Opposite-Sex Marriage and Deep-Rooted Cultural Tradition: Considering the Argument

And then there's this: last week, as I continued trying to find my way out of my latest little stint of selva oscura, I follow the thread responding to Michael O'Loughlin's good commentary at the America blog on the debate about civil unions for same-sex couples in Rhode Island.  Why I bother, I don't know, since I can write the predictable (and exceptionally banal) responses from most of the contributors to this blog in advance--the predictable male heterosexist responses, that is to say.

There's a watchdog group that has long monitored the Jesuits and America, and who intend to do everything in their (male, heterosexist, privileged, Republican) power to keep those leftie Jesuits in check.  To remind the Jesuits, if they even think about showing some solidarity with gay and lesbian people in their struggle for justice, that they'll pay a steep price for doing so.

And, predictably, one of these watchdogs, a Mr. Smith, who always chimes in when the gay issue is raised at the America site, says to Jim McCrea, a regular contributor to these threads who writes with good sense (and accurate theological background), the following:  

Marriage in the West means one man and one woman.  You upset such a deep-rooted piece of cultural tradition at your very great peril, especially when there are excellent alternatives, like reciprocal benefits legislation.  

And on the same day that I read this, I happen to be reading through the estate records of an ancestor of mine, a man named James Lane who died in eastern North Carolina in the summer of 1789.  (This is one of the ways I handle the selva oscura: I spend hours snooping into the lives of those who have gone before me, doing genealogical research, because it's in many ways very much like putting together the pieces of an intricate puzzle--and putting puzzles together has real therapeutic value for me.)

And I find this: when James Lane's estate is inventoried, the inventory shows the following items among his possessions as he dies: a copy of Pilgrim's Progress, a bible, and a Book of Common Prayer.  James is, in other words, not merely a casual churchgoer, an enculturated Christian who calls himself Christian because the established church had demanded up to the Revolution that everyone living in North Carolina be at least nominally a member of the Church of England.

He and his family are pious Christians, members of that solid middle class that, we're told by historians, built the nation through its hard work, devotion to moral principle, and commitment to church and churchly ways. And commitment to the "deep-rooted pieces of cultural tradition" about which Mr. Smith speaks, which we upset at our "very great peril," when they're rooted in long-standing Christian tradition.  And in the bible itself.

Like marriage as the union of one man and one woman for life.  (Except that that's not at all what the bible says marriage is all about for, oh, millennia of sacred history, when polygamy is the norm: one man with many wives.  But no women with many husbands.  And divorce permitted to men, who can repudiate their wives in the twinkling of an eye, by a word of renunciation, while no women are ever permitted to do the same to their husbands.  But never mind about all that: let's not confuse ourselves with facts while we do battle to uphold the "deep-rooted pieces of cultural tradition" that we envisage discarding to our "very great peril.")

And then I leaf through the estate records to the settlement of James's estate, and find the following: in addition to "the Negro Woman Named Moll" whom James had left in his will to son Ethelred and the "Two Negro Boys" whom the will had left money for James's widow Sarah to purchase, who, along with their increase, were to be "divided" among the youngest children of the family after Sarah's death, there were an unnamed "Negro Wench" and her child Zilla, Beck, Bett, Hannh, Silvia, and Jude, all disbursed as property among James's oldest children (including my ancestor Zilpah Lane and her husband Sumner Holland).  With stipulations that Jude and her increase were to be divided, following Sarah's death, among the older children.

Zilpah, by the way--in case you're wondering--was the name of a handmaid (read: slave) of Jacob's wife Leah, whose father Laban gave Zilpah to Leah.  Zilpah then marries Jacob, who has also wives Leah, Rachel, and Bilhah.  Rachel and Leah are sisters.  He ends up being married to both sisters because Laban deceives Jacob by switching Leah for Rachel when Jacob imagines he's marrying Rachel.  When Rachel and Leah compete to give Jacob sons, they then use their maidservants Bilhah and Zilpah in the son-bearing game, offering them to Jacob as wife material.  Some accounts suggest Bilhah and Zilpah are half-sisters of Leah and Rachel.

All in the family, don't you know.  The good, old-fashioned, God-fearing family . . . .

Deep-rooted cultural traditions.  Just like the traditions re: slavery that went hand in hand with Pilgrim's Progress and the Book of Common Prayer.  And the bible.  Traditions that James Lane and all the other upright Christians around him would have been shocked to learn anyone questioned or considered irreconcilable with Christian morality and Christian faith.

Since they had been practiced for centuries by good bible-reading, church-going Christians.  Since slavery is not merely allowed but presupposed and defended by the Jewish and Christian scriptures.  Since it was a deep-rooted part of the cultural heritage of those who wrote the biblical books.  

And, of course, despite the bible's support for slavery, despite the longstanding endorsement of this practice in both Judaism and Christianity, despite the continuation of slavery in Christian cultures right into the 19th century, we'd now be hard-pressed to find any Christian anywhere openly espousing a return to bible-based slavery.

Espousing bible-based slavery because we upset "deep-rooted pieces of cultural tradition" at our "very great peril," if we overturn them when they have biblical warrant.  When they've always been there.  When it's always been done this way.  When everyone around us takes this for granted, and only a tiny minority of people (the losers of history, and surely they can't be on God's side, since God's a winner) question how things have always been done.

We have discarded slavery because we have finally decided to take Paul at his word, when he tells us that "in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."  We've decided, in other words, that despite the countenancing of slavery in other biblical texts (including other texts attributed to Paul himself), the very heart and soul of the gospel is summed up in Paul's proclamation of the freedom and equality of all believers in Christ.

We've decided that the bible was not really ever about--not in its most essential proclamation about who God is and what God desires for the world--the subordination of one group of people to another, the subjugation of one group of people by another.  It's about, instead, a vision of a world in which every one who comes from the hand of God is treated with equal dignity and respect.  And has equal access to the goods of the world.  And to the rights accorded to everyone merely because she is a human being.

We have long since gotten this when it comes to the issue of slavery.  Why, I wonder, is it taking the Mr. Smiths of the world so long to get it when it comes to the issue of gender roles, and the power allocated to men and to women respectively?  And to the related issue of sexual orientation?

It's almost as if some of the men who rule us these days don't want to get it.

The graphic is Dutch Baroque artist Matthias Stom's depiction of Abraham with two of his wives, Sarah and Hagar.

Mary Hunt on Royal Wedding: Theologically, "Stabilizing for the Status Quo"

As with everything she writes, Mary Hunt's recent commentary at Religion Dispatches on the royal wedding is well worth reading.  Hunt's take: in key respects, the symbolism woven into the recent wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton was "stabilizing for the status quo," in a theological sense.  And more's the pity.

Hunt notes that Kate's father gave her in marriage by giving her hand to the priest solemnizing the marriage, who then gave her hand to William.  When the marriage ceremony ended, the presider pronounced William and Kate "man and wife"--not husband and wife.  And the entire ceremony relied heavily on patriarchal rhetoric identifying God as father, ruler, and king.

The puzzle here, Hunt points out, is that while increasing numbers of young people (the royal couple included) ignore the stipulations of churches about premarital liaisons and about many aspects of gender behavior, people still commonly opt for marriage ceremonies that reinforce patriarchal assumptions which couples presumably otherwise reject: 

Young people who live together for years before they marry, women who hold responsible positions in the world, even some same-sex couples fall into the traps set by patriarchal religions. Somehow, despite any other modern or postmodern ways of behaving, when it comes to a wedding they want the old model. And they get it when uncritical clergy repeat the ancient formulas without any connection to the way women with men, women with women, and men with men conduct their lives before and after the ceremony.

This makes clear just how irrelevant religion is to most people. Yet they instrumentalize it for marriages (not to mention funerals and burials) without apology. I don’t blame them. If religious leaders don’t do our part to show new ways of celebrating that are more congruent with reality—new language, symbols, and gestures—what options do they have?

These are points well worth making, it seems to me.  When it comes to thinking about gender and gender roles, there's a cultivated archaism in much of our social behavior that is apparent in few other aspects of our cultural lives today.  And in this discrete area, we deliberately and willingly resort to religious warrants to prop up gender assumptions long since exploded in many areas of our society and our own practice.

This is, of course, precisely why Austen Ivereigh wanted to point to the power of this particular liturgical ceremony to remind us that traditional marriage is all about one man marrying one woman--even if the man marrying the woman happens to have lived with her without benefit of marriage prior to the wedding.  Or to have impregnated her.  Or several hers.

It's all about issuing symbolic reminders, backed by religious warrant, of who counts in our society and who doesn't.  Of who's on top and who's on bottom.  And of who should stay on bottom and not get out of her place.

In a symbolic way, weddings still very frequently enact governing presuppositions of our society that have everything to do with heterosexual male power and control, and which those intent on using religious symbols to shore up such male domination of women and gay men do not want to see getting out of their hands.  Hence the perfervid praise of this ceremony in some male heterosexist quarters, in the Catholic church and other churches in which men have much invested in maintaining male heterosexual power and control.  

And hence Mary Hunt's questions, from a feminist theological perspective, which need to be asked.  They need to be asked, that is, by anyone who does not take for granted that someone born with a penis happens because of that biological chance to be born as well with entitlement not given by birth to anyone born without a penis.  Or by anyone who does not take for granted that God has a penis, metaphorically speaking, and that God therefore shares the concern of some of God's male cheerleaders to keep those with a penis on top in our world and in our communities of faith.

Assuming, that is, that they use their penises in the natural and divinely ordained way.

National Catholic Reporter on Firing of Bishop William M. Morris: Pope's Priorities Now Clear

National Catholic Reporter has published an editorial addressing the recent firing of Australian bishop William M. Morris.  As the title of the editorial suggests, if anyone still remains in doubt about Pope Benedict's priorities for his church, she or he need doubt no longer: the priorities are clear after this action.  It's all about extending an "intellectual chill" in the church that goes beyond the excommunication of Fr. Roy Bourgeois for supporting women's ordination or the condemnation of Sr. Elizabeth Johnson's magisterial work on the theology of God.  

It's about suppressing any and all dissent, even the kind of pastoral thinking out loud that Bishop Morris did in the 2006 pastoral letter to his diocese that has resulted in his dismissal.  It's about asserting absolute control over any and all intraeccesial conversations, from the top or center of the church, and assuring that if those conversations don't march lock-step with the top/center, they're squelched.  Squelched along with the hapless brothers and sisters in Christ mounting the conversations because they imagine that the gospels (and Holy Spirit) have inspired them to do so.

A powerful excerpt from this powerful editorial statement:

First, it turns out it’s really not that difficult for the pope to give a bishop a pink slip. In the course of the quarter-century clergy sexual abuse cover-up, there’s been considerable handwringing over just this question. Bishops don’t “work for” the pope, we have been told. Bishops are “fathers” to their flock – with all the unconditional love and commitment that entails – not employees subject to the whims, well-intentioned or otherwise, of the boss. Canonical procedures must be followed.

Apparently, that’s just so much hooey. If the pope and his advisers care deeply about an issue about which a bishop has publicly raised questions – such as women priests and optional celibacy – a way can be found to dismiss that bishop.

And – noteworthy because it goes to some underlying issues – a bishop who acts against church teaching and law related to sexually abusive priests apparently need fear no such reprisal.

Philadelphia Cardinal Justin Rigali, for example, continues a life befitting a prince in splendorous surroundings, even as his flouting of church procedures (and perhaps civil law) resulted in nearly 30 diocesan priests facing administrative suspension and heat from local prosecutors.

And not to forget Cardinal Bernard Law, orchestrator of the Boston clergy abuse cover-up. His punishment?  An extended Roman holiday and a healthy pension. Meanwhile, Morris gets the door.

The pope’s priorities are clear. 

The context presupposed by the preceding remarks: one of the ploys the Vatican and some dioceses have sought to use to evade moral and legal responsibility for priests sexually abusing minors, who are permitted to remain in ministry after their abuse has become known, is the argument that bishops and priests don’t work for any big boss above them.  They are independent contractors, as it were.  And so those above them in the tightly controlled hierarchical system according to which Catholic governance is structured are not in any way responsible for the actions of those beneath.

As anyone who has given even cursory thought to the behavior of ethically challenged, morality-eliding corporations recognizes, this tactic of shielding the top or center from responsibility is a common evasive tactic of any corporate structure that is a rigidly structured hierarchy.  This evasive technique is a by-product of hierarchy, a predictable response precisely of organizations structured as top-down (or center-to-margins) hierarchies.  

Hierarchical corporate structures place supreme emphasis on the obligation of everyone in the hierarchical chain of command to obey everyone above him.  I use the male pronoun deliberately here, because these tightly controlled hierarchies demanding implicit, absolute obedience down the chain of command are far and away more typical of male-dominated institutions than female ones.  They’re common in institutions that have historically been male-bonded fraternities, like the military, the police, corporate boards, etc.  And the Catholic church. 

In most of those secular institutions, of course, change has been underway throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, and the rigid mechanisms of control are being vigorously challenged, primarily by women seeking full inclusion in the social and economic structures of various societies.  In the Catholic church, however, the structures of absolute control have grown only ever more stolidly authoritarian at this point in history, precisely in response to the claim of many women that they are called by the Spirit to be ordained ministers, and thereby to enter (and, from the viewpoint of the patriarchal system itself, to interrupt) the hierarchical chain of Catholic governance.

The response of the leaders of the Catholic church to that claim of many Catholic women and those in solidarity with women seeking ordination has been to fossilize the structures of control, the hierarchical mechanisms, even more decisively.  It has been to reassert the hierarchical motif within the Catholic system of governance, and, following Bl. John Paul II, whose ultimate response to the question of ordaining women was to decree that he could not change what God had set up within the church even if he wanted to do so, to call that inflexible patriarchal reassertion divine inspiration, an affirmation of what the Catholic church has always believed and practiced, which no pope has the right to change.

This reflexive gesture of self-protective, self-perpetuating patriarchy within the Catholic governing structures, in response to the valid claims of women to share in the ministerial life (and governing responsibility) of the Catholic church, locks the leadership of the Catholic church into patterns of patriarchal response typical of male hierarchical communities at their morally grossest.  To return to the evasive technique of the Vatican and bishops faced with questions about their moral and legal responsibility for priests abusing minors: one of the effects of the decision of the past two popes to hinge the future of their church on the maintenance of patriarchy as a divinely instituted ecclesial order for Catholicism is that Catholic governance structures are now ever more faithfully aping the behavior of male hierarchical institutions at their ethical worst, in secular society.

When faced with questions about the responsibility of those on top (or at the center) for those down the chain of command, leaders of rigidly structured hierarchies completely dependent on unquestioning obedience as the primary virtue of the leadership structure always, predictably shield the top or center from responsibility.  Though everyone observing the behavior of the structure under consideration, and examining how it fits together, knows that in the tightly controlled hierarchy, no decision ever takes place or can take place without the knowledge and consent of the man at the top/center.

Since total control of the top/center man is what the entire system is all about.  And total unquestioning obedience of every other link in the chain is what it’s all about as a corollary.  In an absolutist hierarchy whose central virtue is unquestioning obedience, no one in the chain of command dares to make decisions independent of the man above him.  He does not dare to give even the suggestion of asking questions or disobeying, because the reprisal is too great.  It is immediate expulsion from the hierarchical system itself.

And so here’s the situation that results from the decision of Popes John Paul II and Benedict to structure the Catholic church even more hierarchically, more patriarchally, than has been the case in the past: as the NCR editorial notes, while good, pastorally astute bishops (or priests or theologians) like Bishop Morris or Fr. Bourgeois or Sr. Elizabeth Johnson are chewed up and thrown away by the current system of Catholic governance, morally shady, ethically disreputable characters like Archbishop Chaput or Cardinals Rigali and Law thrive.  They are held up by the system as exemplars of its primary virtue: unquestioning obedience.

Cardinals Rigali and Law continue to live in “splendorous surroundings” despite their clear, undeniable protection of priests sexually abusing children, while Bishop Morris is out on his ear.  And the Catholic faithful are asked to identify Chaput, Rigali, and Law as moral heroes (they have, after all, served the church well through their unquestioning obedience), while they’re asked to view Bourgeois, Johnson, and Morris as morally questionable renegades.

Something’s wrong with this picture, with the picture the official Catholic church wants to paint for itself and adherents at this point in history—it’s morally wrong, in the view of increasing numbers of faithful Catholics.  Because we can see with our own eyes that those being chewed up and spit out by the rotten system have a moral integrity that vastly exceeds the integrity of the men being held up to us as moral exemplars.  And we find ourselves in a moral and spiritual bind, as a result.

When such harsh cognitive dissonance develops—particularly around central symbols of who or what is a moral exemplar—in an institution that claims to teach and exemplify moral values, here’s what usually happens: morally thinking, morally sensitive, upright people tend to shy away from the institution, and look elsewhere for sustenance for their moral lives.  But as they do so, true believers energized by the demand for absolute unquestioning obedience turn to the institution in question even more decisively, because it feeds their psychological need for unquestioning obedience.

The beatification of John Paul II is a rallying cry—a battle cry—of Benedict to the latter group, to carry the day for the Catholic church in the 21st century.  As Tom Fox notes in a statement today about the Bishop Morris story, Morris knew that he was to be fired the day following the beatification of John Paul II.  Pope Benedict himself told Morris this in a meeting 14 months ago (for further background information, see Anthea Gleeson’s interview with Bishiop Morris in The Chronicle [Toowoomba, Australia] and Tom Roberts and Joshua McElwee in this recent NCR article).

The date of Bishop Morris’s sacking was chosen deliberately by Pope Benedict to follow immediately on the beatification of the previous pope.  It was chosen, in other words, to be a concrete demonstration of what that beatification means for the whole church, and a signal to the true believers within the church who have called for the heads of Morris, Bourgeois, Johnson and others that they won a victory with this beatification.

And that, no matter what many Catholics or people of good will think, the leaders of the Catholic church will continue to demand that we regard Chaput, Rigali, and Law as unalloyed exemplars of the Catholic moral life in the 21st century.  Precisely as they also demand that we see Bl. John Paul II such an unalloyed exemplar.

This is a bold decision on the part of Benedict to continue at all cost hinging the future of the Catholic church on its remnant elements (and, it always has to be said when we speak of the remnant church, on the powerful economic European and American economic elites driving these Vatican decisions), on the ever diminishing cadre of true believers willing to identify unquestioning obedience as the central virtue of the Christian life.  Even if Jesus does inconveniently say that love is the primary calling of those who walk in his path of discipleship, and is the primary characteristic by which those called by his name must be known.

From One Royal Wedding to Another: Kate and Wills Marry, and I Remember Charles and Diana

When I wrote yesterday about Austen Ivereigh's anti-gay heterosexist take on the Kate and Wills show, I said in a comment to TheraP that I had not intended to mention the royal wedding at all on this blog.  I chose to do so only after having read Ivereigh's comments, which, in my view, deserve attention as one in a series of male-entitled heterosexist blasts he has made against his gay brothers and sisters in recent years at America and elsewhere.  Blasts that baffle me, since I wonder what causes him to invest so much energy in issuing persistent reminders to his gay brothers and sisters that they do not count and must not expect to be included in his Catholic church.

And now, having set my foot on the path of wedding commentary, I find myself unable to get off that fateful path until I've reached its end.  Or, as our British cousins say (and changing metaphors wildly), In for a penny, in for a pound.  Or, As well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.  Or something like that.  Both seem appropriate here.

I didn't watch the royal wedding.  I find myself little interested in it except as a cultural phenomenon, as an illustration of our willingness to permit those who rule us to mount lavish spectacles designed to manipulate our consciousness and distract us from the real business of our lives.  I find the royal wedding interesting as an illustration of our never-quite-vanquished hankering for a Father who knows best and has our best interests at heart--if only we relinquish our adulthood to Him and let Him return us to perpetual childhood.  In this light, I find the fawning wedding-inspired commentary of many American conservative thinkers about monarchy and all it might do for us, if we could only find the right father figure to whom to yield ourselves, fascinating.  And repulsive, in how it misses the point about what we really need to become a humane society today.

I also find what has been taking place with the Kate and Wills show interesting because it brings back sharp, evocative memories of the wedding of Charles and Diana, which was surrounded by equal fanfare and similar fawning media adulation.  I didn't watch the Chuck and DiDi show, either, though when it was staged, I happened to be living and studying in Canada, a country linked to the Crown, many of whose citizens still preserve a certain nostalgic fondness for the monarchy--though many others find the fuss about the royals baffling, and the institution itself embarrassingly archaic (and a drain on the British economy).

Almost all of the Canadians with whom I studied in the 1970s and 1980s ignored the monarchy.  Some were actively opposed to it.  One friend would deliberately turn stamps (with the head of the Queen) upside down before she affixed them to letters.  The only ardent monarchist I ever met in my years in Canada was, as it turned out, the Polish-born friend about whom I've blogged elsewhere, who was for monarchy anywhere: he supported any king, queen, prince, or princess anywhere in the world.  Just because.  As a matter of principle.  Because that was how things were meant to be.

As a guest in another country, I didn't normally get into intra-national political discussions, unless my Canadian friends invited me to do so.  When I did so, I almost always found them jocular and mannerly, even when they were characterized by good-natured sparring between my Canadian friends and "the" Americans.  "The" Americans who were nothing like me, since I hadn't grown up in the parts of the U.S. with which my Canadian friends were familiar and which they used to form their opinion of the Yanks.  I was very surprised, indeed, to discover that I was a Yank in Canada, when I had been taught throughout my formative years that whatever in the world a Yankees might be, I was to be the precise opposite, with ever fiber of my being.

And, though my family tree is brimful of Revolutionary soldiers, a number of whom died fighting in battle to sever the ties of the American colonies to the Crown, I myself haven't ever given a great deal of thought to monarchy or its alternatives.  I don't quite understand the hankering for royalty many Americans have--not because I'm particularly opposed to monarchy, but because whatever monarchy represents seems long ago and far away to me, given the experiences that shaped me as I grew up in the U.S.  If I was shaped in any overt political direction by my parents and schooling, that direction would most likely be called Jeffersonian democracy, with strong hints of agrarianism.  I was taught to admire and try to emulate those who sought to make democratic society truly democratic, and to provide economic advantages (hence the agrarianism) to every citizen, so that all citizens might find some way to sustain their lives and communities, and become fully participating members of democratic society.

When Charles and Diana married, I was teaching a summer course at a Jesuit college in northern Ontario.  The Jesuits who ran the university were French-Canadian to a man, as were almost all of the students in their college.  The summer was good for my French, since I found myself in a sink-or-swim situation at faculty gatherings, in which I had to speak French if I wanted to communicate at all.  I ended the summer with a better grasp of spoken French than I had ever had after years of schoolroom French--though, admittedly, the French I spoke after that summer was heavily overlaid with a joual accent that would have horrified the Sorbonne-educated woman who taught me French as an undergraduate.

And the clash between the standard French I'd been taught in college and what I heard around me during that wonderfully instructive summer sometimes led to ludicrous misunderstandings, including my inability to know how to reply when I answered the phone in my office--an office assigned to a Père Pion, who was away for the summer--and thought I heard someone saying, "Papillon?"  I had no idea what to say when these calls came through, until I finally realized I was hearing people asking for Fr. Pion in a Québécois accent.  Not for a butterfly.

The French Canadian students and faculty at this Jesuit school were gloriously hospitable.  I'll never forget passing the beautifully tended little garden on which one of the Jesuit brothers lavished daily care, and having him pull out of the ground a number of radishes, hold them up to me, and say, Mais manger-en!  Ce sont médicinales.  Just as I won't forget the librarian who taught me to recognize edible wild plants of the area that her grandmother had picked for spring salads--also with medicinal qualities.  

Or the wonderful party the French students threw on one occasion--precisely what it was, I've forgotten, though it had some church significance, as well as I can recall.  It may, in fact, have been St. John's day.  The party taught me how gifted some cultures are at creating the conditions for celebration by pooling the limited resources available to individual members of the community so that, when those limited resources are gathered together and turned into the basis for a celebration, everyone benefits from them.  

A few pieces of fresh fruit here added to several slices of cheese there, along with flowers from someone's garden and a bottle of wine and loaf of bread from another person's larder: and there was the party, with more than enough for everyone.  After we had eaten and listened to music, I remember we walked outside in a kind of procession, which the students of the Anglican college on the same campus gathered to watch in silence: two cultures, with entirely different predispositions and radically different histories, on silent (and somewhat tense) display with the events of that interesting evening.  And I, caught between them, since by cultural and ethnic background, I certainly belonged with the wary, watching Anglos, but happened to be processing with the French with whom I'd affiliated myself when I became Catholic.

This was the context in which I heard news of the marriage of Charles and Diana that summer.  Needless to say, the French Canadian students and faculty among whom I was living as the royal couple married were anything but enthralled with the wedding and its fanfare.  They laughed uproariously at the news that many fellow Canadians and many Americans intended to stay up far into the night to watch the royal ceremony on television.  Why would anyone want to lose sleep to watch that man with such big ears marry? they'd ask when we gathered to discuss the news of the day.

And so it went, and so it goes as Kate and Wills marry: and I have absolutely no idea where this particular posting is going, or why I am sharing these fond memories, other than to point out that things don't seem to change--not fundamentally--over the course of years.  Not easily.  And not frequently.

People remain stuck in cultural patterns that deform them.  People remain altogether too willing to relinquish control of their adult lives to mythic figures and mythic forces that they're taught to regard as saviors, figures and forces that inevitably betray those who give the reins of their autonomy into the hands of those saviors.  Whether political, economic, or religious: mythic savior figures in each and every case.

People remain voraciously hungry for fairy tales, too--but for the easiest fairy tales of all, not for the ones that require virtue or a heroic quest of us.  The fairy tales that enthrall us on television (or in legislative halls or churches) are the ones that promise easy virtue to us, automatic reward, if we but fit the norm.  If we conform.  If we do what's expected of us.

As Mr. Ivereigh says, if we become proper boys and girls and approach the altar wearing properly matched topcoats and gowns.   If we keep the wedding cakes crowned with little men beside little women.  If we uphold the central symbols that make everyone in our society comfortable with themselves.  If we do not challenge those symbols in a way that forces people to think about what they take for granted--or about the injustice enshrined in the world we seek so desperately to reinforce by keeping those central symbols in place, the injustice we seek to keep hidden as we madly manipulate those central symbols and claim that they are readings of reality as God ordains it, and not culturally determined choices that can be changed.

And so it goes, as William marries Kate.  And I certainly wish them a happy life together.  They'll need it, on the stage they occupy.

Claire Bangasser on Holy Women as Apostles of the Resurrection

And one final update/postscript today: as I blogged during Holy Week about the questions the Elizabeth Johnson case raises re: the bishops' teaching authority, I noted the role that the holy women of the gospels played as Jesus was crucified and resurrected.  I noted that it was the women among Jesus's disciples who walked with him to the cross and who first found him risen from the dead, and because of their fidelity to Jesus and their witnessing of the resurrection, these holy women then challenged Peter to find his faith again--after he had abandoned Jesus during his passion.

And I wrote that if the bishops want to regain their authority as apostolic teachers (this is the central claim of Cardinal Wuerl's letter about the bishops' authority following the Elizabeth Johnson case: that bishops are the primary teachers in the church as successors of the apostles), then, like Peter, they will seek out the  faithful, exemplary women within the community who follow Jesus to the cross and witness his resurrection, and sit at their feet.  And they will learn from these women apostles.

And now I'd like to take note of Claire Bangasser's superb Easter meditation this week entitled "Apostles of the Resurrection," which reflects on these same themes.  As Claire notes, Jesus gave women a role they had never had in his Jewish community prior to him, and which they have never had in any male-dominated religion.  This role--this apostolic role for women--lasted within the Christian church only up to the period of Constantine, when the church adopted the style, governance structures, and mores of the rulers of the Roman Empire--including its patriarchal and misogynistic cultural practices.

From which point, Claire notes, women have been systematically marginalized until remarkable women theologians of the post-Vatican II period began reclaiming women's rightful place in the church and re-reading the scriptures to ferret out the passages concealed or obscured by post-Constantinean misogyny, which show that women played a primary role--as apostles--within the first community of Jesus's followers.  Theologians like Elizabeth Johnson, Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, Joan Chittister, Rosemary Radford-Ruether, and many others . . . .

Claire's conclusion: 

‘Do not be afraid,’ Jesus said to the women he met after his Resurrection. ‘Do not be afraid,’ Jesus tells us today. Be what you have always been: bold and strong. Go and proclaim my message of hope to all who are marginalized and left by the side of the road... 

The Resurrected One, Cosmic Christ, is pulling everyone of us toward Godde, each of us as we are, generously included et gloriously loved.

In His name. 

And that strikes me as a wonderful meditation point for this Easter week--and very beautifully put.

(And, of course, amidst the Easter joy of this week, tragedy and great suffering for many people in my part of the country, with the tornadoes across parts of the South yesterday, and terrible loss of life in Alabama, along with Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee.  I feel a particular connection to the people of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where so much of the damage occurred, and where so many people were killed.  My grandfather was born in Tuscaloosa Co., and I have deep roots going back to the formation of the county on his side of my family.  In the midst of life, we are in death, though we're an Easter people who look for the final victory of life over death . . . .)

U.S. Bishops' Pro-Life Spokeswoman: Catholics Oppose Taxpayer Funding of Contraception

Third update: I posted during Holy Week about Gerald Slevin's recent critical analysis of Germaine Grisez's revisionist history of the post-Vatican II papal commission on birth control.  As I noted in that posting, it strikes me as inconsistent to oppose both artificial contraception and abortion, since abundant evidence demonstrates that the majority of abortions take place because pregnancies haven't been planned or a couple or woman dealing with a pregnancy feels unable to provide for and raise a child.  

And in a Good Friday posting, I noted the recent finding of the Guttmacher Institute that some 98% of Catholic women in the U.S. have used birth control--a finding Fr. Anthony Ruff notes in his response to Cardinal Wuerl's recent statement about the teaching authority of bishops in the wake of the condemnation of Elizabeth Johnson's work.  As I noted in my discussion of Ruff's article, it's intriguing to me that we're only now discovering something that statisticians, theologians, and many others have known since the late 1960s: that an overwhelming percentage of Catholics in the developed areas of the world stoutly reject Catholic magisterial teaching about artificial contraception and sexual ethics in general.

In light of these previous discussions of the contraception issue, I find the response of the U.S. Catholic bishops' official pro-life spokeswoman to the Guttmacher Institute data fascinating.  Nancy Frazier O'Brien discusses this response in a recent article in National Catholic Reporter.

As O'Brien notes, after the Guttmacher findings were published, Deirdre McQuade, assistant director for policy and communications at USCCB's Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities, told Catholic News Service, "The way the data is presented . . . is misleading in a pretty fundamental way." McQuade's response to the Guttmacher data showing the vast majority of American Catholics reject church teaching about contraception is to reiterate the church's opposition to both abortion and contraception.

McQuade notes that "Catholics" are opposed to taxpayer funding of contraceptive services, because some contraceptives are actually abortifacients, and because "fertility is a sign of health."  Fertility should not be considered a disease to be controlled--and therefore birth control is not an area of health care that one ought  routinely to expect to be provided by health care agencies funded by tax dollars.

And again I have to say: I don't get it.  If we're really opposed to abortion and consider it one of the most heinous abuses of life to be curbed in our society, it seems to me we'd not only step back from the ban on artificial contraception, but we'd actively advocate for access to contraceptives for those who want or need them.  It's logically inconsistent to claim we're pro-life when it comes to abortion, and then to oppose contraceptives--given the clear link between preventing unwanted pregnancies and preventing abortions.

And there's another ethical issue lurking behind this debate that seems to me well worth noting: this is the desire of various groups of the religious and political right to control women and women's access to contraception, because women's ability to determine whether or when they will bear children is exceptionally threatening to the patriarchal mindset of the leaders of the religious and political right.  This is the unacknowledged goal of those trying to shut down Planned Parenthood.

What they're effectively trying to shut down is women's control over their reproductive lives.  In particular, they're effectively trying to shut down the control of poor women over their reproductive lives.  And that strikes me as morally reprehensible in the extreme, when those mounting this crusade know full well that affluent women will always have the means to obtain contraceptive devices or medications--while more and more women at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder will be deprived of those health care needs if this crusade has its way.

Pace Ms. McQuade, contraceptives most certainly are a part of any adequate health care plan for adults that seeks to provide comprehensive health care.  I grew up hearing one horror story after another about the effects of unplanned and unwanted pregnancies on many poor women in the chronically impoverished American South in the period from Reconstruction through the Great Depression.  I know from stories I heard my grandmother, mother, and aunts tell that women suffered horribly in the past when they were expected (and often forced) to bear one child after another during their years of fertility, and when food and the comforts to make life humane were scarce.

To ask that women be returned to that subjugation to biological fate and to male domination in the name of God strikes me as obscene.  The leaders of the Catholic church are on the wrong side of history and of morality with this particular crusade--and it's time they recognized that fact.  The opposition to contraceptive use undercuts what they want to teach us about the value of life and the evil of abortion.  Colluding with the religious and political right in attacks on the health care needs of poor women in the U.S. is not a morally admirable thing for Catholic bishops to do.

Donald Cozzens to Bishops Accusing Elizabeth Johnson: Step Up and Let Yourselves Be Seen

I'm struck today by a number of articles that seem to me to offer interesting perspectives on topics I've discussed here in the past.  And so I think I'll do one of those "in the news" series of postings, catching up on issues from previous postings.

First, I'm intrigued by Donald Cozzens' call for transparency on the part of the U.S. Catholic bishops in the case of Elizabeth Johnson.  As I have noted in a number of postings in the past several weeks, the U.S. Catholic bishops' committee on doctrine issued a condemnation of Sr. Elizabeth Johnson's 2007 book Quest for the Living God at the end of March.  The bishops claim that the book is doctrinally defective and is an imperfect guide to Catholic truth for those using the book in classrooms and other theological discussion groups.

As Donald Cozzens notes, this condemnation ostensibly reflects concerns raised by a number of U.S. bishops, whose identities we don't know.  Though the bishops have a policy that encourages bishops to engage in dialogue with a theologian whose work is under episcopal scrutiny prior to issuing a condemnation of this sort, in the case of Elizabeth Johnson, there was no such dialogue.  She was not informed of the ostensible defects of her work as it was being reviewed by the bishops' committee, not told who had made accusations against her, and not given a chance to defend herself and her work as it was being reviewed.

Hence Cozzens' call for transparency now: who is questioning Johnson's work, and why are those bishops doing so?  In Cozzens' view, an adult church demands adult techniques of handling dispute--not secrecy and top-down, authoritarian suppression of discussion:

For the bishops who accused Johnson, I have a thought. Step out from behind the sanctuary of your chancery desks and identify yourselves. Johnson is ready to sit down with you for a serious conversation about the mystery of the living God.

It seems to me that’s the adult thing to do.

Though I certainly don't know the identity of any of Johnson's accusers, I can well imagine the theological niche within the U.S. bishops' conference from which the accusations are emanating.  I can imagine that niche because I began to be aware that Elizabeth Johnson was on the radar screen of the Catholic fringe right by the early 1990s.  And when I became aware of that fact, I also became aware of several of the primary factors that were driving the attack on Johnson and other theologians who were beginning to be perceived as threats to Catholic truth in this period.

Here's how the attacks on Johnson came on my radar screen: not too long after I was given a terminal contract in 1993 by Belmont Abbey College, whose theology department I chaired, the Benedictine community of monks that own the college hosted a lecture by a popular American Catholic speaker, Fr. Alfred McBride, on the topic of the future of Catholic theology.  Curiously, though I was chairing the theology department of this Catholic college at the time, I wasn't invited to the lecture.

I found out about it only post factum, from some of the majors in the department who were potential candidates for monastic life and who had been invited to the lecture.  They told me that McBride's lecture was, in their view, a broadside attack on much of American Catholic theology in the wake of Vatican II--the kind of theology they was being taught in many of their theology classes at Belmont Abbey.

In particular, they told me, he lambasted Elizabeth Johnson, who was "tearing apart" the church with her feminist ideas of God.  How was she permitted to get away with this kind of thing?  Where were the theological controls that used to assure that anyone calling herself a Catholic theologian was a bona fide Catholic theologian, and not a maverick dangerous to orthodoxy?

When I heard the reports of my students about these attacks on Elizabeth Johnson in a quasi-secret lecture advertised as a public lecture, which was essentially a call for a purge of groups of theologians regarded as threats to an embattled clerical regime, it became clear to me that the monks of Belmont Abbey had invited Alfred McBride to give the lecture because of their own concerns--concerns that underlay my terminal contract--about issues of control in the theological realm.  I was the first lay chair of Belmont Abbey's theology department.

Throughout my troubled two years at this small Benedictine college, there was constant turmoil due to the palpable fear of many of the monks that the appointment of a lay chair of the theology department signaled the end of clerical control of the discipline of theology.  On more than one occasion, I had the unhappy experience of sitting through sermons in the abbey church in which the monk preaching told students that theologians were leading them astray, and that they needed to study theology on their knees, praying for God to hold them fast in the truth.  I also discovered after I received a terminal contract that, during my time at the college, one of my books had circulated through the monastery, where monks made marginal notes re: the "errors" of the text, to show that I wasn't qualified to teach theology.

Not long after I was issued a terminal contract with no explanation for why I was being fired, the monastery's abbot gave a public presentation to the college community in which he spoke of the need to lop off diseased limbs in order to restore the catholicity of the college.  He followed this with a statement to the media which was printed in the local paper, in which he said that the catholicity of Catholic colleges was waning as more lay faculty taught in these colleges.  He had assumed the presidency of the college, pushing out its lay president, in order to reassert catholicity, and he wanted the public to know this.

The underlying implication of these remarks was clear: lay theologians cannot be controlled in the same way that clerical theologians can be controlled.  Theology had always been and should remain a clerical discipline, tightly controlled by church officials.  Those calling the shots at this particular Catholic college were eager to use the latest mechanism of control on the horizon at that point in time--the mandatum, a "permission" to teach theology granted by the local bishop to theologians after those theologians have taken an oath of loyalty--as a mechanism assuring continued clerical control of the discipline of theology, in an age in which theologians are increasingly lay persons and not priests.

(Unfortunately--an aside, but a pertinent one--the priest that Belmont Abbey was eager to hire to replace me in order to restore the catholicity of the theology department came with some embarrassing baggage.  He disappeared mysteriously halfway through an academic year, while college officials remained mum about the disappearance.  In 2002, the reason for his disappearance became evident from information released during the disclosure process in the Boston trials about clerical sexual abuse: he had come to the college with well-known and proven allegations of sexual advances to seminarians at his previous place of employment.

When this information became public, the then abbot, a monk who had hired me to teach theology and then ditched me with great alacrity when he saw that the prevailing winds were against having a lay chair of the theology department, told the media that he had not known of the priest's messy past at the time he was hired.  The bishop of Charlotte made a similar statement to the media.  Both then had to admit that they had lied a few days later, when Cardinal Law released documents showing he had telephoned and written the abbot and the bishop to tell them about the priest's history of sexual approaches to students when Belmont Abbey College hired him.)

What was of supreme importance to the monks who sought to unseat me as the first lay chair of this college's theology department was, as I have noted, to find mechanisms to assure continued clerical control of the discipline of theology in an age in which theologians are increasingly lay persons and not priests.  And increasingly laypersons and nuns: the growing number of religious women obtaining academic degrees in the field of theology, teaching theology, and writing theological works is also of serious concern to those who imagine that waning clerical control of theological discourse represents the end of catholicity in the church.  Elizabeth Johnson is a lightning rod for these concerns, I began to realize as I worked through my own painful experiences with this small Catholic college, for precisely the same reason I was a lightning rod as a lay theologian.

She's a lightning rod because she's not a priest.  And not a man.  And she is beyond the control of those who equate catholicity with male clerical control.  She's a lightning rod for those who imagine that the church is somehow falling apart when men are not completely in control of it and all that it says and does.

And that's ultimately what the recent condemnation of Elizabeth Johnson's work is all about, and what the U.S. bishops intend to communicate with this condemnation: theology belongs to us.  It belongs to clerics.  It belongs to clerics who also happen to be men.  It belongs primarily to clerics because the church itself belongs primarily to clerics.  They determine the meaning of catholicity, of its symbols and doctrines.   And we can control clerics teaching theology in ways we cannot control lay persons or religious women who teach theology--and this lack of control concerns us and many others who are concerned about the waning of mechanisms of male control in culture at large.

The bishops who have raised concerns about Elizabeth Johnson?  This is where they're coming from.  And we will not ever know their identities, I suspect, because they do not want their identities disclosed.  They don't want their identities disclosed any more than the powerful men in back rooms with whom these bishops collude to keep patriarchal control mechanisms in place in society at large want their identities known.  What they're doing in the case of Elizabeth Johnson is all about reasserting a sense of control that they imagine is threatened by people like Elizabeth Johnson, which does its work within church structures precisely by remaining hidden and unaccountable.

(P.S. I've noted that the fact that Steve and I are a gay couple and were hired together to teach theology at Belmont Abbey played a definite role in the choice of the school to give me an unexplained terminal contract  after two years.  I know this because the president of the college told a student this, when the student expressed his concern about the terminal contract in a conversation with the president.

But this was, I suspect, not the primary reason the monks and bishop of Charlotte wanted me to be terminated.  It was very clear to me--and I have quite a bit of evidence to back up this claim--that the primary movers in the decision to give me a terminal contract were the then abbot Oscar Burnett and the then bishop of Charlotte John Donoghue, who were also being pressured by some very powerful and wealthy right-wing Catholics in the area to fire me.  Though Belmont Abbey refused ever to provide a reason for the termination, before the president of the college was himself fired, he told me that the bishop and abbot were pushing for my firing because they wanted direct control over the theology department, which they felt they had lost with a lay department chair.

The gay issue was simply a convenient way to frame the grab for control and to make it seem palatable to the public--and it proved a very effective way for the monastic community and key players in the old boys' club that dominated the faculty at that point in time to spin my expulsion from the college, which was, in effect, also my expulsion from the Catholic theological academy itself.)

For National Poetry Month: Andrei Voznesensky's "Someone Is Beating a Woman" (Re-Posted)

We're right in the middle of National Poetry Month, and I haven't yet mentioned that event, for which I did a series of postings last year.  Since my discussion of the Catholic abuse crisis in the last several days turns around questions of the continued callousness of many societies and faith communities--particularly those dominated by heterosexist patriarchal elites--to the abuse of women, I want to re-post a poem I posted last April for National Poetry Month.  This is Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky's "Someone Is Beating a Woman":

Someone is beating a woman
In the car that is dark and hot
Only the whites of her eyes shine.
Her legs thrash against the roof
Like berserk searchlight beams.

Someone is beating a woman.
This is the way slaves are beaten.
Frantic, she wrenches open the door
And plunges out--onto the road.

Brakes scream.
Someone runs up to her,
Strikes her and drags her, face down,
In the grass lashing with nettles.

Scum, how meticulously he beats her,
Stilyága, bastard, big hero,
His smart flatiron-pointed shoe
Stabbing into her ribs.

Such are the pleasures of enemy soldiers
And the brute refinements of peasants.
Trampling underfoot the moonlit grass,
Someone is beating a woman.

Someone is beating a woman,
Century on century, no end to this.
It's the young that are beaten.  Somberly
Our wedding bells start up the alarm.
Someone is beating a woman.

What about the flaming weals
In the braziers of the cheeks?
That's life, you say.  Are you telling me?
Someone is beating a woman.

But her light is unfaltering:
World-without-ending.
There are no religions,
     no revelations,
There are women.

Lying there pale as water,
Her eyes tear-closed and still,
She doesn't belong to him
Any more than a meadow deep in a wood.

And the stars?  Rattling in the sky
Like raindrops against black glass
Plunging down
     they cool
Her grief-fevered forehead.

Trans. Jean Garrigue, from An Arrow in the Wall, ed. William Jay Smith and F.D. Reeve (NY: Henry Holt and Company), pp. 20-23 (originally published in Voznesensky's Antiworlds [1966]).

End of Week News Round-Up: Catholic Congressional Briefing re: Gay Rights, Elizabeth Johnson, Other Philadelphias

A number of interesting news items as the week ends:

Sr. Maureen Fiedler has an excellent report at National Catholic Reporter about a briefing held in D.C. this past Wednesday.  As she notes, "The Catholic Bishops of the United States have been lobbying for years against equal rights for the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) community."  (And what a shocking indictment of the U.S. Catholic bishops and implicitly of the church they lead, if you think about it, this bald statement is: a group of leaders of a major Christian church in the U.S. actively lobbying against equal rights for a marginalized minority group!)

But, as Fiedler notes, since a majority of American Catholics have come to a different moral judgment about the issue of gay rights than that of their pastoral leaders, the group Equally Blessed this week met with members of Congress to ask that Congress listen as attentively to what lay Catholics think about these matters as to the bishops.

As Fiedler concludes, this is a positive development, in which we see (parallels here to the Elizabeth Johnson story) that, no matter how loudly the bishops insist that they own "the" Catholic voice, there's an increasing willingness on the part of some other members of the church to claim our right to speak on behalf of the church, too.

Also following up on the Elizabeth Johnson story: at the Catholica site today, Brian Coyne posts commentary by Australian theologian Emmy Silvius which notes the importance of Elizabeth Johnson's 1993 book Women, Earth, and Creator Spirit.  As Coyne's preface to Silvius's commentary notes, it's serendipitous that Silvius sent her piece to him in the last week, before the USCCB condemnation of Johnson's work came down.  And as he adds, "People are no longer listening to the bishops and the old patriarchal line anymore."

As I've been noting, and as Silvius's outstanding article richly illustrates, people of faith are now looking to theologians like Elizabeth Johnson, Denis Edwards, Thomas Berry, Ilia Delio, Neil Ormerod, Tim Flannery and others to understand who God is and how we relate to God.  Not to the bishops.  No matter how loudly they keep squawking about their exclusive ownership of The Truth and the tools by which salvation is effected for the rest of us.

And speaking about how the bishops have perhaps most definitively undermined their claim to teach with moral authority: the New York Times has an editorial today encouraging the bishops to get on with that house-cleaning they've been promising us since the abuse crisis broke wide open in 2002, promises that the Philadelphia grand jury report calls into question in a startling way.  As many Catholics and other people of good will are noting, the Times editorial notes,

The haunting question is how many other Philadelphias may be out there. 

And Paul Moses follows up on that question with a good reflection at the Commonweal blog, entitled "Other Philadelphias."   Where Frank Gibbons notes, rightly, that if we need any indicator that there definitely are other Philadelphias out there, we need look no further than the case of the Jesuits and Fr. Donald McGuire.

2011 is shaping up to be an interesting year in Catholic news.  And with the beatification of John Paul II now just around the corner, I expect it's going to get interestinger.  And curioser.

(Also, as I noted in a comment to yesterday's posting about the Elizabeth Johnson story, there's a thought-provoking thread now underway at Commonweal in response to Mollie Wilson O'Reilly's piece about this story entitled "It's Not About the Feminism (Except When It Is)." 

The graphic is Oregon artist Linda Ethier's cast glass piece entitled "Newspaper Reading Room."

A Reader Writes about Elizabeth Johnson Condemnation: What Are They So Afraid Of?

When I blogged yesterday about the condemnation of Elizabeth Johnson's book Quest for the Living God, MollyJ posted a great comment, asking, "What is the church so danged afraid of?"  Molly also notes that the bishops' response to Johnson sounds very "agendized."

And I agree.  I can't pretend to have a single scrap of information about what has gone on behind the scenes to produce this condemnation.  But my lack of inside information doesn't prevent me from piecing together the tidbits of information I've acquired over the course of some 30 years now as a Catholic theologian in the U.S. (albeit one shoved way to the margins), and, based on those tidbits, reaching some conclusions about why the bishops are making this statement about Johnson's work.  Conclusions that seem plausible to me, at least.

And here they are, for what they're worth to readers:

First and foremost, what the bishops are afraid of is loss of control.  But the fear of loss of control that they're voicing in the condemnation of this book is a broader fear than a specifically religious or specifically Catholic fear.  It's a fear that runs through patriarchal power structures in both faith communities and society at large at this point in history.  It's a quite specific fear that is particularly intent at our time in history, and particularly powerful in some communities of faith, notably the Roman Catholic church.

This is a fear among heterosexual (or heterosexual-posturing) men that they are on the verge of losing control of the key institutions and symbols of many societies and religious groups.  And in response to that fear, there's a ratcheted-up claim among heterosexual (or heterosexual-posturing) men that they exclusively and unilaterally own God.  And the central symbols of various religious traditions.

What the bishops are voicing in their condemnation of Elizabeth Johnson is, ultimately, ownership.  Ownership of God.  Of the symbol of God, which is fundamental to, indispensable to, the entire system of Catholic doctrine.  Ownership of all language about God.  Of all official language about God, which, they keep insisting (along with the Vatican) must always be filtered through their screening mechanisms and stamped with their divine seal of approbation before it's promulgated to the people of God.

As if ordinary layfolks and women and other ragtag people can't possibly know, understand, experience, and talk about God. Not in any official and meaningful way.  Not in any way that affects the allocation of power and structures of power in social groups and religious communities.

What is offensive about Elizabeth Johnson's approach to theology and to talking about God--what is offensive to the bishops, above all--is her method of doing theology as though the experience of ordinary layfolks and women and other ragtag human beings counts.  As if it is valid experience of the divine.  As if we need to listen intently to such experience in order to develop anything close to an adequate theological language about God.

Scan Catholic blog sites in recent days where there's discussion of this book and why the bishops have chosen to condemn it, and you'll notice an interesting sociological trend in the discussion: far and away the majority of those defending the bishops and their choice to condemn the book are men.  And over and over, those men's defense of what the bishops have chosen to do boils down to a language of sheer, raw power.

The bishops should condemn such books, the defensores fidei are saying, because they have the right to do so, and people forget who owns rights unless those who have them assert their rights.  Unless they assert their rights over others.  

The men defending the bishops' action with regard to Elizabeth Johnson's book are jubilant that the bishops have asserted their power over a feminist theologian who dares to write about God in any voice other than the official voice of a chancery office or episcopal palace.  The bishops' decision to condemn Elizabeth Johnson's work is being framed by these male defensores as a demonstration of episcopal muscle of which these defenders of the faith would like to see quite a bit more: more heretic bashing.  More imprimaturs.  More oaths and mandata.

More mechanisms of control to assure that there's only one voice--only one authoritarian voice--declaring The Truth to the world.  Declaring Catholic Truth.  Declaring The Truth that men know, own, and dispense as they wish to the rest of the world.

One of the most amusing responses I am now hearing at blog sites as power-brokering men chew over the "victory" of the U.S. bishops' muscular demonstration of power over Elizabeth Johnson is this: she herself admits she went to press, they say, before she had the full truth about God.  And now she wants to whine when those with more access to the truth--those who own the taps from which dribs and drabs of truth are dispensed to the rest of us--slap her hands for her sloppy work?

The spectacular misunderstanding of what theology is all about exhibited in that recurring statement on some Catholic blogs in the past day or so is mind-boggling.  Can anyone really be so ignorant of what theology is about at the most fundamental level possible--that it's a communitarian search, requiring many perspectives and many voices, for language and symbols to express our experience of the divine?  To voice an experience of the divine Who transcends any and all language?

The reflex to control runs directly counter to everything that the experience of the divine means if it's authentic, in the view of the classic religious traditions of the world.  Authentic experience of God, we're told repeatedly by the classic religious traditions of the world, inducts us into a life of faith in which we continuously experience a loss of control.  Because we've encountered God.  Who is utterly beyond all human control.  Who is utterly beyond all human language. The claim to own The Truth about God and a uniquely correct language in which to utter that truth is, on the face of it, a claim that places those making the claim beyond the pale of authentic experience of the divine, in the understanding of the world's classic religious traditions.

The spiritual life is about going where we never expected to go, walking along paths that lead somewhere we never intended to walk.  It's about letting go of control, and of ourselves, in ceaseless acts of self-giving to others and to God.  In ceaseless acts of self-giving to anyone and everyone in need--which is to say, to the whole world.  It's about Jesus going down into and under the waters of the Jordan River and letting himself be submerged in them as he begins his ministry--a ministry whose paths lead to Calvary, not to a royal throne or a military commander's palace.  Not to power and control, but to the renunciation of those alluring mirages that stand between us and the living God whose love burns away all desire to control, to exercise power over others.

As I think about what the bishops are doing and saying in condemning Elizabeth Johnson's work, I wonder what powerful men where are now pulling the strings for the Catholic bishops of the U.S. I wonder about whose money is changing hands behind the scenes to urge the bishops to attack federal policies designed to prevent discrimination against gay citizens in the area of housing, to remain silent when bullying of gay youths create epidemics of suicide, and when workers' rights are being assaulted in one state after another.  I wonder whose money urged the bishops to, well, lie about health care reform last year and claim that the new federal health care plan would subvent abortions.

I wonder who has bought and spurred on this ugly inquisitorial gesture against one of the most highly respected American Catholic theologians.  Who happens to be a woman.

I wonder about all of these matters as I see the bishops make yet another utterly doltish, bafflingly wrong-headed pastoral move that, in the minds of the men who are cheering them, demonstrates the bishops' magnificent power to all the world.  When what it really tells an increasing number of us, instead, as the abuse crisis continues to unfold and we learn just what the bishops have really been doing as all that money changes hands behind the scenes, is that the bishops are totally devoid of any power that spiritually or morally astute people would recognize as authentic, transformative religious power.

That kind of power is to be found now in the theology of Elizabeth Johnson--not in any words the bishops are uttering. 

You Have to Hear This . . .

You just have to hear Joelle Casteix of SNAP talking about Father Martin O'Loghlen's case to John Kobylt and Kenneth Chiampou at KFI AM 640's (southern California) "John and Ken Show."  The link is at Patrick Wall's blog (with a hat tip to the wonderful Abuse Tracker site). 

If I were pope--and I have an inkling I may not ever be, so please don't hold your breath contemplating that horrid possibility--I think I'd put every bishop in the world in a room and have him listen to this interview.  Over and over.  Non-stop.  For, oh, about 10 days.

I'd offer bread and water as the bishops listen.  I'm not utterly cruel.

And, in particular, I'd have the contingent who want to say that this is, for pete's sake, just a story about a lonely, sad, repressed priest kissing a teenaged girl listen for 20 days non-stop.  Sipping water and chewing bread as they listen.

This story is just so sick from all kinds of angles, and what's most disturbing about it all is that the sickness in the narrative is normalized in the heterosexist male-dominated culture of Catholicism, so that every excuse in the book comes pouring forth when a story about this particular kind of abuse breaks open:   

Just an isolated, overworked priest doing what men do, kissing a teenaged girl.  

And we all know what teenaged girls are like when their hormones are raging.

Not gay, after all.  Not molesting boys like the rest of them. Doing the normal thing for a change.

And so he gained valuable experience.  Other priests can benefit from this experience.  Let's put him on the review board of the diocese.

Called her up and tried to apologize, didn't he? 

Got counseling, got himself straightened out--why don't they leave poor Father alone and let him minister in a parish?  Forgive and forget!  That's what Christianity is all about.

Just sickening, the excuses.  As John and Ken conclude, this is a story of stinky liars running a Catholic diocese, trying to convince us--with all the abundant records of what O'Loglen did to Julie Malcolm in his bulging file--that they didn't happen to look carefully at O'Loghlen's file when they put him back into ministry.  In 2009!

And who managed to whisk O'Loghlen out of the country to the Philippines, I wonder, for the precise period of years in which California extended the window for abuse victims to file suit against molesters?  Whose power has been protecting and promoting this priest who was superior of his religious community, with powerful ties in Rome?  Why has he been protected and promoted?  After his molestation of Julie Malcolm was well known.

Worth the whole listen: Joelle Casteix's brilliant analysis of the minors that clerical perpetrators choose to groom and molest--the defenseless, vulnerable, confused young people who are least likely to have any power to fight back.  Or to blow the whistle after they've been molested.

Bread and water and non-stop wall-to-wall messaging for 10 or 20 days.  Would they get the message then, those who keep placing priests like Martin O'Loghlen back into parish ministry and schools?  And the many Catholics who continue to make excuses for the stinky, lying behavior of those who make the decisions to put O'Loghlen and others back into ministry?

The graphic for the posting is a photograph of Joelle Casteix.

The Father Euteneuer Story and the Charge of Schadenfreude: Misplaced Attempts to Shut Down Conversation

When I began blogging about the story (and here and here) of Human Life International's former director Father Thomas Euteneuer early in the month, I suggested that this story was not going to go away anytime soon, though there would be predictable attempts from predictable quarters to shut the conversation down.  As I wrote in one of my postings about this story,

And I predict that this story isn't going to go away simply because the usual folks shout the usual slogans to try to stop the conversation.  The goal of church officials and church organizations will, of course, be to keep the lid on the discussion and hope people will simply stop discussing this story when another case du jour comes along.

And if we've learned anything about the Catholic church in recent years, it's that another case is drearily predictable down the road.  Meanwhile, there are aspects to this story--the extensive influence of Euteneuer and HLI, the high profile Euteneuer has had in the American Catholic church in recent years, the truly bizarre fixation on the demonic and exorcism, and the fact that revelations offered by Euteneuer's former friends and fellow travelers are driving the story--that make me think it will continue to be discussed for some time.  No matter how much the apologists try to shut down the discussion.

In the last several days, both America's "In All Things" blog  and Commonweal's blog have had lively discussions of the Euteneuer story.  Among several fascinating aspects of both discussions has been this: in both discussions, Catholics with strong sympathies for the conservative political agenda Euteneuer promoted have tried to shut conversation down by claiming that those who want to talk about the Euteneuer case are engaging in Schadenfreude.

And here's what one contributor to the America thread, Bob Nunz, says about that charge:

Scadenfraude has bewcome a new mantra of the right, including the usual suspects here, who want to minimize the damage done by one of theirs.  I heard it parroted about the Philadelphia "bloodbath" to use Rocco's phrase.  I think it's really tedious that  we continue posts from  the same ideologues who don't want to deal with the issue here, viz. a criminal action  by a highly ranked clergy member taking advantage of his position.

The right-wing approach to Schadenfreude evidently runs something like the following: it's not shameful joy when we spend millions of taxpayer dollars to fund an investigation of a Democratic president's affair with an intern; but it is Schadenfreude when you want to talk about the betrayal of our most loudly proclaimed convictions by one of our own.  By a religious leader on our side who has made a cottage industry out of attacking liberals and touting chastity.

As I said when one respondent to my own postings about Euteneuer kept accusing me of Schadenfreude in talking about the Euteneuer story, the shameful joy charge is misplaced when folks committed to the moral values of a religious tradition insist, as our religious values require us to do, on talking about cases in which someone with a high public profile has conspicuously betrayed those values.  While loudly proclaiming them and bashing others who are said to fall short of the ideal.

Stories like this have all the elements of what Aristotle outlines as the very core of dramatic narrative.  Aristotle noted that dramas which engage our attention and allow us willingly to suspend disbelief commonly include the following elements: a powerful man treads the weak down as he wields power; he behaves arrogantly while ignoring his own shortcomings; those shortcomings, and the people he has trodden down as he wields power, then prove his downfall.

And we watch such dramas--we willingly enter on the narrative journey to which they invite us--not because we are joyful that the powerful man receives his just reward.  We watch in horror, seeing with our spectators' eyes what those blinded by power and arrogance are not able to see, precisely because their power and the arrogant way in which they use it blinds them to the downfall they are creating for themselves.  We watch with fascination to see the arrogant and unjust man brought down, because we want to have our moral view of the universe reaffirmed.  Our horror stems from the fact that the overweening powerful one cannot see that he is setting the conditions for his own takedown, while we can see clearly in the audience.

We are not joyful about seeing someone's downfall.  We are relieved to see that there is, indeed, a moral order in the world, which assures that no tyrant goes unpunished, no hypocrite goes unexposed--particularly when tyrannical hypocrites have done repeated harm to others too weak to defend themselves against the overweening tyrant.

There is an Aristotelian line to the story of Father Thomas Euteneuer, and that is what keeps this story alive.  There is an Aristotelian line to the story of priests who have abused minors, in general.  This is what keeps these stories alive.  At the heart of the story of the abuse of minors by Catholic priests is a narrative about power: about power that resides unilaterally in the hands of a privileged set of people--priests--within the structures of the Catholic church.  And about how some of those to whom this unilateral power is given have grossly abused it, repeatedly, and with seeming impunity.  For far too long.

We keep talking about these stories, we the people of God, because we hope to see what we pray for as we read the psalms and sing the Magnificat take place in our world: we hope to see the downtrodden vindicated.  We hope to see the poor lifted up from their powerless condition.  And we hope to see those who misuse power to hurt others, to abuse the weak, brought to justice.

We hope for this outcome--we pray for it--precisely because we believe in God.  We believe in a God who, in the words of the old African-American hymn,  may "sit high, but looks low."  We believe in a God who is on the side of the downtrodden and the poor, of the abused--not on the side of those doing the abuse.

Cries of Schadenfreude aren't going to shut down conversations among the people of God about the misallocation and abuse of power within the structures of our Catholic church, because our faith in a God who works justice in the world and who stands with the marginalized demands that we keep talking.  And pushing back.  And calling for reform.

And the stories just keep pouring fourth, demanding yet more conversation: the media are reporting today that a St. Paul, Minnesota, priest Father Christopher Wenthe has been arrested and charged with felony sexual misconduct following charges from a young woman to whom he ministered that he abused his pastoral relationship with her and repeatedly coerced her into sexual activity.  Though officials of the archdiocese have apparently known of these charges for some years now, and had sent Father Wenthe for treatment, he has remained in active ministry.

This story has important elements in common with the Euteneuer story.  In both cases (if the allegations about Father Wenthe are correct), there is an abuse of pastoral trust with a vulnerable adult woman to whom a priest is ministering.  As I've pointed out, the deep-rooted heterosexism running through much of Catholic culture predisposes some Catholics to view this kind of clerical misconduct as somehow more justifiable than other forms of clerical abuse.

But our legal system is not so easily persuaded by arguments that priests taking advantage of their role as pastors and counselors to coerce women in a pastoral counseling relationship into sexual activity is a matter to be taken lightly.  And so we Catholics need to continue to talk--about why we are inclined to give adult heterosexual men so many free passes, while we don't give those free passes to women or gay folks, for instance.

Lots to talk about.  As Phyllis Zagano wisely says in her recent NCR article about our broken church, the stories aren't going away, and so we have no choice except to keep talking, if we care about the broken church.  Continuing problems.  Continuing gross abuse of power, and continuing lies on the part of church officials who keep informing us that they have all of these matters under control and priests with a proven history of abuse are no longer in parishes or schools.

This--and our deep-rooted faith in a God who works justice in the world, particularly for the downtrodden--will assure that we keep talking.  Even when those who do not intend for these conversations to continue keep shouting about Schadenfreude.