Same-sex marriage and Catholic voters

The election in heavily Catholic Ireland last week, with 62 percent of the populace in the Republic voting in favor of same-sex marriage has been widely reported and analyzed.  The first piece I read was by Frank Bruni in the NYTimes, who raises a question he does not answer about why voters in traditionally Roman Catholic countries--from Argentina and Brazil to Belgium, France and Spain--have suddenly, it seems, become "gay friendly."

Why do sixty percent of American Catholic voters polled say they approve of same-sex marriage?  Bruni suggests that young Catholics are "less rooted in Rome." In Europe and Latin America, he goes on, many people pay "primary obeisance to their own consciences, their own senses of social justice."

That last phrase is troublesome. I doubt if the sense of social justice on the part of many Republican politicos in this country is congruent with the church's teachings, going back to Leo XIII in the late 19th century and including Dorothy Day and the Franciscan tradition embodied today most visibly by Pope Francis.  Bruni is overlooking the importance of "thinking with the church," which is not the same as agreeing with everything taught by the church.

That point aside, each country that has so far legalized same-sex marriage is different, so generalizations are not easily made. What is there about the Irish, for example, other than disgust with the hierarchy's handling of the sexual abuse scandal, that would lead them to such a surprising vote?

I would like to think it has a lot to do with charity toward an oppressed minority, a respect for equality in the eyes of God, even if this basic human respect is at odds with the moral teachings of the church.  Of course, there are other reasons, too: a higher percentage of Catholics today are better educated than in the past, at least in the USA.  There is also the Catholic experience with celibate clergy whose numbers include many homosexually inclined priests.

There may also be a paradoxical love of tradition, as E. J. Dionne mentions in his current Commonweal article. What is more traditional than marriage, which indicates a belief in the past as well as the future, a belief that a structure exists, even though outside the sacramental rubric of the church, enabling fidelity and fostering stability.

So it was sad to see the harsh response to the Irish vote from the Vatican's Secretary of State, Cardinal Parolin: "a defeat for humanity." The Archbishop of Dublin was wiser, less hysterical: he said that church needed a reality check, that bishops should listen to young people.

Cardinal Kasper of Germany, in another context, has called for a "listening magisterium": a hierarchy that pays real attention to the capacity of individuals to think about moral and social issues in the context of what the church stands for.

One thing is now clear from the vote in Ireland and other seemingly Catholic cultures: the days of top-down authority coming from Rome are coming to an end, with more power being given (in keeping with the Second Vatican Council) to the laity and the local churches.  I hope that gay people will feel more at home in such a church and actually be treated in a Christian way.

Same-Sex Marriage: Who is Threatened?

Although I have had reservations about the use of "marriage" to refer to the legal union of two people of the same sex who love one another and might wish to be legally joined, I have never felt that these civil unions, or marriages, if that is the legal term, threaten my marriage or anyone else's. Many of these same-sex couples adopt children and apparently raise them successfully.

Gay marriage, which the Cardinal Archbishop of New York recently called "the defining issue of our time," concerns about one percent of the population. He and most of the others on the right insist that it undermines marriage. But are they right?

As Eugene Cullen Kennedy, the Loyola University psychologist, writes in National Catholic Reporter, the bishops might be better advised to look at the facts, which are often inconvenient: co-habitation and illegitmate births have been soaring in recent decades. Since 1970, marriage has been declining in this country quite apart from the divorce rate. Kennedy gives the full statistical picture, which is not pretty.

The conclusion: if we want to focus on a threat to marriage, let us focus on the social conditions that lead so many, especially in the lower socioeconomic class, into relationships that produce off-spring but little stability. The family unit is indeed under threat, but it is not coming, in my view, from those gays and lesbians who wish to be treated as equals.