually abusing children in ministry after having been apprised of their history of abuse of children;

2. Circumvented the criminal justice system by sheltering these priests who had abused minors;

3. Falsified his archdiocesan audit of the archdiocese’s handling of abuse cases by omitting damning information about the failure of the archdiocese to abide by covenants of his own USCCB regarding handling of priests known to be abusing minors;

4. Ignored the advice of his own archdiocesan review board to remove abusive priests from ministry;

5. Empowered a vicar for priests who is known to have coached clergy about denying allegations of sexual abuse;

6. Engaged in cover-up and deceit regarding his circumvention of criminal laws governing the handling of adults abusing minors, and of church documents governing the proper handling of abusive priests;

7. And violated the USCCB Charter to Protect Young Children, which he himself helped write.

Embarrassment, Cardinal George? Notre Dame?

I don’t think so. It’s you who are the extreme embarrassment to me, and, I daresay, many other Catholics.

A Reader Writes: Thugs?! The Cardinal Newman Society? Really?

In response to yesterday's posting about the Cardinal Newman Society and Notre Dame's invitation of President Obama as its commencement speaker (here), a reader posted a response, asking what I meant by the term "thugs" and to whom I was applying it. I replied, and a dialogue ensued.

That dialogue seems significant to me. Since blog comments are notoriously under-read, I'm lifting yesterday's comments to a posting. Here's the discussion:

John: Why call them 'thugs'? If it was some Soros-funded outfit trying to influence the culture, you'd laud them as 'activists' or 'community organizers'. But right-wingers are always 'operatives' and 'thugs', simply because you disagree with them?

Bill: Thanks for your reply and question, John.

The term "thug" is Joan Walsh's, in reference to Randall Terry.

And I completely agree with that term, as applied to Mr. Terry.

John: OK, glad to know you don't think the Newman Society is a bunch of thugs. The title of your post made me think you did. In any event, I would say that the more conservative bishops are 'allying' themselves with groups like Newman (accepting your notion that they are) for the purpose of rallying resources in order to respond to 'scandal'. What is more pastoral than wishing to protect your flock from the danger of moral confusion?

Bill: John, I do actually view the Cardinal Newman Society folks as thugs. It's not a word I use often. I've been blogging here for, well, quite a while, and if you do a search of the blog using its search engine, you'll see that I have never used the word until today.

But I do agree with Joan Walsh's use of it in this context, and I would extend that word to Cardinal Newman Society. I agree with the assessment of Bishop John G. Vlazny, when he wrote (as he ended his tenure as chair of the U.S. Bishops' committee on higher education), that Cardinal Newman Society often employs tactics that are "aggressive, inaccurate, or lacking in balance," as well as "objectionable in substance and in tone."

Both leaders of American Catholic higher education and bishops have noted that Cardinal Newman Society engages in bullying tactics. In my view, if our position on life issues is right, it will be compelling and morally persuasive and will not require coercion or hardball tactics that include fudging the truth and playing partisan politics. The fact that we keep resorting to those tactics undermines the message on life that we hope to present to the culture at large.

As for the bishops' concern to protect the flock from scandal, many of us are already scandalized, and by the bishops themselves. As a lay Catholic, if I were asked by the bishops how I'd like them to exercise pastoral leadership, I'd point them to the Catechism, which states, ''The whole concern of doctrine and its teaching must be directed to the love that never ends. Whether something is proposed for belief, for hope or for action, the love of our Lord must always be made accessible, so that anyone can see that all the works of perfect Christian virtue spring from love and have no other objective than to arrive at love'' [Catechism, para 25].''

"The love of our Lord must always be made accessible": the actions of Terry and Cardinal Newman Society, and of many bishops who ally themselves with those folks, do not make the love of the Lord accessible to many of us or to the culture at large, I believe. We will persuade others with our message when we live it--in love--rather than trying to beat others up and shout them down.

John: OK, fair enough. I like +Vlazny (my own shepherd, here in W Oregon) so that's persuasive testimony. If the Newman Society is being deceptive, shame on them. I support their mission, though, as long as it's conducted charitably. The letter-writing campaign and such is, in my opinion, a completely legitimate expression of dissent and concern.

Bill: John, Vlazny is a good bishop. I spent a semester in Oregon doing sabbatical research on the work of Martin Luther King, and was impressed with him (and with many members of the local Catholic community I met out there) during that period.

It's not the letter-writing campaign of the Cardinal Newman Society I object to. It's the bullying tactics and the shilling for one party--while the Society totally ignores the considerable moral shortcomings of the positions and leaders of that party, focusing exclusively on the party it opposes.