Bishops Behaving Badly

If the Catholic hierarchy were to design a plan for driving people away from the church, they could not have found a more effective method than the ongoing embarrassments coming from Rome and from certain American bishops.

The bishop of Peoria, IL, who compared President Obama to Hitler and Stalin, is too stupid to warrant much response. He condemns himself out of his own mouth. The bishops who excommunicate politicians who do not vote the pro-life agenda do everyone involved a disservice.

The recent Vatican action of stripping American nuns of the right of self-governance by condemning the Leadership Conference on Women Religious has prompted Garry Wills to react, somewhat overheatedly, in the New York Review of Books. "Is it any wonder so many nuns have left the orders or avoided joining them? Who wants to be bullied?"

Wills is one of many intelligent Catholics who try to remain faithful to a life of prayer and the sacraments while deploring the reactionary activities of the men in power, celibate men who are afraid of women, sexuality, change, and even discussion of such issues as clerical celibacy, the ordination of women, the rights of homosexuals in the church, and contraception.

The Vatican officials involved in the recent scrutiny of U.S. nuns, Wills says, are upset that these women, who have done heroic work for generations, do not follow the bishops' thinking. We should be grateful they do not. "Nuns have preserved Gospel values while bishops have been perverting them."

Strong stuff, yet the state of the macro-church, as opposed to the parish-level life of the church, is in a crisis that will lead either to a second Reformation or a tragic schism.

The nuns are accused of being more interested in ministering to those affected by the AIDS crisis, just as their forbears ran soup kitchens and hospitals and supported the civil rights movement, than in the Gospel teachings on contraception, which do not exist (Wills notes). They are criticized for teaching the "social Gospel" as if there was another kind --one that doesn't say love thy neighbor or challenge injustice.

While mixing politics with religion at the highest levels in Washington, in an effort to defeat Democrats, the bishops oppose religious women and laypeople from being overly political. How long can thinking people tolerate such hypocrisy?

As Wills and other have long observed, women in particular must be singled out by our frightened hierarchs for public chastisement, the very women whose humility stands in such stark contrast to episcopal arrogance.

So we have a hierarchy distrustful of the People of God, as the Second Vatican Council defined the church, and interested in reverting to Latin ritual practices, turning the clock back while the world moves on. These leaders are fearful of the intelligent discussions that female and other progressive theologians want to have, and their fear leads to anger and the threat of excommunication of anyone who dares defy church teaching on sexual morality. These are, of course, the same bishops who, as a group, have mishandled the sexual abuse crisis to the great shame and embarrassment of us all.

Calling the state of the church sad, a writer in Commonweal (4-9-12), Jo McGowan, addresses the blindness of many clergy in the area of sexuality. She does so as a prolife Catholic mother who has "practiced only Natural Family Planning." She is saddened by the priests' limited understanding of contraception as it re-surfaced in the recent debate over health insurance (and the candidacy of Rick Santorum).

She finds it "unsettling when men who may never have experienced sex feel qualified not just to speak about it but to pronounce on it with certainty." She wants the clergy to understand that defending contraception within marriage is not defending sexual license. "The church has made a spectacle of itself by promoting an immature version of sexuality that is missing the sinew of lived experience." (emphasis added)

She does not raise the issue of mandatory celibacy for priests, but this is obvious from her heartfelt and thoughtful article. Insisting on all priests remaining permanently celibate, however noble and beautiful, is at the root of the shame and ignorance that church leaders have displayed for years whenever issues of sexual morality arise.

What we face in the future is the decline of a church as a large tent that can embrace all--even gay men and women, even dissidents from the official teaching--and focus on the Gospel mandate for social justice in the world rather than a small-tent church of narrow thinking and exclusion. (Sister Joan Chittister has, among others, used this helpful tent metaphor.)

I pray that one day, after I am gone from this earth no doubt, the Catholic Church will become more inclusive, the kind of church envisioned by the Second Vatican Council that the bullies in Rome seem determined to thwart. These men need more than prayers. They need to be called to account regularly, as Garry Wills and members of Call to Action have been doing, demanding change.

Politics and the Catholic Bishops

The editorial "Bad Reaction" in the current issue of Commonweal is must reading for any thinking person (especially Catholics) concerned, as I am, about the right-wing alliance between the U.S. Bishops Conference and the evangelicals to protest anything related to "Obamacare." (See www.commonwealmagazine.org for 2-26-12.)

At issue now, of course, is the recent compromise offered by the President on the contraceptive issue that the bishops have rejected out of hand, with apparent haste and with little thought. Even before the details of the president's proposal were known, says Commonweal, the bishops were opposed; they are now demanding that no employer be required to offer free contraception coverage to its employees.

What bothers me is what upset me in 2004, when the same coalition of the religious right contributed substantially to the re-election of G. W. Bush. Now the USCCB is urging priests to speak out in churches across the land, during an election year, indicating that the president is either opposed to religious freedom or is inherently anti-Catholic, both of which are nonsense.

As the editorial asks, why were the bishops not opposed to the Bush administration's use of torture? Why is it only the issues involving women and sexuality that inflame them? Do they not see that their political activism is counter-productive, playing into the hands of abortion-rights advocates who will claim, understandably, that (in the words of the editorial) "the church's opposition to abortion is motivated by a larger disregard for the health of women"? Anyone seriously opposed to abortion should be in favor of contraception, which lowers the rate and risk of abortion, among other things, as thinking Catholics have known since the unfortunate 1968 encyclical of Paul VI banned contraception.

As Andrew Sullivan wrote this week, "I find the protectors of child rapists preaching to women about contraception to be a moral obscenity." Garry Wills has a more thoughtful and lengthy response, "Contraception's Con Men," in the New York Review of Books (www.nybooks.com for 2-29-12). Wills notes that contraception is not a religious matter but a matter of arguable "natural law" rejected by most Catholics.

The bishops do not see that people attend church for many reasons, but these do not include listening to veiled messages that support the Republicans, whop are more than happy to attack Obama as anti-Catholic. I have heard these messages in my own parish and protested, and I will do so again.

The public perception of religion as divisive and judgmental, with negative views of human sexuality, will only be reinforced, and more church-goers driven away, by more political activity by the bishops. Milton attacked the "blind" bishops of his day (1637); thinking Catholics should do the same today.

Of course, to mention "thinking Catholics" may be a stretch. I am reminded of what Adlai Stevenson said to a supporter of his presidential candidacy in 1956 when she told him, "Every thinking person should vote for you."

He replied, "Madam, that would not be enough; I need a majority."