Mothers' Day: Catholic Bishops Would Be Better Fathers If They Acted Like Good Mothers

As Mothers' Day arrives in many parts of the world, I'm thinking back to the following posting that I wrote in May 2009. It still seems pertinent to me, with its arguments that the bishops of the Catholic church would be far better bishops if they acted more like good mothers and less like bad fathers.  Here it is (with Mothers' Day wishes to readers):

After I posted yesterday about the inability of the U.S. Catholic bishops to convince either Catholics or society at large about their interpretation of what respect for life entails, my friend and fellow-blogger Colleen Kochivar-Baker left a comment. Colleen notes that my posting dovetailed with what she posted on her Enlightened Catholicism blog the same day.


Colleen’s posting focuses on the homily Pope Benedict gave this past Sunday at a Mass in Jordan. And she is absolutely right: her critique of that homily dovetails in a remarkable way with my analysis of why the U.S. bishops are failing to convince either their co-religionists or the wider public that the Catholic church really means what it teaches about the value of life.

Colleen notes that Benedict’s homily follows a well-trodden path in speaking of male-female complementarity and the “special” vocation of women. As Colleen notes, Benedict has been emphasizing this theme for some time now: in 2004, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the then Cardinal Ratzinger issued a “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World.”

That document enunciates the same themes Benedict highlighted this past Sunday: e.g., that women have a “particular dignity, vocation and mission” in church and world, a mission centered on “building peace and fostering love.” Benedict speaks of women as “bearers of love, teachers of mercy and artisans of peace, bringing warmth and humanity to a world that all too often judges the value of a person by the cold criteria of usefulness and profit.”

Benedict bases his theory of male-female complementarity in part on the Genesis creation narratives. But as Colleen notes, Benedict’s understanding of those narratives seems not to be informed by sound exegetical research, since

[w]hat Benedict usually leaves out in his references to Genesis is that biblical scholars see the first chapter of Genesis describing the creation of ha adam out of adamah. That is creating an 'earthling' (ha adam), from earth (adamah). There is no gender definition implied in the original Hebrew.

The Hebrew in which the Genesis creation narratives are written implies that God creates humanity first and foremost. The distinction of human being into gender is a secondary moment in the creation process. The calling to be human—fully human—transcends any biological calling to be male or female.

This is not merely a niggling observation about the need for exegetical accuracy as we interpret the bible. It is a profoundly important observation about what being human is all about, in the mind of the author(s) of the Genesis creation narratives. If we are called by these narratives to live our lives according to some divine purpose implanted in us by virtue of creation, that purpose is first and foremost about being a human being—a human being made in God’s image. It is only secondarily (and tangentially) about being a man or a woman.

In elevating the male-female distinction to the level of God’s divine plan for human beings and arguing that these stories lay down separate biologically-grounded roles for men and women, Benedict and many other Christians today are missing the point: they are turning into an idol something in the text that was not meant to have divine status. They are reading biological imperatives as divine commands, which then translate into commands about gender roles for faithful men and women.

There is no gender definition implied in the original Hebrew: Colleen’s analysis of the story is absolutely correct here. There is no gender definition implied, and to the extent that we now read these stories as stories about male-female complementarity (and separate male-female gender roles), we’re misinterpreting them by imposing on them preoccupations that were not part of the worldview of the authors of the text.

And how does this insight dovetail with what I posted yesterday? In yesterday’s posting, I argued that the U.S. Catholic bishops have failed to convince many of us with their ethic of life, because they ground that ethic in paternalistic example and a paternalistic worldview. I argued that to be convincing about life, the bishops would have to do what seems not to come naturally to them these days: they’d have to act maternal for a change.

They’d have to think like mothers. They’d have to think like what they keep insisting the church is to all of us, a mother. They’d have to start wrapping their arms around the world the way God does in the very first image of God we meet in scripture, in those very same Genesis creation stories, which speak of God creating the world by folding matter under her divine wings and brooding over it until it comes to life.

To convince us about life, the men wearing bright robes while brandishing big croziers need to begin acting like good mothers. As I wrote, if the bishops want to be convincing when they talk about life, they need to cultivate the maternal virtues that, as Benedict’s homily last Sunday rightly notes, are central to any profound ethic of life.

They’d need to begin nurturing the young and the weak, healing the sick, tending the earth and making it flourish, creating a safe and welcoming space for others, building a community of homes in which everyone has welcome places throughout the land. They’d need to start doing these things themselves and stop relegating them to some woman somewhere, or any woman anywhere (the paternalistic rhetoric of the magisterium assumes women are objects, generic care-providing things).

That noble-sounding rhetoric of the magisterium re: male-female complementarity and the “particular dignity and vocation” of women is a trap and a cop-out. It’s a trap for women and a cop-out for men. It entraps women because it allows men all over the globe to slough off responsibility to do what women are always expected to do and men need to do: care for the young and the elderly and the weak, cherish the earth and make it flourish, build welcoming homes across the globe, nurse the sick. The paternalistic rhetoric of male-female complementarity is a cop-out for men because it lets men off the hook when such necessary human tasks arise. It allows men to relegate the most significant tasks in the world to some woman somewhere, who is not even respected as she undertakes these tasks, and is regarded as interchangeable with all women in the rhetoric of paternalism.

Benedict's reading of Genesis allows men to be not who they were meant to be—full human beings capable of a wide range of emotions and responsibilities—but less human. Benedict twists Genesis to permit men to become something they were never meant to be, half-human beings with no instinct for care, nurture, tenderness. In being paternal without being maternal, in fulfilling their “God-given” role as real men, men end up being stunted human beings, even as men profess to be the lords and masters of creation under the divine imperative of Genesis.

Human beings who do not aim at being fully developed humans, who combine in their persons and lives male-female tasks, are incapable of effective leadership of communities of care centered on an ethic of respect for life. The bishops cannot and never will obtain buy-in for their life ethic until they begin to show that they themselves take the ethic of life seriously, in all its ramifications. As a start, they could begin to listen, for instance, as mothers listen carefully to their children, to hear the words inside the spoken words, the cries of the speaking heart hidden in the words.

One of the supremely ironic effects of the current papal regime’s call for a purge of gays in the priesthood and in seminaries is that this purge is likely to weed out precisely those men in ministry most competent at modeling the gender-complementarity that should be the goal of any balanced human psyche, and, in particular, of the psyche of any human being in ministry. The church’s current ugly, preposterous attempt to convince us that the only good priest is a manly man—a man modeling a macho, swaggering maleness that demeans women—will eventually starve the priesthood of candidates most gifted for pastoral ministry.

And it will also eventually undermine the church’s teaching about respect for life even more profoundly than it has already been undermined by a generation of bishops who have unthinkingly bought into the rhetoric of gender complementarity with its attendant presuppositions of the male's obligation to dominate and the female's calling to submit. If the bishops ever want to convince us that they really do respect life—all life, from cradle to grave—then they need to drop the act of the domineering papa and the gay-bashing that goes with that act, and act like good mothers for a change.

Attacks on Planned Parenthood Continue to Raise Questions about Goals of Pro-Life Movement

When I've blogged about Planned Parenthood (most recently here), I've noted that, for me as a Catholic, one of the overriding moral issues to be taken into consideration as proposals are made to cut funding for this organization is that it provides essential health care services to economically struggling women throughout the U.S.  And I've questioned whether one can have bona fide pro-life intent if one claims that Planned Parenthood should be shut down because it provides abortions, while the large majority of the services the organization offers are much-needed health care services for poor women.

The drive of the religious and political right to defund Planned Parenthood (which does not use tax dollars to support abortions, since it's forbidden by law to do so) remains in the news these days, as Indiana governor Mitch Daniels announces that he will sign legislation to cut all funding for the organization in his state.  Daniels' announcement has taken political observers by surprise, since Daniels had previously made noises about the need of the Republican party to stop pushing culture war issues, and had received praise in the Beltway echo chamber for making these noises.

Daniels' "moderation" on social issues had made him appear to many Beltway observers to be a viable, credible GOP presidential candidate.  And it now appears his decision to go after Planned Parenthood may well be part of a strategy to position himself as a presidential candidate by enhancing his cred with the the religious right faction of the Republican party, which has decisive power in making or breaking a potential GOP candidate.

Indiana is not the only state considering action to defund Planned Parenthood.  As Laurie Basset reports today at Huffington Post, in Oklahoma, Republican state legislator Jason Murphey is seeking to amend a nutrition bill so that no independent contractors can administer the state's WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) program.  Among the groups in Oklahoma distributing WIC vouchers, which provide food, nutrition education, and regular check-ups for mothers of small children and pregnant women, is Planned Parenthood of Tulsa.

This particular branch of Planned Parenthood does not even provide abortions.  Planned Parenthood of Tulsa provides essential health care for more than 3,535 women, infants and children yearly.  In addition to distributing WIC vouchers, the clinics of this Planned Parenthood group provide about 8,600 prenatal visits a year for poor mothers, and 5,600 pediatric visits a year for their children.

And so, in my view, what's happening in Oklahoma provides an instructive example of the moral incoherence about which I've been blogging as I look at the drive to defund Planned Parenthood: in the name of serving the values of life, of preserving life, influential political leaders are willing to remove food from the mouths of poor children and their mothers, and to block health care services that these mothers and children receive from no other organization.  To make a pro-life point.

Something is morally awry with the pro-life movement, when it arrives at this point.  Or so it seems to me.

Weekend News Round-Up: Continued Discussion of Planned Parenthood

 

As anyone reading the U.S. news in recent days will know, the organization Planned Parenthood has remained in the news as the Republicans in Congress tacked a tea party-driven rider onto the negotiations about the federal budget, in a last-ditch effort to defund this organization that provides much-needed services to low-income women throughout the U.S.  I blogged some weeks back about this Republican initiative, and the disinformation (Planned Parenthood is predominantly about abortion, federal tax dollars go to the organization to pay for abortions, etc.) being used to garner support for the initiative among pro-life people of faith.   

As I noted, in my view, any reasonable and sustained pro-life ethic seems to me to demand that one do all one can to provide much-needed medical services to economically marginal women who are unlikely to have access to those services if Planned Parenthood funding is cut off.  And the vast bulk of Planned Parenthood's work is not the provision of abortion, but of other desperately-needed medical services.  Largely to poor women.

Some interesting commentary/news items that bring this story up to date, as the budget deal is made and the attempt to yank funding from Planned Parenthood fails--for now:

Lawrence O'Donnell comments with conviction at MSNBC on the ethical implications of blocking the access of poor women to Planned Parenthood's medical services, and on the lies being used by the religious and political right to sustain their crusade against Planned Parenthood;

And Senator John Kyl admits he was, well, spectacularly wrong, when he claimed in the debate about defunding Planned Parenthood that "well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does" is to provide abortions;

And, predictably and to his discredit, Michael Sean Winters argues (as well as I can understand) that the Republicans may well be right about Planned Parenthood being mostly about abortion, and the Democrats ought seriously to consider using poor women's access to health care as a bargaining chip, and (by implication) real Catholics like MSW must have "deep reservations" about Planned Parenthood and its "worldview."

Something like that.  Winters is an ardent Democrat.  When he's not.  And when he's not is almost always--and predictably--when he insists that authentic, faithful Catholicism is to be defined as what the Republicans (and bishops in the Republicans' pocket) say and believe on issues of "life" and sexuality.

Whether what the "pro-life" party says has any factual basis or not.  Or much vital connection to Catholic social teaching or not.

In the News: Jamie Manson on Consistent Ethic of Life, Nicholas Cafardi, NCR, and CNS on Philadelphia

From my file of articles published in the last several days that I find well worth reading:

Jamie Manson at National Catholic Reporter, commenting on the damning irony of some Catholics' wish both to curb abortions and to cut social support services that help economically distressed women choose some option other than abortion, in crisis situations:

The greatest irony, of course, is that many of the loudest voices crying out in horror at the high abortion rate are also the strongest voices proposing severe cut backs in entitlement programs -- not to mention union busting and tax cuts for the wealthiest.

Nicholas Cafardi at Commonweal, surveying the situation in Philadelphia and noting its implications for those who now argue that the zero-tolerance policy of the Dallas charter is unfair:

What was wrong with the Philadelphia review board and the bishops who signed off on their decisions? Who instructed board members on the standard of proof? The fact that bishops approved the board’s mistaken recommendations doesn’t mean they committed a crime. The grand jury would have indicted those bishops if it had come to that conclusion. Still, their failures ought to give pause to critics of zero tolerance. As should the admitted failure of Cardinal Francis George, who—three years after lobbying for zero tolerance in Dallas—refused the advice of his own review board and allowed an abusive priest to remain in ministry. Until there are no more Bostons, no more Philadelphias, no more Chicagos, any talk of softening zero tolerance remains premature. Without that policy, we’d be asked simply to trust such bishops’ judgment. As any Philadelphia parent would ask, Why should we?

And, finally, staff of NCR and Catholic News Service writing at NCR about how the Philadelphia situation calls into question the bishops' reporting system:

Asked what Rigali’s move might reveal of how sex abuse allegations are being treated in other dioceses, [Terence] McKiernan [of BishopAccountability] said “we have no reason to think that Philadelphia is unusual in all this.”

Said McKiernan: “No doubt there are priests who remain in ministry in other dioceses and no doubt review boards there are doing pretty much what they did in Philadelphia, which is protect priests in the system instead of protecting the children.”

It's going to be a long Lent, indeed.  The question I'm wondering about: how many Catholics will be using this period of prayer, reflection, and penance to begin understanding and taking responsibility for the mess that their church has become?  In 2002, we could perhaps validly say that the bishops were primarily responsible for the mess.

It's now 2011, and we're way too far down the road to say that we haven't known all along what most bishops are capable of, when it comes to truth-telling (or its opposite), scapegoating and diversionary tactics, and downright ethical sliminess.  We're now responsible, if we permit ourselves to continue to be made fools of.  

And it's our church every bit as much as it is theirs.  We provide the money that oils and fuels the machine.  If we expect any kind of machinery at all to remain functioning in the years ahead, we're going to have to start thinking long and hard about our ownership of the machine.  And our responsibility to clean up the mess.

Because the bishops aren't going to get their hands dirty.  That is, not any dirtier than we keep finding out their hands have already gotten.

Commentary on Assault on Planned Parenthood: "War on Women" Targeting Poor Women

As a follow-up to what I posted a few days ago about Planned Parenthood (a posting that has elicited quite a bit of commentary, suggesting the strong divide that runs through many faith communities today, including the Catholic church, about "pro-life" issues): I'd like to draw attention to several significant statements of the past day or so.

First Jason Linkins and Kevin Bunkley note at Huffington Post how the assault on Planned Parenthood is part of a much larger assault on women's reproductive rights and on health services--contraceptive ones, iamong others--for low-income women throughout the nation.  It's going on everywhere, both at the federal level and in statehouses across the U.S.  And it's part of a concerted effort to turn the clock back vis-a-vis women's access to birth control, in which poor women are being asked to bear the brunt of the socially regressive attack.

In its editorial today on this issue, the New York Times characterizes what is taking place as a "war on women," stating,

Republicans in the House of Representatives are mounting an assault on women’s health and freedom that would deny millions of women access to affordable contraception and life-saving cancer screenings and cut nutritional support for millions of newborn babies in struggling families. And this is just the beginning. 

As the Times editorial points out, the bill that would slash funding for Planned Parenthood also seeks to eliminate support for Title X's federal program providing birth control, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and HIV testing to low-income women.  The bill also seeks to restrict family planning and reproductive health care overseas, where U.S. dollars are spent to provide health services in other nations.  The "pro-life" legislators sponsoring the attack on Planned Parenthood also want to cut nutritional programs serving millions of  low-income women and children, along with programs providing prenatal health care to poor women.

Ryan Grim does a good job at Huffington Post of showing how the religious and political right have ginned up support for the attack on Planned Parenthood by disseminating absurd disinformation to religious groups exercised about abortion (e.g., "Your tax dollars support abortions through Planned Parenthood") and through Lila Rose's doctored, misleading, downright mendacious videos seeking to depict Planned Parenthood as a corrupt organization. 

As Charles Blow points out in New York Times, this bogus moral crusade, which is so deeply anti-life rather than pro-life in key respects, has significant moral implications: while pretending to care intently about pre-born life, those promoting this legislation are exceptionally callous about the quality of life of those already born, particularly when babies are born to economically struggling mothers.  Blow's moral conclusion:

It is savagely immoral and profoundly inconsistent to insist that women endure unwanted — and in some cases dangerous — pregnancies for the sake of “unborn children,” then eliminate financing designed to prevent those children from being delivered prematurely, rendering them the most fragile and vulnerable of newborns. How is this humane?

And as Jonathan Bernstein suggests at his Plain Blog two days ago, the reason we--the reason the American people--are sitting ducks for this kind of savage pseudo-moral and pseudo pro-life crusade is that we are simply ill-informed, most of us.  We let ourselves be twisted and turned hither and yon by ideologues who feed us a steady diet of disinformation.  In our faith communities, many of us are bombarded by a constant stream of lurid misrepresentations of facts about abortion, about what is known scientifically regarding fetal development, and so forth.

Those lurid misrepresentations, packaged as pious concern for unborn babies, cause us to leap onto a "pro-life" bandwagon that, in key respects, has nothing at all to do with respect for the sanctity of life, and, indeed, is callously indifferent to the value of life in almost any arena outside the abortion arena.  And so we become willing tools in political battles that have nothing at all to do with creating a culture of respect for life, and everything to do with partisan politics and with the determination of the ideologues using faith communities in partisan political battles to serve the interests of a single political party.

For Catholics, an important question to ask is this: Are the U.S. bishops capable of using rhetoric about abortion to serve political ends that have little or nothing to do with respect for life?  If the answer to that question might be yes--if there are plausible reasons to suggest that the bishops' concern for pre-born life is in any way overlaid with political goals and political intent that have little to do with respect for life--then perhaps we'd be better off stepping back a moment from the overheated rhetoric and analyzing what the bishops are asking us to do.  And why they're constantly nudging us onto the front lines of the abortion war.

And whether they have any compelling status now as moral teachers, given their performance with the abuse crisis.  It's time we shook off our slumber and became better educated, many of us--if, that is, we really care about respect for life in all its manifold ramifications, in our culture.  Attacking poor women and their children in the name of preserving the sanctity of life is morally heinous.

To do better, we need to learn better.

Standing with Planned Parenthood: Why I Signed the Petition

 

A good e-friend of mine, whose insights I respect, has asked me how I can be Catholic and sign a petition stating that I stand with Planned Parenthood, as a group of federal legislators seek to remove all federal funding from that organization.  This is a valid question, and I'd like to try to answer it in this public forum, where others might benefit from this dialogue between two Catholics with a different perspective about Planned Parenthood.

Here are my reasons for signing the petition, for what they're worth:

1. I signed after another e-friend whom I also respect--and who is also a Catholic and a faithful and practicing one--signed the petition and then sent me a link to it.  Like me, this e-friend has an academic background in theology.  She has a degree in ministry from a Catholic university, in fact.  And unlike me, she's a highly engaged, practicing Catholic who hasn't let herself be shoved beyond the margins (as I find myself).  Because I respect her, and because loyalty to friends counts pretty high in my list of virtues, I was happy to stand in solidarity with her when she invited me to sign this petition.

2. Shutting Planned Parenthood down (and that is surely the goal of withdrawing federal funding from it) will harm many people who have few avenues of access to the many valuable services Planned Parenthood provides in addition to abortions.  Many of these are low-income women who need the reproductive planning services of Planned Parenthood, prenatal care, and other valuable medical services provided by the organization.

It strikes me as cruel and immoral to try to prevent the access of those who need Planned Parenthood's services to those services.  It is particularly cruel and immoral to block the access of economically deprived people to much-needed medical services, including services that help poor women carry a healthy baby to term.

3. Though those spearheading the movement to shut Planned Parenthood down keep claiming that federal funds support abortions provided by this organization, that is not the case.  In my view, many of those circulating this disinformation know they are circulating erroneous information.  They are, not to put a fine point on it, lying.

I have been told--and if I am wrong in thinking this to be the case, I would like to be corrected--that Planned Parenthood does not even provide abortions in some areas of the country.  Or when it does so in these areas, those services are strictly limited.  Meanwhile, if I am not mistaken, throughout the nation it does provide much-needed health services, including reproductive ones, which are not widely available through many other medical providers, particularly for low-income people.

I think it's important to ask, too, whether all those calling for Planned Parenthood to be shut down because it provides abortions have investigated their own health care plans to see whether their plans are hermetically sealed from all abortion services.  If not, how do they justify having some of their own withheld dollars used to support abortions?  To be consistent, to be purists, should we not examine all of our contributions and tax funding for each and every organization that may in any way support abortions--and then withhold those funds from those organizations?

4. I have long been convinced that it is absurd for Catholics to claim that they seriously oppose abortion and want to diminish abortions, while at the same time they oppose the widespread availability of contraceptives.  And the use of contraceptives by sexually active people including teens who do not wish to have a child or cannot afford to have and care for a child.  It is inconsistent to say, when it comes to abortion, that the value of preserving life trumps everything else, and then to try to put barriers between sexually active people and contraceptives when those who will likely opt for an abortion if their sexual activity results in a pregnancy are denied access to contraception.

As a corollary to this, I will repeat something I've said over and over on this blog: I am not convinced--not at all--that respect for life is the driving force behind the anti-abortion movement of the political and religious right.  I do not see anywhere near a consistent ethic of respect for life in most of the pro-life movement.  I am highly dubious about the movement that calls itself pro-life, and I find I cannot make common cause with most of the pro-life Catholics I know because much of what they stand for in every area except the abortion area is, in my view, not exemplary in its respect for life.  I find much of what many Catholics who call themselves pro-life morally repugnant--precisely because I respect life.

I also think that the U.S. Catholic bishops have made a colossal mistake in putting all of their eggs into the anti-abortion cause of the religious and political right.  Their obsessive focus on this single issue has not resulted in the creation of a credible pluralistic coalition of people around the country intent on respecting life consistently.  Their reliance on a top-down dictatorial style of leadership which forbids discussion of the nuances and complexities of moral issues including abortion does not assist either Catholics or the culture at large to make intelligent decisions and to inform their consciences about these complex issues.  The result is that the Catholic pro-life movement has marginalized itself in the public square and can exercise influence only by trying to coerce legislators behind the scenes to do the bishops' bidding--as if the bishops are little lords in the land who should have the right to cross the church-state line by pulling political strings in back-room deals.

5. Planned Parenthood first came on my own radar screen in the following way, and this is part of the story of why I am happy to support this particular petition to stand with Planned Parenthood.  At the Catholic college in North Carolina at which I received an unexplained terminal contract some years ago, ending my career as a Catholic theologian, the student newspaper published an ad for Planned Parenthood not too long before I received the terminal contract.

The editor of the newspaper at that time was a theology major.  She did not ask me about placing this ad in the paper.  She did not tell me she intended to place it in the paper.  Nonetheless, because she was a theology major and I was chair of that department, some of the monks who owned this college and some faculty members who had been intent on seeing me fired because they opposed the theology of Vatican II (and, in truth, because I was not a right-wing Republican like them) accused me of nudging this theology major to place the Planned Parenthood ad in the student paper.

The student did come and talk to me after the ad was published and the blowback--which was fierce and exceptionally mean-spirited--began.  She did so because she was personally hurt, and deeply so, by the blowback.  Though her family had been close to the monastery that owned the college, she found herself shunned and disinvited from dinners the abbot held during this tense semester to "unite" the college.  (I was not ever invited to any of these "uniting" dinners, either.)  Faculty members did not hesitate to say slanderous and ugly things about her in class.  When her dorm room had a plumbing problem causing the toilet to back up, the maintenance staff would not fix the problem after repeated requests.

She left the school at the end of the semester, and who can blame her?  This young woman's mother was a former nun.  She came from an exemplary Catholic family.  She told me that the had placed the Planned Parenthood ad in the paper because she herself knew of some five young women at this Catholic campus who had had abortions that semester, and she thought that students should know where to obtain birth control and how to do so.

When the ad appeared, hell broke loose.  There were calls from the bishop's office, screaming at the college's administrators.  The well-organized and well-funded right-wing group of Catholics who have long thought they have unilateral ownership of this school made threats about withdrawing funding.  They also demanded that I be fired--and they evidently did this with the active assistance of the bishop.

Though I had had nothing at all to do with this ad and, in truth, hardly knew who or what Planned Parenthood was at the time, the ad became a convenient excuse to mount an ugly crusade on the campus, in which a number of people were shunned, demonized, attacked, driven away.  And it struck me as interesting to see who led that crusade among the faculty.

Not too long after I received the terminal contract, the abbot held a symbolic, demon-exorcising procession to celebrate the return of the college to orthodoxy.  In this procession, as he held his crozier high, he was accompanied by folks carrying fetal remains to the abbey cemetery to bury.  Lined up behind him was a line of faculty members, all male, all politically arch-conservative, most of whom never set foot in church.  These men had been overjoyed when Anita Hill found herself smeared as a liar during the Clarence Thomas hearings, and when Thomas was confirmed.  When Clinton was elected, they acted as if the world had ended.  The mood in the faculty lounge the day after the election was like the mood at a funeral, whereas it had been like the mood at a party when Thomas was confirmed.

There was, in other words, a clear political context to the "pro-life" movement on this Catholic campus, and it did not take a great deal of insight to see that this particular Catholic pro-life movement was repulsively misogynist and extremely conservative politically.  Those promoting this crusade of respect for fetal life were also bitterly and openly homophobic.  They were, in many cases, racist.  They were crudely heterosexist and determined to maintain this Catholic college as a boys' club welcoming only to them and their kind--though the monastery had, as Benedictine institutions commonly do, a statement over one of its doors stating that every guest must be received as Christ.

This experience is part of what opened my eyes to what the pro-life is really all about, in many Catholic circles.  Since I cannot stand with men like this in their intent to attack women, gays and lesbians, and people of color, or their intent to prevent poor people from having access to medical treatment, I cannot see how I can stand with them when they claim that they are pro-life in opposing abortion.

In my view, much that Planned Parenthood does serves a pro-life ethic, and I am happy to stand with the organization in those areas--even if I do also work for a society in which the choice to have abortions will be less appealing or less necessary for many people.  I find the demonization of Planned Parenthood and the callous crusade to shut down much-needed health services including contraceptive ones by the religious and political right morally repugnant.

Kate Childs Graham on Don't Ask, Don't Tell Policy of Catholic Institutions: Continuing an Important Conversation

Yesterday, I wrote about my experience teaching theology in a Catholic university in the 1980s.  I noted that, like me, every gay or lesbian faculty, staff, or administrative person at the school of which I had any inkling was strictly closeted, as were almost all gay or lesbian students I encountered.  I also stated that there was (and still is, in most Catholic workplaces) no other option for gay faculty, staff, or administrators (and for gay students in a large percentage of Catholic universities).  Though, increasingly, gay and lesbian students at Catholic universities are refusing to live in the closet, and are beginning to challenge the institutionalized homophobia of these universities.

For those interested in following this story up to the present, I recommend Kate Childs Graham's latest piece at National Catholic Reporter on how a don't ask, don't tell policy remains firmly in place in many Catholic parishes and workplaces in the U.S.  Gay and lesbian folks remain closeted in many Catholic workplaces because the reprisal for those who come out of the closet in these workplaces can be swift and painful.  Acknowledging who one is as a gay person, and coming to terms with one's nature as a gift given by God to oneself and the community of faith, can result in the loss of a job, in the loss of health-care coverage, in financial struggles that can even have the ultimate outcome of the loss of one's home.  It can result in the experience of finding oneself slandered, lied about, falsely accused of all kinds of maleficence, and forever blocked as one seeks employment in any other Catholic institution in the future.

Last summer, the Wall Street Journal published an essay which tried to rebut claims that virtually all Catholic colleges and universities in the U.S. have glass ceilings in place in their approach to gay or lesbian faculty, staff, and administrators.  The Wall Street Journal article claims that a number of Catholic universities in the U.S. have openly gay or lesbian people in leadership positions.  

I have seen no evidence at all to confirm this claim.  And those who maintain that they have such evidence are apparently unwilling to disclose it--precisely because, as they indicate, the administrators about whom they're speaking aren't out of the closet at all  in their workplaces.  Gay and lesbian employees at most Catholic workplaces throughout the U.S. remain closeted because they know what the consequences will be if they come out of the closet.  And many people cannot afford to lose their jobs, health-care coverage, houses, etc.

I thought of the preceding Wall Street Journal article, with the disinformation it sought to spread about how gay and lesbian human beings are actually treated in U.S. Catholic colleges and universities, when I read Marci Hamilton's recent essay on how the conservative media suppress (and distort)  information about the abuse crisis in churches.  Hamilton states flatly, 

The Wall Street Journal, FOX News, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity, among others, routinely skew reporting on religious issues, and suppress stories that might put religious leaders in a bad light. As they read this, they are puffing themselves up and declaring that they do no such thing. That would be incorrect.

In the essay published in the Wall Street Journal last summer, and in Kate Childs Graham's recent essay about the hidden but powerfully active DADT policy that requires gay and lesbian persons to remain closeted in Catholic workplaces and many other Catholic institutions including parishes, we have two diametrically opposed pictures of how Catholic institutions in the U.S. today treat those who are gay and lesbian.  One of these, I want to maintain, is an accurate picture based in the real-life experience of a young Catholic journalist who has walked through the fire of discrimination in Catholic institutions.  The other, I would suggest, is spin control offered to us by a conservative journal with a history of suppressing information that is not flattering to various churches, and of distorting its reporting on issues that raise unsettling questions about how various communities of faith deal with those on the margins.

It is all to the good--it is a sign of hope, I think--that a national Catholic publication like NCR has chosen to give a voice to openly gay or lesbian Catholic writers, for the first time in the history of the American Catholic church.  This is a sign of a growing maturity within the church in the U.S.  

There will definitely be fierce pushback as the voice of openly gay and lesbian Catholic journalists, thinkers,  and theologians begins to emerge in the American Catholic church.  If you doubt that, read some of the vicious comments, almost all of them written by that busy reader called "Anonymous" who seems to be everywhere on Catholic blogs, already popping up in response to Graham's essay.  They accuse her of flaunting her sexuality (straight folks never do that, of course), of reducing everything to sexuality, of having nothing to say except gay, gay, gay, of not "fitting into nature."  You name it, and she's guilty of it.*

Yet Kate Childs Graham keeps writing, and Jamie L. Manson keeps writing, even when these tired attempts to shut the conversation down predictably roll forth on many Catholic blogs anytime any of us who happen to be gay or lesbian and Catholic, and who think it's important to discuss these issues honestly, write about our experience as LGBT people in the Catholic context.  And no matter how hard some Catholics work to stop this conversation, or how low they are willing to go with their slurs and insinuations and their conversation-detonating tactics, the conversation is going to continue.  Because it's part of an ongoing, necessary conversation in the culture at large.

And unless the Catholic church is going to find some way to live in a hermetically sealed museum entirely cut off from the world at large, important moral conversations in the secular world will continue to find their way into intraecclesial conversations.  And will keep making us think about what we take for granted, and what seems so clear and so simple to us when we live only in a world defined by narrow Catholic viewpoints and narrow Catholic presuppositions.

*I can easily recognize the dynamics at play here, because I experience them, too, when I contribute to Catholic blog discussions.  Look, for instance, at how two of my Catholic brothers and sisters, Mark and Kathy, seek first to box me in in this discussion, and then, when they imagine they've gotten me to reduce my range of points to a one-note song, how they imagine they can simply dismiss me and the range of points I'm making about how Catholic positions on life issues can't be credible when Catholic people and Catholic institutions treat some real-life human beings with conspicuous lack of respect. 

The name of the game here is to tag someone in a demeaning way ("a practicing homosexual"), while implying that the demeaned person has an "agenda" (being "guaranteed employment" in Catholic institutions).  With the ultimate goal of putting the person raising questions you don't intend to answer and issues you don't intend to discuss out of the conversation.  With the ultimate goal of putting a person you don't intend to respect as a human being in any shape, form, or fashion out of sight and out of mind.  As you go on talking about the need for respect for life in the culture at large.  And about love, communion, salvation, and all kinds of other high-flown theological concepts you don't intend to live, when it comes to some of your own brothers and sisters.

And, of course, the end result of this ugly dynamic that is all about claiming the Catholic church as a purist enclave only for me and my kind and putting everyone else outside is to weaken the very argument that these folks tell us they want to make persuasively in the public square.  Where the lack of respect of some ardent pro-life Catholics for the real human lives of some of their own already-born Catholic brothers and sisters is obvious to many non-Catholics, and where that lack of respect for real human lives calls into question the claim of these pro-life Catholics to be all about respect for life, when it comes to abortion and pre-born human beings.

Birds Fall, Fish Die, and Questions Abound

There's nothing intelligent I know how to say about the recent mysterious events in which some 5,000 red-winged blackbirds fell from the skies on new year's eve in the small town of Beebe, Arkansas, and in which 85,000 drum fish died nearby in the Arkansas River a few days before that.  I have heard or read no plausible explanation for either event, or for connecting the two--though how not to wonder if they're connected, when they occur in places very close to each other at nearly the same time?

And now we read that four species of bumble bees in the U.S. have declined in population by around 96% in recent years.

And it's hard not to receive news of these events without flirting with an apocalyptic framework of interpretation.  It's hard not to see them as canary-in-the-mine events that portend massive ecological disturbance which will soon affect all of us direly, events due to climate change and other ecological imbalances produced by the late-industrial modern period.  

For now, all I can do is record them in my journal like some early medieval monk on the coast of Ireland noting the sighting of a nearby Viking ship, as he transcribes Marcus Aurelius and scribbles poems about the ephemeral beauty of birdsong in the margins of his manuscript.  What rough beast slouches to Bethlehem to be born in 2011, I wonder?

The graphic for this posting is New York artist Ross Bleckner's "Falling Birds.  I haven't been able to ascertain if using this image on a blog requires his permission.  If anyone has information to guide me here, I'd appreciate it.  Meanwhile, I want to give proper credit for the work and to direct readers to Bleckner's website for further information about his work.

Michael Sean Winters on John Boehner as Admirably Pro-Life: No Such Animal

This is exactly what I was talking about in my summary of Charles Curran's analysis of the shift in the U.S. Catholic bishops' position on abortion in the past 40 years: Michael Sean Winters writes yesterday, 

Mr. [John] Bohener is admirably pro-life - although the rest of his policy positions are less admirable.

And I repeat: there is no such animal.  One cannot espouse positions antithetical to the values of life in every other respect, and still be "admirably pro-life" simply because one opposes abortion.  As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing pro-life at all about John Boehner or anything for which Mr. Boehner stands.

The term "admirably pro-life" is an oxymoron, when applied to neo-conservative politicians who oppose health care for everyone, promote discrimination against women and gays and lesbians, target immigrants, and actively defend a socio-economic system that robs the poor and makes those who are already wealthy obscenely wealthy.

The U.S. Catholic bishops have made a colossally stupid and downright immoral misstep in building their entire body of moral teaching at this point in history around men like John Boehner--or Deal Hudson, Erik Prince, Newt Gingrich, and Randall Terry.  The values of life and respect for life are hardly the first things that leap to mind for most of us who observe who such men are, what they stand for, and what they're promoting.

And as we look at the behavior of the bishops themselves, and their chosen alliance with these political operatives . . . .

Charles Curran on U.S. Catholic Bishops' Current Abortion Teaching: Unfounded Certitude

 

National Catholic Reporter is running an excellent essay now by Catholic moral theologian Charles Curran.  It's an abridgement of a chapter of his forthcoming book The Social Mission of the U.S. Catholic Church: A Theological Perspective.  The essay focuses on the shift in the teaching of the U.S. Catholic bishops about abortion over the past forty years, and then critiques the ethical basis the bishops use to support their current position.

Curran  notes that under the leadership of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, in the 1980s, the bishops had moved in the direction of a consistent ethic of life or seamless garment approach to undergird their teaching about abortion.  But a shift occurred in the final decade of the 20th century, in which the bishops began to redefine the phrase "consistent ethic of life" to mean that the right to life is fundamental and primary, and that any "rightness" in any other area of life concerns (e.g., capital punishment, issues of racism and discrimination, poverty, war and peace, health care, housing, education, etc.) is not only diminished but canceled out, if one does not oppose abortion.

In the first part of the 21st century, the U.S. bishops added to these assertions that the right to life is fundamental and primary, and no amount of "rightness" about any other life issue can make up for "wrongness" on the issue of abortion, the additional assertion that 

[t]he intentional taking of human life is intrinsically evil and a legal system that violates the basic right to life is fundamentally flawed. No prudential judgments are involved in the case of abortion. 

The bishops crystallized this new position in the document  “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility from the Catholic Bishops of the United States,” prepared for the 2008 election.  This document removes decisions and moral thinking about abortion entirely out of the realm of any prudential judgment, while it leaves all other life issues within that realm.  It seeks to place abortion in an exclusive sacred reserve that makes abortion "the primary issue," the make-or-break issues for Catholic voters, as they assess any political candidate from the standpoint of Catholic ethics.  

No matter how strong a politician's record is on all other life issues, if he or she is not with the bishops on abortion, faithful Catholics must not support that candidate.  And conversely, no matter how lamentably a politician violates all Catholic canons of respect for life in other areas, if he/she stands with the bishops on abortion he is worth the support of Catholic voters.

Curran summarizes this new position of the bishops as follows:

The historical record thus clearly shows that the U.S. bishops have changed their approach to abortion law over the span of 40 years. They now clearly state that abortion is the primary issue. They also have explicitly stated the reason why this issue is primary and differs from all the other areas of social issues that they have addressed. Other issues of public policy and law involve prudential judgments, but in the case of abortion laws they deal with something that is intrinsically evil and does not involve prudential judgments. Catholics have certitude on the abortion law issue. 

Curran's critique of this position focuses on the bishops' claim of certitude for their position.  The rhetoric of abortion as intrinsically evil, and as removed from the realm of prudential judgment,  is designed to stamp the bishops' position with a stamp of absolute certitude which makes it impossible for a faithful Catholic to question or reject this position.  

But as Curran notes, despite the attempt of the Vatican and the bishops to silence open discussion of the morality of abortion, questions persist about precisely when human human life begins (and Catholic tradition has been far from univocal on this point); every application of moral principles to the political realm involves questions of feasibility and possibility which are overlooked by the new absolutism of the bishops about abortion; strong currents in Catholic moral thinking have always emphasized that moral and civil law are not and should not be synonymous;  and the intrinsic evil argument is weak.

Re: the latter point, Curran notes that the Catholic moral tradition has long held things like adultery or prostitution to be intrinsically evil, but it has not advocated forcing civil society to change or adopt laws to enshrine in civil law the Catholic understanding of these practices.  The attempt to make abortion the exception to all rules of prudential judgment--to make it the fundamental moral issue trumping all other moral issues--flies in the face of Catholic tradition itself.

I agree with Curran on this point, and in his primary argument that the bishops are seeking to claim a moral certitude for their position on abortion that it cannot have.  As I've noted previously in postings about this topic, I am unconvinced that a large number of those who claim that the right to life is absolute and primary actually believe this assertion, given their record vis-a-vis almost any life issue other than abortion.

One cannot draw a sacred line around abortion and claim that it trumps all other life issues, while violating the Catholic ethic of life in every respect except re: the issue of abortion.  One cannot convincingly argue that one is pro-life, that is, when one is anti-life in all respects except re: abortion.

There is also something formulaic about the assertion that the right to life is fundamental and primary, and about the claim that the teaching on abortion enjoys quasi-infallible status, that seems to shut down the minds of those who make these claims.  As I've also noted in numerous postings, sound ethical analysis requires a respect for complexity and a drive to inform oneself about the entire range of issues related to any moral decision one is seeking to make.

Vis-a-vis abortion, sound ethical thinking cannot simply make formulaic statements about the primacy of life and the intrinsic evil of abortion, and then dispense with study of--for instance--what is scientifically known about when human life begins.  About fetal development.  About the division of a single fertilized zygote in the process of fetal development, to form twins.  About the well-attested fact that the huge majority of fertilized eggs do not implant in the uterus, so that nature itself appears naturally to "abort" almost all fertilized eggs--an act that, from the standpoint of current moral teaching, would be the abhorrent destruction of one human being after another by a natural process designed by the Creator.

One cannot form compelling moral judgments about abortion without looking at the long, rich--and far from univocal--tradition in Catholic moral teaching on this topic, either.  Or on the topic of when human life begins.  Or about the issue of how moral teaching should connect to civil law.  Or about the fact that a religious community can hold moral positions that it regards as strong and even absolute, without seeking to force a multicultural, pluralistic society to adopt its religiously-based moral judgments.

The false certitude that the bishops now claim for their teaching about abortion translates into, frankly, moral stupidity on the part of many Catholics--a moral stupidity that is not serving the Catholic tradition well at this point in history.  When people are absolutely certain that they are right, without involving themselves in the hard work of learning, thinking, listening to a variety of viewpoints, they are apt to make ill-informed and often cruel moral decisions in all sorts of areas in addition to the one about which they are certain they are right.

And they are apt to be sitting ducks for demagogues and any huckster that comes along selling some noxious brew of religio-political certitude that happens to agree with their fundamentalism.