In the News: End of Year Commentary on Religious News Stories (Uganda, Gay Marriage, Papal Pathology, Hobby Lobby, SSPX)

Good commentary from articles uploaded to Facebook feed by friends in the past day or so, and from blogs I read:

Amidst Controversy about Susan Sarandon's Benedict-Nazi Remark, Anti-Semitic Bishop Williamson Spouts Off Again

A day or so ago, when Kathy Hughes mentioned to me the dust-up about Susan Sarandon's recent remark re: Pope Benedict Hitler Youth past, I hadn't yet seen the news about Sarandon's remark.  I subsequently read an article at Truthdig reporting what Sarandon said.

Hans Küng on Healing a Church in Crisis: No Denying That Ratzinger Engineered Cover-Up

Some members of the boys’ club rallying to the Vatican’s defense in recent days are now proclaiming that the crisis in the church is over.  The Vatican has weathered the storm quite well, these defensores fidei are announcing.  The storm is already abating.

This announcement, which purports to be objective description of how things stand at present, is, of course, spin.  It’s designed to give those who call for continued open discussion of the abuse crisis—and, in particular, of the Vatican’s role in it—the impression that their continued conversation is silly and ineffectual, mere petty gossip and pubtalk.  It’s designed to close ranks even more tightly and to keep outsiders from straying into a pub that has hitherto been exclusively clerical (and therefore exclusively male).

Continued Conversation about Catholic Centrists: David Clohessy on Michael Sean Winters

UPDATE (2 P.M., CST): Interestingly enough, the America thread to which I link below, by Michael Sean Winters, with David Clohessy's response, is now gone from the America website. And I've just gotten a press release from VOTF combating misinformation in the media about its role with the legislation in CT (now withdrawn) that provoked Winters' posting (here).

I noted yesterday that Michael Sean Winters questions the faithfulness of the Catholic lay group Voice of the Faithful in a posting at America magazine's blog this week (here). Winters asks what criteria those who characterize VOTF as faithful use, and whether they are competent to make that judgment.

In response, I noted that the question of criteria used to judge brother and sister Catholics as faithful, and the question of the competency to make such a judgment, cuts both ways. It can be asked of Winters himself and of other centrist American Catholic thinkers who, as does Winters, write off millions of brother and sister Catholics to the left of the center-right as inadequately faithful.

I conclude,

I wonder what criterion they're using in making such a cruel judgment. And if they are competent to make it. And if they think it serves the church well to do so. And if they think that it doesn't undermine their pontifications about catholicity and love and justice and what "we" all believe.

I'm not the only one asking Winters those questions, I find. David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), responds to Winters in a comment at America today (here):

What a mean-spirited, gratuitous and unfair slap at the many fine Catholics who are in VOTF! Regardless of how one feels about the legislation advanced by 2 VOTF members, few doubt the good intentions and genuine compassion of the largely well-educated and clearly compassionate members of this group.

Democracy is messy and any public forum attracts a few loud-mouths. But such sweeping disdain for good Catholics in a Jesuit publication is disturbing.

Clohessy is absolutely right. Winters's snide remarks about VOTF (which has supported SNAP and those abused by priests) implicitly write off a wide group of faithful brother and sister Catholics, including lay groups working for reform of the church, and those sexually abused as minors by priests, as well as those who stand in solidarity with survivors of such abuse.

As I have noted over and over on this blog, American Catholic centrists have constructed a narrow ecclesiology that apologizes for the status quo and excludes millions of brother and sister Catholics whose voices sorely need to be heard, if the church is to heal from the horrific clerical abuse scandal, and to face the challenge of this postmodern millennium effectively. VOTF and SNAP may well represent the future of the Catholic church--the viable future of the church--far more adequately than do centrist apologists for the status quo.

Pope Benedict XVI has issued a statement this week admitting that the Vatican mishandled its offer of reconciliation to the Society of St. Pius X and its bishop Richard Williamson. In that statement (I'm relying on a copy published on Rocco Palmo's Whispers in the Loggia blog yesterday), the pope speaks of the need for "breadth" in the church:

But should not the great Church also allow herself to be generous in the knowledge of her great breadth, in the knowledge of the promise made to her? Should not we, as good educators, also be capable of overlooking various faults and making every effort to open up broader vistas? (here)

A splendid statement, indeed. And one touching on the root meaning of the word "catholic"--a church with "broader vistas" and "great breadth," capable of accomodating everyone, and of "overlooking various faults" as it extends its broad welcome to everyone.

Benedict's ecclesiology here is at odds with the ecclesiology of Winters in his remarks about VOTF. As long as those occupying the power seats of the center find it possible to welcome SSPX and Williamson, while they cannot find room for their brothers and sisters in VOTF and SNAP as well as for millions of Catholics who stand in solidarity with those groups and what they represent, something will remain radically awry with the church and its claim to catholicity.

The State of the Catholic Church, Lent 2009: A Photo Essay

For today, a photo essay--an interesting snapshot of the state of the Catholic church as Lent begins, 2009 . . . . The first two photos are from the Carnival parade in Düsseldorf on Monday, 23 February. The armband of the dignitary with the red wings reads (in case you cannot make out the lettering), "Bischof Williamson.

And then a photo of the real Bishop Richard Williamson, as he left Argentina this week for England, Argentina having demanded that he leave the country when his anti-Semitic views became known. Bishop Williamson is the gentleman in the ball cap raising his fist to a reporter:

Weekly News Roundup: Austrian Church Crisis, Rabbi Yehuda Levin, Knoxville Shooter

Lots of stories today following up on ones discussed in recent postings on this blog. A number of websites are reporting that the Catholic bishops of Austria will meet on Monday to deal with the crisis caused in the Austrian church by Benedict’s rehabilitation of SSPX and his naming of Gerhard Maria Wagner as auxiliary bishop of Linz (here and here). These decisions are having the following effect:

Four times as many Catholics have officially quit the Church in Linz so far this year as in early 2008, the Austrian Press Agency APA reported, and departures have also been running higher than usual in Vienna, Salzburg, Tyrol and Lower Austria.

On Tuesday this week, 31 of the 39 deans of the Linz diocese issued a statement of no confidence in Wagner. On the same day, Salzburg Archbishop Alois Kothgasser said that the church must avoid shrinking into "a sect ... with few but strictly obedient members" through such decisions that alienate more and more Catholics of good conscience shaped by Vatican II.

Meanwhile, as my e-friend Colleen Baker reported on her Enlightened Catholicism blog this week, Rabbi Yehuda Levin of the right-wing Rabbinical Alliance of America, has praised Benedict’s choice to rehabilitate SSPX and anti-Semite Richard Williamson (here and here). Levin, who supported Patrick Buchanan in his failed 1996 presidential bid, and who has participated in anti-gay demonstrations with Fred Phelps (who maintains the God Hates Fags website), has told Lifesite news that Benedict deserves support because he is seeking to weed the church of left-wing Catholics and fill its pews with morally upright believers. Levin states,

I understand that it is very important to fill the pews of the Catholic Church not with cultural Catholics and left-wingers who are helping to destroy the Catholic Church and corrupt the values of the Catholic Church. This corruption has a trickle-down effect to every single religious community in the world.

Levin believes that there is a conspiracy of a “strong left wing” in Catholicism, which is using events like the media furor over Richard Williamson’s outspoken anti-Semitism to undermine Benedict’s platform to purify the church of dissidents. In his view, this conspiracy involves an alliance between the “strong left wing” of the Catholic church and the “homosexualist” movement. Levin calls on Benedict to preserve his version of Catholic orthodoxy, and states that he is willing to overlook the anti-Semitism of SSPX because of that group’s other morally and politically upright views.

Vis-à-vis that “homosexualist” conspiracy, also in the news this week is an allegation by Tony Perkins of the influential religious-right organization Family Research Council that lesbians are ultimately responsible for the choice of Nadya Suleman to have octuplets through in vitro fertilization, in addition to the six children she already has. Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin has that lesbians-made-me-do-it story (here).

Also in the news this week is the sentencing of Knoxville, Tennessee, church shooter Jim David Adkisson for his rampage in a Knoxville Unitarian Universalist church in July 2008. Adkisson opened fire in the church without warning and killed two people. He was sentenced this week to life in prison.

At the time Adkisson was apprehended, he indicated that his motive for the shooting was his hatred of liberals and gays. A manifesto Adkisson wrote before the shooting has just now been released (here). It indicates that he hoped through his murderous actions to spur similar actions across the country to rid the United States of the “cancerous pestilence” of liberalism and homosexuality.

Adkisson writes,

The worst problem America faces today is Liberalism. They have dumbed down education, they have defined deviancy down.

I’m struck by that oft-heard complaint of the American political and religious right: "[T]hey have defined deviancy down.” It appears that, in the view of Jim David Adkisson, taking a gun and walking into a church full of people (including children) and opening fire is not deviancy. This act, is, rather, a response to deviancy.

And there, in a nutshell, we see, I would argue, just why the rhetoric of the American religious and political right has become so dangerous to our democracy and should be monitored vigorously by those concerned to safeguard our democracy. Shooting unarmed gays and liberals at worship and placing their children at risk in the process,is not deviancy. Being gay and/or liberal is.

And finally, headlines I like this week:

"Next Time, Let’s Have the Women Study the Men” at NCR, on the recent Vatican announcement that it will be "studying" American women religious to ascertain whether they are doing a proper job of carrying on their founders' charisms (here); and

“Reaching Right” at America on Benedict’s decision to rehabilitate SSPX (here).

A Reader Writes: The Real Cost of Benedict's Smaller, Purer Church

In this posting, I’d like to give attention to a comment that an astute reader of this blog recently posted in response to my reflections on the thinkability of papal resignations (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/02/on-thinkability-of-papal-resignations.html).

Carl is responding to a comment made by a previous poster at the same thread, who had stated, “The church now is not losing members . . . . Where the faith is traditional, it is growing. Where it is radical, it is withering away.”

In response to the statement that the church is not losing members, Carl writes,

Quite bluntly, that is a lie! Pew forum reports that the Catholic Church is experiencing a net loss of 7.5% of its membership annually. That number is escalating. This week, the German Government reports that record numbers of German catholics are renouncing their membership in the Catholic Church. While there are old members returning, I myself am one, the numbers are far too small to offset the numbers who are leaving. Those loses are not sustainable. There is no way the RCC can survive this level of losses.

Carl’s comments then link to recent Pew Forum reports at http://religions.pewforum.org/portraits and http://religions.pewforum.org/reports#.

For anyone seeking accurate information about what is happening demographically in American Catholicism, the Pew Forum data are a sine qua non. They provide a very troubling snapshot of what the restorationist agenda of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, upheld by American bishops largely hand-picked by those two popes, means, precisely, in terms of continuing affiliation of American Catholics with the Catholic church.

As I reported in November (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/11/points-to-ponder-approaching-election.html), the Pew data show the following:

Percentage of Americans who are former Catholics: 10%

Percentage of American adults raised Catholic who have left the church: 33%

At the present moment in the history of the American Catholic church, a tenth of all American adults are now former Catholics, and a third of all American adults raised Catholic have left the church. As the same posting notes, as of February 2008, statistics from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) show the percentage of American Catholics attending weekly Mass at 23%. I suspect the number is lower now.

Carl’s posting also notes that, in the wake of Benedict’s rehabilitation of Richard Williamson and his SSPX confrères, resignations from the Catholic church in Germany have been “escalating.” I’ve been reporting on this phenomenon (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/02/living-in-hope-petition-of-german-swiss.html). As the posting to which I just linked notes, on 7 February, the newspaper Deutsche Welle reported that German Catholics are leaving the church “in droves” following Benedict’s action: that is, they are officially leaving by going to their local governmental office that maintains lists of church members for tax purposes, and having their names removed from those rolls.

Patrick Allard’s blog reported on this still-unfolding story on 7 February, with a transcript of a 6 February article from Der Spiegel, which indicates that all over Germany, Catholics are officially resigning from the Catholic church in unprecedented numbers following Benedict’s rehabilitation of SSPX (http://patrickattard.blogspot.com/2009/02/spiegel-catholics-leave-church-out-of.html). As I have also noted (see the link above to my Living in Hope posting), a similar situation exists in Austria, where there has been a mass exodus from the Catholic church in the past several years—and where media reports indicate further resignations following Benedict’s recent action.

And the situation I am describing is not different in other developed nations of the world. Even in formerly staunchly Catholic countries like Spain and Ireland, the Catholic church is dropping members at an unthinkable rate.

I agree with Carl: in light of these numbers, it seems strange, indeed, that Catholics enamored by the restorationist agenda still speak of their movement as one that is saving the church, returning people to church and to the practice of their faith. The numbers speak for themselves: precisely the opposite is happening in developing nations with Catholic populations. And the numbers of those leaving are skyrocketing in the wake of recent decisions by Rome.

And, it must be remembered, those statistics capture only the numbers of those officially leaving. They do not count those of us who have accepted, with heavy hearts, the church's decision to exclude us, and who longer participate in church life and liturgy because we have been given a clear message that we are not wanted.

This phenomenon appears not to perturb either Benedict or most bishops around the world—the majority of which have been appointed under the last two papal regimes and are solidly in the restorationist camp. As I’ve noted on this blog, the weeding out of Catholics who raise critical questions about the place of women in church and society, about sexual ethics, and about the political strategy of the church (e.g., in the pro-life movement) is deliberate. It is taking place under the aegis of purer, truer Catholicism: the restorationist agenda that has been at the center of Benedict’s church politics for decades now, from the period when he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as Cardinal Ratzinger, intends and celebrates the exclusion of vast numbers of Catholics from the leaner and meaner "restored" church.

In the view of those promoting the restorationist agenda, authentic Catholics (even avowedly anti-Semitic ones) will remain and are welcome. The rest are unwelcome and should go, because we are disobedient children. As I’ve also noted, the new right-wing bishop in Linz, Austria, Gerhard Maria Wagner captures the nonchalant (and belligerent and intransigent) attitude of the church’s present pastoral leaders about this loss of millions of Catholics who took hope from Vatican II by arguing that the church cannot permit itself to be blackmailed by those leaving.

As if those leaving the church in large numbers are leaving primarily because we have sought to force change in the church, and not because our consciences no longer permit us to collude with a system that hides pedophile priests and welcomes anti-Semites and makes a shambles of an ecumenical council of the church. The consciences that the church itself has formed, through its teachings about ethical issues . . . .

In my view, the response of the current pastoral leaders of the church (and those who defend them from the center) to the pastoral needs of millions of Catholics experiencing a crisis of conscience because of the behavior and decisions of those pastoral leaders is not merely inadequate: it is a shocking betrayal of all that pastoral leadership is about. The charge given to the church’s pastors is to seek out the lost members of the flock, and to feed the flock—not to drive away and starve the flock.

Historians will one day ask how people given such a charge could drive away and starve the flock entrusted to their care. By then, of course, it may well be too late to ask that question in anything but a theoretical sense, since starved and dispersed flocks have a way of disappearing altogether.

Holocaust Denial and the Denial of Universal Human Rights

In the interview with the German journal Spiegel that I cited in my first posting today, Richard Williamson is asked if he recognizes university human rights. His response is illuminating:

When human rights were declared in France, hundreds of thousands were killed throughout France. Where human rights are considered an objective order for the state to implement, there are constantly anti-Christian policies. When it comes to preserving the individual's freedom of conscience against the democratic state, then human rights perform an important function. The individual needs these rights against a country that behaves like a Leviathan. But the Christian concept of the state is a different one, so that the Christian theories of human rights emphasize that freedom is not an end in itself. The point is not freedom from something, but freedom for something. For good (http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,606323,00.html).

This response speaks volumes. At the heart of the denial of Vatican II by groups such as the Society of St. Pius X is a denial of human rights. What such groups are essentially combating is the movement within Catholicism after Vatican II to adopt the language of universal human rights as an appropriate way of speaking about ethical issues and about the church's mission to the world.

Strong currents within the Catholic church resist the use of that language because they resist--at a very fundamental level--human rights themselves. They resist the extension of fundamental human rights to groups (e.g., to women) who have previously been denied rights and have been relegated to positions of subservience in many societies.

It is this ineluctable movement to recognize the fundamental rights of all human beings that generates the critique of modernity that runs through groups like SSPX. Unfortunately, the current pope in many ways endorses that critique and its implication that the language of human rights is a flawed, politicizing way of talking about ethical issues and the mission of the church.

It will be interesting to see if the Catholic church, in its central governing structures, recognizes and acknowledges the dilemma it creates for millions of its faithful by telling us to respect the human rights of all, and then by allying itself with fascist movements that resist rights for all. When asked recently about all those the church is losing in nations like Austria and Germany due to its continuing intransigent infatuation with fascism and betrayal of its own message of human rights, Gerhard Maria Wagner replied that the church cannot allow itself to be blackmailed.

This response--shocking in a pastoral leader--spectacularly (and deliberately) misses the point. The crisis of conscience that is causing German and Austrian Catholics to renounce their church membership after Benedict rehabilitated SSPX is due precisely to the conflict Catholics of good conscience experience when the same church that calls them to respect human rights turns around and tramples on rights--and welcomes those who deny the tradition of universal human rights.

Confronting the Evidence for the Holocaust: Seeing, Believing, and Moral Conversion

I keep thinking of Bishop Richard Williamson’s recent statement to the German media that, as he studies the evidence for the Holocaust, he will not visit Auschwitz (www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,606323,00.html). I think I understand his refusal.

When we engage in dangerous arm-chair dissection of bogus “evidence” proving that a major historical atrocity did not happen, seeing the real evidence for that atrocity—the artifacts of torture and murder, starkly displayed in the light of day—shatters our illusions. It forces us to see ourselves in the stark light of day. And to understand the twisted motives that lead us to deny plain sense and the evidence of our own eyes, as our need to hate drives everything we do. And as we cling to arcane conspiracy theories that feed the ravenous area inside us from which our hate springs, despite abundant clear evidence demonstrating that we are wrong.

I can understand, because I have visited places in Germany in which violence—real violence, undismissable violence—took place against the Jewish population in the Nazi period. Those places have a resonance about them. The evil done at these sites hangs in the air about them, a sour tang of mob violence and ethnic hatred still perceptible to anyone with eyes to see, a nose to smell, ears to hear.

As I’ve noted on this blog several times, my life partner, Steve, is German-American. Though quite a few branches of his family were in the United States prior to the Civil War, the majority of his ancestors came to this country in the period after that war and even up to the early part of the 20th century. Those who had arrived “early” continued their use of German language in ethnic enclaves in the Midwest, where it was possible to go on speaking German as the mother tongue and language of home (and church and school) even beyond the first world war.

Steve’s grandparents all spoke German as their first language. His two grandmothers both had mothers from the German areas of the present Czech Republic, from Bohemia and Moravia in what later came to be called the Sudetenland. Steve’s family stopped speaking German only in the World War II period, as prejudice against German-speaking Americans mounted and caused families that had clung to their mother tongue for generations in a dominant Anglo cultural world to abandon it and to use English in their homes.

Because of his cultural heritage, Steve feels the Holocaust as a personal burden, as an act of incommensurable and inexplicable evil for which he himself is in some way responsible. He has spent years trying to understand how it is that people—his people—could do something like this to another people. He has worked hard to read every scrap of history he can find about the Holocaust, the rise of Nazism in Germany, the theological roots of anti-Semitism, and so on.

Because I share my life with him, I have had a broad, vicarious education in these subjects, merely by listening to him process what he is reading and learning, and then by reading what he recommends to me. Our education has also included travel—primarily, to places in Germany in which he still has cousins, to reconnect to those cousins, and to hear from them what they remember or have been told about the Nazi period.

We have not visited a concentration camp. I am not sure I am ready yet to see one. We have, though, visited other sites that bring us face to face with the history of Nazi Germany’s murder of the Jews. Those visits have been, for me, spiritual moments, gifts in my own pilgrimage towards transformative truth. I have come away from each of these encounters changed. And I am remembering those encounters lately, as I think about Richard Williamson’s refusal to visit Auschwitz.

I’ve written elsewhere about one of these sites—a Jewish cemetery in the Kraichgau area of Baden (http://neverinparadise.blogspot.com/2008/10/weingarten-baden-171998-dead-cemeteries.html). Steve and I were in that area visiting cousins of his in 1998. We’ve gone back once with Steve’s parents.

On both visits, the cousins took us to the Jewish cemetery of the community in which they live. The cemetery is a “dead” cemetery. The last stones in it are dated 1936. Standing in it, one is confronted with astonishing, deeply troubling evidence of the eradication of an entire group of people in this community (and in community after community across Germany).

People who had lived side by side with their Christian neighbors in this Rhineland area from the early Middle Ages. People who considered themselves German, since they had, after all, built Germany and lived in the area that became Germany for almost a millennium and a half before they were expelled and murdered.

In the same town is a plaque stating that the synagogue had stood on this spot, and that it was torn down on 10 November 1938. Kristallnacht: the same night on which synagogues across Germany were decimated in an organized act of mass violence engineered by the Nazis. The night on which Jewish citizens who had lived among the Christian population of Germany for centuries found their shops and houses attacked, their belongings pulled into the streets, by neighbors whom they never suspected of harboring such hate. A prelude to murder.

Steve’s Badish cousins are Catholic, as Steve is and his ancestors were. In addition to showing us these places, they have shared with us photo albums documenting their family history and the history of the community in these years. One of these shows several smiling village girls of the 1930s underneath a sign reading, in bold letters, Die Juden sind under Unglück: the Jews are our misfortune. A prelude to murder.

The cousins tell us that in this Catholic village, as in nearby Protestant villages, as in villages across Germany, there are families still living who took part in the events of Kristallnacht. Some of these families have held office in the community, since then. They are respected and well-regarded, at least by many of their neighbors.

As I think about our visits to Steve’s cousins, I remember, too, a visit to another Catholic Rhineland community in which some of Steve’s ancestors lived—this one north of Baden, just outside Köln, a little village called Stommeln. This village is unique in that its synagogue survived the Nazi years. It did so because a local farmer used it as a pigsty after the Jews of the area were expelled (http://neverinparadise.blogspot.com/2008/09/stommeln-7505-klsch-and-maibume.html).

Again, because this community is near the Rhine, which was a major route for migration of Jews into the German lands from early in the Christian era, its Jewish roots are ancient. In fact, as we did research there, Steve discovered that both of his great-great-grandparents who were born in the town and who emigrated to America in the pre-Civil War period had a Jewish grandmother. Both grandmothers has converted to Catholicism. This branch of Steve’s family—the one with roots in Stommeln—is among the most fiercely Catholic of all his family lines today.

Visiting the synagogue in Stommeln was one of the most moving experiences of my life. There was, first of all, the sense of continuity—of my own continuity with the community that had worshiped here for centuries and which was now gone. Of my continuity with Judaism as a Christian whose religion is the offspring of Judaism.

There was also a sense of inconsolable loss, of the absolute, definitive “removal” of an entire community of human beings who led lives here that contributed to their community for generations. Gone. All their contributions forgotten, denied, except for the synagogue, with its stark evidence of so much more that once flourished in Stommeln and other communities like it, through the Jewish presence.

As I think of Stommeln, I recall, too, our meeting with a local historian, a history teacher, who told us of his struggles to help his students remember what happened with the Holocaust—so that it may never happen again (http://neverinparadise.blogspot.com/2008/09/kln-10505-decentering-touches-and.html). Steve has remained in touch with this scholar. He continues to send Steve material about the history of the community, including its rich Jewish past.

I cannot forget, either, the monument of the Kneeling Jew that we came on entirely by accident on a visit to Vienna in 2003. It is in the Albertinaplatz, near the Albertina art museum. Immediately in front of this monument is a granite gateway called the Gateway of Violence, through which one passes to see the bronze monument of a Jew with barbed wire on his back, groveling as he is forced to scrub pro-Austrian slogans from the streets (http://neverinparadise.blogspot.com/2008/04/vienna-8703-heurigers-extra-early.html). The graphic at the head of this posting is a picture of this monument.

This monument by Alfred Hrdlicka commemorates actual events, the humiliation imposed on an entire population of people during the Nazi period. Also in a Catholic area. As a prelude to murder.

I remember, as well, a visit Steve and I made to a cousin of his who had been, like the current pope, a Nazi youth and a Nazi soldier. This was a cousin with whom Steve’s family had maintained contact over the years, someone who grew up in the same house in which his great-grandmother was born and lived in Moravia, in a Catholic German community, until she emigrated in the early 20th century. He had visited Steve's family several times in Minnesota. Because they are a large Catholic family with many far-flung branches, they hosted his visits in the local American Legion hall.

He was a . . . horrifying . . . man. He spoke of good S.S. officers, of the need for Germans to “cleanse” their land of the “filth” of African immigrants, who were taking over and stealing. He decried the willingness of the German Catholic church to support Bread for the World, using his money to allow the licentious Africans to continue breeding too many children, while the German population declined. He lamented the size of Poland—“all that land and so few people”—when Germany needed more room for its people.

He had, in short, learned nothing, nothing at all, from the defeat of Hitler. And he was Catholic—a point Steve insists on making when we talk about these issues. Because his struggle is to understand how a people born out of Judaism, who read the Jewish scriptures and have made those scriptures our own, who claim as Savior a Jewish man, how we can turn in hatred against the Jewish people.

He struggles to understand how his own people, Catholic Germans, a people committed by faith and baptism to healing the world, could have ripped the world apart by partaking in the mass murder of the Jewish people. And visiting those monuments close to his own history, memorials to the hatred that allowed this to happen, deepens rather than resolves these questions for him.

Just as visiting Auschwitz might trouble the certainty of Richard Williamson that no gas chambers were used to kill Jews in Nazi Germany, and that 300,000 and not 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. As I say, I can understand Richard Williamson’s decision not to go to Auschwitz.

Having visited places—real places where real violence took place against real human beings—which document the history of Nazi Germany, but in which the level of violence was nowhere near so atrocious as that of Auschwitz, I can understand. If those places made such an impression on me, imagine what Auschwitz might do to Bishop Williamson.

Benedict's Smaller, Purer Church as Incredible Shrinking Church: Paul Gorrell on Rehabilitation of Pius X

Clerical Whispers also links today to a piece yesterday by Paul Gorrell at Religion Dispatches. It's entitled "The Incredible Shrinking Catholic Church."

Gorrell focuses on the link between Benedict's belief in a smaller, purer church and his decision to rehabilitate Richard Williamson and the Society of St. Pius X. As I have done in my series on Benedict's smaller, purer church, Gorrell notes the irony of a move on the part of Benedict that welcomes an anti-Semitic, misogynistic homophobe, while millions of Catholics whose vision of church has been shaped by Vatican II are implicitly told that we are unwelcome:

All corrections to this controversy aside, what has been revealed in this story is Benedict’s vision of the Church as a “perfect society” that places orthodoxy as the primary requirement of membership. If the faithful are willing to give this unquestioning assent to papal rule, then filtering history through the lens of bigotry is not a problem for the Church.

But Benedict’s vision for the Church is a big problem for gay folks, women who seek equal rights, people who believe the expression of sexuality should not be restricted to marriage and procreation, those who embrace ecumenical dialogue, and people who believe in the primacy of conscience (a hallmark of post-Vatican II Catholic moral theology).

For Benedict, a Holocaust denier is welcome and these ecclesiastical outliers are not.

Ironically, by recognizing Williamson as a member of the Church in good standing, Benedict has made his flock much smaller.

If present trends continue, the smaller, purer church of John Paul II and Benedict XVI may be known primarily not for its conspicuous orthodoxy, but for its conspicuous lapses in the area of orthopraxis--for its betrayal of catholicity and its embrace of exclusivist prejudices, more than its retrieval of tradition.

For its failure to stress the sacramental nature of the church and the obligation of all church members to live in a welcoming, inclusive way that communicates God's all-inclusive, all-affirming love to the world . . . . Which happens to be what Catholicism claims to be all about in the word it uses to designate its brand of religion . . . .

What Benedict Knew When: God's Rottweiler Caught Off-Guard?

Again, the question of what Benedict knew when, re: Richard Williamson and his gross anti-Semitism (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/02/cut-from-same-patriarchal-cloth.html and http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/02/lesbians-made-me-do-it-vatican-on-plot.html).

Today's Clerical Whispers blog picks up an editorial from the 5 Feb. Financial Times (London) that notes the following:

Mr Williamson has long been openly anti-Semitic . . . .

For this German Pope to devote years to bringing these errant brethren back into the fold and not know one of their number is a Holocaust denier is solipsism of cosmic proportions.

Yet this learned Pope is not just a scholar but a student of power and the guardian of a dogmatic doctrinal certitude (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2009/02/popes-fallibility.html).

As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) excelled at compiling detailed dossiers about theologians suspected of doctrinal lapses. It was his careful work at policing the church in this office that earned him the title by which he is often known in Europe, God's Rottweiler. Policing, monitoring, spying, receiving secret allegations about theologians: this was Ratzinger's metier for years.

The church that John Paul II and Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, worked hard to fashion through such methods is one in which there has been a powerful theological chill for years now. Theologians have been terrified to open their mouths, to exercise their God-given voctions in the church.

The church fashioned through such repressive measures is a church that has suffered tremendously. The suppression of open, respectful theological discourse has left the Catholic church entirely unequipped to meet the challenges of postmodern culture in any effective way.

The church has also suffered tremendously due to the willingness of John Paul II and Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) to rely on information-gathering methods that keep theologians (and many bishops) in fear: spying, behind-the-scenes tattling, compiling secret dossiers have been par for the course jin the central offices of the church for some years now. These techniques have been used to reinforce an autocratic, centralized system of governance that suppresses local governance in the church, and which turns local leaders into lackeys who live in fear of displeasing the center.

And we're expected to believe now that Benedict did not know of Richard Williamson's gross anti-Semitic views prior to Benedict's rehabilitation of him?

More on the Attempted Lesbian Coup at the Vatican: Blaming Fiammetta Venner

Wow. There is some seriously disturbed . . . stuff . . . out there on the heels of the Vatican's attempt to blame its current problems on French journalists Fiammetta Venner and Caroline Fouerst.

Check out blogs like The Catholic Knight ("Putting the Sword to the 'Tyranny of Relativism'"), which picked up the blame-the-lesbians story from Rorate Caeli Tuesday (http://catholicknight.blogspot.com/2009/02/attempted-coup-underway-at-vatican.html). Big cry there of an "attempted coup" at the Vatican.

For its female readers, that blog, maintained by a "happily married" Knight of Columbus in Missouri, offers a nifty little poll in which you may choose to let the world know that you are "a Biblically modest woman and I will veil." The winning choices so far? 437 Biblically modest women have reported that they will veil; 437 men have logged in to state that they support veiling (of women, one assumes).

Who knew this little world was out there?

Even the powerful Alliance Defense Fund picked up the story yesterday, adding it to its ADF Alliance Alerts, under the heading, "A Liberal Plot Against the Pope?" (www.alliancealert.org/2009/02/04/congressional-dems-chide-the-pope). Two stories down: "Bishop Williams [sic] Apologizes to the Pope . . . ."

How to read what's going on here? Well, first of all, it's clearly payback from the right for those who have pressed Benedict on Richard Williamson. As I noted today, the worldview that dominates patriarchal institutions requires that I define my power, prestige, authority, at your expense. I prove myself on your back.

I have to stand on you in order to stand tall.

So when its own inepititude (or its even more unsavory characteristics) force the male-dominated institution to yield, it looks for someone to whom it can pass on the pain--often, someone with a female face and/or a gay "lifestyle." In this case, the Vatican has found both, in Venner and Fouerst.

There's also a cynical political calculation going on here. It's as if the Vatican is involved in a poker game, and is raising the stakes. With Williamson, the Vatican's hand has been called.

So now it's responding, "I see your anti-Semitism, and I raise you a lesbian." Those playing this cynical blame-the-lesbian game know perfectly well that they will get nowhere with anti-Semitism. That horrific prejudice lives only in the underbelly of developed Western societies nowadays, and rears its ugly head only covertly. That's what has made Benedict's attempt to rehabilitate Williamson so grotesque: we claim to have put anti-Semitism beyond the pale.

But with homophobia, it's entirely different. The same voices that are calling the Vatican, and loudly, on its anti-Semitism won't utter a word about its homophobia. The mainstream media routinely gives religious groups a big pass when it comes to gay-bashing.

This lesbian-coup fable is a diversionary tactic on the part of the Vatican and its religious right allies, and a particularly mean-spirited one. It's both an attempt to divert attention from Benedict's considerable faux pas with Richard Williamson, and to pass on the pain to those who can be bashed with impunity.

To pass on the pain so that the big boys will feel like big boys again.

The Lesbians Made Me Do It: The Vatican on a Plot to Embarrass Benedict

An interesting twist on my posting earlier today about the claim of the Vatican that Benedict did not know of Richard Williamson’s gross anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial before Benedict invited Williamson and his SSPX confrères back into the Catholic church: two days ago, the Rorate Caeli blog reported about “a dossier circulating within the Vatican which could reveal that a plot was planned for several months to embarrass the Pope in the ‘Williamson affair’” (http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com, "A Plot against the Pope").

According to Rorate Caeli, the blog had received a tip about this inside information, but did not choose to make it public until Italian newspapers Il Riformista and Il Giornale had disclosed the information.

To be specific: the text that Rorate Caeli claims to have received—apparently from inside the Vatican itself—maintains that Fiammetta Venner, “a very well known french lesbian activist,” in collusion with her partner (the tip-off text uses coy brackets to indicate its distaste for this term) Caroline Fourest, colluded with Swedish television to air the interview with Richard Williamson in which he made his infamous statements right on the eve of the papal announcement about SSPX.

I hear from those who track right-wing Catholic blogs that this claim of a lesbian plot to embarrass the pope is now burning like wildfire through that murky demi-monde of blogland. Fiammetta Venner, who co-authored a book on Catholic integralism with Caroline Fourest (Nouveaux Soldats du pape), flatly denies the existence of any such plot (www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2009/02/04/ni-moi-ni-la-television-suedoise-ne-connaissaient-a-l-avance-l-agenda-du-vatican_1150857_3224.html).

The German and Swiss media are already noting the Vatican’s attempt to shift the conversation about the rehabilitation of SSPX to this purported lesbian plot (www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,605392,00.html and www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/international/williamson_vatikan_1.1881660.html).

And so here’s what interests me in this sordid little blame-the-lesbians story: remember that earlier today I wrote, “Like any bureaucracy—particularly those heavily invested in monitoring the morality and controlling the behavior of others—the Vatican keeps extensive files on major ecclesiastical players like the SSPX bunch”?

Remember that I talked about how dubious I was re: the claim that Benedict did not have access to files that showed precisely what Richard Williamson’s Holocaust record is?

Now right-wing Catholic blogs trying to defend Benedict are claiming to have tips about “a dossier circulating within the Vatican which could reveal that a plot was planned for several months to embarrass the Pope in the ‘Williamson affair’” (my emphasis)?

Isn’t that interesting . . . . There was no dossier at all circulating about public, easily documented claims over the course of years by Richard Williamson denying the Holocaust and blaming the Jews for everything wrong in Western culture.

But there is a zingy little dossier immediately circulating, blaming “a very well known french lesbian activist” and her [partner] for the kerfuffle around the rehabilitation of Richard Williamson.

We’re to conclude—so it seems—that the Vatican's inner circles have access to more information about Fiammetta Venner and Caroline Fourest than they do about Richard Williamson before Benedict makes an historic move to rehabilitate Richard Williamson?

Puhleez!

This despicable attempt of the big men in Rome, caught red-handed in a plot to rehabilitate a vicious anti-Semite, to try to hang their shame on the lesbians is pathetic. It’s scraping the bottom of the barrel. Shame on those gullible and/or venal right-wing Catholic bloggers helping to circulate this tripe as a way of letting Benedict off the hook.

H/t to a faithful reader of this blog for links to the Rorate Caeli blog and information about the Venner story.

Cut from the Same Patriarchal Cloth: Catholic Lies, Mormon Lies

Yesterday the Vatican Secretariat of State released a statement indicating that Richard Williamson will be required to relinquish his views about the Holocaust in order to be permitted to function as a Catholic bishop (www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/world/europe/05pope.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink). As I have noted on this blog, in a papal audience last week, Benedict XVI stated that the schismatic bishops of the St. Pius X Society, including Richard Williamson, would be readmitted to communion in the hope that afterwards they would mend their theological ways.

What’s noteworthy about yesterday’s Vatican statement is that it concedes to the widespread uproar about the pope’s choice to readmit an avowed anti-Semite to communion, and appears to make a disavowal of the anti-Semitic views a precondition for readmission to the church—well, at least a precondition for holding office in the church. The Vatican statement makes no mention of Williamson’s equally troubling misogynistic or homophobic utterances.

What catches my eye in the Vatican statement is the following disclaimer:

Bishop Williamson, in order to claim admission to episcopal functions in the church, must distance himself in absolutely unequivocal and public fashion from his positions regarding the Shoah, which were not known by the Holy Father when the excommunication was lifted (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/3293; my emphasis).

Color me dubious. Papal decisions such as the one to rehabilitate SSPX are not taken lightly. They are preceded by abundant investigation and back-and-forth dialogue with the Curia and other papal advisors. Like any bureaucracy—particularly those heavily invested in monitoring the morality and controlling the behavior of others—the Vatican keeps extensive files on major ecclesiastical players like the SSPX bunch.

I believe this claim of blithe papal innocence about as much as I believed the claim of the leaders of the LDS church, following the victory of prop 8 in California, that they had contributed a measly $2,078 to the prop 8 battle (http://progressivemamablogger.wordpress.com/2009/02/02/somebody-needs-to-write-thou-shalt-not-lie-about-a-hundred-times-on-the-old-chalkboard). Now, several days after the California courts denied an appeal by prop 8 supporters to shield the names of donors and six weeks into an investigation of LDS involvement by the California Political Practices Commission, the Mormons have suddenly found—hold on, new receipts appearing on our desks!—nearly $188,000 more than they first claimed to have spent, to assure prop 8’s victory.

It’s all of a piece, the lying. By major organized religious groups. By major organized religious groups that have some key things in common, including a highly centralized and autocratic male-dominated leadership structure intent on defending heterosexual (or heterosexual-passing) male privilege in the political, economic, social, and ecclesial structures of Christendom at all cost. A leadership structure hell-bent on holding the line against women and gays, which conveniently receives new revelations when it becomes politically necessary to give an inch . . . .

In my experience, both Catholics and Mormons tend to dismiss lying in the service of God as a minor peccadillo, one easily forgiven—a mere bending of the truth to effect a greater good. As an openly gay man dealing with folks in both male-dominated, hierarchical, politically powerful churches, I’ve had a number of disquieting experiences of being lied to blatantly by members and officials of both churches. These experiences have let me know that, when the one asking to be dealt with humanely is only a filthy faggot, a little truth-skirting for the Lord is just a peccadillo.

So color me unconvinced by the Vatican claim that Benedict was unaware of Richard Williamson’s anti-Semitism when Benedict announced plans to rehabilitate SSPX. This is a cover-up, a concession to the force of popular opinion that finds this Vatican action, finally, beyond the pale.

No, Benedict and his cronies are getting what they wanted, with this rehabilitation of a Vatican II-denying cult known for its anti-Semitism, disdain for women, and pretense to having preserved the true church in a period of apostasy and cultural decline. What they did not want or expect was the hue and cry that ensued when the announcement was made. They were so fixated on the response of their amen chorus, for whom Benedict can do no wrong, that they did not anticipate the widespread outrage with which they are now contending.

And, to me, that says a great deal about what is wrong with the leadership of the Catholic church at present. As I read responses to the rehabilitation of Richard Williamson and the appointment of Gerhard Maria Wagner, I keep flashing back to the election of Benedict. It was clear to me when new pope was announced that those who elected him wanted this man as the successor of John Paul II, and were determined to promote their choice even if it meant shoving an entire gold tiara down the throats of the rest of the church.

I well remember what I saw and heard with my own eyes that day, as I watched in a kind of fascinated repulsion. The announcement was made from the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square, and there was immediately not only loud cheering, but an audible, sharp booing from some members of the crowd, accompanied by a groan of dismay.

I was watching on EWTN, which cut immediately to Raymond Arroyo and Richard John Neuhaus, who looked stunned and were uncharacteristically speechless for a moment. I thought initially that their astonishment was at the fact that their candidate, a staunch leader of their restorationist movement, had been elected. But as I listened to their nervous patter as they sought composure, I suddenly realized that they had heard what I had heard, and were unmade by the response: we have come to such a pass with our church that the announcement of a new pope is greeting with boos and groans by some Catholics.

I then recall most of the church dignitaries on the balcony quickly scurrying back inside, while the odious Cardinal George remained, scanning the crowd, back erect, eyes coldly blazing, appraising—looking, looking, challenging the people of God to do anything but accept this choice that was being rammed down our throats. For our own good. Yes, the same Cardinal George for whose resignation the Catholic lay group Voice of the Faithful has called, when news broke last fall that he had known about and hidden priests who had abused children, while serving as head of the U.S. Catholics’ Bishop Conference (http://votf.org/Press/pressrelease/081808.html).

I would have thought that I had simply imagined the scenario I describe in the preceding paragraphs, had I not read, in the weeks after the papal election, an online remark by an American Jesuit who saw and heard the same thing I saw and heard when Ratzinger’s name was announced. He, too, heard booing and groans. And he interpreted them as I did.

I would have thought I had imagined what I believed I had seen and heard when Ratzinger was made pope, until I saw the pictures that appeared a day or so after Benedict’s election in some American newspapers. They showed American seminarians celebrating after the papal announcement. These fine young men, the flower of the next generation of American Catholic leadership, had all fired up stogies—great, big Rush Limbaugh cigars—and were puffing away, grinning to beat the band.

Celebrating the continuation of phallic dominance in the church, their church, no matter who gets hurt by that dominance or how indefensible it is, in gospel terms. Because, you know, you can’t be a man, a real man, without hurting somebody. Without lording it over someone weaker than yourself. You can’t assert yourself, exercise authority, tell others what the Truth is, without making yourself bigger at somebody else’s expense. Women and gays have tremendous utilitarian value for those who have wagered the future on male dominion: we are the screen upon whose blank scroll the claims to male power are inscribed.

What has been going on for some time in the Catholic church is this: not only a purge of questioning, conscientious Catholics who cannot toe the party line when our consciences lead us in other directions, but a refashioning of the entire church, insofar as this is possible from its center, into a lean, mean political machine intent on ramming male dominance and clerical privilege down the throats of the people of God. At all cost. Even if this power play means destroying the church.

The election of Benedict was an in-your-face statement to the rest of us by those who wield power at the center of the church. Like it or lump it. It’s going to be this way. Our way or the highway. We own the scriptures. We own the sacraments. The central symbols and creed are ours, as well. We will do with them as we please. Protesting will only get you in trouble. We don’t care if we hurt you. In fact, we’ve rigged the game so that your hurt is our victory, a demonstration of the power we intend to assert at all cost. Vatican II and all that blather about the people of God and the Spirit dwelling in every believer’s heart? A mere blip on the screen of history, one we can easily erase.

It’s all of a piece, Mormon lying and Vatican lying. It’s all of a piece, the cynical use of gay human beings to symbolize all sin everywhere, even as church officials blatantly lie and engage in cynical cover ups. It’s all of a piece, the message that the ultimate proclamation of Christianity to the world is all about male dominance and female submission, the “natural” complementarity of the sexes. We would be foolish to read news stories about Richard Williamson and Gerhard Maria Wagner and Marcial Maciel, and not understand the real game being played out before our eyes.

Benedict and Richard Williamson: Roars in Europe, Squeaks in America

Meanwhile--and speaking of popes--things are not going well with Benedict following his attempt to rehabilitate outspoken anti-Semite (and misogynistic homophobe) Richard Williamson. Particularly not in Benedict's native Germany.

The Clerical Whispers blog has been chock-full of postings lately with clippings from news accounts of the German reaction to Benedict's welcome-back of Richard Williamson (see, e.g., http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2009/02/holocaust-bishop-row-has-undermined.html and http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2009/02/german-pope-becomes-embarrassment-in.html). Even prominent Catholic clerics in Germany are speaking out, including Archbishop Werner Thissen of Hamburg, Bishop Gebhard Fuerst of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, and Cardinal Karl Lehmann, former chair of Germany's Catholic bishops' conference.

The Canadian Bishops' Conference has made a statement (www.cccb.ca/site/content/view/2662/1217/lang,eng). A Dutch moral theologian has left the church in protest at Benedict's decision to rehabilitate SSPX (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2009/02/dutch-ethicist-leaves-rc-church-in.html). A German theologian has called for Benedict to resign (www.bild.de/BILD/news/bild-english/world-news/2009/02/03/pope-benedict-xvi/german-archbishop-calls-for-resignation-over-holocaust-denier-williamson-rehabilitation.html). Austrian lay Catholic groups, already decimated over the years by John Paul II and Benedict in those popes' drive to create a leaner, meaner church, are up in arms (www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jZayBo2K1PwrWfHS8tFcZWKGCJAQ).

And the American bishops? Not so much. Typically pusillinamous. Typically deferential to Rome. The head of the U.S. Bishops' Conference Cardinal Francis George has at last released a statement, which manages to do the traditional balancing act at which the American bishops are so skilled, praising the pope while raising faint questions about his action in this case (www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/us/04brfs-006.html?ref=us).

Pope Benedict's Double Standard with Richard Williamson: Nothing Short of Scandalous

In a papal audience he gave this week, Pope Benedict addresses the furor that has resulted from his announcement that he intends to bring the schismatic Society of St. Piux X, including outspoken anti-Semite Bishop Richard Williamson, back into communion (http://zenit.org/article-24934?l=english). Benedict notes that his goal is to offer mercy to these brothers in Christ who find themselves estranged from the Catholic church, and whose suffering is “sharp” as a result of that estrangement.

The pope also makes an astonishing statement about the theological views the SSPX group holds—presumably, their rejection of Vatican II (and the anti-Semitic views more members of SSPX than Williamson espouse?). He states that his hope is, in readmitting this schismatic group to communion, he will spur the group to “complete final necessary steps to arrive to full communion”—that is, to reconsider their erroneous theological views:

Precisely in fulfilling this service to unity, which determines in a specific way my ministry as the Successor of Peter, I decided some days ago to concede the remission of the excommunication incurred by four bishops ordained without pontifical mandate in 1988 by Archbishop Lefebvre. I have carried out this act of paternal mercy because repeatedly these prelates have manifested their sharp suffering in the situation in which they found themselves. I trust that following from this gesture of mine will be the prompt effort on their part to complete final necessary steps to arrive to full communion with the Church, thus giving testimony of true fidelity and true recognition of the magisterium and the authority of the Pope and the Second Vatican Council.

Well, isn’t that special? In November, Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois was given thirty days to “recant his ‘belief and public statements that support the ordination of women in our Church, or (he) will be excommunicated’” (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/2545). Father Bourgeois was told that he would be placed outside communion if he did not renounce theological positions Rome regards as erroneous.

The SSPX group, by contrast, are told that they will be readmitted to communion, and then, it is hoped, they will correct their theological errors. Outspoken anti-Semites (and misogynistic homophobes) are welcomed by Rome with open arms. Someone who attends a women’s ordination ceremony is shoved from communion.

Can anyone say double standard? Big old double standard. To the millions of Catholics who have been told we do not belong because we question the ban on artificial contraception, the pastoral treatment of divorced and remarried Catholics, the teachings about gay and lesbian persons, the church’s complicity in fascist violence, the willingness of pro-life bishops to support unjust wars, the refusal to ordain women and married men, and on and on, this readmission of misogynistic, homophobic anti-Semites who reject an ecumenical council of the church is nothing short of astonishing.

And nothing short of scandalous.

We, after all, are not given a chance to correct our views after we are accepted back into the fold. To the contrary, we are told in no uncertain terms that we are not welcome until we mend our ways.

Nothing short of scandalous . . . . Homophobic, misogynistic, anti-Semites have a place in the church of Benedict XVI. Those who support women’s ordination or welcome of gay and lesbian human beings do not.

Benedict's Smaller, Purer Church: Room for Antisemites, Misogynists, Homophobes . . . But Not for Us (5)

I’ve been struggling with the conclusion to my series of postings on connections between the March for Life and Benedict XVI’s rehabilitation of the Society of St. Pius X. I’m finding myself unable to bring that series to a close, and I suspect the reason is this: I’ve been writing in a voice that is too self-conscious. I’ve (unconsciously) been struggling to to convince those I’m implicitly addressing with my critique—those I call the knowledge class of the center of American Catholicism.

So I’ve adopted an artsy-fartsy theological language that convinces no one, and which causes me to second-guess everything I say. And all to no avail, I suspect, since I doubt that those I’m trying to address are listening, anyway. In my experience, they are too busy talking to each other, and only each other, to pay much attention to voices like mine.

So I’m just going to say what I have to say bluntly, and, if no one else may be convinced or pleased by what I say, at least I will have the satisfaction of having had my say. Here’s the point to which I’ve been driving in this series of postings: while the educated elite of the American Catholic church faintly (and all too faintly, in my view) decry the decision of the pope to readmit the SSPX crowd to communion, there are millions of us, their fellow Catholics, who have been even more decisively shoved out of communion in the past few decades. And I hear very little concern among the leading thinkers of the American Catholic church—its most influential journalists, theologians, prestigious bloggers, and so on—about this development.

In fact, as I read what that group of leaders has to say about the March on Life, I find many of the same ecclesiological assumptions that govern the way the SSPX folks do business. To the extent that the leaders of the American Catholic church (certainly its bishops, but also its leading theologians and journalists/bloggers) have mortgaged the future of American Catholicism to the fight against abortion, and to that fight alone, they seem to share the view of SSPX that the church should return to a pre-Vatican II fortress mentality, a lean, mean fighting machine. And should, in the process, ruthlessly weed out all those of us who had heard something different in Vatican II’s ecclesiology, and who do not share the ecclesiological presuppositions of those at the center of the American Catholic church.

It’s dismaying to me to read accounts of the March for Life which tacitly assume that all American Catholics buy lock, stock, and barrel into the anti-abortion movement as it has been developed by the leaders of American Catholic church. Hidden in that assumption is a nasty assumption about who belongs and who doesn’t—a nasty defense of what seems to me to have been a completely insupportable purge of many faithful Catholics in the last several decades.

There’s a hidden assumption in the rhetoric of many leaders of American Catholicism—and I’m focusing primarily here on the lay leaders of the center, not the bishops—that those of us now on the outside looking in have put ourselves there. We’ve been unfaithful, disloyal; we’ve questioned what may not be questioned, if one wishes to remain a faithful Catholic. We haven’t played the game right—not so adroitly as have those who continue to occupy seats of power at the center.

My reason for directing this critique to the lay leaders of the center? Because, while they often depict themselves as critics of the bishops who have led the way to a smaller, purer church, they are actually playing the bishops’ game in writing off many of their fellow Catholics.

It’s about far more than abortion and politics. It’s about what it means to be church. In my view, the failure of the American Catholic church of the latter half of the 20th century to convince most American citizens of the importance of the abortion issue points to a serious failure of the American Catholic church to be church in a way that compels the attention of American culture.

I stated in my previous posting that the American Catholic church has failed to produce a convincing, coherent discourse about abortion. It has failed to produce such a discourse because the ecclesial life of American Catholicism is itself unconvincing and incoherent. When there can be such mass oblivion to the situation of exclusion in which millions of us find ourselves—and oblivion on the part of those whom one would most expect to be preoccupied with that reality—something is radically wrong.

Something is radically wrong with a church that claims to be all about communion, about catholicity, about living as a sacramental community that demonstrates God’s all-inclusive and all-affirming love in the world, and which has so little concrete concern for millions of tacitly excommunicated brothers and sisters. Something is radically wrong—at the very heart—of our church when millions of us find ourselves pushed outside communion, not by our choice but by the choice of those at the center, and those who profess to be all about thinking through catholic claims utter not a chirp about this situation.

In the final analysis, we American Catholics have failed (and will continue to fail) to convince the American public of the seriousness of the ethic of life because we ourselves do not live as though life counts. We are not conspicuously pro-life in how we go about doing business as an ecclesial community—in how we organize our parishes, in what we do in our schools and hospitals, and, above all, in how we treat each other.

There are ethic-of-life implications, and very strong ones, involved when one human being writes off another human being. I have linked the situation of gay and lesbian Catholics to the issue of life, for instance, for precisely that reason. The multitude of LGBT American Catholics who have no place at all in the church and its parish life—because we have been shoved away by those at the center—are human beings with human lives, after all. We have human minds and human hearts.

Being told that one does not belong hurts. Being told that one has somehow earned one’s place as an outcast stings. Watching the knowledge class of American Catholicism dissect Richard Williamson’s antisemitism—and it should be dissected and resoundingly repudiated—while that same set of leaders never denounces the equally gross homophobia of Richard Williamson affects us. It has implications for our self-esteem, for how we view ourselves, we who are gay and Catholic. And those implications have everything to do with an ethic of life.

And with the inability of the American Catholic church to sustain an ethic of life, and therefore to convince other Americans that life issues are of supreme importance. We cannot convince anyone of what we do not live, and we clearly do not live the ethic of life as a church—not in how we deal with each other. Not in whom we admit and whom we exclude. Not when our best and brightest can remain supremely unperturbed by the fact that one in ten Americans today is a former Catholic and one in three American adults who were raised Catholic no longer belong to the church.

And I daresay that, among that truly shocking percentage of former Catholics, there's a significant proportion of gay folks who know full well we do not belong, as well as others who are fed up with seeing their church dehumanize and bash gay human beings while proclaiming that it respects life and values the rights of all human beings.

Benedict's Smaller, Purer Church: Room for Antisemites, Misogynists, Homophobes . . . But Not for Us (4)

Catholics oppose abortion. Good Catholics work to outlaw abortion. We Catholics support the March for Life. Catholics in good standing vote with abortion in mind, first and foremost. Richard Williamson and the Society of St. Pius X are Catholics who deserve communion, regardless of their views about Vatican II, women, gays, Jews, etc. Excommunicate Biden.

All of a piece, in my view, the slogans, the hidden assumptions. And they dominate not just the viewpoint of the far right of the American Catholic church. They hold sway at the center. The middle-to-liberal center of American Catholicism, at least in its knowledge class, finds it far easier to welcome to communion Richard Williamson with his lisping vile “faggotth” taunts than it does, say, an openly gay couple living in a committed relationship.

How on earth did we get to this point from Vatican II?

It’s not just about abortion. It’s about an entire ecclesiology that the anti-abortion movement in American Catholicism has necessitated, insofar as we intend to pursue the anti-abortion cause as we have been pursuing it for some decades now. It is about a kind of church, a notion of church, that the American Catholic bishops have worked very hard for some years now to create, with the active or silent complicity of Catholics of the center.

It’s about a betrayal of Vatican II and of the very traditional ecclesiology for which Vatican II stood—in particular, of its sacramental notion of the church that makes it very important to think about how Catholics live in the world, what they say, what they do to each other and to those around them. That is, it’s about a notion of church that would make it impossible for us to rehabilitate a Richard Williamson, under the guise of serving the unity of the church, without first dealing with his hate-filled rhetoric about some of God’s children.

Re: abortion itself, I contest the hidden assumption of Catholics of the middle that we all share zeal for the crusade to outlaw abortion. I contest this assumption for all kinds of reasons. I will say it plainly and without any apology: abortion is, for me, not the central moral issue of all time, or of this period in history.

Catholics of the right and center have failed completely to convince me of its moral priority. And the more they tacitly assume that abortion is the primary moral challenge of our time, and that Catholics who do not share that assumption do not truly belong to the communion of the church, the more they alienate me.

Please note what I’m saying here: I’m not saying that I deny that abortion is a moral issue, or that it is an important moral concern, or that it deserves consideration when one looks at the moral life. I’m rejecting the analysis that pervades American Catholic ecclesiology right now—that abortion is the moral issue. That it holds primacy of place among all moral issues. That true Catholics and good Catholics and faithful Catholics will automatically see the world through the lens of the anti-abortion crusade, and will give top priority to “the” right-to-life issue.

As far as I am concerned, Catholics of the right and center have conspicuously failed to produce an articulate, reasoned defense of the claim that abortion is the overarching moral issue to which all others should be subordinated as Catholics think about and interact with the public sphere. The rhetoric about abortion that Catholics of the middle and right offer in support of this claim is not a reasoned defense of a moral position. It’s rhetoric plain and simple.

It’s slogan-slinging. It cannot convince because it does not, for the most part, advert to reason or to facts. It appeals to emotion and it seeks to force everyone who encounters it to share its emotional repugnance to abortion—and to regard that emotional repugnance as sufficient moral reasoning. Sufficient enough to hang everything on it, including the future of the church.

The Catholic church has worked long and hard, from the top down, to suppress any and all dialogue about abortion, to reduce thinking about the morality of abortion to the level of emotional sloganizing. Just as it has worked long and hard to suppress careful, rational conversations about women’s ordination, sexual ethics (birth control, homosexuality), and a number of other neuralgic theological and moral issues of our period of history.

In suppressing careful, respectful, reasoned, fact-regarding dialogue about these issues, notably abortion, the leaders of American Catholicism have completely undermined the vast, all-encompassing moral claims they want to make regarding these issues—particularly abortion. By choking off theological and ecclesial conversation about these issues, by reducing moral discourse about them to top-down commands that are enforced with severe penalties, the leaders of American Catholicism have produced not moral agents with informed consciences, who are capable of making wise moral and political choices around issues like abortion: they have produced fanatical premoral automatons who do what they are told.

And who cannot, therefore, carry on a rational or convincing conversation about the morality of abortion with the very folks they’re trying to convince, in the public sphere, to take abortion seriously as a moral issue . . . . The issue of abortion has been handled by the leaders of the American Catholic church and the knowledge class of its center in such a way as to suppress the kind of moral reasoning that is precisely necessary if one seeks to convince anyone of either the claim that abortion trumps all other moral issues, or that the practice of abortion is immoral.

This is a problem of communication. It is a problem of the inability of teachers of a church that is totally preoccupied with the abortion issue to communicate convincingly to me, to millions of other contemporary Catholics, and to the public at large about why we ought to share their preoccupation with abortion. It is the kind of communication problem that occurs when one shuts down dialogue, and simply instructs people to think and feel, as an alternative to dialogue. It is a fundamental failure of the contemporary American Catholic church, this failure to develop a coherent language about abortion, a coherent system of thought about abortion, that transcends slogans and punishment for those who will not chant the slogans.

In fact, the louder the shouts about the evil of abortion become, the more many of us begin to wonder what is not being said, as we’re urged to shout, to shut down our minds and consider every act of abortion as murder, whether the person engaging in it shares that moral judgment or not, and to see all acts of abortion as the taking of a human life regardless of the when in the gestation period the abortion takes place. When a moral discussion is reduced to shouting and silencing, one has to wonder about the claims on which those silencing and shouting others down really rest their moral argument. Surely those claims cannot be compelling, when one’s best approach to convincing others of the rightness of a moral position is bullying.

Also to be noted: when one considers that abortion never previously occupied the central place in the consciousness of the Catholic church that it now occupies—notably in American Catholicism—and when one also notes that the preoccupation with abortion as the moral issue primarily worth addressing arose just at the moment in history when, for the first time, women began to have some control over their destinies and their reproductive lives, it is hard not to reach the conclusion that the Catholic crusade against abortion is energized by resistance to women’s rights. Among the discussions being suppressed by those who will not permit abortion to be discussed rationally today is a discussion about the place of women in the world and in the church.

It is clear to many of us that the drive to ban abortion is about far more than that: it is at its heart about placing women back into the social locations of subjugation to male control that women occupied before social and technological changes permitted women relative control over their lives and their biological destinies. It is certainly possible, I believe, to see abortion as an undesirable moral option while also unambiguously affirming the right of women to control their lives and destinies. But to come to that such an understanding, we’d have to talk and think, to reason and critique and listen to many points of view besides those of the true believers who want to control the conversation from the top.

But this is not what we’re being told to do—to think, reason, critique, listen, talk among ourselves and with those outside our fold. We’re being told, instead, to march and shout. And to threaten.

In the eyes of many Catholics who have been implicitly excommunicated because we do not want to take part in such bullying demonstrations, the marches for life such as the one that recently took place in D.C. are not marches for life at all: they are fascist demonstrations designed to bully and to allow the church to flex its muscle. And, though this is often not made explicit in the rhetoric of many pro-life Catholics, among those being bullied are women and men who do not conform to rigid pseudo-natural law expectations about gender roles: that is, gay men.

It is impossible to deny that connection, which is totally glossed over by many centrist American Catholic apologists for the right-to-life movement, when one looks carefully at what many of the evangelical allies of Catholic right-to-lifers believe about the place of women and gay folks in the world and in the church. Indeed, it’s impossible to deny that many Catholics want to link the pro-life movement to opposition to the human rights of gay persons and of women. Witness Bob Dornan, who (as my first posting in this series noted) played a prominent role in this year's March on Life, and who claims to be a pro-life leader while slamming gays and lesbians and taunting Jews.

It has come to seem all of a piece to many of us: the spectacle of Catholics marching for life while marching against women’s rights and gay rights. What the anti-abortion movement has brought to life in the American Catholic church, many of us are finding, is a viciously anti-intellectual, self-righteous, narrow, contra-factual and contra-scientific way of being a church that betrays core values necessary to sustain the very ethic of life it promotes.

For many of, even if we share the concern to protect life (while we may also not share the agenda of many of our pro-life co-religionists, including the push to outlaw abortion for those who do not accept our moral claims), the price of being pro-life seems increasingly and impossibly steep, in the church that has come into being through the pro-life movement. To be pro-life, we are implicitly told, is also to be homophobic and misogynistic.

If that is the case, then to be pro-life is to question some of the moral positions we have come to regard as central to our practice of faith, and on which we have come to base our pro-life ethics. To be pro-life is to join a cadre of true believers with whom we have little in common other than our commitment to respect life—and whose conflation of the pro-life stance with homophobia and misogyny seems to us to undermine the pro-life stance.

The fundamental problem many of us have with the pro-life movement in American Catholicism and its apologists of the center is, therefore, ecclesiological: we do not live in the church in which many of our co-religionists live. We do not want to live in such a church. We believe, in fact, that the understanding of our church that is communicated to the public through the pro-life movement as it now stands is dangerously distorted, a betrayal of what we have come to expect the church to be, following the second Vatican Council.

About which, more later . . . .