Bill Donohue's NY Times Ad, Last Fall's Minnesota Bishops' Anti-Gay Video: Gay-Bashing Alive and Well in American Catholicism

When I blogged yesterday about the astonishing way in which Steve's sister chose to repay our recent hospitality with a thank-you note reminding us that "the rules of the Church" command her not to "condone" our "gay lifestyle," I think some readers of that posting may have missed the significance of the graphic I used to illustrate my posting.  The graphic is a snapshot of the video that the Catholic bishops of Minnesota mailed to every Catholic household in the state on the eve of the 2010 elections, in an attempt to use anti-gay sentiment to throw the gubernatorial election in their state to the one candidate that opposed gay marriage, Republican Tom Emmer.

I blogged repeatedly last year about this video, whose funding source has never been released, and the many indicators that its primary purpose was to play the anti-gay card to gain votes for the Republican gubernatorial candidate.  To track that string of postings, you have only to click on the label "Minnesota" beneath this posting, and the series will pop up.  They include one featuring a Catholic woman in Minnesota, Jan Buczek, the mother of a lesbian daughter, who challenged the bishops to stop creating needless pain for families by their gay-bashing activities, while they pretend to speak in the name of Christ.

It occurs to me as I read the welcome responses to what I posted yesterday that some readers may be under the impression that because this particular sister of Steve's attends only the Latin Masses of the schismatic St. Pius X Society, the problem of homophobia and rejecting gay family members is confined to the cultic fringe of American Catholicism.  My point in using the picture of the c.d. the Minnesota Catholic bishops sent all Catholic households last fall is to underscore that the homophobia comes right from the bishops themselves.

It comes right from the center of the church.  And it's embedded in the Catholic church's core institutions.  It is not merely a fringe phenomenon.

In telling Steve that "the rules of the Church" encourage her to inform him that his "gay lifestyle" is sinful, Steve's sister was doing precisely what the Catholic bishops of Minnesota told her to do with that expensive, political video campaign last fall.  Though she and her family will attend only Masses celebrated by the schismatic SSPX Society, what this particular sister tells Steve in her recent thank-you note is what his other sister who does not attend those schismatic Masses, but is a self-proclaimed "orthodox" Catholic, has also put into writing to him.

And it's what his brothers, who are also not part of the Tridentine remnant movement of SSPX, have repeatedly told him and me verbally and through one ugly action after another towards us on any visit we make to his family in recent years.  These brothers and their families are also über-orthodox Catholics. I have--and on repeated occasions--had the unpleasant experience of having some of his family members refuse to shake my hand right in their parish church, right after a liturgy at which they have received communion.  I've had the unpleasant experience of watching some of the members of his large extended family sitting in pews after a liturgy has ended in their parish church (and after they've received communion) laughing, pointing, and mocking at us inside their church.

Homophobia is not merely a fringe phenomenon in American Catholicism, something to be found only in the marginal cults like SSPX (which are growing ever more centrist under the current papal regime, in any case).  It is a problem of the Catholic church itself.  It is a problem of many of the most ardent defenders of the Catholic church in the U.S., of its most faithful adherents.

Steve's sister is absolutely correct to inform him that the church--her Minnesota Catholic church--condemns the "gay lifestyle" and urges faithful Catholics to condemn their own children, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles who happen to be gay.  If that is not the message the Minnesota Catholic bishops deliberately intended to give in the last election cycle, I'd like to know what the message really was?  The diocese in which Steve's family lives, the diocese of Crookston, a relatively poor and very rural diocese, is said to have given more than any other diocese in the nation, per capita, to block the right of civil marriage for gay citizens of the distant state of Maine in 2009.

Homophobia--the message that good Catholic families should deliberately target their gay family members and the gay family members of other families, and should block the rights of those family members and strip rights away from them whenever possible--this message is built right into the official teaching of the Catholic church at this point in history.  It's very precisely the message that the president of the U.S. Catholic Bishops' Conference, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, hoped to give in his recent television interview that equates gay marriage with incest.

And it's very precisely the message Dolan's ally Bill Donohue hopes to give in that ugly ad he published in yesterday's New York Times.  The current leaders of the Catholic church remain perfectly willing to use the sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, uncles, and aunts of some families--when these folks happen to be gay--as despised objects in political games over which those gay human beings have little control, but which do radical harm to their lives.  The current pastoral leaders of the Catholic church are still very happy to use gay and lesbian human beings in diversionary political battles that have nothing at all to do with the people they're using to score political points, but everything to do with diverting attention away from the moral corruption of the bishops themselves, and from their politics-playing.

And they will continue to do this as long as faithful Catholics in the U.S. permit them to get away with it.  This is why--and I intend to keep repeating this--that, while I celebrate the growing tendency of U.S. Catholics to reject the gay-bashing, I still maintain there is much work to do.  Donohue's ad makes that point for me all over again.  He wouldn't have published it in a leading newspaper, and somebody with deep pockets wouldn't have paid for it, if they didn't imagine someone is listening.

U.S. Bishops' Annual Audit Comes Out, and Bully Bill Goes on Warpath: One Day, Two News Items

Suppose you were head of a big corporation with shady ethical principles, or a paid spin-doctor for the shady, ethically dubious corporation, and a report was about ready to come out that revealed your corporation was as ethically dodgy as ever.  While it claimed to be something altogether different.  And while it was involved in a huge, multi-faceted, money-draining legal situation that began opening its internal files up for all the world to see the corruption.

What would you do?  If you lacked ethical principles, and if you were mainly about money, power, and image management, you might try to change the subject.  You might try creating red herrings to get people running off on tangents, rather than analyzing your corporation's betrayal of its ethical principles.  You might try a blame-the-victim tactic, looking around for some hapless and relatively powerless group despised by many of your fellow citizens, and try to pin the blame for your own ethical shortcomings on them.

You might use some of that money that is so important to you, and so available to you as long as you cozy up to the right people, to engage in a big, ethically stinky diversionary publicity scheme, to deflect attention from that report that shows you lack ethical principles altogether--that you still do so, despite your claims to have been cleaning up your act as those expensive lawsuits lifted the veil on the inner workings of your money-power-image-focused organization.

Yesterday, the U.S. Catholic Bishops' Conference released the results of its 2010 national audit of U.S. dioceses, to see how they're doing with the sexual abuse situation that has been eating away at the image of the Catholic church for some years now and causing thousands of Catholics to walk away from the church.   A press statement about the annual audit is on the USCCB website here.  The press release leads with a positive spin right in the first clause of its title: "Drop in Number of Victims of Clergy Sexual Abuse Continues."  

The report itself is on the USCCB website here.  What it does not tell you, but David O'Reilly reminds us in the Philadelphia Inquirer, is this: right as a series of legal hearings are taking place after a grand jury report in Philadelphia found at least 39 priests credibly accused of abuse of minors still in active ministry, the 2010 audit trumpets Philadelphia's "full compliance" with the stipulations of the 2002 Dallas charter.  Philadelphia is given a passing grade by the audit!

As O'Reilly notes, this clean bill of health is Philadelphia's own self-assessment.  The entire audit system depends on each diocese (each one that is willing to participate, that is) submitting its own data to the Gavin Group, which conducts the audit.  

And so the conclusion of this annual audit--that almost all of the nation's dioceses are in compliance with the Dallas charter (but on what "almost all" really means, see the SNAP press statement cited below)--is called into serious question by what we learned about Philadelphia just weeks before the annual audit announces to us that it's all sunny in Philadelphia now.  Things couldn't be better.  Number of abuse cases continuing to drop . . . .

As Laurie Goodstein reports in the New York Times, "Church officials say they were looking into the reasons for the discrepancy" between what this annual audit says about Philadelphia and what we know from the grand jury report.  

I'll say!   "Looking into" the discrepancy . . . .

As church officials look into this discrepancy, they might want to begin by looking at the audit system itself, which, as today's editorial about the audit by the National Survivor Advocates Coalition (NSAC) points out, relies for its completeness and accuracy on information provided to the auditors by the very people being audited--by diocesan officials.  The 2010 report itself states this, explicitly.  It also states that in two-thirds of all dioceses, dioceses did not meet the audit deadline, did not answer all questions asked by auditors in a timely way, and supplied data that fell outside the audit's parameters.

And so the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) concludes that this audit report demonstrates the precise opposite of what the bishops wish us to believe with their misleading press lede announcing that the report demonstrates that the "drop" in victims of clergy sexual abuse "continues."  As SNAP notes, this year's audit actually finds 55 of the 188 dioceses that chose to participate in this annual audit out of compliance with the 2002 norms--more than double the number of dioceses in that category last year.  And so SNAP states:

Bishops are getting worse, not better, with children’s safety, according to their own-hand-picked abuse panel. After a decade or more of promises, bishops are still refusing to abide by their own vague, weak policies adopted largely as public relations moves.

It’s alarming that dozens of bishops are refusing to honor the most basic and important pledge they’ve made – to keep predator priests out of ministry. When bishops let pedophile priests work and appear in public as priests, Catholics and citizens assume those priests are “ok.”

And now back to my initial question: what do you do, if you're an ethics-challenged corporation whose image depends on sound ethical behavior, but there's a huge, glaring "discrepancy" between what you're loudly proclaiming to the public about yourself and what everyone knows about your real behavior from information readily available to the public?  If you lack any strong sense of ethics, you bring in an unscrupulous hired gun with access to quite a bit of funding from somewhere--somewhere in the same shadows your own shadowy business enterprise inhabits, while it proclaims its ethical soundness to the public.

And you encourage that hired gun to let loose with a volley of shots designed to draw attention away from the stinky report that further exposes your moral rottenness to the public, as you cope with lawsuits in which that moral rottenness is on full display for anyone who cares to look.  And so enter Bully Bill Donohue of the Catholic League:

Who, the very day the U.S. Bishops release the results of their annual audit, takes out a hugely expensive full-page ad in the New York Times to make all of his usual ugly, false, diversionary arguments about the abuse situation that try to do everything but the one thing necessary, if we're ever going to understand and resolve the situation: that is, to acknowledge and begin to deal with church leaders' responsibility for this morally rotten situation.  Predictably, Donohue blames the media, liberals, anti-Catholics, lawyers and greedy litigants, everyone else who is just as bad about child abuse as the Catholic church is, and above all, the gays for the abuse crisis. 

I've dealt with Donohue's pseudo-arguments in the past, and won't rehash them here.  They don't deserve to be given that level of intellectual credibility.  Because they're not about having any real or productive conversation about the abuse crisis, one that might reach its roots and address them effectively.

They're designed to do the precise opposite: to create slimy red-herring diversions that keep us talking about all the wrong things rather than the one right thing we need to talk about to resolve this situation--the bishops.  And their lack of pastoral leadership.

For anyone interested, here's a smorgasbord of good commentary about Donohue's shameful diversionary tactics, about why Bully Bill is doing this, and about what's wrong with his arguments from just about every vantage point possible.  These links are all (or mostly: I forget if I gleaned them all from this one site) from the wonderful Abuse Tracker site at Bishop Accountability.org, and several of them have the full text of Donohue's ad:

Michael O'Loughlin, "Bill Donohue's Ad in NYT," America's "In All Things" blog

David Mittleman, "Catholic League President Bill Donohue Dishes Out Big Bucks for NY Times Ad," Injury Board Blog Network

Wayne Besen, "TWO Calls on the Catholic League's Bill Donohue to Stop Blaming Gay People for Catholic Clergy Sexual Abuse Scandal," Truth Wins Out

Susan Campbell, "Bill Donohue's Straight Talk," "Still Small Voice," Hartford Courant

Eric Lach, "Catholic League NYT Ad: Priests Unfairly 'Singled Out' Over Sex Abuse Scandal," TPM

"The Disgusting Defense of Priest Molesters That Catholic Leagues' Bill Donohue Got the Times to Run," Queerty*

As you'll see if you wade through all of that material, from every angle imaginable and unanimously, no one is buying this particular segment of the Donohue show.  Or is it the Donohue-Dolan show, I wonder?  Note the good commentary following Michael O'Loughlin's America blog posting to which I link at the head of this list of links, in which some commentators ask if we're seeing a "one-two punch" here, delivered by USCCB president Timothy Dolan working in tandem with Bully Bill Donohue--Donohue whom Dolan defends.  And Dolan, in whose archdiocesan office building Donohue and his Catholic League offices are located.

And as several contributors to the America thread also note, who's footing the bill for this expensive full-page ad?  And why are they doing so?  And why was it released on the very day of the audit report?

If the president of the USCCB or people close to him had anything at all to do with the timing of this ad, with its subject matter, with its scummy attempt yet again to attack gay folks in order to create a smokescreen around the real causes of the abuse crisis, then it would appear we haven't gotten very far at all down the road to addressing the real reasons for the abuse crisis.  Or the real moral corruption in the Catholic church from which it stems.

Have we?

*This link was working earlier today, but seems to be down as I post this posting.  I'll keep re-checking and update you on the status of the link later.

John Aravosis and Mark Jordan: A Debate about How to Approach the Role of the Bible in Gay Bashing

I agree with John Aravosis here.  When I linked several days ago to Mark Jordan's essay on which Aravosis is commenting (I linked to an earlier version at Religion Dispatches, while Aravosis is linking to it at the Alternet site), I did so to point to a problem that needs to be addressed in the American cultural and political discussion of homosexuality.  This is that many people talk about what "the bible says" without having a clue about what it actually says.

In the American political and cultural context, people speak about the Jewish and Christian scriptures with supreme confidence that the bible condemns homosexuality--and that supreme confidence is usually in direct proportion to their ignorance of what the scriptures actually say about anything at all.  Because I thought Jordan made that point well, and his call for educating ourselves (and the public at large) re: these issues seems on target, I linked to his essay.

At the same time, I did know, of course, that he was responding to John Aravosis on these points.  But my posting didn't mention that, because, to be honest, I thought Jordan had misunderstood Aravosis's primary point about how the bible is used to support gay-bashing in the U.S.  And so my references to Jordan's essay didn't mention Aravosis at all, since I didn't want to reinforce the critique of John Aravosis.

Now that Aravosis has reiterated his point--and I'm very glad he has done so--I want to address the debate between him and Jordan, and others who have also been criticizing John Aravosis re: how the bible is understood and used in American culture to lambast gays.  I think this criticism has been unfair.  The primary point I understand John Aravosis to be making--and it's an extremely important one--is this: regardless of whether the Jewish and Christian scriptures actually do condemn homosexuality, and regardless of what they really say about "homosexuality," the bible is constantly used in the American cultural and political context as a basis for discrimination and violence against those who are gay and lesbian.

And we have to acknowledge and deal with that fact if we hope to get anywhere with movements to combat anti-gay oppression and secure gay rights.  There's a double challenge in the American cultural context, vis-a-vis gay bashing and the bible, and Jordan and Aravosis are identifying two different facets of that challenge, it seems to me.

On the one hand, the persistent, serious challenge faced by anyone struggling for recognition of the human rights of gay persons in American culture is to face the fact that, for millions of Americans, the bible is an obvious and unquestioned source of anti-gay teaching.  And that uninformed, widespread cultural assumption is going to continue to be there, and to continue to be strongly persuasive for a large sector of the population, regardless of what scholars say about the biblical texts. 

On the other hand, for the last several decades, there has been significant scholarly discussion about the six clobber texts to which homophobic groups persistently return, which strongly refutes the widespread cultural belief that "the bible condemns homosexuality."  And it's important to educate ourselves and others about that biblical scholarship.  It's particularly important, I'd maintain, for people of faith committed to gay rights to begin to assure that this scholarship impacts what the churches say, think, and do about gay people and gay issues.

The role of the churches in challenging cultural misappropriation of the bible to attack gay people could, if the churches ever dared to do the work they claim they are about, be considerable.  And that correction of cultural misapplications of the scriptures needs to begin in the churches themselves, if communities of faith are to make a dent in the prevailing cultural norms.

Here's why I think John Aravosis's point is undeniable and important: no matter how wrong or misguided they are in thinking so, many Americans, whether churched or unchurched, take for granted that the bible instructs them to despise and marginalize those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered.  I cannot think of a single other minority group in this country right now that is routinely subject to violent attacks by people spouting bible verses.  I don't know of any other group of citizens we can point to, where someone still takes for granted that he or she has the right to fill a sock with stones and beat a man to death because the bible tells us to stone homosexuals.  Or where someone defending the savage beating of a gay man comes out to defend that action displaying a tattoo quoting the Leviticus verse that, as we all know, condemns "homosexuality" and calls for the stoning of gays.

Or where this kind of ugly hate speech, which is in the news today at the Box Turtle Bulletin site, pours out of the mouth of someone attacking a minority group, who repeatedly cites the bible as the source for his hatred--and for his right to attack.  We have a problem in American culture, and it is, to some degree, unique to our culture.

That problem is the taken-for-granted, casual belief that the bible supports hatred of those who are LGBT, and that those engaged in activities to demean and deny rights to gay people are doing a holy thing, something commanded by God--whether they themselves happen to be churchgoers or not, or whether they've even read the bible (and noticed how predominant its insistence on love, justice, and mercy is--and not on those six exegetically murky clobber texts).  In American culture, those working for gay and lesbian rights have a volatile combination of factors to contend with unique to American culture and politics: biblical literalism (undergirded by ignorance) runs throughout our cultural and political lives, whether people are churched or not; and because we are a nation with the soul of a church in which people, whether churched or unchurched, take for granted that the bible is the foundation of our unique city on a hill, ignorant biblical literalism wields enormous influence in our culture and political sphere.

My point in posting about these themes several days ago, as I cited Jordan's essay, was to note that this kind of biblical literalism is now affecting many American Catholics, too, despite the skepticism of traditional Catholic theology and teaching re: biblical literalism.  Listen again to those video clips of Fr. John Hollowell indoctrinating Catholic high school students in Indianapolis about their gay brothers and sisters, to which I linked several days back, and you'll hear the surprising claim that there are "multiple" bible passages condemning homosexuality, which see homosexuality as an "abomination" and "grave offense" against God, and if we question any one of these, the whole bible will become "completely useless."

These are not in the least traditional Catholic arguments.  They're not how Catholics do theology at all, including moral theology.  They're not how Catholics would approach any other moral issue today.

There's something unique about how contemporary Catholics have decided to deal with the issue of gay and lesbian people and rights, and, as I noted in my previous posting about this matter, that uniqueness begins with the 1986 letter of the current pope on the "pastoral" care of homosexual persons, which was roundly criticized by biblical exegetes and theologians when it was issued precisely because it adopts a fundamentalist approach, and pulls biblical proof texts out of context to insert into its argument, without grappling at all with the core meaning, the real meaning, of the scriptures to which it points.

The Catholic magisterium has made a calculated decision at this point in history to do, in the case of gay persons, what it refuses to do in the case of any other moral or theological issue.  The Catholic church has decided, in the case of the discussion of gay and lesbian people, to adopt a biblical literalist approach that is far more characteristic of Protestant fundamentalism than of traditional Catholicism.

To me, the reason for that calculated decision is obvious: it's a politically driven decision motivated by the desire of the leaders of the Catholic church at present to make common cause with the religious right, particularly in the United States, but also in developing parts of the world such as Africa where American-style religion has made huge inroads, to combat gay people and gay rights.  The price of this calculated decision and the coalition it forms is that Catholics are encouraged, in the single area of combating gay rights, to adopt a biblical literalism alien to traditional Catholic theology.

And this has proven to be effective.  As I've noted, I'm suspicious of the way in which the Catholics-promote-gay-rights story has gotten shopped around in recent weeks.  I'm suspicious about that story not because I doubt that an increasing number of Catholics in the U.S. do reject the politics of the hierarchy and endorse gay rights, nor because I doubt that this is a very positive development.

I'm suspicious because I think the growing meme about this development overlooks (and even masks) the very real and very powerful continued ability of some influential, highly placed, and well-funded Catholics in the U.S. to keep on doing serious damage to their gay brothers and sisters.  Anywhere that there are battles for gay rights underway in this nation, Maggie Gallagher and the National Organization of Marriage are there, with tons of money flowing their way from donors whose names they refuse to disclose, with expensive, slick videos pouring hateful disinformation into people's minds.

Anywhere there are struggles for the rights of gay and lesbian folks in the U.S. now, the Knights of Columbus are on the scene, funneling large sums of money that this organization used to give to the homeless and the hungry into the anti-gay cause, colluding with other religious groups, many of them fundamentalist ones, to block gay rights or remove rights from gay people.  And then there's the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops, Timothy Dolan, who went on national television recently to inform America--and he was speaking as head  of the USCCB, as the spokesman of all American Catholic bishops--that same-sex marriage is equivalent to incest, that it would be equivalent to his wanting to marry his mother (for more on this, see the link at the end of this posting).

The bishops, the Vatican, Maggie and the Knights: they know very well what they're doing when they make outrageous, incendiary statements like this.  They're playing to deep-rooted prejudice, prejudice fueled by misappropriation and misunderstanding of biblical texts--precisely the kind of misappropriation and misunderstanding these Catholic leaders now deliberately seek to foster as they attack gay and lesbian people in concert with religious groups used to biblical literalism.

The bishops, the Vatican, Maggie and the Knights know what they're doing and why they're doing it, why they have allied themselves with fundamentalists of the religious right and why they're adopting the tactic of biblical literalism exclusively against the gays: they're doing what they're doing because they intend to keep on bashing gays.  And the bible--the culturally deformed version of the bible that circulates through American political networks of the right--is a useful tool in this battle.  It's one of the most useful tools they have.

For that reason, we need to keep listening (I think) to what John Aravosis has to say on these points, even as we also listen to Mark Jordan when he encourages us to educate ourselves and others about how these cultural misuses of the scriptures misrepresent what the bible actually says.  And we need--I would also argue--to push back.

If you want to push back against Timothy Dolan and what the U.S. Catholic bishops are doing to their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters right now, here's one way you can do so: the Care2 site has a petition now underway calling on Dolan to apologize for his incendiary remarks equating gay marriage with incest.   I encourage readers to log in and sign this petition.

The hate-mongering needs to stop.

Next Installment of Nienstedt Story in Minnesota: From Gay Bashing to Bashing Survivors of Clerical Abuse

In case you were wondering what Archbishop John Nienstedt has been up to in recent weeks, in addition to sending out videos to Catholic households bashing gays to gain votes for Republicans (see the links at the end of this posting to a selection of my previous postings on this topic)*: this report from Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) is eye-opening.

The archbishop is seeking to make a man who has filed suit claiming abuse by a Minnesota priest, Fr. Thomas Adamson, pay court costs--some $64,000.  David Clohessy of SNAP thinks that Archbishop Nienstedt is taking this "mean-spirited and intimidating step" to frighten anyone else who might consider filing suit after having been sexually abused by priests in the area.  And Clohessy believes Archbishop Nienstedt wants to punish this particular person because this survivor of abuse is trying to force the archdiocese to disclose names of other priests credibly accused of abusing minors.

The Minnesota SNAP chapter has put a video online at You Tube, in which Clohessy speaks further about this matter at a protest in front of the archdiocesan headquarters in St. Paul.  Here, Clohessy states again that this move on the part of Archbishop Nienstedt is "extraordinarily mean-spirited and callous."  He suggests that what Nienstedt is doing is one of the "most egregious, most callous" moves of an American Catholic bishop thus far, in attacking survivors of clerical sexual abuse.  And he concludes,". . . We don't believe that an alleged spiritual leader can profess to be a caring shepherd in public while in private and in court acting like a cold-hearted CEO."

There's a disturbing pattern here: as I reported in numerous postings last year (e.g., here), at the same time that Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, Connecticut, was fighting tooth and nail against litigation pushing for his diocese to open its files about predatory priests to public inspection, he also mounted a gay-bashing battle in his state.  It appears that abusing survivors of clerical sexual abuse goes hand in hand with gay-bashing, for many Catholic bishops today.

The targeting and demonizing of gay citizens and gay Catholics is a diversionary tactic on the part of the Catholic hierarchy, one designed to divert attention from the inhumane and anti-Christian way in which many members of the hierarchy continue to treat those who experienced sexual abuse by priests as minors.  Like the Vatican's attempt to expel gay candidates from seminaries and bar ordination of gay seminarians, the homophobic finger-pointing is designed to rally the faithful so that they focus on a perceived enemy, and stop asking unsettling questions about the bishops' lack of genuine pastoral leadership in the abuse crisis.

As Fr. Thomas Doyle notes in a recent article in Voice of the Faithful's journal In the Vineyard, to which I linked some days ago, the rhetorical, public, professed response of the bishops to the abuse crisis is all about healing.  But when one looks at what bishop after bishop is actually doing when survivors of clerical abuse ask for healing and justice, one sees, instead, destructive and ruthless behavior that belies the claims of the bishops to be concerned for healing.

This behavior will go on just as long as the Catholic people of the U.S. continue to tolerate it and to fund it.  It will go on as long as the powerful voices of the intellectual elite of the Catholic center continue to ignore both the bashing of survivors of clerical sexual abuse, and the bashing of gays and lesbians.  As long as these Catholics, who have the ability to stand up, speak out, and make a difference, continue to practice their faith as if survivors of clerical abuse and gays and lesbians simply don't exist.  As if their voices don't count.

As if the way the bishops have chosen to treat these two groups of human beings made in God's image, of brother and sister Catholics, is not a well-nigh insuperable obstacle to continued connection to the Catholic church, for many Catholics.  I am hearing reports that there is now a noticeable exodus of Catholics in Minnesota from the Catholic church, following the recent anti-gay political activity of the Minnesota bishops.  I'm told some non-Catholic churches in the state are in dialogue about how to offer hospitality and healing to Catholics for whom the behavior of their bishops in the last election is the final straw.

I have to wonder what kind of faith my brothers and sisters of the center imagine they are practicing, when they can find it in their hearts to remain silent about these matters, while talking on and on about theological trivia when the real theological challenge of our times is to demonstrate why anyone should remain connected to a church whose leaders are capable of such inhumane and unChristlike behavior.

(*Oh, and then there are the churches he's been closing and parishes he's been merging while spending lavish funds from an unnamed donor or donors to bash gays--and while claiming the archdiocese is in serious financial straits and has to close churches.)

On the Minnesota story, see:

"The DADT Vote in Light of Catholic Centrist Conversations: A Personal Response"

"Democracy for Sale: Minnesota Catholic Bishops Play Partisan Politics as Front for Unnamed Donor"

"Minnesota Priest Speaks Truth to Power, Challenges Bishops' Anti-Gay Marriage Video"

"Gay and Catholic?  No Bread, but a Blessing for You!"

"Minnesota Catholics Respond to Anti-Gay Marriage Video: So Much Needless Pain"

"New York Times on Shadowy Army of Non-Profits Funding Republicans: The Case of the Knights of Columbus"

"Buying and Selling of American Democracy by Anonymous Donors: More Reflections on Archbishop Nienstedt's Political Anti-Gay Initiative"