Benedict to Christian Leaders in Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: Pro-Life Means Anti-Gay

And in case we don't get the point that I emphasized in my posting yesterday commenting on Archbishop Timothy Dolan's "state of the union" address to Congress--that being pro-life now means, for Catholic leaders, being anti-gay, and that gay and lesbian human beings are, simply by virtue of being gay or lesbian, in some sense a threat to the sanctity of life--John Allen helpfully spells it out for us today in commentary on a warning Pope Benedict just issued to leaders of non-Catholic churches.

Allen is reporting on Benedict's concluding remarks this morning at a Vatican ceremony marking the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.  Note how Allen links the church's anti-abortion stance to its anti-gay stance, and how he stresses that Benedict views Catholic opposition to gay rights as a manifestation of the pro-life teaching of the church: 

Benedict expressed the hope that “no new confessional differences” will erupt on the pro-life questions, noting that since 2009 the Catholic bishops of Germany and leaders of the Lutheran Church have had a bilateral dialogue commission on “God and Human Dignity.”

That dialogue has at times been contentious, given that many Lutheran churches in Germany accept openly gay clergy and view homosexuality as morally acceptable, and some also bless same-sex unions.

Benedict’s warning that ecumenical good manners cannot blunt the church’s pro-life message comes at a time when disagreements over gay rights and gender roles are producing new fault lines in Christianity, perhaps especially with the Anglican Communion.

As I noted yesterday, the growing trend of top Catholic officials to link opposition to gay rights and opposition to abortion--with the more or less explicit claim that the gay issue is a life issue because gays are in their very nature anti-life--is a dangerous trend.  It is theologically dubious, since official Catholic teaching about why homosexuality is wrong has long stood on its own feet, feet entirely separate from the teaching on which opposition to abortion stands.  The church has condemned homosexual acts because they are not open to conception, but without the claim that gays are taking life or threatening life simply by being gay. 

Catholic teaching has condemned abortion from conception to birth because it wants to maintain that a human person is present in the fertilized zygote from the moment of conception, and abortion is a direct assault on a human life.  (And for a careful philosophical analysis of the arguments on which Catholic teaching about abortion rest, with helpful commentary on the shortcomings of some of those arguments, see Joshua McElwee's interview with George Dennis O'Brien in National Catholic Reporter this week.)

Lumping these two teachings together creates a theological mishmash that is nonsensical.  And dangerous, particularly for gay and lesbian human beings, because this new theological tactic on the part of Catholic officials relies on the rhetorical insinuation that gay and lesbian human beings are anti-life.  Threats to the human race.  People who have, as the past president of the U.S. Catholic Bishops' Conference Francis George recently stated, "lost touch" with the human race.

This is dehumanizing rhetoric on the part of church officials, aimed at an already vulnerable minority group.  It is rhetoric that quite deliberately seeks to inflame prejudice and elicit fear of the vulnerable minority group towards which it is aimed.

Those pushing this rhetoric have to know what they are doing in pushing it, and what they risk.  Benedict lived through the Nazi period in Germany, after all.  He surely remembers that those who seized control of his nation during that dark period of its history paved the way for the extermination of a race they tagged as inferior with rhetorical attacks on the Jewish people suggesting that the Jewish people were subhuman, threats to life who had lost touch with the human race.

It's easy--it's politically easy--to lump the anti-abortion cause together with the anti-gay cause, and to speak of gay and lesbian human beings as a threat to life, simply because they are gay or lesbian.  This political rhetoric is easy because it elides careful thought and--it has to be said--because it very easily stirs up fears and hostilities against those who are gay and lesbian that are never far from the surface in many societies.

But the price to be paid for such politically easy energizing of one's base can be very high, when the ultimate outcome is increased hostility and even violence towards an already stigmatized minority group.  Responsible Christian leaders have no business at all engaging in this kind of bloody mob-stirring.  Though Benedict (and John Allen) want to attack those strong movements within many other Christian churches--Allen singles out the Lutheran and Anglican communions--that affirm and protect gay and lesbian persons while proclaiming an ethic of respect for life, perhaps those churches and their leaders have something of crucial importance to teach Benedict and Catholic leaders today.

If so, their message might be as follows: stop attacking gay and lesbian human beings as you seek to promote an ethic of respect for life.  This strategy may score political points in the short run, but in the long run, it won't work.  It's unwise and dangerous.  And it calls into question--very strongly so--what you claim you're defending when you preach to the world about the sanctity of human life.

Pastoral Leadership of Bishops and the Exodus from the Catholic Church: Is There a Correlation?

In my previous posting about Eugene Kennedy's critique of John Allen's attempt to spin Cardinal Francis George as the U.S. Catholic bishops' "thinker-in-chief," I suggested that what perturbs me about Mr. Allen's (persistent) spin-doctoring when it comes to church officials is this: he does one somersault after another to  try to turn mediocre thinkers and mediocre shepherds of the flock into intellectual and pastoral giants.

And the Catholic community deserves better.  It deserves shepherds who both listen respectfully to their flocks, and who engage the surrounding culture thoughtfully, with intellectual and moral integrity, and yes, critically. 

And I don't think that is what we get nowadays, with a large number of our bishops.  Hence--I would argue--the ongoing mass exodus from the Catholic church at this point in time.

Another way to put my concern with spin-doctoring discussions of Catholic leaders like Cardinal George, which implicitly dumb down American Catholic theological discourse by treating the intellectually mediocre as if it's astute, is the following question:

Would different--would better--pastoral leadership stem the tide in the mass exodus of American Catholics from their church?  To my mind, the answer to that question is indubitably yes.  And so we need to be concerned when pastoral leaders who do not deserve high praise, because they are not conspicuously pastoral (and being thoughtful, theologically well-read, and willing to engage ideas respectfully if dialogically is part and parcel of being pastoral) are treated as paragons of pastoral (and intellectual) virtue.

Recently, Michael Sean Winters wrote a very good posting about the Boston archdiocese at his blog at NCR, which touches on some of these concerns.  In that posting, Winters notes the praiseworthy way in which Boston's chief shepherd, Cardinal O'Malley, has handled controversial public discussions of issues like same-sex marriage.  Though O'Malley makes his position (that is to say, the official Catholic magisterial position) on such issues crystal clear, he also tries to avoid demagoguery and iron-fisted imposition of positions peculiar to the Catholic church on the public square.  He tends, instead, to foster dialogue within the church and between the church and the culture at large.

Winters rightly applies this analysis to the ongoing mass exodus of many American Catholics from the church today.  Interestingly enough, he prefaces his discussion of O'Malley and the reversal (to a certain degree) of that exodus in the Boston archdiocese with the following throwaway line:

All bishops are understandably upset at the secularization of the culture and their powerlessness to affect it, even to stanch the bleeding within their own flock. 

I call this a throwaway line, since Winters' own good analysis and the conclusions he reaches subvert his claim that many bishops are powerless to stanch the bleeding within their own flock.  As Winters himself notes, O'Malley's model of leadership, which is "pastoral through and through," has resulted in increased donations to the church in Boston, higher numbers in local seminaries, and more respectful treatment of the official church in the local media.

How bishops behave has concrete effects on their flocks.  When bishops behave in conspicuously unpastoral ways, people respond by voting with their feet: they (and their checkbooks) leave the church.  When bishops begin to act like pastors, people think more carefully about leaving.

Bishops who expect to be taken seriously as shepherds have to listen carefully to and engage in respectful dialogue with their flock.  They have to respect the variety of political and other judgments--including theological and ethical ones--at which members of their flocks arrive, using their informed consciences, as they pray, study, read theology, and apply what the church has taught them to the issues confronting them in everyday life.  Even when bishops set a standard and call it "the" Catholic position on a given issue, they can continue to engage the members of their flock in critical dialogue about that particular standard, listening respectfully to the laity's own viewpoints about the issue in question--as they expect the laity to listen respectfully to their teaching as bishops.

And all that I've just said holds true for how bishops engage the public at large--academic communities, the media, and so forth.  Bishops do very decidedly have the ability to affect the ongoing mass exodus of American Catholics.  They have the ability to affect this exodus by choosing to be good shepherds.

Bishops who are good shepherds will begin to stanch the bleeding.  Those who continue to demagogue, lay down laws without engaging in respectful dialogue with their flocks, proffer shoddy intellectual justifications for their dictatorial approach to Catholic teaching, and seek to coerce the public square to accept their authority without engaging in intellectually compelling dialogue with members of the public square: these bishops will continue driving good Catholics away.

P.S. A quick reminder to readers that if you want to follow previous postings on a particular topic--e.g., Cardinal Francis George--you can click on the tags beneath a posting, and you'll then see a list of all previous postings that use that particular tag.

The graphic is Malaysian artist Hanna Varghese's depiction of the traditional Christian iconographic theme of the good shepherd.

John Allen on Cardinal George as U.S. Bishops' Thinker-in-Chief: Eugene Kennedy Responds (Say Whaaa?!)

Yesterday, I noted a lecture that the outgoing president of the U.S. Catholic Bishops' Conference, Cardinal Francis George, gave in December at Boston College.  As I indicated, in his remarks at Boston College, George stated that supporters of same-sex unions have "lost touch" with humanity.  

In his defense of "traditional" marriage at Boston College, George also advanced an essentialist argument long promoted by defenders of any "tradition" that is under new scrutiny due to moral shifts in the surrounding culture.  The essentialist argument seeks to maintain that the "traditional" institution or practice it's defending has always been this way, and any attempt to change it, as we reframe our understanding of the institution or practice in light of broad cultural shifts, tampers dangerously with tradition and introduces social chaos.

George told his Boston College audience that "traditional" marriage has always been as it now is, since both Mother Church and Mother Nature set it up to function as it has always functioned.  And so "no one has the right to change marriage"--neither the church nor the state.

What these essentialist arguments conveniently overlook, of course, is the way in which all historical institutions--marriage included--evolve over the course of history, in response to one cultural shift after another.  And so the face of "traditional" marriage at one point in history is entirely different from that at another point in history.

What was "traditional" for marriage in the patriarchal period of Judaism, for instance, is hardly traditional today.  The fathers and mothers of faith in the Jewish community, whom Christians also revere as the founders of their faith, practiced polygamy for generations.  The earliest texts of the Jewish scriptures take polygamous marriage for granted as "traditional," and their procreative ethic--be fruitful and multiply--is premised on the right of one man to take many wives in order to beget as many heirs as possible.

Within the Christian context, marriage was not even regarded as a matter of ritual concern for centuries.  For centuries of Christian history, people married as they had traditionally done--by entering legally sanctioned contracts within the civil society.  The sacrament of marriage is the last sacrament of all to be incorporated into the canon of sacraments.  And the understanding of marriage that the sacramental notion of marriage enshrines in the Catholic church is largely the cultural one of Graeco-Roman civilization, baptized as a Christian practice in the sacramental ritual.

Even more to the point: Cardinal George's essentialist argument for "traditional" marriage pays no attention at all to the fact that little more than a half century ago, his very argument--marriage has always been this way; no one has any right to tamper with what God and nature have set up--was loudly promoted by those opposing interracial marriage.  Who maintained that permitting people of different races to marry interfered with God's divine plan, evident in nature itself and reinforced by scripture and tradition, to separate the races.  Why did God place people of color in one part of the globe and Caucasians in another, these traditionalists argued, if He wanted the races to mix?

And here's what I'm driving at with this analysis of Cardinal Francis George's recent comments about traditional marriage: these are hardly stellar intellectual musings on the complex subject of what has constituted marriage over the course of history, of what is at the very heart of marriage, of how cultural shifts that allow us to view some traditional practices as morally dubious shift our understanding of those practices, etc.  These are not careful, thoughtful responses to a cultural shift in which key issues of justice and human rights are at stake--a cultural shift that demands a thoughtful and respectful response from Christian leaders, no matter which side the church eventually chooses to take.

And because I have never found the previous leader of the U.S. bishops to be a compelling thinker who engages difficult ideas carefully, and who encourages his brother bishops to be thoughtful men engaged in respectful dialogue with lay Catholics and the culture at large, I was surprised, to say the least, to read John Allen's interview with George a week ago, anointing George the "thinker-in-chief" of the U.S. bishops.

And because I think Allen is full of . . . blarney . . . as he does one somersault after another to  try to turn mediocre thinkers and shepherds of the flock into intellectual and pastoral giants, I'm delighted to read Eugene Kennedy's current rejoinder to Allen in NCR.  Even if Kennedy had to break his new year's resolution to be nice to bishops.  A resolution I myself didn't make this year.

My Real Rights Trump Your Alleged Rights: Catholic Officials Keep Appealing to Religious Freedom While Urging Discrimination

In several postings as the new year began, I predicted that we'd see much more of what I regard as a subject-changing rhetorical ploy of Catholic officials today: when the subject needs to be, as Nicole Sotelo argues, an honest and effective engagement of the longstanding cover-up of cases of clerical abuse by members of the Catholic hierarchy, the issue that the top Catholic leaders want to press today is the issue of religious freedom, instead.  With the attendant claim that the Catholic church is under attack by those who do not want to respect its right to religious liberty, and who do not recognize that religious freedom is the fundamental right on which all other human rights depend.

As I noted in my 4 January posting to which the first link above points, Cardinal Pell of Australia has already pointed this religious freedom rhetoric (which emanates from the pope himself) in the direction of gay and lesbian human beings, with the astonishing claim that, in attacking the right of gay and lesbian persons to marry, the Catholic church is defending and promoting human rights.  That is, it's defending and promoting its own "right" to discriminate against others in the name of religious belief.  My posting about Cardinal Pell's recent statements predicts that we will hear this rhetoric coming frequently from Catholic pastoral officials in the coming year, as an institution whose leaders have victimized and re-victimized those who suffered clerical sexual abuse as children seeks to portray itself as the real victim.

Unfortunately, this prediction appears to be right on track.  On Monday, Pope Benedict met with diplomats from around the world, and once again, in his "State of the World" address to these dignitaries, he made religious freedom the topic of conversation.   And in his remarks on this occasion, Benedict pointed the rhetoric of religious freedom squarely in the direction of gay and lesbian persons, just as Cardinal Pell did in his similar statements discussed at the link above.

The pope specifically decried sex education programs that, he maintains, want to "mandate obligatory participation in courses of sexual or civic education" with content opposed to Catholic teaching. As Cindy Wooden notes in the Catholic News Service report about this address to which I've just linked, these remarks clearly pertain to a controversy now occurring in Spain, where some parents are objecting to sex education programs in Spanish schools that teach teach students about homosexuality as a natural manifestation of human sexuality, and do not condemn this orientation as they teach about it.  

Benedict inveighed against "alleged new rights which, while actively promoted by certain sectors of society and inserted in national legislation or in international directives, are nonetheless merely an expression of selfish desires lacking a foundation in authentic human nature." As the CNS report cited above notes, in case listeners did not understand where Benedict intended to go with this denunciation of "alleged rights," the papal press secretary Father Frederico Lombardi helpfully glossed the comments in a CNS interview with the observation that the "alleged new rights" the pope is attacking are the right of homosexuals to marry or adopt children.

And so with Benedict's recent "State of the World" address, we're back on the same page we found ourselves on as the year began, with Cardinal Pell's mystifying insistence that, in attacking the human rights of gay and lesbian persons, the Catholic church is actually defending human rights.  My real right trumps your bogus right.  My right to believe as I want, and to use my belief to block your human rights, trumps your "selfish" and "alleged" right to share in the full range of rights accorded to all other human beings simply because they are human.

As I say, we can look for much more of this rhetoric to come from Catholic pastoral officials this year.  Already, Mexican Archbishop Jose Martin Rabago has echoed Benedict's World Peace Day statements about religious freedom as the core human right by observing this week that religious freedom is the foundation of all other human rights.  And, precisely as Benedict does in his address to world diplomats, Archbishop Rabago goes on to apply this alleged fundamental right to the question of education, insisting that parents have a right to control what their children are taught in schools.  Irish Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has also recently used the religious freedom meme to argue for the freedom of parents to control the education of their children in schools, though I do not find news reports indicating that Archbishop Martin oriented his remarks against sex education or education that teaches children to respect those who are gay and lesbian. 

Not surprisingly, 2011 is already shaping up to be  a year of stepped-up attack by Catholic pastoral officials on the "alleged" human rights of gay and lesbian human beings.  I say "not surprisingly" for two reasons.  The first is that Catholic officials have no option except to step up their attack on the gay and lesbian community, as society at large increasingly recognizes the humanity and human rights of LGBT persons.  That is, Catholic officials have no option except to enhance the attack as long as those officials continue to make blocking the human rights of LGBT persons at every turn a key priority of the Catholic church today.  The more the culture at large begins to view gay and lesbian human beings as human, with human rights, the more the church is locked into a tragic cycle of vicious anti-gay attacks, insofar as it is determined to resist this cultural trend.

Second, Catholic pastoral officials have no option except to keep trying to change the subject, because the real subject that these pastoral leaders need to discuss is their own horrendous malfeasance in the abuse cover-up.  And they adamantly do not intend to discuss that subject.  The issue of religious freedom, the claim that the church is under attack, and the diversionary attack on gay and lesbian human beings (and on women) are all aspects of a rhetorical ploy designed to change the subject, to divert attention from the malfeasance of Catholic pastoral leaders in the abuse crisis.

We can definitely look for more of this rhetoric in the American Catholic context.  As Chuck Colbert reports at Huffington Post, in December, the outgoing president of the U.S. Catholic bishops' conference, Cardinal Francis George, spoke at Boston College.  When questioned by a BC graduate student about his opposition to the right of civil marriage for gay and lesbian couples, Cardinal George stated that those who support same-sex marriage have "lost touch" with the human race.

Cardinal George bases this rather dangerous and incendiary remark (since stating that members of a minority community have "lost touch" with humanity opens the door to dehumanization of and violence against that community) on the claim that nature clearly points to one and only one framework for understanding marriage: a heterosexual procreative one.  And yet as my critique of the recent defense of this "traditional" view of marriage by Boston College professor Susan Meld Shell notes, at the same time that Catholic officials and their supporters like Shell argue that gay and lesbian persons should be excluded from marriage because they cannot procreate, advocates of traditional marriage do not call for the exclusion of heterosexual couples incapable of procreation from marriage.  Nor are they arguing that a commitment to procreate ought to be a precondition for heterosexual marriage.

As my critique of Shell (and my ongoing critique of those in the Catholic intellectual and media center who similarly argue that gay and lesbian persons should be excluded from marriage, while they also argue for the right of heterosexual married Catholics to choose when or if they will procreate) maintains, it is inconsistent--and exceptionally unjust--to argue for a right for one's own group, or for the dominant group in a social setting, while one simultaneously supports the exclusion of another group, a minority group, from that right.  Using precisely the same norm one wishes to use to support one's own right to observe a norm like procreation selectively . . . .

Interestingly enough, Professor Shell's (married heterosexual) colleague who tags my argument "weak" notes that one can argue for the "traditional" model of marriage while leaving the door open for heterosexual couples who cannot or do not wish to procreate to adopt children.  (This critique is in the italicized preface of the posting to which I've just linked.)  I say that this is an interesting admission, because the professor offering this analysis does not seem to recognize that it actually strengthens my own argument, not his and Professor Shell's against same-sex marriage.

On what rational grounds could one possibly maintain that same-sex couples should be denied the right to marry if one maintains that non-procreative heterosexual couples should have that right, and may express their generativity by adopting?  If the only difference between a non-procreative couple who adopt children and a same-sex couple who do so is the gender of the spouses, then on what rational and fair basis is one arguing that the former couple should be permitted to marry, while the latter should not be permitted to marry?  The argument is not really about procreation at all, is it?  It's really about the gender of those who should be permitted to marry, about the kind of gendered couples we will permit to call themselves married.  And so it's ultimately about the sexual orientation of those seeking marriage, though this bias is not acknowledged as we talk about who is natural and who has lost touch with the human race.

The kind of argument from nature promoted by Cardinal George in his Boston College remarks, and implicitly by Boston College professor Susan Meld Shell, builds unacknowledged, unexamined prejudice right into its foundations.  When heterosexual married couples have for decades been exercising their right to curb and plan their procreation using artificial contraception, one cannot credibly maintain that same-sex marriage is a huge threat since it will inhibit or threaten heterosexual procreation.  Same-sex marriage has not even been on the cultural horizon for most of the period in which heterosexual control of procreation has become the norm in developed nations.  It is still not permitted in many places in the developed world, even as heterosexual couples in overwhelming numbers choose when, how, and whether to have children.  Gay marriage has not caused and will not cause the limitation of procreation that heterosexual couples themselves are choosing, due to the availability of various techniques to control procreation at this point in history.

And when those arguing for the exclusion of gay and lesbian couples from the right to marry because same-sex marriage is unnatural and a threat to traditional marriage simultaneously support the right to limitation of procreation among heterosexual couples, as leading voices of the American Catholic intellectual and media elite do--that is, when they argue for a right for themselves that they simultaneously seek to deny to those who are gay on grounds of "nature" or tradition--then there's a strong if unacknowledged question of justice on the table.  And no amount of rhetoric about the "alleged" human rights of gay and lesbian persons, or the alleged selfishness of gay human beings, or the way in which those who are gay have "lost touch" with the human race, is going to make that question go away.

Addendum, 14.1.2011: My apologies to Nicole Sotelo for misspelling her name in the preceding posting.  As I re-read her NCR article today, I noticed I had transposed the t and the l in her name, and have now corrected the mistake.  And it occurred to me to check past postings in which I had mentioned this outstanding journalist at NCR, and I found that I had misspelled her name twice previously.  All of those misspellings are now corrected.  Please let me know, readers, of any misspellings at all (or other errors) you spot in my postings--I'm grateful for such information.

Illinois Senate Passes Civil Unions, Despite Cardinal George's Opposition

An update to the story about which I posted two days ago: the outspoken opposition of the Illinois Catholic Conference to a bill for same-sex civil unions in that state.  As I noted in a subsequent posting, the bill passed the Illinois House and was then presented to the Senate.

Yesterday, the Illinois Senate voted in favor of the bill.  It will now go to Gov. Quinn, who is expected to sign it.  

As Christopher Wills and Carla K. Johnson note in the TPM article to which I've just linked, the outgoing president of the U.S. Catholic Bishops' Conference Cardinal Francis George fought hard against this civil unions bill, though some members of the Catholic hierarchy have sought to claim that they're not opposed to civil unions for gay couples--only to gay marriage.  Since lack of legal recognition exposes gay couples in long-term committed relationships to discrimination, and has negative consequences for any children they might have, in opposing civil unions for gay and lesbian couples, bishops are actually promoting discrimination.

As the Chicago Tribune notes, the bill gives gay couples "the chance to enjoy several of the same rights as married couples, ranging from legal rights on probate matters to visiting a partner in a hospital that won’t allow anyone but relatives into a patient’s room."  

This is what Catholic pastors like Cardinal George are opposing, then: the right of one member of a gay couple to visit his or her dying partner in the hospital.  By defending cruel injustice and discrimination, the outgoing president of the USCCB is making mincemeat of the magisterium's claim to stand against all forms of unjust discrimination, and for human rights for every human being.  This is, of course, why younger Catholics are walking away from the church in droves at this point in its history.

Robert McClory on the Anti-Gospel of Catholic Leaders, and Exodus from Catholic Church

In Chicago Catholic News, Robert McClory, professor emeritus of Northwestern School of Journalism, writes in response to Cardinal Francis George's assertion that one in three American adults raised Catholic has left the church due to secularization.  For McClory, that's a far too simplistic answer to the mass exodus.  It's also one that lets George himself and his brother bishops off the hook.

Here's McClory's analysis:

What George does not acknowledge is that for many who have fled, perhaps the majority in the last 10 years, the Catholic Church was abandoned because of the Church. An all-too-pervasive anti-gospel has compelled people to leave their Catholic heritage, not to embrace secularism or self-sufficiency but to find some peace of mind.

What is this anti-gospel? It is the persistent priest abuse scandal that drains respect for Church authority even as it keeps bubbling up all over the world. It is the shameful failure of the pope and bishops to take control of the scandal in its early manifestations and in many cases to spread the contagion by transferring offending priests over and over into sensitive situations. It is the fact that many self-protecting bishops to this day have not been removed from their positions, have not offered contrition or done penance and remain in their cathedrals living as if nothing had happened, while their dioceses dry up and go bankrupt. It is the rigidity of an institution which relies on its naked authority to pronounce final judgment on so many critical moral issues that deserve at least a hearing, an institution that repeatedly denies the sense of the faithful has any validity in this day and age. It is the clericalism of those priests and bishops who lord it over their flocks and require the higher seats on every occasion. Finally, the anti-gospel is the ongoing effort to convince Catholics that the Second Vatican Council changed nothing and that the spirit of that council is a dangerous illusion that must be dispelled.

The behavior of the pastoral leaders of the Catholic church has become, today, for many of us a counter-sign to the gospel the church itself proclaims.  It is precisely our belief in what the church has taught us that forces us to distance ourselves from what these men have made (and continue to make) of the Catholic church. 

And when they've behaved without a scrap of moral integrity in addressing the abuse situation, the bishops of Illinois and Minnesota and other places think that they can retrieve respect and bring Catholics back into the fold by attacking their gay brothers and sisters?  What gospels do these men of God read daily?