The Conversation Centrist Catholics Do Not Intend to Have: What Are the Gays to Do?

The conversation about how we manage to carry on talking about church, love, God, redemption, communion, as we savage and exclude a stigmatized group of brothers and sisters: that remains the conversation liberal Americans, including liberal churchgoers, simply do not intend to have. That remains the conversation topic that centrist Catholics do not intend to entertain.

Even when those centrist Catholics themselves benefit enormously from the willingness of the hierarchy to turn a blind eye to their overwhelming use and support of artificial contraception in marriage. Even when the same norm that grounds the savagery towards and stigmatization and exclusion of their gay brothers and sisters grounds the church’s teaching about the use of artificial contraception as well.

Even when the church targeting its gay children in every way possible claims it is acting to safeguard the sanctity of marriage, while it does nothing to enact laws in the one area in which marriage is most threatened—in the area of divorce.

Even when those centrist Catholic brothers and sisters benefit in every way possible from their ability to conform to gender roles that have nothing at all do with what is most important about being human or being a person. Even when they take their privilege as heterosexual (or heterosexual-appearing) persons for granted, while they turn a blind eye to the atrocious injustices their church does to those who cannot and will not conform to these gender stereotypes.

Even when they go on talking about love, justice, compassion, and inclusion while practicing its opposite.

And so I remain fairly much where Andrew Sullivan tells his readers he finds himself, in the church today—though unlike A. Sullivan, I have long since given up on liturgy, for reasons I’ve described in previous postings. I find myself unable to take part in liturgical celebrations that are all about the bread of life when the church setting the table, and the ministers who preside there, are willing to remove daily bread from the lives of their gay and lesbian employees. While those ministers enjoy astonishing economic security and privilege.

It is clear to me that the Catholic church simply does not want its gay and lesbian members, and would be happier if we moved on. Catholics salve their consciences as they practice savagery towards us by telling themselves that we can go, along with the other rebels, to the Episcopalian church—as if seeking God within a particular religious tradition is akin to shopping for the best flavor of ice cream in a consumer market full of alluring choices. What this says about many Catholics’ own belief in the claims of their church is in itself fascinating.

There will come a time in history, I believe, when historians and believers will look back on this period of American Catholic history and wonder how a people so certain of their sanctity could maintain that certainty while doing such unholy things to a particular group of their brothers and sisters. And could remain totally silent in the face of those brothers’ and sisters’ cries of pain—could remain, in fact, seemingly satisfied to hear those cries because they reinforce the ugly prejudices on which the need to inflict that pain is premised.

Salt Lake City Enacts Gay Rights Ordinance with LDS Support: Reflections

I haven’t yet commented on one of the big stories this week—the decision of the Salt Lake city council to enact a gay rights bill with the support of the LDS church. I haven’t written about this decision because I’ve been thinking it through.

Steve and I had actually just returned from a week and a half in Salt Lake when this news broke. Steve had business there, and I tagged along to do some research at the LDS family history library. In the 1970s, as we prepared to head off to graduate school, I began to gather my family’s dusty old bibles and caches of yellowing letters and diaries in trunks in my grandparents’ attics, and to piece together what we knew of our family history. I began that project then because I had no certainty I’d ever be living at home again, and thought it was important for someone to record what we knew, the stories passed down by our forebears and told and retold at family gatherings, before this heritage was lost.

That assignment to myself has turned into something of a passion for both Steve and me, and for some years now, we have gone routinely to Salt Lake City each year to continue our family history research. We’ve watched the culture there slowly adapt to the growing presence of openly LGBT people, and have been fascinated by the process. We have also connected to a group of friends, several of them gay or straight but active in gay causes, who keep us up to date on what’s happening in Utah vis-à-vis gay issues.

Salt Lake City is and remains not so much a homophobic culture as a male-dominated heterosexist one. It’s not uncommon to see elderly couples walking up and down the street hand in hand—male-female couples, the wife always appearing to be in tow—just as it’s not at all uncommon to see young couples in their early twenties with a passel of children around them as they shop or walk up and down the street, the wife caring for the children as the husband, well, preens.

Utah is a culture in which being unmarried sets a person apart in a noticeable, and not favorable, way. It’s a culture in which men take their position of authority in every area of life for granted. And as a macho heterosexist culture, it can also definitely be homophobic. We’ve experienced overt homophobia in Salt Lake City, as straight couples at nearby tables in restaurants make ugly remarks about us in our hearing, for instance.

But things are changing in Salt Lake City—and for the better. We were in Salt Lake right after the big disturbances following proposition 8 and the revelation that Mormon money had significantly funded that assault on the rights of gay citizens of California. Things were exceptionally tense in the city and in Mormon circles following those disturbances.

I sensed not so much defiance as shame among many Mormons I knew or encountered in the weeks following the prop 8 upheavals. It was clear to me that quite a few Mormons in Utah felt embarrassed and even grieved by the revelation that money they had donated to their church had been used in an organized political machination to remove the right of marriage from gay citizens of another state.

This year, a year down the road from prop 8’s aftermath, we found a very different spirit at the LDS family history library, and among the Mormons we know there. There was a tangible, obvious attempt on the part of those staffing the library to be welcoming and friendly—scary friendly, in some instances. Something was clearly afoot. We could sense it. It made us a bit apprehensive, even when the new spirit was vastly preferable to the spirit of saint-gentile separation that normally prevails when Mormons encounter non-Mormons. And it had something to do, we felt sure, with what had happened following prop 8—with the embarrassment of at least some members of the LDS church at the revelation that they had given to their church, only to find that they were actually funding a political attack on their gay brothers and sisters.

At one point in the past two weeks, as we spent time in the LDS library, staff circulated a survey form among patrons, asking us to provide feedback about the services of the library. We’ve never encountered such a form on previous visits to the library.

In the section that allowed patrons to write comments, I noted that I was grateful to the LDS church for making its vast genealogical resources available at no cost to the public. But I also wanted to note that I was unhappy with the choice of the church to attack gay folks in California in the previous year. I appended that observation to my statement of gratitude for the church’s generosity in opening its library’s doors to the public.

The day after I submitted my form, one of the many Mormons who volunteer to assist patrons in the library approached Steve and me as we worked at microfilm readers. “Brothers,” she asked, “do you know that you can save time by noticing the numerical guides on each row of microfilm drawers? You don’t have to remember the precise number of your film to locate the drawer in which you found it, if you notice that number.”

This is something that had never happened to us in the LDS library—being called “brothers,” or being assisted in this particularly helpful way (though staff are almost always cordial and go beyond the call of duty to see that your questions are answered, if you approach them). Something is changing in Mormon culture, has changed, in response to the turbulence following prop 8. And that something is good for gay folks.

There’s a willingness to listen to and think about the experience of gay citizens of the state and gay Mormons that is, by contrast, simply not there at all in the Catholic church of the U.S. today. There has been a willingness in the LDS church to listen to the many Mormons who wanted an accounting from their churches and stakes for the money they thought they had given to the church, only to find that they had actually donated to a homophobic political cause—a willingness, I want to stress again, that is totally absent from the Catholic church and its leaders right now.

What many of us who are gentiles do not know and appreciate about the LDS experience is how strongly communitarian it is. That communitarian focus is definitely shaped by the us-vs.-them mentality of the saints-gentile theology. And it has been made sharper by the years of persecution that Mormons endured as a religious and cultural group set apart because of their peculiar notions of marriage and their non-mainstream theology.

At its best, however, the communitarian emphasis in Mormon theology and culture assures that the church (and civil society in Utah, which is dominated by the church) pay attention to the effects of important decisions on everyone. There is, at best, in Mormon theology and culture a strong concern not to overlook anyone, as a significant decision is made.

Mormons are also frankly sensitive about their image, and rightly so, given their non-traditional understanding of the Godhead and Christ, not to mention their defense of polygamy through a noteworthy formative period of their history. Many Mormons did not like the bad publicity that followed what the church did with prop 8, and have been willing to listen to criticisms and suggestions about how to approach and include the gay community in a more productive way—again, this in marked contrast to how the U.S. Catholic church is now choosing to behave.

One other point deserves attention, I think, as we assess the turn now taking place in Mormon thought about gay people. Harry Reid is a Mormon, and Utah is, on the whole, pulling hard for health care reform—and in this sense, for the success of the new administration, though the state remains overwhelmingly Republican.

While we were in Salt Lake, the local papers published a number of editorial statements in favor of health care reform. This reflects the state’s loyalty to Reid as a Mormon. But it also reflects that communitarian focus of the LDS church and Mormon culture, which wants to see everyone included and taken care of in the beloved community of the saints. There’s a strong—and an admirable—commitment among many Mormons to the right of everyone to health care, and, I would go further and say, a willingness now to take that particular recognition of human rights and apply it to other areas.

There’s a willingness to extrapolate from the commitment to rights like health care, to recognize that gay human beings have fundamental rights, as well, and that saints don’t build Zion when they trample on the rights of any group of human beings. There’s the recognition, flowing from the communitarian emphasis of Mormon theology, that we cannot build a really humane society for anyone if we savage and exclude a targeted group of human beings.

What’s happening in Utah now deserves attention. It deserves attention for what it says to the rest of the country about human rights, and about the kind of society we build when we ignore the rights of any group of human beings. There’s a troubling argument now emerging in some Catholic circles—including (and notably) centrist Catholic circles—that gays and lesbians are a small minority group, and those of us concerned about justice may just need to eat the injustice done to that small minority, in order to achieve greater justice for everyone in American society today.

The Mormons appear to be questioning that argument, and rightly so. That centrist Catholics can still play with it says a lot to me about a fundamental lack of commitment to human rights traditions, even when we talk about issues like justice, in liberal American thought in general, including liberal American Catholic thought. From its inception, this liberal attitude has vitiated the Obama administration and everything it has sought to do. It undermines the Democratic party right now, and will probably return the nation to Republican dominance in the 2010 and 2012 elections. We can learn from the Mormons now, and from their refusal to exclude anyone from the conversation as issues of justice and rights are discussed in civil society and in churches.

I would be less than honest if I ended this reflection on an entirely glowing note. I have to admit that I remain somewhat skeptical of the LDS response to the gay community. I see promise in the Salt Lake City developments this week. At the same time, I know in my bones (and from bitter experience) that churches—all churches—have a way of selling minority groups short, when it becomes expedient for them to do so.

I know that churches often engage in window dressing to make themselves look like good guys when they are anything but, and that they proclaim ideals which, in their own institutional life, they belie egregiously. As with any of the churches, I intend to adopt a wait-and-see attitude with the LDS church and its apparent shift to a more inclusive approach to gay persons. But as I stand waiting and watching, I’m also cheering the steps I'm seeing right now.

More commentary:

“Compare and Contrast,” Eduardo Peñalver, Commonweal

“The Mormon Move,” Andrew Sullivan, Daily Dish

“LDS Church Supports Salt Lake LGBT Protections,” Jim Burroway, Box Turtle Bulletin

“Another Reason to Rejoice?,” Jim Burroway, Box Turtle Bulletin

“Will LDS’s Incremental Approach To LGBT Issues Someday Lead To Bigger Changes?,” Jim Burroway, Box Turtle Bulletin

“SHOCKER: Salt Lake City Passes LGBT Rights WITH Support Of Mormon Church,” Joe Jervis, Joe.My.God

“More Right-Wingers Attack LDS Support Of Salt Lake City LGBT Rights,” Joe Jervis, Joe.My.God

Ms. Prejean and the Catholic Bishops: Glass Houses, Stones

I wrote earlier today,

When people claim to be moral teachers, those whom they teach will naturally look to the lives of the teacher to see how his life exemplifies the values he’s teaching. If there’s a wide and easily discerned gap between the teaching and the life that is lived, people will wonder. And they’ll talk.

I went on to apply that observation to the U.S. Catholic bishops and their current monomoniacal pursuit of their gay brothers and sisters. I opined that it's wise not to go on the attack and shake the big stick when the ground is already sliding away underneath you as you wave your big stick around.

Little did I know when I made these comments earlier today what a timely illustration of my point would emerge as the day ends. It has now come to light that Ms. Prejean, who (as with the bishops) has made her recent career out of informing LGBT human beings that we are uniquely defective in moral terms, has--oops--made not one but a whole big mess of sex tapes similar to the one that recently gained public notoriety.

Oops. You'd think, wouldn't you, that, knowing she had made these tapes and they might come to light, she'd have been a tad bit more . . . temperate . . . about posturing as a moral authority figure?

And that the Catholic church's chief ally in its gay-bashing activities in Maine, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), headed by Catholic Maggie Gallagher, would have been at least a tiny bit less jubilant about promoting Ms. Prejean as an icon of moral uprightness in the battle against the sinful gays?

Am I saying that the bishops are in bed with Carrie Prejean? In a way, I suppose I am. They have certainly been in bed with Maggie who has been in bed with Carrie. If the bed fits, wear it, I always say.

And I think this rumpled old bed may be about to become mighty uncomfortable and crowded, as these new sex tapes begin to make the rounds. Glass houses, stones . . . .

Responding to the Misuse of Catholic Money to Bash Gay Brothers and Sisters: An Action Plan for Catholics

I’ve spent several days writing about the nationwide use of Catholic money to attack Maine’s gay citizens recently. In my view, complaining and analyzing without following critical insights with action is ineffective, if therapeutic.

I’d like to offer some practical suggestions to any readers who would like to respond to what I’ve been posting about the misuse of Catholic money across the nation to attack the gay sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, of Catholics who do not support this use of their donations.

What can you and others do, if you care about this issue?

1. Help inform Catholics.

□ Share educational resources (including online articles) with Catholics in the dioceses that donated money to the Maine initiative.

□ Write letters to newspapers (including online versions of those papers) in those areas expressing your concern at the misuse of Catholic donations for a political cause many Catholics do not support.

□ Encourage any Catholics you know in dioceses that donated funds to the Maine initiative to share educational resources and write letters, as well.

2. Ask for hearings at parish councils in dioceses that donated funds to the Maine initiative.

□ If a parish council agrees to hear you, organize a group to make a presentation explaining why the use of Catholic donations for this political cause without the knowledge or consent of Catholics donating funds is unacceptable.

□ Note that people are not donating to political causes when they donate to their parishes, and that money donated to churches should be used to maintain the church, support schools, feed the hungry, heal the sick, shelter the homeless, etc.

□ Encourage parish councils to demand (and exercise) financial accountability re: use of church donations.

□ If parish councils refuse to meet with you, publicize this through letters to local news outlets and by contacting the local media.

3. Write bishops in dioceses that donated money, and encourage Catholics whom you know in those dioceses to do the same.

□ Ask for meetings with bishops to discuss their use of church funds.

□ If bishops refuse to meet with you or others seeking such meetings, or do not answer your letters asking for meetings, publicize the bishops’ responses to your requests.

□ Request that bishops provide complete, itemized financial reports for all income of the diocese, and how that income is spent.

4. Organize protests at chanceries and cathedrals in dioceses that donated funds to the Maine initiative.

5. Identify corporations or foundations donating funds to Catholic dioceses or Catholic charities (e.g., here).

□ Publicize lists of corporations and foundations donating funds to Catholic dioceses and Catholic charities that gave funds to the Maine initiative.

□ Contact these corporations and foundations to ask if they support the use of money donated to Catholic groups to attack gay persons.

□ Publicize the responses of these corporations and foundations.

6. Withhold funds and other support from the church until bishops are transparent and accountable about how your donations are used, and encourage other Catholics to follow suit.

□ Give your donations and your direct support to causes in which you believe, as an expression of your faith.

□ Publicize that you are taking these steps and why you are doing this.

7. Join and support lay Catholic movements calling on the church to be faithful to Vatican II.

The graphic for this posting is the logo of the We Are Church movement.

Commentary on U.S. Catholic Bishops' Collusion in Attacking Gay Citizens of Maine: A Collection of Opinion Pieces

Some helpful comments are now appearing at various websites, re: the use of Catholic money by bishops around the country to remove the right of marriage from their gay brothers and sisters in Maine recently.

Peter Isely at The Survivors Network of Abuse by Priests (SNAP) issued a press statement about this yesterday. He notes that when challenged to help survivors of sexual abuse by priests deal with their trauma and disrupted lives, bishops routinely say that they are each “independent.” One diocese cannot help another in such cases. Each diocese is expected to deal with the financial pressures caused by the abuse crisis independently of the other.

So it’s fascinating to note that, when the challenge is to find funding to beat up on gay folks, the bishops are suddenly able to collaborate. They seem unable to pool their resources and help victims of clerical sexual abuse. But they are eminently capable of gathering funds from brother bishops to attack their gay brothers and sisters.

Something is wrong with this picture, from a gospel standpoint.

Peter Isely’s statement links to an article of Jen Colletta at Philadelphia Gay News, noting that the archdiocese of Philadelphia sent the diocese of Portland, Maine, $50,000 a month and a half after the Philadelphia archdiocese closed two Cath0olic high schools, indicating that it could no longer afford to keep them open.

The latest issue of the monthly newsletter of the Catholic lay group Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), In the Vineyard, carries an opinion piece by Daniel B. Sullivan commenting on the political use of money donated by Catholics for non-political uses, for support of the church and its charitable causes. To read Sullivan’s commentary, click on the link I just provided, scroll down to “Opinion Piece,” and after you finish reading that portion of Sullivan’s article, click on this link and read the rest.

Sullivan focuses as well on the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, noting that its $50,000 contribution came on the heels of a statement by Philadelphia Bishop Joseph McFadden, as the two schools were closed, “Right now, we’re making ends meet.”

Sullivan notes, as I’ve done on Bilgrimage, that there are serious issues re: accountability and transparency in how bishops put money to political use, when it is donated by the faithful for upkeep of churches and to further charitable causes. Many Catholics do not know that their money is being used for overtly political ends. Many do not agree with the political causes bishops are funding with money donated for other purposes.

And as Sullivan points out, because churches enjoy tax-exempt status, the diversion of church donations to political causes can circumvent tax regulations and the public scrutiny that goes along with those regulations, as church funds are placed in the coffers of outright political organizations. Sullivan wonders if this is an orchestrated strategy of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Sullivan urges Catholics to think twice before writing their next check to their parish or the bishop’s appeal fund.

Sullivan’s statement is followed by a reflection by theologian Anthony Padovano, who looks at Catholic bishops’ use of lay Catholic donations to attack their gay brothers and sisters from a theological standpoint. Padovano raises two critical questions about this practice:

1. Do lay Catholics donate to the church in the expectation that their money will be used to fight same-sex marriage (or to fund legal battles related to clerical sexual abuse)?

2. Is it productive for the church to pursue moral goals by attempting to coerce secular society and to strongarm the political process? If its moral goals are admirable and church teaching is correct about issues like homosexuality, then shouldn’t we allow the goals and teaching to speak for themselves and convince others of their correctness without trying to bully people into submission?

Finally, Michael Bayly’s Wild Reed blog carries a summary today of commentary about the attempt of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., to use Catholic Charities (and the thousands of indigent people it serves) as political bargaining chips in a battle to undermine the non-discrimination laws of D.C. Michael’s conclusion:

Humanity has progressed too far with regards to basic fairness, equality, and compassion to be held back by the likes of those stunted individuals calling the shots and making the threats in such crudely self-serving places as the chancery of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C.

The bishops think they are on a roll, after their “victory” over their gay brothers and sisters in Maine and their last-minute interjection of the Stupak amendment into the health-care reform bill. It’s clear that the Catholic bishops of the U.S. worked hard—and probably as a body—to remove the right of marriage from gay citizens of Maine, because that provides them and their right-wing allies with a talking point they desperately want: the claim that same-sex marriage is not supported even in a liberal, secularized New England state like Maine.

What the bishops do not want to have acknowledged or discussed, however, is the lavish outlay of funds required to lure a bare majority of the citizens of that state to remove rights from gay citizens. While 53% of Maine’s citizens voted to remove the right of marriage from gay citizens, 47% voted against that action. And that 53% was bought at a very high price, indeed.

It was bought at price of hundreds of thousands of dollars donated by Catholics to their dioceses to keep church doors open, to fund Catholic schools, to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and heal the sick. The bishops won a temporary political “victory” in Maine while losing a significant long-term moral battle. When an ostensibly moral cause requires such lavish outlay of money donated for far more morally defensible reasons, accompanied by the use of lies and trickery, to carry the day, one has to wonder about the “morality” driving the cause.

Morally speaking, the U.S. Catholic bishops are already on shaky ground, indeed, due to their handling of the sexual abuse crisis. Even though the diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, has continued to fight tooth and nail to prevent the opening of its files about clerical abuse cases, and though the forthcoming report on abuse in the diocese of Dublin has been sent back to court for further fine-tuning, these and other revelations about what the bishops have known and done in the abuse crisis will eventually see the light of day.

And when they do, and as we ask how the bishops could imagine they might have he moral high road with their attack on their gay brothers and sisters, we’ll be told by bishops and their defenders that our interest in these revelations stems from anti-Catholicism and a desire to bash bishops. What’s astonishing in many bishops’ behavior is their apparent lack of self-awareness—on the part of bishops, who profess to be moral teachers, after all—that people whose moral house is not in order push themselves into the limelight as moral exemplars at a certain risk.

When people claim to be moral teachers, those whom they teach will naturally look to the lives of the teacher to see how his life exemplifies the values he’s teaching. If there’s a wide and easily discerned gap between the teaching and the life that is lived, people will wonder. And they’ll talk. And in the case of the U.S. Catholic bishops, that talk isn’t anti-Catholic or bishop-bashing.

It’s constructive, necessary talk by people of good will about how Catholics deserve better moral leaders, more authentic (and more gospel-oriented) shepherds. It’s talk about how we find it very difficult to hear the message when the one proclaiming it belies the message in gross ways.

Sometimes it’s better for authority figures to stop and listen, rather than rev up the belligerence, when their claims to authority are on shaky ground. It’s not at all wise to brandish a big stick and issue threats as the ground quickly slides away underneath you all the while you’re waving your stick.

Reflections on Marilynne Robinson's "Home": Yet More Light and Truth

I finished Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home last week, and want to recommend this book to anyone who appreciates first-rate literature, or is interested in the manifold connections between religion and culture in the United States from the foundation of the American experiment. Home won the prestigious Orange Prize this past summer, following in the footsteps of its predecessor Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005.

Home and Gilead (about which I blogged glancingly back in April) are interlocking novels. Both are set in the small fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, in the latter half of the 1950s. Both center on the families of two of the town’s elderly ministers—the Ameses of the Congregationalist church and the Boughtons, who are Presbyterians. And the plots interlock, so that events told from the perspective of the Ames family in Gilead unfold in Home as we hear the Boughton side of the story.

A proviso before I go any further and forget an important admonition: don’t bring Home onto an airplane if you fear disturbing fellow passengers and embarrassing yourself by sobbing aloud as you read. Not, that is, if you’re a certain kind of reader. The book is not bathetic in the way that caused Oscar Wilde to mock The Old Curiosity Shop and Daniel O’Connell to toss it out a train window.

Home is insidiously moving, for anyone who grew up in, around, or in even the most remote connection to families and humans (and other animals: there’s Snowflake and a little hen who gets cooked) who comprise those odd social units. Its tormenting of the heart sneaks up on you slowly—as love does, the kind of love that entangles our hearts with the hearts of others and will not release us, as it makes the fates of those with whom love has interwoven our hearts matter perilously to us.

Just saying . . . .

And so that’s one major focal point of Home: as the title suggests, it’s a book about family. About home. About an aging, retired Presbyterian minister Rev. Boughton and his youngest daughter Glory, whose life is something of a mess for reasons obscure even to her—a mess because she believed and tried and cared and was overlooked and taken for granted in the process. And the book is about her lost and wandering alcoholic brother Jack, who arrives home after many years of exile to find his father dying.

And who cannot mend the breach between himself and his family, cannot justify himself and his existence in any effective way at all. Jack is helpless before his father’s refusal to stop loving him despite anything he has done or left undone.

And then, as the novel ends, the tables turn and it’s Jack who, in his ruined abjection and with his wounded hands, brings redemption to his father and his helpless sister, as Rev. Boughton lies dying.

As this brief plot summary suggests, Home is, at one level, a retelling of the parable of the prodigal son. It’s far more than that, though. For anyone steeped in the biblical text—as Americans of almost all classes and backgrounds once were, unavoidably so, because it was taught in schools and its stories were fundamental to the nation’s cultural currency—Home is a primer of biblical allusions ranging from David and Bathsheba to the Suffering Servant.

It’s a book you won’t understand—just as the United States is a nation you won’t understand through much of its history—if you don’t know and pay attention to subtle, omnipresent allusions to the Judaeo-Christian scriptures. And to the hymns that shaped the cultural outlook of generations of Americans, particularly in Protestant churches of the heartland and the Southeast throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th. Hymns that envision saints and grieving family members (who sometimes overlap) gathering at rivers, walking in gardens, listening for the whisper of hope to lift their hearts.

It’s easy to be sentimental about the story Home tells, particularly for someone who, as I did, grew up with overt connection to the mainline and evangelical Protestant churches that have long mediated salvation to and reinforced the morals of middle America. There’s a way in which both Home and Gilead celebrate something many of us take for granted, and which now seems to be passing quickly from our culture: the centrality of church life, of biblical allusions, of the kind of community churches uniquely comprise in small American towns and in rural America—something rather difficult to explain to anyone who grew up outside a cultural milieu dominated by the Protestant experience of the heartland and the Southeast.

It’s clear that Marilynne Robinson appreciates—and yes, wishes to celebrate—that experience and that influence, and it’s equally clear that she is nostalgic about the demise of this experience and cultural influence in postmodern America. At the same time, she is cool-eyed about what the churches of middle America can and cannot do, what they have and have not done. She is cool-eyed about our cultural sins of omission and commission, even as she celebrates our soul of a church.

As the posting about Gilead to which I link above notes, Robinson wants to remember what some churches, at least, were able to accomplish in the Midwest during the period of abolition. She does not wish her readers to forget that, even when many of our churches caved in to culture and did what was easy and expedient (and rewarding in terms of money and power), some believers pulled hard against the tug to concede and fought to set captives free.

Home continues that story through an ongoing dialogue between Rev. Boughton and his feckless son, who can no longer find himself at home in his family’s church until that church comes to terms with the struggle for civil rights that is contesting barriers to justice throughout the nation in the period in which the novel is set. And for all his fundamental goodness—his holy, biblically shaped, theologically astute goodness—Rev. Boughton cannot appreciate this struggle.

His alcoholic son, who did not attend his mother’s funeral, who has been in prison, who fathered a child out of wedlock and then abandoned that child and its mother: his son Jack the prodigal is the one who understands. It is Jack who is able to retrieve the strands of liberation that powerfully informed the 19th-century piety of his forebears and their neighbors in Gilead during the struggle against slavery, and to point those strands to their contemporary significance in the civil rights movement.

This is a novel about church and family, then. It’s a novel about the way in which biblical and theological preoccupations formed the crucible of family life for generations of churched Americans in the areas of the nation in which Protestant churches dominated cultural life up to the latter part of the 20th century.

Marilynne Robinson is masterful—a word I don’t use lightly, one that is simply accurate here—in her depiction of the painstaking and exceedingly painful way in which members of traditional churched families work out their salvation through the pedestrian but sublime medium of everyday conversation. Not a word that is spoken goes unmeasured, unanalyzed. Every nuance of speech passing between family members is weighed in the scale of right and wrong, of forgiveness and compassion, of possible hurt and probable misstatement, in a way impossible to explain to anyone who has not spent years being schooled in the intricacies of biblical exegesis—of the kind of exegesis peculiar to the Protestant tradition in its classic expressions, in which life or death depends on the meaning of this text and the interpretation of that text.

Robinson is powerfully nostalgic about—she hungers for the retrieval of—a culture in which language matters. In which it matters intently. In which everything hangs on the choice of the right word or the wrong word. In which the cultural imagination of ordinary people is enriched beyond measure by meticulously crafted sermons that subtly, with inexpressible care, parse the significance of a text until its hidden sense springs forth suddenly to demonstrates that, yes, God hath yet more light and truth to break forth from the Word, even now.

Home is a book about the power of the word/Word, about its forgotten power in American culture, about its ability to illuminate and to open doors that appear decisively closed (and to wound, whip, and subjugate). It is, in that sense, an old-fashioned book, one whose faith in the power of language to shape culture and sensibility appears almost impossibly quaint at a time when few of us can expect to hear a halfway literate sermon in any of our churches of a Sunday—let alone a well-crafted, thoughtful, heart-rending one.

But when we can find novels that contain passages like the following, we need not lament the loss of the word/Word too loudly:

In college all of them had studied the putative effects of deracination, which were angst and anomie, those dull horrors of the modern world. They had been examined on the subject, had rehearsed bleak and portentous philosophies in term papers, and they had done it with the earnest suspension of doubt that afflicts the highly educable. And then their return to the pays natal, where the same old willows swept the same ragged lawns, where the same old prairie arose and bloomed as negligence permitted. Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile? Oh, to be passing anonymously through an impersonal landscape! Oh, not to know every stump and stone, not to remember how the fields of Queen Anne’s lace figured in the childish happiness they had offered to their father’s hopes, God bless him.

As long as we can read literature like this, we are not totally bereft of sermons that continue to break open the Word as they break open hearts to let it in. Even if our churches continue to starve heart and mind with inane, jingoistic homilies that merely skim the surface of thought. Or of redemption. And of humanity, for that matter.

Exclusionary Politics or Care for the Poor?: Reflections on the Eroding Moral Authority of the U.S. Catholic Bishops

I appreciate the discussion that followed my posting two days ago about the latest Catholic hall of shame—the list of Catholic dioceses across the U.S. (and in the Caribbean) that sent donations to the diocese of Portland, Maine, to attack gay human beings in Maine recently. Some readers have noted that if you look carefully at the list of donors to the Portland diocese which the diocese provided the Maine Ethics Commission on 23 October, you’ll see more bishops than those I listed contributing to this attack.

That’s correct, and I’m glad to have it pointed out. I’ve revised the list to try to include the names of any bishops I missed with my initial compilation.

Another issue that has surfaced in the discussion is the question of whether these dioceses took up special collections to support the Maine initiative. I don’t have any way of knowing for certain, but I suspect that the vast majority of the dioceses, if not all of them, contributing to the assault on their gay brothers and sisters in Maine used funds donated by parishioners in ordinary Sunday collections each week.

That’s to say that I suspect that most Catholics from all over the country whose donations to the church were used in this mean-spirited political initiative had no idea at all that when they were dropping their dollars into church collection baskets, they were funding a political attack on their gay sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. I suspect that most Catholics around the country imagined that these dollars were going to be used to support schools and church buildings, clothe and shelter the homeless, feed the hungry, tend to the sick, and so forth.

Faithful Catholics need to be critically aware that bishops have used and will continue to use money they donate to the church for purposes other than those for which they believe they’re giving. One of the ongoing revelations of the crisis of clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic church is that bishops have used—and continue to use—millions on millions of dollars donated by good Catholics who believe they are giving for all the reasons outlined in the previous paragraph but who find, instead, that their donations have been used to beat up survivors of clerical abuse who seek a hearing from the church, to hire aggressive lawyers to threaten survivors with hardball court battles, to pay off families and buy their silence, and to influence the media and criminal justice system to back off from investigation of the abuse crisis and its cover-up.

As many Catholics have become aware that their donations are being used for such purposes, they have been rightly outraged. As they ought to be. And they ought to be equally outraged, it seems to me, to discover that they are now contributing to a national Catholic political cause many of them do not support—to put gay folks in our place as second-class citizens and defective human beings, to show gay people that we do not count and ought never to expect to count, and to remove rights from us.

The American Catholic church needs to have a national conversation about its bishops’ continued use of church funds to pursue ends of which lay Catholics, the funding base of the church, do not approve. And about which they do not even know, since no laws require that the church provide comprehensive, accurate accounting of the monies it takes in and how it expends those monies.

Meanwhile, as the Catholic bishops find money to fund attacks on a vulnerable group of brothers and sisters, they continue to close churches and curb charitable programs in many of the dioceses that sent money to Maine in recent months. As Timothy Kincaid notes at Box Turtle Bulletin yesterday, on 16 July, the archdiocese of St. Louis ponied up $10,000 for the attack on gay citizens in Maine.

But on 22 June, less than a month before, the St. Louis archdiocese eliminated four positions at Catholic Charities, Missouri’s largest provider of social services. As it did so, the archdiocese announced that it had to cut jobs to downsize.

As Timothy Kincaid notes, “Choosing exclusionary politics over care for the poor does not yield itself to many PR successes.” Indeed. Nor should it, because it’s a lamentable betrayal of gospel values, one that radically undermines the attempt of the church to proclaim God’s love to the world. This kind of behavior makes the church’s proclamation of the gospel message sound exceedingly hollow.

Some defensive Catholics leading the charge in these aggressive political battles are trying to raise the tired old ghost of anti-Catholicism (see here, here, and here), with claims that the secular media and progressive organizations are piling on as the bishops make their voice heard in the public square—in a way that the media and progressive groups would never do if any religious group other than Catholics were under consideration. What’s baffling about that charge—beside its tiredness, and the expectation that it will find legs even now, as new revelations of the bishops’ complicity in covering up sexual abuse of children by priests continue to roll forth—is how oblivious it is to the primary reason that many Americans, including large numbers of Catholics, are disgusted with the behavior of the U.S. Catholic bishops, and unwilling to listen to them as moral teachers.

The bishops have, on their own and with no help from anyone else, done a very effective job of stirring up critical scrutiny of their activities and resistance to their role as moral standard-bearers. And it seems very unlikely to me that the willingness many bishops have just exhibited in the Maine case to place exclusionary politics over care of the poor is going to help their case.

It need not be anti-Catholic to note this. In fact, Catholics concerned about the future of their church ought to be intently concerned about the huge gap that has opened between what the church wants to teach, and how many of its leaders are now behaving—particularly in the political arena and with their handling of the abuse crisis, and particularly re: their gay brothers and sisters. It is very difficult to talk about respect for human rights and concern for a culture of respect for life, when those spouting such rhetoric target hurting people, to make their lives even more miserable.

It is exceedingly difficult to talk about love, salvation, being a sacramental sign of God in the world, and communion when everything one does in the case of a group of vulnerable human beings belies the core meaning of each of those terms. The bishops are doing a splendid job of undermining their authority as moral teachers. They need not turn to the old canard of the anti-Catholic media in an anti-Catholic culture to explain why they find their role as moral authorities questioned and contested.

And what the archdiocese of Washington, D.C., announced yesterday is not going to help the bishops regain the moral high road one little bit. The Catholic archdiocese of D.C. announced yesterday that if D.C. does not suspend its non-discrimination laws as it entertains a same-sex marriage bill, the archdiocese will be forced to shut down Catholic Charities.

Though the bill states that religious groups will not be required to perform or provide space for same-sex weddings, the archdiocese is concerned that it will be expected to offer same-sex partner benefits to Catholic employees if the bill passes. The Catholic archdiocese of Washington, D.C., is demanding that it have the right to discriminate, and it’s willing to play hardball politics with the lives of tens of thousands of D.C. citizens living on the economic edge to obtain that right.

Not a pretty picture. But one consistent with the bishops’ behavior in the case of Maine recently, and throughout the health care debate, in which the bishops have used abortion as a make-or-break issue to hold health care reform hostage, regardless of what a majority of Americans think or want in this matter.

It seems that the more the bishops erode their authority as moral teachers, the more intent they are about using vulnerable groups as political pawns in ugly games designed to bolster their faltering authority. And to issue threats and to try coercive tricks rather than to engage in respectful dialogue with those whom they seek to convince that Catholic principles deserve a hearing.

There is little wisdom and a shocking dearth of charity in this behavior. And the only way I can see it changing anytime soon is if ordinary Catholics everywhere demand better of church leaders by withholding donations and other support from the church until the bishops begin to act like something approaching good and faithful shepherds for a change.

Update, 11:35 A.M.: Interesting to read now what Andrew Sullivan posted on his Daily Dish blog around the time I was posting my piece above:

The hierarchy's growing fusion with fundamentalist Republican politics is becoming harder and harder to ignore. They can turn a blind eye to state-sanctioned torture, and to the suffering of those without healthcare, but when it comes to ensuring that gay couples are kept stigmatized or that non-Catholic women can't have access to abortion in a secular society, they come alive.

Andrew Sullivan notes that he's struck by the emphases of the American hierarchy in recent months. In the discussion of health care reform, there seems to be far more preoccupation with preventing those who obtain health coverage through a government plan from getting an abortion, even if they pay for it themselves, than on the core principles of Catholic teaching about health care as a human right.

Andrew's correct, I think. And in the process, the bishops are eroding their authority as moral teachers even more decisively than they've already eroded it, through their handling of the clerical sexual abuse crisis.