Advent: Mary and Joseph Search for Shelter (3)

This picture was taken at a clinic offering free health care in Kansas City, on 9-10 Dec. 2009.

Mary and Joseph continue searching for a place.

Defining Gay Persons as Disordered: Catholic Roots of the Ugandan Situation

In my posting yesterday about the Ugandan situation and the scandal of Pope Benedict’s silence, I said that the deliberations about executing gays and lesbians in Uganda cast light on the diabolical edge or diabolical potential of the rhetoric used by some Christians to condemn those who are gay or lesbian. In my view, what we’re seeing in the legislation now before the Ugandan legislature is the logical, ultimate extension of many of the unfounded and malicious claims made by various Christian groups about those who are gay or lesbian—and, in particular, by those religious right and neocon political groups in the U.S. who have worked overtime to export American-style homophobia to Africa, with the blessing of Rome.

The Revisionist Attempt to Deny History of Term “Objectively Disordered”

As the “traditional” rhetoric condemning LGBT persons reveals its diabolical face in events like the Ugandan legislation, we can expect to see attempts on the part of those who have promoted this rhetoric to step back from it, to deny that they intended the logical and ultimate diabolical extension of their rhetoric represented by the Ugandan legislation, or even to deny that they have said what they are on record as saying about gay and lesbian persons. What follows deals with the latter development: as the diabolical face of Catholic anti-gay rhetoric becomes more apparent with the Ugandan legislation (and the collusion of many Catholics dioceses in the U.S. to remove the right of civil marriage from gay citizens of Maine), some right-wing Catholics in the U.S. are now seeking to disseminate disinformation about what the Catholic church has said in recent years re: gay folks, particularly about its teaching that all gay and lesbian people are “objectively disordered.”

I argued in yesterday’s posting that Benedict has a particularly strong obligation to speak out about the Ugandan situation because he is, in key respects, directly implicated in what is taking place in Uganda. The nation is slightly over 40% Catholic—it has almost the same proportion of Catholics that Germany had when the Nazis came to power, in fact. Catholics wield great political power in Uganda. A word from the pope would have tremendous import for the future of the legislation now pending in Uganda, which seeks to make homosexuality a capital crime. Just as, many of us maintain, a word from Pius XII would have had great import in Germany and other nations occupied by the Nazis, as millions of Jews (and gypsies, Slavs, mentally and physically handicapped people, gays, and others) were rounded up and murdered in the first part of the 20th century . . . .

Silence in the face of such mass evil is unthinkable. One of the lessons consistently drummed into the heads of schoolchildren in most parts of the world following the Nazi period is the never-again lesson: never again may we justify remaining silent as a nation begins to deliberate about putting a vulnerable minority group to death. After what we did in the Nazi period and what we know from that period, never again can we claim innocence when we stand by in silence as such deliberations take place. Never again can the church credibly claim to be a salvific presence in the world when it is a willing party to such evil because it remains silent as the groundwork for such evil is prepared.

Benedict is also implicated in what is taking place in Uganda because he has directly fanned the flames of anti-gay prejudice in Africa through statements he has made about the African church and African culture. Yesterday’s posting provides examples of dangerous and inflammatory statements Benedict has made, which form the context in which it has become thinkable for the people of Uganda, including Catholic people, to deliberate about putting gay persons to death.

I noted as well how the Catholic magisterium’s use of the term “objectively disordered” to define those who are gay and lesbian leads directly to the mentality evident in the current Ugandan legislation—a mentality that makes the eradication of a despised and dehumanized minority group thinkable and desirable. Benedict bears great responsibility for this particular designation. The term “objectively disordered” as a description of the human nature of gay and lesbian people is relatively new to Catholic thought. And its origins can be directly traced to Benedict in his ecclesiastical career before he became pope.

And now, as the diabolical potential of this designation of an entire group of human beings solely because of who they happen to be reveals itself in events like the Ugandan legislation—it is now thinkable for a nation over 40% Catholic to consider executing gays and for the leader of the Catholic church to remain silent as such deliberation takes place—I notice more and more Catholic apologists spreading disinformation about what the church has taught re: gay people in recent years. An attempt is underway to deny that the church has defined its gay and lesbian members as disordered in their very natures. And so I feel it is important to revisit the term “objectively disordered” or “intrinsically disordered” as designations of gay persons in recent Catholic teaching.

As quite a few scholars and theologians have noted, this term is not traditional at all, though those promoting it customarily claim to be more firmly grounded in Catholic tradition than anyone else. It is an innovation. In its present form and use, it dates, in fact, from the time in which the current pope was head of the church’s central doctrinal watchdog office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Cardinal Ratzinger and 1986 Letter on Pastoral Care of Gay Persons

In 1986, as head of the CDF, Cardinal Ratzinger issued a Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Care of Homosexual Persons. This document purports to be a set of guidelines for the “pastoral” care of those who are gay and lesbian.

For many gay and lesbian Catholics and our families, friends, and supporters, however, the letter is anything but pastoral. It was issued, in fact, to squelch a number of movements in some local churches, including the U.S., to engage in more positive pastoral outreach to the LGBT community. The letter effectively ended that pastoral outreach.

Its first effect was the expulsion of a number of groups working to build pastoral bridges between the Catholic church and the LGBT community, including the organization Dignity, which found itself expelled from Catholic premises across the U.S. following the publication of the 1986 letter. Within days after the “pastoral” letter was released, one of the co-founders of this group, Jesuit priest Father John McNeill, issued a press release stating that he had been given an ultimatum by his Jesuit community either to stop ministry to LGBT persons or be dismissed from his religious order. He chose the latter option. The founders of another group with a similar mission of pastoral outreach to LGBT persons, New Ways Ministry—Father Robert Nugent and Sister Jeannine Gramick—also found themselves silenced and disciplined by Cardinal Ratzinger in the years following the 1986 letter.

It would not be far-fetched to conclude that the ultimate effect of Ratzinger’s 1986 “pastoral” letter—its intended effect, in fact—was to create a kind of pogrom or purge in which large numbers of gay and lesbian Catholics were disappeared from the church. With this “pastoral” letter, the church had revealed its face to its LGBT children not as maternal but as diabolical. In the wake of the 1986 letter, as Dignity chapters were expelled from parish after parish in diocese after diocese, LGBT persons were, to a great extent, disappeared from Catholic parishes that had previously been working, after Vatican II, to find ways to reach out and include these members.

The quickness with which this purge was effected suggests that, along with the “pastoral” letter, dioceses received specific instructions from Rome to remove Dignity from their premises and to shun any group whose work might be construed as gay-affirming. It seems evident, given what happened following the 1986 letter, that bishops were told by Rome that they would be punished if they did not adhere to the emerging party line Cardinal Ratzinger wished, with Pope John Paul II’s blessing, to create in the Catholic church re: gay persons.

In my own city, when Dignity was removed from Catholic premises, a religious community of sisters courageously offered space for its meetings in the hospital they owned. Even so, the entire chapter of Dignity, chose to convert en masse to the far more welcoming Episcopal church. Gay faces, gay bodies, gay human beings, vanished from many Catholic communities following Ratzinger’s 1986 “pastoral” letter. Only in large cities with a concentration of LGBT people have some Catholic parishes managed to sustain visible and viable communities of gay and lesbian persons, and ministries of outreach to these persons.

Cardinal Ratzinger clearly intended this purge with his 1986 letter. It was clear not only to the LGBT community, but to Ratzinger’s strong allies on the political and religious right in the U.S. and elsewhere, that this “pastoral” letter was a shot across the bow at the incipient gay rights movement. It was a statement that, as an institution and at an official level, the Catholic church would do all in its power to stop this movement in its tracks, and to attack openly gay LGBT people whose experience of grace led them to affirm their identities as God-given.

In fact, it is clear that, in issuing the 1986 “pastoral” letter, Cardinal Ratzinger was responding to concerns expressed from some influential political (and financial) quarters that the teaching and pastoral work of the Catholic church was becoming too gay-affirming in the post-Vatican II period. Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Care of Homosexual Persons begins with statements about how an “overly benign” interpretation of homosexuality began to grow following a 1975 CDF document “Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics.”

Among those pressing Rome to hold the line on gay people were influential Catholic groups in the U.S. with ties to highly placed, well-heeled donors, both Catholic and non-Catholic, with a neoconservative political agenda that gave a high profile to opposition to gay rights and support of “traditional family values.” In issuing a pastoral letter whose effect was not to welcome, include, or provide authentic pastoral outreach to LGBT people, but to remove LGBT people from Catholic communities, Cardinal Ratzinger was also allying the church, at an institutional level, with the political right, from which many of the complaints about an “overly benign” attitude towards gay people were emanating.

Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1986 Pastoral Letter and Definition of Gay People as Disordered

Central to Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1986 Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Care of Homosexual Persons was a term new to the Catholic tradition, which defined not only homosexual acts, but homosexual people, as “objectively disordered”—as disordered in their very nature, in their constitution as human beings, in their personhood. As the 1986 pastoral letter maintains, when the CDF’s 1975 “Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics” defined homosexual acts as “intrinsically disordered” without connecting the acts done by gay persons to the nature of gay persons, it implied a certain neutrality re: the condition of being gay.

It is that neutrality that Ratzinger wishes to correct in his 1986 statement, by connecting the dots between homosexual acts and homosexual persons: gay people do disordered acts because gay people are disordered. The disorder of the act flows from the disorder in the nature of those doing the acts. As Ratzinger states,

Explicit treatment of the problem [confronting Catholic pastoral responses to gay persons] was given in this Congregation's "Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics" of December 29, 1975. That document stressed the duty of trying to understand the homosexual condition and noted that culpability for homosexual acts should only be judged with prudence. At the same time the Congregation took note of the distinction commonly drawn between the homosexual condition or tendency and individual homosexual actions. These were described as deprived of their essential and indispensable finality, as being "intrinsically disordered", and able in no case to be approved of (cf. n. 8, #4).

In the discussion which followed the publication of the Declaration, however, an overly benign interpretation was given to the homosexual condition itself, some going so far as to call it neutral, or even good. Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.

“Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder”: to be gay is not in and of itself sinful. But to be gay is to experience an inclination that is “more a or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil.” And therefore this inclination is itself an “objective disorder.”

Disordered homosexual acts express and confirm something inherent in the disordered nature of homosexual persons. As the “pastoral” letter notes at a later point,

This does not mean that homosexual persons are not often generous and giving of themselves; but when they engage in homosexual activity they confirm within themselves a disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent.

As it deals with the question of discrimination and violence against LGBT persons, the letter hammers away again at the message that being gay is, in and of itself, a “disorder,” and one ought not to use sympathy for the human rights of LGBT persons as an excuse for denying the disorder that these persons bear in their very nature:

It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church's pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law.

But the proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered. When such a claim is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.

“Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder”; when they engage in homosexual activity they confirm within themselves a disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent”; “the proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered.”

These are astonishing claims, and exceptionally dangerous ones, claims that lead to maleficent social consequences. They fly in the face of abundant, incontrovertible psychological evidence that a gay sexual orientation is not unnatural or disordered, but is a naturally occurring psychological phenomenon, one to which moral judgment cannot justifiably be attached in the absence of evidence that those born with such an orientation are ipso facto psychologically or morally defective. With its language about “objective disorder,” the 1986 “pastoral” letter counters the growing consensus of all professionally respected psychological and medical associations that a homosexual orientation is not disordered or sick—that LGBT persons are not defective human beings.

And it counters that consensus without offering any evidence at all for its judgment that being gay is a disorder, or without consulting the experience of those who are gay or lesbian. It imposes, unilaterally and without compelling evidence, a value judgment on the very fact of being gay, which reinforces (and justifies) ugly prejudice against those who happen to be LGBT.

This is, of course, why many gay Catholics politely exited the Catholic church and/or distanced ourselves from it in the period after 1986—even as we were given strong signals, by the purge the “pastoral” letter began, that our exodus was very much to the liking of the pastoral authorities of the church. As many commentators on Ratzinger’s Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Care of Homosexual Persons have noted, the language of objective disorder is in and of itself violent: it assaults the dignity and the personal worth of those who are gay or lesbian.

And in doing so, it provides a linguistic (and a religious) basis for acts of outright violence against those who are LGBT. The letter immediately effected a purge within the Catholic church in which gay faces, gay bodies, and gay persons became invisible in—were disappeared from—Catholic communities.

There is a straight line between Cardinal Ratzinger’s language defining LGBT human beings as disordered, and the violence we now see being mulled over by the Ugandan legislature. There is a straight line from Cardinal Ratzinger’s language of disorder to Pope Benedict’s silence, as Uganda considers executing people solely because they are gay.

Ratzinger’s language of objective disorder has now entered Catholic teaching at an official magisterial level. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church (¶ 2358) states,

The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.

This inclination, which is objectively disordered: we have sympathy and compassion for you, as you carry your cross. We resist discrimination against you.

But remember that you are disordered. Because we tell you so. Because we have defined you as disordered. Without seeking your own contributions as we define you (and demean you and dismiss you and make you invisible and susceptible to violence).

It almost seems that the process of defining an entire group of human beings as disordered without any contribution from that group being so defined, and without any reference to an overwhelming body of empirical evidence which flatly contradicts your definition, entirely undercuts your claim to have compassion and sensitivity, doesn’t it? Or to be concerned about pastoral outreach? Or to be opposed to discrimination?

The Current Argument to Deny Implications of the Term “Objective Disorder”

And here’s what’s happening now, as the diabolical potential of this rhetoric of objective disorder reveals itself in the Ugandan legislation (and in the collusion of one U.S. Catholic diocese after another to remove a civil right from a minority group, and in the bullying threats of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., to shut down ministries for the poor unless that jurisdiction removes a civil right from a minority group): as all this is now taking place, Catholic apologists who wish to disguise the role that the term “objective disorder” has played in these ugly political actions now wish to claim that the Catholic church defines all kinds of other things as objectively disordered.

It is now not uncommon to read that the term “objectively disordered” is not applied unilaterally to LGBT people in Catholic teaching, but to many acts that are intrinsically evil, because they do not fulfill the “order” to which nature orients them.

This apologia, of course, entirely (and, in my view, deliberately) misses the point: the term “objective disorder” is not applied in Catholic teaching to any group of human beings other than those who are gay or lesbian. It may well be true that the term “objective disorder” has come to be used to describe various acts regarded by church teaching as sinful.

But in the case of those who are gay or lesbian, the Catholic church took a fateful step with Ratzinger’s 1986 “pastoral” letter that it has not taken with any other group of human beings: the church argues from the act it wishes to define as disordered to a definition of the human beings performing that act as disordered. In their personhood. In their constitution. In their nature. In their humanity.

Gay people perform disordered sexual acts. The people performing such disordered acts must be disordered in and of themselves, if they perform such acts. The disorder of the act points back to the disorder within the nature of those doing the acts. This the logic of Catholic teaching about homosexuality, in Ratzinger's 1986 pastoral letter.

The Catholic church does not apply a similar logic to heterosexual people performing “disordered” sexual acts. Heterosexual people are not defined as disordered in Catholic teaching, because they perform disordered sexual acts.

Catholic teaching wishes to maintain that any sexual act which is not open to the possibility of procreation is disordered, because it fails to remain open to the procreative purpose for which nature and God have designed human sexuality. I think one can safely say that the vast majority of heterosexual people who engage in sexual activities do so for the overwhelming majority of their adult lives, in the overwhelming majority of cases in which they engage in erotic activity, without intending to procreate. Procreation—the so-called “order” that apologists for Catholic natural-law thinking believe is self-evident to any rational, thinking person, as the goal of all human sexuality and every sexual act—is not, I daresay, the primary reason the vast majority of heterosexual people engage in sexual activity.

In fact, I think that there is abundant and incontrovertible evidence that, in the vast majority of cases, for the vast majority of heterosexual people engaging in sexual activity, there is the strong hope and determination that procreation not be the outcome of the sexual act in question.

On the basis of this overwhelming evidence that most heterosexual people actively, purposefully, and with full intent engage in sexual activity for much of their lives hoping not to procreate, does the Catholic church conclude that heterosexual people are therefore “objectively disordered”—disordered in their nature, personhood, constitution, humanity? It does not.

Even when overwhelming evidence points to the “disorder” of almost all heterosexual activity within the biologistic framework of Catholic natural law teaching, the Catholic church does not take the fateful step of defining heterosexual people as disordered, on the basis of this evidence. It takes that step only and exclusively in the case of those who are gay and lesbian.

As the legislation now pending before the Ugandan legislature demonstrates, authority figures set forth on a fateful path, indeed, when they begin to use language like “objectively disordered” about a vulnerable minority group. Designating any group of human beings as human in a way that differs from what makes others human, as less human, in fact, because the humanity of members of that group is flawed, has consistently been, throughout history, a recipe for violence against the group so stigmatized. Such stigmatizing definitions of minority groups are especially potent when they are crafted and promoted by religious authority figures.

It is impossible to address the Ugandan situation, in which a nation with a population nearly 90% Christian is now considering the death penalty for LGBT persons, without paying attention to the religious roots from which the thought of eradicating gay people from a society arises. It is impossible to address what is taking place in Uganda today without adverting to the Catholic religious roots of the Ugandan situation, given the fact that Catholics constitute over 40% of the nation's population.

It is impossible to examine what is taking place in Uganda with any thoroughness without paying attention to the fateful decision of the man who is now pope to issue a pastoral letter in 1986 defining every gay or lesbian human being in the world as disordered.

Why does Benedict continue to be silent about Uganda? Because breaking his silence could call into question what he wishes to teach about his gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. And because it would call for serious soul-searching on the part of the institution he leads about what that religious institution has been doing to its gay members, and to gay people throughout the world, in a period of its history in which the current pope has wielded tremendous power to set the course of that institution for the future.

P.S. I have deliberately refrained from linking here to the abundant scholarly research that can be cited to corroborate my statements about recent Catholic teaching re: LGBT persons. My goal with this and other theological reflections I publish on Bilgrimage is to open theological conversations to those who may not have formal training in the field of theology, but who nonetheless have significant theological insights and who engage in theological reflection in a non-academic way within non-academic cultural contexts. In my view, such theology is extremely important and academic theologians do not do nearly enough to promote conversation at popular and non-academic levels.

For those seeking links to scholarly research about these issues, I highly recommend two blogs linked to this blog, Michael Bayly's Wild Reed and Terry Weldon's Queering the Church. On their homepages, both have extremely helpful links to a wealth of literature and documentation about the issues discussed above. And both Michael and Terry publish insightful, theologically significant analysis of these issues on a regular basis, with strong documentation.

Advent: Mary and Joseph Search for Shelter (2)

This picture was taken at a clinic offering free health care in Wise Co., Virginia, on 24 July 2009.

Mary and Joseph continue searching for a place.

Advent: Mary and Joseph Search for Shelter

Today is, for many Christian communities, the Monday of the fourth (and final) week of Advent. Advent is a season of liturgical remembrance and expectation devoted to preparation for the celebration of the birth of Christ.

In the synoptic gospels of (Matthew and Luke), which provide the background for much of the imagery of the Christmas story, and for the songs Christians sing during the Advent and Christmas seasons, emphasis is placed on the humble conditions into which Jesus was born. The Nativity stories of Matthew and Luke weave a narrative that seeks to involve readers in a dramatic story: a story of God’s astonishing humility in taking on human flesh, and, not merely human flesh, but the flesh of a poor, displaced person living at the fringes of his social world, of a person whose parents could not find a house in which their child might be born, or anyone to assist the mother as she gave birth.

The Nativity narrative speaks of Mary and Joseph setting out for a large city to obey a governmental demand, and finding no place to stay—no room at the end. In some Christian countries, people act out this aspect of the story during Advent and the Christmas season by having people playing the role of the Holy Family go from door to door, where they find no place to stay, until the only option left is a barn in which the holy infant of the narrative can be born in a manger.

As my own contribution to such enactment of this dramatic story during the final week of Advent, and as a way of deepening my own engagement with this story, I’ve chosen to relate Advent and Christmas this year to my country’s debate about health care. I live in a nation that touts itself on setting a standard for faith and morality around the world.

I also live in a nation in which over 46.3 million citizens (this was the figure at the end of 2008; my guess is that the figure is now closer to 50 million) have no health insurance. I’m one of those citizens. Nearly 50 million citizens of the United States have no access to basic, ongoing health care.

I am shocked, and it grieve me, that this is the case. I have lived in a country (Canada) that provides access to basic, ongoing health care for all citizens. I know from my experience living in that country that, while its system is not perfect, it is vastly superior to the American system of providing health care. It is vastly more ethical than the American system, whose bottom line is the dollar: human worth measured by dollars.

As it appears that our Congress may pass a health care bill that is, in my view, seriously defective—but at least an attempt to address the lack of access to health care by many citizens—I am being bombarded daily by emails from people I know, some of them relatives of mine, who are outraged that health care reform may be enacted. The relatives sending me these emails are people of faith.

I do not understand, frankly, how one can read the gospels and turn one’s back on any brother, sister, neighbor, stranger—anyone at all—in need of medical treatment. I cannot understand reading the nativity stories at Christmas and then scorning attempts to provide health care for all citizens.

And so my Advent remembrance this week: I offer for anyone who wishes to take a look, to reflect, and then to relate who we are today and where we find ourselves today to the story of Jesus’s birth, pictures from the free health care clinics held around the nation this year to demonstrate our country’s need for a better system of health care delivery. I intend to invite those sending me emails to decry health care reform to have a look at the pictures I’ll be uploading on this blog each day this week.

Each of these pictures was taken in the past year at one of the free health care clinics. T he people whose faces you’ll see in these pictures are ordinary American citizens, many of them working citizens whose jobs provide no health care coverage. They are our brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, friends, neighbors, grandparents.

They are Mary and Joseph seeking a place for Mary to give birth.

The picture for this posting was taken on 15 August in Inglewood, California, at a free clinic that drew thousands.

Why Catholics Are Silent: John Allen on Ugandan Situation (2)

In my posting summarizing John Allen’s reflections on Catholic silence about the situation in Uganda, I argued that Allen’s commentary masks the real problem that must be confronted by apologists for Catholic church leaders: this is not, as Allen implies, the question of why Ugandan bishops have failed to follow the Vatican’s lead (the “cover” Allen insists the Vatican has given them) in condemning legislation that would impose the death penalty on gay people. It is, instead, the ongoing silence of the Vatican, and, in particular, of Pope Benedict, about draconian legislation that much of the rest of the world has come to see as morally unjustifiable. As evil . . . .

Neoconservative Political Background to Allen’s Reporting on the African Church

As I noted, Allen’s journalism suffers from his unacknowledged entanglement in the presuppositions and commitments of the American religious right and of Catholic church leaders who have made common cause with the religious right around sexual ethical issues. These include the presupposition that African culture has held onto “traditional family values” (a religious right buzz-phrase that Allen uses in his work) at a point in history at which many Western believers are abdicating those values for an ethic open to homosexuality (and to women’s rights).

The American religious right and Catholic church leaders not only presuppose that African Christianity offers a valuable corrective to the purported abandonment of “traditional family values” by many Western Christians. They go further and involve themselves actively in African religious and political discussions, to bolster those “traditional family values”—as well as hostility to and fear of those who are gay—in order to use African culture and religion as a weapon to invalidate gay-affirming or gay-welcoming stances in churches of the West.

This has been a highly effective political and media strategy of powerful neoconservative anti-gay activist groups in the U.S., including the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), which was founded by Catholic neoconservatives to divide mainline Protestant churches over issues like homosexuality in order to mute the economic critique of these churches in American politics. Central to the tactic of marginalizing the social witness of mainline Protestant churches in order to mute their voices in socioeconomic debates has been an ongoing, deliberate attempt to use the churches of Africa as tools to divide Western churches.

This use of the gay issue and the African churches to divide mainline Protestant churches and block their social witness is evident from the moment one logs into the IRD website and sees its welcome statement announcing that IRD is “an ecumenical alliance of Christians working to reform their churches’ social witness.” As Andrew J. Weaver and Nicole Seibert demonstrate in a 2004 article entitled “Church and Scaife” (and see here), what “reform” really means here is “attack.” Weaver and Seibert note that IRD is a “pseudo-religious think-tank that carries out the goals of its secular funders that are opposed to the churches’ historic social witness.”

They also note that two of the three founders of the organization were key Catholic leaders of the radical right wing of the neoconservative movement, Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigel. Both were influential in the Bush administration, and both were overtly involved in the American government’s attempt to discredit and destroy the Catholic liberation theology movement in developing nations.

IRD’s current president, Mark Tooley, is a former CIA employee. The thick connections between IRD and right-wing political groups are extensively documented in Stephen Swecker’s Hard Ball on Holy Ground (2005), which concludes that the bottom line of IRD and its funders is to promote neoconservative economic policy, and to shred governmental regulation of business and of social safety nets (and see here).

As these and other scholars tracking the IRD’s activities, political connections, and funders note, one of the primary ways that this political organization seeks to undercut the social teaching of mainline churches is by inducing schism in those churches over issues like gay rights. Again, visit IRD’s website and click on the link to “Issues” of primary concern to IRD as it tries to “reform” the churches’ social witness, and the very first link you’ll find—it’s at the top of the list, indicating its importance to IRD’s political agenda—is “Marriage.”

And what do you find when you click that link? You immediately discover yourself launched into a discussion of an African Christian statement about marriage presented to the UMC General Conference in 2008, which announces that the only thinkable pattern for marriage is a lifelong union of one man and one woman. This statement is followed immediately with a slighting reference to Bishop Gene Robinson’s “marriage” (IRD uses the quotation marks), which, IRD suggests, is celebrated by decadent Western Christians who have departed from an orthodoxy that African Christianity maintains in the face of Western imperialism.

There you have it in a nutshell: African Christianity traditional and good; progressive currents in Western Christianity heretical and bad. The use of African people and African churches to further a right-wing political agenda in the West, which is intent to divide the churches in order to “reform” their social witness, could not be more evident.

And so the serious threat posed to groups like IRD by the growing worldwide abhorrence of the Ugandan legislation, and by voices like Rev. Kapya Kaoma’s in his whistle-blowing report about the activities of right-wing Western politico-religious groups stirring anti-gay hatred in Africa. On 24 November, Jeff Walton, IRD’s communications director, filed an IRD report about Rev. Kaoma’s Globalizing the Culture Wars, whose publisher Political Research Associates clearly identifies it as written by Kapya Kaoma.

But if you were relying on IRD for information about this report, you wouldn’t know, without careful digging and tortured exegesis, that an African Anglican priest, Kapya Kaoma, authored the report. Walton begins his analysis (second paragraph) by stating that Globalizing the Culture Wars was “authored by Political Research Associates.” We’re then treated to seven paragraphs of vituperation against PRA before we read that Kapya Kaoma is actually the report’s author—and then we get several more paragraphs of personal attack on Kaoma, which seek to portray him as a bogus African who has, IRD suggests, practically destroyed the parish he pastors in the U.S.

Nor would you know, as you read this report, that IRD’s reporter Jeff Walton has political-religious baggage and telling commitments of his own. Go to his biography on the IRD website, though, and you find that he’s actively involved in the movement to split the worldwide Anglican communion over gay issues, and that he has been systems administrator for Virginia Republican Congressman Frank Wolf and legislative correspondent for the Republican Representative from North Carolina Virginia Foxx, who disgraced herself (and, in my view, her fellow Catholics) on the House floor this past April by maintaining that Matthew Shepard was not murdered because he was gay, while Shepard’s mother sat across from her.

Groups like the IRD have been highly effective at planting in mainstream media discourse a forceful narrative suggesting that churches that welcome and affirm gay people are abandoning the gospel and Christian tradition, and that only those churches which hold the line against gays are thriving today. A corollary of this narrative is the claim that only a minority of Western Christians welcome and affirm gay people, while the vast majority of Christians in the developing nations—who stoutly hold “traditional family values” in the face of strong pressures from the West to abandon those values—remain committed to tradition and to the gospel.

John Allen’s Reporting on the African Church: Reinforcing the Neocon Narrative

John Allen’s reporting about the African church stands against a backdrop of these neoconservative presuppositions and commitments, and it has consistently sought to further the dominant narrative I have just described, and to strengthen its power in the mainstream media, where Allen is considered a premier spokesperson on matters Catholic in the U.S. What is happening in Uganda now—and, in particular, the deafening silence of Benedict about this situation—represents a serious challenge to those neoconservative thinkers and groups that have developed the meme of African church = fidelity to the gospel, Western progressive churches = abandonment of the gospel.

As I noted Friday, in my view, Allen’s attempt to explain the silence of Catholic leaders about the Ugandan situation is unconvincing in the extreme, because it fails to grapple with the central problem confronting Catholic apologists. This is Benedict’s ongoing silence. It is clear that one of Allen’s key underlying intents is to deflect attention from Benedict’s silence about Uganda—to explain it away; to justify it—though he never mentions the pope at all in his article (and that in itself is interesting for what it suggests about Allen’s wish to shield the pope from criticism). In fact, he mentions the Vatican only three times.

The burden of the article’s argument is that Ugandan Catholics have been strangely silent—though Allen himself cites evidence that, far from being silent about the impending legislation to make gay people susceptible to capital punishment, Ugandan Catholics are actually happy about the legislation, on the whole.

Ugandan Catholics are silent, Allen implies, because the “colonial experience” sensitizes them to the imperialistic efforts of Western progressives to push against homophobia in African cultures. They are silent because they are committed to “traditional positions on sexual ethics” that they are loath to give up, even when those positions are now implicated in legislation that would make merely being gay or lesbian cause for capital punishment.

Note how this argument lets Benedict and the Vatican off the hook. It implies that, in a highly top-down hierarchical church which the present pope has sought to make even more top-down, those with the chief responsibility to speak out are Ugandan Catholics themselves! And they can’t do so because they’re being pressed by Western progressives who act like colonizers.

This argument totally overlooks—it shields by silence—the responsibility of leaders of Christian churches to point the way, when such moral threats arise anywhere in the world. It totally overlooks the responsibility of Christian leaders to make unambiguous, strong, public statements in the face of impending evil like a nation’s decision to adopt legislation that makes a minority group susceptible to capital punishment.

Allen is employing the kind of argument that corporate leaders or apologists for those leaders always use when they want to deflect attention from leaders’ responsibility for bad decisions or inaction at times of crisis. He is shifting the burden to those at the bottom, who have nowhere near the power Benedict has to make a dent in the mind of the Ugandan legislature as this legislation is under consideration. He is permitting the Vatican to slough off any responsibility for its silence by his argument that a single ambiguous statement by a low-level Vatican official, which did not even mention Uganda, was an attempt of the Vatican to provide “cover” for Ugandan Catholics to speak out.

As if the Vatican dearly wishes to make a public statement, but finds itself compelled to be silent, for fear of placing Ugandan Catholics in a tight spot, for fear of making them susceptible to reprisal for bucking the social trend. If this bogus argument about the Vatican’s silence re: the Ugandan situation sounds familiar, that’s because it is familiar.

It is precisely the same argument that has been advanced to justify the silence of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust. Though Benedict has just declared Pius XII venerable (the first step to sainthood), there remains strong criticism from many quarters, including the Jewish community, of Pius’s silence as the Holocaust took place. Apologists for Pius argue that he personally intervened to save the lives of several Jews during the Holocaust, that he was unable to speak out without endangering more lives, and that he worked quietly and diplomatically behind the scenes to oppose the Holocaust.

Critics—including many Catholics—argue that nothing can excuse the silence of the premier moral voice of the church at a time when targeted minorities were being murdered in “Christian” nations. Those who find Pius’s silence abhorrent argue that the pope’s unambiguous, decisive voice urging Catholics everywhere to combat mass murder would have galvanized resistance in Nazi-occupied nations whose Catholic population was either mostly silent during the Holocaust, or actively in support of it.

The critical assessment of Pius’s role during the Nazi years points to the undeniable and strong anti-Semitism in many Catholic nations, and suggests that one of the shameful reasons that Pius found it impossible to speak unambiguously and decisively against the Holocaust was that the church itself is deeply implicated in anti-Jewish prejudice from which it was unwilling to extricate itself as Christian nations executed Jews during the Nazi period.

Obviously, the historical context of Pius XII’s silence during the Holocaust makes Benedict’s silence about Uganda now all the more perplexing—and exceptionally dangerous to him and others who wish to defend the Catholic church’s teachings about LGBT persons or on human rights. When one remembers that Benedict grew up in the Nazi period in Germany and was a Hitler Youth, one sees immediately that, in remaining silent as Uganda debates putting gay people to death, Benedict courts strong criticism that may undermine his effectiveness as a moral leader even more decisively than the silence of Catholic leaders about clerical molestation of children has already done.

Benedict’s Silence: A Serious Problem for the Neocon Narrative

And so the problem with which John Allen is grappling in his reporting on the Ugandan situation: in what is now occurring in Uganda, we see the practical consequences of years of involvement of the American religious right (with strong, overt support from Catholic leaders including Benedict) in the churches in Africa. The homophobia that these religious leaders have deliberately seeded in African churches, with the intent of bolstering the homophobia of Western churches combating the move to affirmation and welcome of gay believers, is expressing itself in the most extreme way possible, through the demand for capital punishment of gay folks. Extreme, but logical: this demand is the ultimate logical outcome of the rhetoric and action of those Christian groups promoting homophobia within the African context in order to strengthen resistance to gay folks in Western churches.

Now that the ultimate goal—the logical goal—of the anti-gay movement in Western churches, which is all about silencing and removing gay people from church and society, has become apparent in Uganda’s extreme proposal for capital punishment, many of those Western Christians who have promoted homophobia in the African context have no choice except to dissociate themselves from what is happening in Uganda. The Ugandan situation exposes the malice at the heart of the anti-gay movement in Western churches—its intent to dehumanize gay persons and make them invisible in church and society.

But it does so in a horrific absolutist way that undercuts the claim to moral validity of the anti-gay movement in Western churches. The Ugandan legislation serves as a salient reminder that you can’t have a modicum of prejudice and discrimination—a modicum of working to dehumanize a minority group and make that group invisible—without setting into motion a chain of events whose ultimate logic will be to try to make the targeted group really invisible, absolutely and completely so. You can’t have a modicum of attempts to dehumanize a group and make it disappear without setting into motion events that will finally seek to imprison and execute the targeted minority group . . . .

The Ugandan development thus forces Western Christians—including Catholic leaders—who have helped set the stage for what is happening in Uganda to make a painful decision. On the one hand, not to repudiate the Ugandan legislation outright, vocally and unambiguously, makes one a party to sheer, obvious evil. It makes one a party to sheer, obvious evil every bit as much as those who remained silent in the face of the rise of the Nazi party in Germany are now considered to have been silent partners in the Nazis’ murder of millions of Jews, Slavs, gypsies, mentally and physically challenged people, homosexuals, and others.

On the other hand, for those Western Christian groups that have played a significant role in creating the situation in Uganda, to speak out is also to admit that the way “traditional family values” are being promoted by many Western Christians has an undeniable diabolical edge, a diabolical potential exposed by the Ugandan legislation. What is happening in Uganda is part and parcel of the rhetoric of “traditional family values” so strongly defended by many Western Christians. It is not an aberration of that rhetoric. It is its logical, ultimate extension.

To speak out strongly, publicly, and unambiguously in condemnation of what is under consideration in Uganda requires those Christian leaders—Benedict included, Benedict notably—who have had a hand in creating the Ugandan situation to admit responsibility for this situation, and to reconsider the rhetoric and ethical teachings that have brought Uganda to this precipice. And that’s the dilemma—the rock and the hard place—with which John Allen’s article about Catholic silence vis-à-vis Uganda seeks to help Catholic leaders deal.

Allen’s Reporting on African Synod as Replication of Neocon Narrative

The dilemma John Allen is now facing is built into his reporting on the African church. Not only does this reporting uncritically incorporate (and therefore replicate, with a leading American Catholic reporter’s stamp of approval) the neocon and religious right narrative about the church in Africa. It also provides abundant evidence of Catholic involvement in and responsibility for developing and spreading that narrative in Africa—and thus, for creating the situation in Uganda, which now demands an outspoken Catholic response.

Allen’s journalistic style consistently embeds prescription within what purports to be value-free description. It is prescriptive in the guise of being descriptive, objective, disinterested. One of Allen’s favorite journalistic ploys is to wear a mask of detached innocence as he “describes” battles between right and left from which he himself is presumably aloof.

But read his narratives carefully, and it becomes immediately apparent that—as with other centrist mainstream political and religious commentators who use a similar journalistic technique—John Allen’s real commitments and unacknowledged interests lean to the center-right. To the center-right (which always discredits the left altogether while finding large room even for extreme positions of the right) that journalists of his ilk like to remind us is normative, the place in which moderation and reason reside as the extreme left and right battle things out. Allen’s right-leaning description of how things supposedly are, when we take off our ideological blinders, is loaded with prescription about how they should be, even as he poses as a disinterested centrist who is merely telling us what he sees.

And, interestingly enough, what Allen sees when he looks at the African church with supposedly unvarnished eyes is very much what the IRD and the American religious right see: a corrective to the Western church, particularly in the area of “traditional family values.” This neocon prescription of African Christianity as a corrective to decadent Western values runs—under the guise of descriptive reporting—all through John Allen’s reporting on the African synod this past fall.

For instance, turn to Allen’s midpoint summary of the synod on 16 October, and you’ll find him declaring (prescription embedded in purported description),

If the first point [i.e., African Christianity is driving Christians in the West to greater social engagement] seems to cut in what Americans might consider a “liberal” direction, the approach of the African bishops to issues of gender, the family, and sexual morality moves decisively in the opposite direction. On that cluster of concerns, forming what Americans know as the “culture wars,” the growing influence of Africa seems likely to steer Catholicism toward a more conservative posture.

Allen follows that observation—which completely ignores any American involvement in exporting Western culture wars to Africa, a theme about which John Allen is always silent when he reports on the African church—with statements by Archbishop Joseph Tlhagale of South Africa and Archbishop Charles Palmer-Buckle of Ghana which claim that there is a “second wave of colonization” coming from the West, which represents a “deliberate campaign” to force African Christians to accept abortion and homosexuality. On the basis of these reports, Allen concludes that “the synod will issue a defense of traditional family values.”

Set these seemingly disinterested reports from Africa side by side with the religious right and neocon narrative about the African church developed by groups like IRD, and what’s striking is how uncannily close they are to each other: what John Allen is “reporting” about the church in Africa, a purportedly disinterested description of what Africans believe and think, is precisely what neocon political activists and the American religious right have been prescribing for some time now for the African church. It is precisely what these groups have been working for some decades now, according to Rev. Kapya Kaoma, to effect in the African church.

Again, what is totally lacking in these “disinterested” reports is any recognition at all—any admission at all—that what Allen is reporting about the African church as a prescription for the Western church is something being disseminated to African Christians by strong, well-funded political and religious groups in the West. There’s no recognition at all that a phrase he uses as if it is merely a statement of disinterested reporting—“traditional family values”—was, in fact, invented by the American religious right as a political tool to bash gay folks.

Or that the American religious right has worked for decades now to induce among African Christians the sense that they are being “re-colonized” by Western progressives who want to impose decadent Western sexual values on African Christians. While those Western groups maintaining that such neocolonialism is taking place are themselves spending countless dollars to beam their message of fear and loathing of LGBT people to African churches . . . .

Furthermore, though Allen’s article about the perplexing silence of Ugandan Catholics re: the legislation now under consideration in their country seeks to imply that Catholics would condemn this legislation if they could, if they could only find a voice, his reporting on the African synod demonstrates that not merely highly placed African Catholic officials, but the Vatican itself, has worked very hard to plant the anti-gay narrative of the American religious right in Africa.

Read Allen’s article on the synod entitled “A Consistent Ethic of Life,” for instance, and you’ll find him reporting that at the synod, the conservative half of the African soul “found its voice” when representatives such as Archbishop Robert Sarah of Guinea, secretary of the Vatican Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, informed his brother bishops that pernicious Western progressive groups were promoting a “theory of gender” in Africa that would call for acceptance of gay and lesbian people.

As Allen notes, though, the most forceful statement made at the synod about these themes was made by a non-African Vatican official, Italian Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family, who joined Sarah in blasting Western “gender theory,” which, he said, “is starting to infiltrate associations, governments and even some ecclesial environments in the African continent,” often “heavily disguised.” Antonielli stated,

For example, equality of people no longer just means equal dignity and access to fundamental human rights, but also the irrelevance of the natural differences between men and women, the uniformity of all individuals, as though they were sexually undifferentiated, and therefore the equality of all sexual orientations and behavior: heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, polymorphous.

This ideology is spread by reproductive health centers, local educational meetings and international TV programs broadcast via satellite. Collaboration of African governments and local groups, including ecclesial groups, is sought, and these groups usually don’t realize the ethically unacceptable anthropological implications of this.

And Benedict himself? Has he remained aloof from this clear, obtrusive attempt of Western Catholic church officials to stir up among African Christians the sense that they are under attack by insidious Western forces trying to re-colonize the continent, infiltrate it, and alter “traditional” African culture by inserting “heavily disguised” messages antithetical to the culture in educational materials, health pamphlets, and so forth?

Unfortunately not. In fact, Cardinal Antonelli appears to be echoing the pope directly in these inflammatory statements that so closely toe the line of American religious right and neocon activist groups. At his opening liturgy for the African synod three days before Antonelli delivered the preceding remarks at the synod, Benedict informed the liturgy’s participants, most of them African bishops, that

The so-called “first world” has exported and is still exporting its toxic spiritual refuse, which infect the populations of other continents, especially in Africa. Colonialism is finished in a political sense, but it’s not completely gone away.

Toxic spiritual refuse, social infection by insidious hidden groups infiltrating the culture, and re-colonization of Africa by such groups: this is dangerous rhetoric. It’s inflammatory rhetoric. It has strong overtones of the very similar Nazi rhetoric about the Jews—a people who “infect” Christian civilization by inserting sneaky “heavily disguised” messages into ordinary-seeming discourse, infectious messages that sap the moral and spiritual vitality of those infected. This is the kind of rhetoric that led to the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust, and has justified repeated atrocious acts for centuries in which Christian people have rounded up, imprisoned, and then expelled or killed Jews.

There is a direct line between such rhetoric, with its Naziesque overtomes, and what is now taking place in Uganda. The American religious right and its neoconservative political allies have worked for some decades now to induce fear and loathing of gay people in African societies, using language eerily reminiscent of that used to justify the murder of millions of Jews by Christians during the Holocaust. And, to its discredit, rather than challenge that rhetoric, or a political alliance that undercuts the claims of the church to defend human rights and resist destructive forms of capitalism, leading Catholic officials have done all they can to promote the rhetoric. To fan the flames of anti-gay hatred among their co-religionists in Africa.

And Benedict himself is implicated, with his talk about Western groups “infecting” African Christianity, with his counter-factual statement that condom use does not prevent but fosters the spread of AIDS in Africa, and above all, with his designation of gay and lesbian persons as “objectively disordered” in their very nature and personhood, in his 1986 pastoral document on the care of homosexual persons in the church. A document whose very first effect was to produce the expulsion (the disappearance) of gay and lesbian Catholic groups like Dignity from church premises, and thus the disappearance of many gay and lesbian Catholics from parishes in which they suddenly found themselves told they were unwelcome . . . .

You cannot designate a group of human beings as “objectively disordered” without dehumanizing that group of human beings. You cannot suggest that a group of human beings is subhuman without inviting violence against them. As the example of Nazi Germany demonstrates, you cannot then speak of a minority group whom you have defined as subhuman as an “infection” without inviting the permanent removal of that group from society, through acts of unspeakable violence.

It is not to Benedict’s credit that he continues refusing to speak out about Uganda. On 17 December—last Thursday—Benedict met with Francis K. Butagira, the new Ugandan ambassador to the Holy See. And what did the pope, the moral voice of an influential and vast religious group, say to this dignitary on this occasion that cried out for a statement about a situation in which that ambassador’s nation is mulling over the death penalty for gay citizens?

Not a word. Not a word about the pending legislation that may make being gay susceptible to the death penalty. Not a word about human rights.

Instead, Benedict used the occasion to praise Uganda for the “respect” it shows the church. He stated, “Diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the Republic of Uganda continue to offer many opportunities for mutual assistance and cooperation for the spiritual good and welfare of the people of your nation.”

Not a single word about, not even an allusion to, legislation that may set into motion capital punishment for people who happen to be gay. Benedict’s continued silence is scandalous in the extreme.

John Allen knows this. And that’s why he seeks to give Benedict cover, as he puzzles over the strange Catholic silence about Uganda. The longer the silence goes on, the more strongly it calls into question the religious right and neocon narrative that Allen and others have promoted about the African church. And the more it points to the role that Catholic leaders, including the pope himself, have played in creating and reinforcing that narrative. And to the connections between the indefensible magisterial teaching that gay human beings are objectively disordered and acts of violence against LGBT people . . . .

Benedict’s continued silence points to connections between a destructive narrative he has helped design, to justify the disappearance of LGBT persons from church and society, and similar narratives about the Jews through Christian history that also eventually pointed to extermination of a despised minority group. A narrative regarding which a previous pope was also silent as millions of Jews were murdered . . . .

End of Week News Round-Up: When Charity Is a Casualty in Church Teaching; Cardinal Barragán Gets a Coughie

As one week ends and another begins, I’d like to bring to readers’ attention a few noteworthy articles or blog postings.

The first is Bryan Cones’s thoughtful essay about the dilemma that Catholic magisterial teaching on sexual ethics creates for faithful Catholics whose experience of gay or lesbian people and couples conflicts with the church’s conclusion that these friends and family members and their relationships are “intrinsically disordered.” The essay is entitled “Mind the Gap,” and is in the current issue of U.S. Catholic.

Here’s how Cones sketches the “gap” that many faithful Catholics experience in this area—Isa is the daughter of a Catholic lesbian couple whom Cones knows:

On the one hand, there is the Catholic Church's clear and consistent teaching that a homosexual orientation is an "objective disorder" and that sex between people of the same gender is "intrinsically evil," that is, can never be morally justified. That stance logically progresses to opposition to gay marriage and parenting, which is no doubt shared by many Catholics who are alarmed at attempts to change the legal definition of marriage.

On the other hand, others, myself included, hear a different story from gay and lesbian Catholics, especially when they speak of their aspirations to commitment and family life. To think of Isa's family as "a multifaceted threat" is profoundly jarring to say the least. I'm sure I'm not the only Catholic who feels stuck between the teaching of the church and my own experience, though Catholics are certainly not free to dismiss the former just because it contradicts the latter.

As Cones notes, the “gap” between what many Catholics actually experience when they encounter LGBT persons and their families, and what the church tells us we should perceive, raises significant theological questions that go beyond ethical debates about the status of LGBT people. There’s first, the question of what to do with any “profound disconnect between the experience of conscientious baptized people and church teaching.”

If Catholic teaching presupposes an integral connection between faith and reason, what do we do with teachings—notably, in our era, with the church’s teachings about sexual ethics—in which the graced experience of the faithful conspicuously moves in another direction from the direction indicated by the magisterium? When the sensus fidelium begins to question magisterial teaching as strongly and consistently in many cultures and geographic areas as it has done with the church’s sexual ethical teachings in recent decades, can the magisterium claim to have reason on its side, as it delivers these teachings?

Such a “profound disconnect” between the graced experience of millions of Catholics and what the church teaches has to be recognized frankly and addressed, if the church wants to be heard when it teaches in any area at all. And if the church wants to claim that it respects human experience, scientific findings, and reason, as if formulates its ethical teachings . . . .

And then there’s the problem of love: love, which is the summation of the ethical life, the first and most compelling command. What to do about love in a church whose teachings about gay and lesbian persons are almost uniformly received by those persons and anyone in solidarity with them as hateful, rather than loving, as excluding rather than inviting, as demeaning rather than respecting? When the gap between the command to love first and foremost, and what the church teaches (and how it behaves), is so wide, what do faithful Catholics do? It is the church itself that has taught us to believe that “[t]he first law of the gospel, after all, is charity, and it is charity that has often been a casualty in the church's debate about homosexuality.”

Finally, there’s the question of how a church can claim to be catholic when its teachings and behavior appear to target a vulnerable minority group with the intent of excluding that group from human and ecclesial community. Bryan Cones concludes that his own experience of Catholicism moves him in the opposite direction—towards including rather than excluding his LGBT friends and their families:

As for me, I can only say that my experience of the "catholic," or universal, dimension of the church would be profoundly diminished if Isa's family wasn't a part of my Sunday assembly. Though life in Christ's body is not always neat or easy, sticking together makes us, or so I hope, a fuller sign to the world of the love God extends to all  people.

I also recommend Frank Cocozzelli’s announcement yesterday of his second annual Coughie Award. The announcement is at Talk to Action’s website. As Frank notes, the Coughie is named for the notorious anti-semitic priest and radio personality of the 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin:

The Coughlin (or as I affectionately refer to them, "the Coughies") is named after the infamous 1930s radio priest and noted anti-Semite, Rev. Charles Coughlin, whose media diatribes against FDR and Judaism while being openly sympathetic to the racist policies of Adolph Hitler made him a role model for today's TV and radio preachers and "conservative" media personalities. Such advocacy was clearly antithetical to the very definition of the word "catholic" . . . .

Frank Cocozzelli notes that he had difficulty choosing among several Coughie-worthy possibilities this year. These included neocon Catholic activist Deal Hudson, who has worked fiercely to block health-care reform, and Archbishop Charles Chaput, who shares Hudson’s partisan animosity to health-care reform (despite Catholic social teaching), and who has such a “knack for rendering religiously supremacist proclamations.”

Even so, one Catholic figure stood out clearly this year in the crowd of potential Coughies, in Frank Cocozzelli’s estimation. The winner of this year’s Coughie Award is the President Emeritus of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Health Care Workers, Mexican Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragán.

Cardinal Barragán, has a penchant for delivering pithy Coughie-worthy one-liners about sensitive moral issues. His Eminence injected himself into the Terri Schiavo debate in 2005 with the following helpful declaration: “Let's stop with the euphemisms—they killed her.” To which His Eminence added the following pastorally helpful gloss: “A doctor who is not a believer is always a frustrated doctor.”

And Cardinal Barragán’s Coughie-worthy pastoral zinger of 2009? This was his declaration a few weeks ago that “transsexuals and homosexuals will never enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” As Frank Cocozzelli notes, this declaration is eminently worthy of an award that “best exemplifies an exclusionary, strident interpretation of the Catholic faith.”

The Catholic faith at its pastoral and theological worst, in the footsteps of Father Charlie Coughlin, who once said, at a rally in the Bronx, after having given a Nazi salute, “When we get through with the Jews in America, they'll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.” As Cardinal Barragán receives his Coughie, we’ll be waiting for his words of wisdom about the proposal to execute gays in Uganda.

The graphic is Ben Shahn’s 1939 portrait of Father Coughlin, from the Philip J. and Suzanne Schiller Collection of American Social Commentary Art.

Something's Not Right Here: Bill Moyers on U.S. Leaders

Update, 4:32 P.M. I note below that the U.S. Catholic bishops have been collaborating in the past day or so with Rep. Bart Stupak and Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell to block health care reform because the Senate bill for reform is not, the bishops maintain, in line with Catholic teaching about abortion. The source I cite for that claim is John Aravosis’s America Blog.

I’m now seeing that Ben Smith at Politico is reporting the same story. Politico has obtained emails showing that a Stupak’s aide has been working with Republican leaders to coordinate opposition to health care reform, in emails cc’d to key staffers of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

As a Catholic, I’m deeply concerned to see the U.S. Catholic bishops playing partisan politics with something as significant and as morally important as health care reform. In my view, Americans in general ought to be up in arms about the attempt of the leaders of any religious group to strong-arm our political leaders to implement policies that reflect the particular teachings of a given religious group, when those same leaders don't submit the policies and teachings they want to impose on all Americans in backroom deals to open public debate.

Sunday reading or listening: Bill Moyers in conversation with Matt Taibbi and Robert Kuttner about what’s gone wrong with the change we believe in:

Something's not right here. One year after the great collapse of our financial system, Wall Street is back on top while our politicians dither. As for health care reform, you're about to be forced to buy insurance from companies whose stock is soaring, and that's just dandy with the White House.

Truth is, our capitol's being looted, Republicans are acting like the town rowdies, the sheriff is firing blanks, and powerful Democrats in Congress are in cahoots with the gang that's pulling the heist. This is not capitalism at work. It's capital. Raw money, mounds of it, buying politicians and policy as if they were futures on the hog market.

I encourage you to watch the program or read the transcript. Something’s not right here, indeed. In our declining empire, as raw money calls the shots, there is no longer even a pretense of push-back from political leaders who came to power promising change we can believe in and a retrieval of our fragmented democracy.

The gap between campaign rhetoric and governing reality couldn’t be starker. Or more blatant and cynical. And as the health care bill heads into Hobbsean wonderland, the Catholic bishops have been working fast and furious, it’s being reported, to hatch backroom plots with Rep. Stupak and—get this—Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. Plots to block health care reform altogether. Plots to serve Republican ends, while claiming to be all about life. Catholic absolutism on abortion as a way to collude with partisan attacks on health care reform altogether, while millions upon millions of Americans lack any access to health care coverage at all.

Pro-life? You’ve got to weep at the disparity between what they tell us about, and what they do over and over again to enact their “pro-life” values.

Meanwhile, I will return to the commentary on John Allen’s take on Uganda and Catholic silence in an upcoming posting. I’m working on it now, but prefer not to release it of a Sunday, when many readers are taking a break from blog-reading, especially as Christmas nears.