Recently in Catholics Category

I've been waiting around for some reaction to the Proposition 8 decision from my friends at bien-pensant Catholic blogs like America's In All Things and Commonweal's dotCommonweal and the National Catholic Reporter's NCR Today, but so far to almost no avail. Michael Sean Winters did issue a critique of Judge Walker's decision, based on a misunderstanding of what the judge meant when he wrote that "a private moral view that same-sex couples are inferior to opposite-sex couples is not a proper basis for legislation." The issue is not whether, as Winters asserts, "there is nothing 'private' about Catholic moral views." It's that, as Walker wrote, "[t]he state does not have an interest in enforcing private moral or religious beliefs without an accompanying secular purpose." And the defenders of Proposition 8 failed to demonstrate such a purpose.

Be that as it may, what are we to make of the silence of all those others on a subject that has engaged no little Catholic rhetorical and political action? What I'm inclined to make of it is that, like most American Catholics, they are actually in favor of same-sex marriage--at least as a right in civil society--and so can't bring themselves to stand with their bishops. But on the other hand, to do anything else would subject them to intolerable abuse from the Catholic right--abuse that (as David Gibson points out over at dotCommonweal today) even that paladin of right-wing Catholicism Archbishop Charles Chaput characterizes as meaner and more vitriolic than anything on the other side.

I'm not suggesting that these moderates come right out and tell the bishops they don't know what they're talking about. Rome has spoken pretty plainly on the issue. But there are issues of prudence and even principle that might usefully be raised. Such as that the church is going to have to prepare itself for the day when, as with birth control and divorce, it accepts same-sex marriage as a normal feature of a civil society whose moral legislation is not its own. And that just because the Magisterium now teaches that same-sex marriage is in violation of the natural law, it could be the case that, as has happened with other moral issues in the past (slavery, for example, and usury), a fuller understanding of the nature of things casts a different light on the matter.

Update: Over on Beliefnet, reader Bryan Comes comments that I missed one of those moderate voices I was looking for--his own, over at U.S.Catholic. And a good post it is. Thanks, Bryan! 

...on what's wrong with same-sex marriage. Or that's how I see it.

"Do the citizens of a state have the right to define legal marriage as a man-woman relationship? Or can courts overrule them on behalf of same-sex marriage?" So Russell Shaw began a piece in that avatar of Catholic conservatism, Our Sunday Visitor, a couple of weeks ago. Shaw went on to acknowledge that courts have "the raw power" to do so, but "[w]hether doing it would be a rightful exercise of their power is questionable indeed."

I'd turn the question around and ask Shaw if he thinks citizens of a state have the right to define legal marriage as a same-sex relationship? Suppose, in a parallel universe, they did so, and a federal court overturned the vote. Would he regard that as a rightful exercise of judicial power? Or suppose, in that same parallel universe, the citizens had voted to give a woman the right to abortion, and courts overruled them on the grounds that fetuses have a right to life. I'm confident Shaw would be on board with that decision.

Such considerations can help us parse the statement issued by Cardinal Francis George, president of the USCCB, in response to U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker's constitutional slam dunk of Proposition 8 in Perry v. Schwarzenegger:

Marriage between a man and a woman is the bedrock of any society. The misuse of law to change the nature of marriage undermines the common good. It is tragic that a federal judge would overturn the clear and expressed will of the people in their support for the institution of marriage. No court of civil law has the authority to reach into areas of human experience that nature itself has defined.

Here, the "clear and expressed will of the people" is a rhetorical feint, calculated to appeal to the majoritarian instincts of a democratic polity but carrying no real weight. For George, it's not the will of the people but what "nature itself has defined" that matters. How does he know that nature has defined marriage as exclusively "between a man and a woman"? Not by revelation, but through the exercise of reason. It's a matter of natural law, and therefore applicable to all people at all times. Or so the Catholic church teaches.

David O'Connell, the former president of the Catholic University who was anointed coadjutor bishop of Trenton last weekend, may be a great guy--but given all that's been happening in the church over the past few months, his allocution left me cold.

His official episcopal slogan, Ministrare non ministrari--to serve rather than to be served--sounds humble enough, but it's simply an evocation of that old papal appellation, servus servorum dei--servant of the servants of God. Depending on who's wearing the mitre, it can signify faux as well as bona fide humility. Which posture will O'Connell assume?

He focused his remarks on laying out three ways a bishop serves: 1) teaching truth; 2) sanctifying his people; and 3) shepherding his people. "To teach. To sanctify. To shepherd. This is what a bishop does for God's people and with God's people." The most regal hierarch in history would have had no trouble uttering that line.

What about serving God's people by ensuring that they are protected against sexual predators in clerical clothing? What about serving God's people with an administration that is open and transparent? What about serving God's people by pledging to fulfill their spiritual aspirations? What about serving God's people, in a desperately poor city, with a renewed commitment to supporting their material needs? That's ministrare in my book.

In the indispensable Commonweal, Nicholas Cafardi, dean emeritus of Duquesne Law School and eminent canon lawyer, does a yeoman's job of trying to sort out the Vatican's sexual abuse story. The basic problem is this: In his 2001 letter clarifying John Paul II's motu proprio establishing the authority of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in sexual abuse cases, future pope Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger noted that the authority of the CDF (over which he presided) was "in force until now" (hucusque vigens). That is to say, such authority, granted in the 1922 papal letter Crimen Sollicitationis, had not been not superseded by the 1983 revision of canon law, which appeared to place authority elsewhere.

But, Cafardi contends, in order to maintain "bureaucratic bella figura" (proper form), Ratzinger fibbed. The CDF didn't really have, or at least didn't understand itself to have, authority over such cases. Rather than acknowledge that he had won the authority in a struggle with the Congregation of the Clergy and its lenient leader, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, Ratzinger gave the impression that nothing had changed. So in what might be taken as a bit of re-revisionist history, the "Historical Introduction" appended to Benedict's new set of norms points out that between 1994 and 2001, "no reference was made to the previous competence of the Holy Office [as the CDF was formerly known] over such cases." Previous or in force until now? You be the judge.

Well, OK. Cafardi's major point is that this is the kind of thing that happens when laws are promulgated in secrecy. What he doesn't offer is an explanation for why the Vatican, in 1962 as well as 1922, was so determined to keep under wraps the fact that the CDF was responsible for conducting trials of priests charged with the sexual crimes outlined in Crimen--such that bishops would only be informed of it on a need-to-know basis. If then.

This can't have been because no one was supposed to know that soliciting sex in the confessional was a serious canonical crime. As Cafardi points out, that had been the case for centuries. The only explanation I can come up with is that Rome did not want it generally known that the CDF was responsible for conducting laicization trials of priests charged with ugly sex crimes because, well, then people might want to know who was being tried and what the outcome was. And that could only create...scandal.

Be all that as it may, it's evident that when the Holy Office/CDF regained its authority over sexual abuse cases, it was with less authority than it had under Crimen. That's because, hitherto, there were no statutes of limitations for matters under CDF jurisdiction. The supposed increase in the limitation for sexual abuse cases, from five years in the 1983 Canon Law to 10 years in 2001, to 20 years in the latest papal instruction, shouldn't obscure that fact.  

Making his own effort to explain Latino Catholic support for same-sex marriage in California, Joseph M. Palacios offers the following:

It is important to note that modern Latin Catholicism has a dual nature: it is "conservative" in the sense of family communalism and tradition that the church offers, yet it is classically "liberal" in the sense of not wanting the Catholic Church to have power in political life-- particularly after the long historical experience of the Latin American Church "meddling in politics." As Mexicans put it: "No meta en la política." A sizable majority of U.S. Latino Catholics shares these attitudes with them. Increasingly they are joining their Latin counterparts in accepting gays and lesbians as part of the social family that is both Catholic and liberal.

This makes sense to me--particularly since so large a proportion of Latinos in California have roots in Mexico, where keeping the church out of public life has been a state ideology since the revolution.

What's worth pondering are the implications of this for Catholicism in America. Over the past couple of decades, the (mostly non-Latino) hierarchy has become increasingly inclined to meddle in politics--an inclination most recently manifested in the USCCB's effective alliance with the Republican Party in seeking to block health care reform.

As the church becomes increasingly Latino, it will be interesting to see if the rank and file become "Americanized" into a more assertive political stance, or if they stick to their own inclination, and continue to ignore the bishops' heated rhetoric about how (in this case) same-sex marriage signals the end of civilization as we know it. It's even possible, I suppose, that the bishops will take a deep breath and consider the virtues of keeping a respectful distance between the church's norms and the norms of a pluralistic civil society.

Because GetReligion's Mollie Hemingway is gracious enough to concede that I've offered the "best defense" of the Goodstein/Halbfinger NYT article on Pope Benedict's performance as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), and because I was perhaps ungracious enough to smack her around a little in a subsequent post, let me acknowledge the validity of her latest grounds for criticism.

First, G/H may fairly be charged with taking a swipe at then-Cardinal Ratzinger's position on Liberation Theology. Here's what they wrote:

As Father Gauthe was being prosecuted in Louisiana, Cardinal Ratzinger was publicly disciplining priests in Brazil and Peru for preaching that the church should work to empower the poor and oppressed, which the cardinal saw as a Marxist-inspired distortion of church doctrine.

OK, if I'd been their editor I would have changed that to read "...for preaching that empowering the poor and oppressed was the church's central mission...." In the context of the article as a whole, I count this venial sin.

Second, and more importantly, Hemingway claims that the G/H time-line regarding when the CDF "dithered" is "a mess." With respect to the paragraph above, for example, her point is that the prosecution of Father Gauthe and the crackdown on liberation theologians took place in 1980s, but that knowledge of the CDF's full responsibility for abuse cases indicated in a letter from 1922 didn't surface until some time in the 1990s.

I'll stipulate that there is indeed considerable fuzziness about when the 1922 letter came to be known inside the Roman Curia. For all we know, the CDF's staff canonists may have been aware of it all along. But that's not the point. The CDF had some considerable responsibility for abuse cases all along. And we know in detail from the Kiesle case in the early 1980s that the CDF under Ratzinger didn't merely dither; it brought to a standstill a proceeding that had been moving forward. As I noted, G/H allude to the Kiesle case (which Goodstein and Michael Luo looked at earlier this year). Had I been the editor, I would have made a little space to name and describe it.

According to the Vatican's new norms, both count as graviora delicta--most serious abuses. H/T David Gibson.

Notwithstanding Michael Sean Winters at NCR, R.R. Reno at First Thoughts, Rod Dreher at Beliefnet, and Mollie Ziegler Hemingway at GetReligion, the big takeout by Laurie Goodstein and David M. Halbfinger in last Friday's NYT is no hatchet job. It is, by my lights, a piece of balanced, well contextualized reporting that added some essential insider commentary and a couple of very important evidentiary pieces to the jigsaw puzzle being put together to show how the Vatican has handled the sexual abuse scandals of the past quarter-century.

Let's begin by stipulating that with the scandals having come home to roost in Rome, it is essential journalistic business to get the best possible fix on the record of Pope Benedict, going back to the days when as Joseph Ratzinger he was archbishop of Munich and, especially, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). Here's what the current archbishop of Adelaide, Australia, Philip Edward Wilson, had to say to Goodstein and Halbfinger about how the Vatican dealt with sexual abuse issues on Ratzinger's watch: "There was confusion everywhere."

The core question raised by the article is posed by Geoffrey Robinson, a retired auxiliary bishop from Sydney:

"Why did the Vatican end up so far behind the bishops out on the front line, who with all their faults, did change -- they did develop," he said. "Why was the Vatican so many years behind?"

The answer, according to the Times:

Supporters say that Cardinal Ratzinger would have preferred to take steps earlier to stanch the damage in certain cases.

But the future pope, it is now clear, was also part of a culture of nonresponsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction. More than any top Vatican official other than John Paul, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s to prevent the scandal from metastasizing in country after country, growing to such proportions that it now threatens to consume his own papacy.

Do the critics claim otherwise? No they don't. The most they can manage is to suggest that Ratzinger was faced with a difficult situation, that he was the best of a bad lot, and that given John Paul II's resistance, he did the best he could. Maybe so, but the most detailed example of his handling of a case we have--that of the child-abusing Oakland priest Stephen Kiesle--indicates otherwise. That's my assessment based on a close reading of documents from the case file. The Times article does not discuss, but does allude to, Ratzinger's performance in the Kiesle case. The evidence is that the case was moving along with all deliberate speed until Ratzinger took charge of the CDF. Then it slowed to a crawl.

It's true enough, as Vatican lawyer Jeffrey Lena points out, that when the Supreme Court declines to hear a case, that cannot be taken as a pronouncement on the merits. Still, it's interesting that the court lacked four votes to take up Doe v. Holy See, the Oregon lawsuit in which an anonymous plaintiff is seeking to get the Vatican to pay damages for his having been abused years ago by a now deceased priest. The case involves a threshold issue over whether such a suit is allowable under the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, and you'd think that if the justices considered it a slam dunk for the defense, they would have granted certiorari rather than let the trial go forward.

Be that as it may, the question of whether priests are employees of the Holy See seems a bit more complicated than recognizing (as Lena would have it) that the Holy See does not pay their salary and benefits or exercise day-to-day control over their work. The person who does those things is the bishop, and these days Catholic bishops themselves look increasingly like Vatican employees.

Admittedly, Catholic ecclesiology does not neatly track U.S. employment law, but if the pope hires and fires bishops, and can create commissions of bishops to put a national church in order, and can order cardinals not to criticize each other, then it sure looks as though they are wholly subject to papal authority. So why exactly should the sins of these sons not be visited upon the Holy Father?

Coincidentally, the Supreme Court's decision to let Holy See proceed occurred the same week that the Vatican announced a replacement for Cardinal Walter Kaspar, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Commission for Religious Relations with Jews. When Pope Benedict was cardinal in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the two got into a spirited public debate over Kaspar's charge that the Vatican was arrogating inappropriate centralized power to itself over the authority of the bishops. Ratzinger vigorously denied it, of course, but one might see Doe v. Holy See as a Kasparian chicken coming home to roost.

Update: Interesting reflection on the issue by Anthony Ruff O.S.B. over on Pray Tell.