Recently in Catholics Category

The Irish bishops come to town and are sent away assured that nothing serious is going to happen to them. Pedophile scandals proceed to break out on the Continent, centering on Germany. The pontiff's brother, Georg Ratzinger, does a Sgt. Schultz, saying he knew nothing about allegations of abuse at the schools affiliated with his elite choir. Osservatore Romano says all this wouldn't have happened if there were more women in positions of ecclesiastical authority. Cardinal Schönborn almost says this wouldn't have happened if it weren't for priestly celibacy. The Vatican's chief exorcist says the Vatican is possessed by the Devil.

So are the wheels coming off the pope-mobile? That's pretty much Rocco's take. To be sure, by medieval standards, it may not seem like much. No one's elected an anti-pope or forced the Curia to pack up and move to Avignon. But think of the lurches from insulting the Muslims at Regensburg to freaking out the Jews over the Tridentine Mass and the canonization of Pius XII to dissing the Anglicans with Anglicanorum coetibus to appalling just about everybody by cozying up to the Lefebvrists.

It's getting hard not to see the Benedictine papacy as a comedy of errors. Or maybe, a tragedy.

What to make of the decision in the Land of Chaput, aka the Archdiocese of Denver, to boot a preschooler out of Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School in Boulder for having two mommies?

The archdiocese says it must do so because it "would be a cause of confusion for the student in that what they are being taught in school conflicts with what they experience in the home." The parish priest in charge of the school is a bit more forthcoming:

If a child of gay parents comes to our school, and we teach that gay marriage is against the will of God, then the child will think that we are saying their parents are bad. We don't want to put any child in that tough position--nor do we want to put the parents, or the teachers, at odds with the teachings of the Catholic Church.

How exactly would the parents or teachers be put at odds with church teachings? What Fr. Bill Breslin knows is that having little Kevin in school will mean that parents and teachers (and he himself) will be loath to engage in the kind of denunciation of same-sex relationships that Archbishop Chaput specializes in. And there would be those pesky field trips and parent conferences and sleep-overs etc., all creating the impression that Kevin's family is pretty darn normal. No, the real danger contemplated here is not that the child might be upset but that the presence of the child would upset the church's teaching authority. It would be an Occasion of Scandal.

Of course, Catholic schools are not unfamiliar with problems involving families who violate the principle invoked by the archdiocese to exclude this child; namely: "Parents living in open discord with Catholic teaching in areas of faith and morals unfortunately choose by their actions to disqualify their children from enrollment." Allowing as how the parish and archdiocese are "within their rights" not to admit children from families who are in such violation, America's James Martin rhetorically inquires:

So do the same rules apply to a child of parents who [are] in similar discord? That is, the child of a single, divorced parent? To a child of divorced and remarried parents? To a child of a single, unmarried mother? To a child of a parent who commits adultery? To a child of a parent who uses birth control?  To a child of a parent who steals from his company? To a child of a parent who fails to forgive his neighbor? To a child of a parent who fails to care for the poor? To a child of any parent who sins? They too would be in "open discord."

The answer to all of the above is, Martin implies, of course not. But the difference is that in all the above cases, the parent in question would be likely to admit that the violation in question was a bad, or at least regrettable, thing. Members of same-sex relationships, not so much. Therein lies the real discord.

So the Archdiocese of Washington has gotten out of the foster care/adoption business, for which they've been receiving $2 million annually from the public purse. D.C.'s new same-sex marriage law requires all married couples to be treated equally, and because the Catholic church regards same-sex marriage as a crime against nature, it won't be involved in placing and supervising children in homes where the two adults have been joined in such. In its press release, the Archdiocese says, "Same on the City for kicking a fine service provider to the curb." No, the provider's spiritual bosses just decided they couldn't render unto Caesar in this case.

Washington is following the lead of Boston and San Francisco, which also folded up their foster care operations rather than treat all unions equally. But so far as I can tell, this has not happened in Connecticut--and there's also Vermont, New Hampshire, and Iowa to look into. The reporting on this story has been woefully inadequate. When the issue is raised at all, it is simply waved away with the vague assertion that the D.C. statute is in some unspecified way more prescriptive than the law in other same-sex marriage jurisdictions.

Be that as it may, foster care is more the symbolic than the real issue. Other foster care agencies can readily take over from Catholic Charities--as is happening in Washington--while CC continues to do the rest of its social service work. The real issue is the applicability of the law to CC employees. How does it affect benefits packages provided to employees who may be in same-sex marriages?

Both WaPo's Michelle Boorstein and the Washington Times's Julia Duin have taken note of this issue but not pursued it very far. The closest thing to an answer is the following, from Boorstein's article:

Edward Orzechowski, president and chief executive of Catholic Charities, the archdiocese's social service arm, said the group is optimistic that it will find a way to structure its benefits packages in other social service programs so that it can remain in partnership with the city without recognizing same-sex marriage.

Asked if that meant looking at ways to avoid paying benefits to same-sex partners or ways to write benefits plans so as not to characterize same-sex couples as "married," Orzechowski said "both, and."

How does Catholic Charities operate in other same-sex marriage jurisdictions? I've tried to elicit answers in both Connecticut and Massachusetts but so far to no avail. Clearly, some assiduous journalism is needed. My guess is that the agencies have managed to find a way to do right by their gay employees--but softly, softly. The problem is that should they acknowledge that they are abiding by the law and "recognizing" the same-sex marriages of the people who work for them, they would have to explain why they can't, then, also find a way to live with the same-sex marriages of would-be adoptive parents and foster caretakers.

You figure the crackdown on women in (some quarters of) American Catholicism has gone pretty far when the popular music director of a major Fairfax, Virginia church is canned for the following paragraph in a WaPo story on the women's ordination question:

Sylvia Mulherin, 69, a former nun married to a former priest, said that Jesus was progressive in his treatment of women but that, over time, men unjustly pushed women out. "Maybe the women don't have to come in the back door, but we still have to sit in the pews," said Mulherin, who lives in Fairfax County.

Mulherin says she is not among those pushing for women's ordination. Indeed, she is a conservative who describes herself on her Facebook page as a fan of Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. In December, she gave Newt a round of Facebook applause for denouncing the "deliberate amnesia of the academic Left" in overlooking the "great men" of the American past.

But she did not take kindly to her pastor's denial that she had been pushed out of her job, and emailed dozens of musicians at the church that in her opinion "women have not achieved true equality in the Church and this fact deserves further consideration by the church's leadership. This position is apparently unacceptable in the Diocese of Arlington."

WaPo's Michelle Boorstein is on the case.

According to David Gibson, the Catholic bishops have been shocked and dismayed at the rapidity with which health care reform has gone from near sure thing to near death. So they've written yet another letter to Congress, urging passage of a comprehensive bill despite the changed "political contexts." Color me not so impressed.

Had the bishops not insisted on their whole package of pro-life measures, health care reform would have been enacted by now. Not only does the letter not acknowledge that, but it continues to insist that all they want is to maintain the status quo, which is simply not the case. Under current law, federal funds do help pay for health plans that include abortion services--in those states that supplement federal coverage under Medicaid with their own funds to cover those services. The Senate bill simply lets individuals do what states can do now. But without the absolute prohibition provided in the House version of the bill, the bishops place themselves in the opposition.

None of this is to deny that the USCCB would like their kind of government-sponsored health care reform to pass. That puts them at odds with those conservative Catholics (including a few bishops) who have been happy to press the abortion issue not only for its own sake but pragmatically as a tool for taking down reform altogether. These include Princeton's Robert George and his pals, whom Michael Sean Winters outed yesterday. The question is whether the USCCB is prepared to support any sort of compromise to advance the cause, or whether by sticking to its guns, it effectively sides with Georgites. If the former, there's no public sign of it. 

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams wowed members of the Society of Jesus & friends with his elegant, eloquent, and moving acceptance of America's Campion Award for achievement in letters last evening. Even though there's been a fair amount of honor paid by the Catholic and Anglican churches to each others' martyrs in recent years, it was still a bit of a bold move for the Jesuit magazine to give its highest award to the chief prelate of the church under whose auspices the famous Jesuit recusant was captured, hanged, drawn, and quartered in 1581.

Not surprisingly, some on the right have taken the award as a purposeful poke in the eye to the Vatican in the wake of last year's dust-up over Rome's outreach to Anglicans who would be Anglo-Catholics. That's  the view over at The American Catholic, where the award makes sense because "what the Church of England has morphed into, a left wing pressure group with prayers, is frankly what America has been championing for years in the Catholic Church." (Ah, that lovely Catholic blogosphere.) Actually, the award was decided on well before news of the new personal ordinariates hit the fan.

And yet, lurking in the background are some real questions about the character of Catholic ecumenism these days. Williams himself is a leading figure in longstanding efforts to bring the Catholic and Anglican churches closer ecclesially. His own assessment of the Vatican's Anglican outreach, made November 18 a conference on ecumenism at the Gregorian, was that it "failed to break any fresh ecclesiological ground." But, as NCR's John Allen made clear in a pointed essay last week, Pope Benedict seems happy to let that business languish in favor of forging common religious cause on challenges like climate change.

As America's editor Drew Christiansen noted, the giving of the award marked the 100th anniversary of the modern ecumenical movement, when "the churches of Scotland gathered in Edinburgh to foster unity in their missionary witness." What Williams described as an "act of ecumenical generosity" was about more than just the desirability of working together on important social issues.

In his message for the 44th World Day of Communications yesterday, Pope Benedict urges Catholic priests to join the digital world and start spreading the Word by blog, tweet, and video. To be sure, the message suggests that the pontiff is himself a bit of a stranger to this world, referring as he does to "the many crossroads created by the intersection of all the different 'highways' that form 'cyberspace.'" Perhaps he should give some thought to teaching by example as well as by word, and fire up a blog of his own--say, "See of Peter."

Be that as it may, James Martin, S.J., the learned and culture-savvy managing culture editor of America, extends a warm blogger's welcome to the message over at In All Things. Picking up where the pope leaves off, he runs though a bunch of examples from Jesus to Fulton Sheen to demonstrate that the "history of Christianity is in large part the history of the church using to great effect the latest media, sometimes even inventing media, to evangelize." Of course, there's also the history of the church doing what it can to control the latest media though the burning of books (see Abelard, Peter, et al.); the Index librorum prohibitorum and the Sacred Congregation of the Index (1571-1917); the episcopal use of the nihil obstat and the imprimatur; the censorship of movies via the various diocesan Legions of Decency, etc. Plus the fact that the real media innovators in the Christian world since the invention of printing have been the Protestants.

Of course, Martin knows all this. His purpose is to get his fellow Catholic clergy off their digital duffs. The problem is that the blogosphere is a scary place for any institution that seeks to maintain message discipline. The pope urges priests who venture into it to be sensitive to the "followers of other religions, non-believers and people of every culture" with whom it will bring them into contact. The tougher job will be to negotiate the "on and off ramps" and "wrong-way signs" and "bad drivers" and "traffic cops" and "road rage" that they'll encounter from fellow Catholics--not least, the ones they work for. 

David Gibson has a nice piece in the NYT Week in Review today on the Vatican's new determination to make just about every recent pope a saint. As he notes, a bunch of early popes are saints, mostly by virtue of their having been martyred. But the canonization of Pius X (by Pius XII in 1954) was the first in 400 years--and it really hasn't worked out that well. (Cf. the schismatic Society of Saint Pius X.) Now there are processes under way for Pius XII, John XIII, Paul VI, John Paul II--and even a movement to do the same for John Paul I, who occupied the See of Peter for a total of 33 days. Over at Politics Daily, David rehearses the problems in current Jewish-Catholic relations that the first of these has helped create.

This development can be seen as part of a (very drawn-out) process by which the papacy has extended its power over sainthood, which represents a standing threat to the ability of the church to control access to the supernatural. Through the first millennium, saints were declared by popular acclaim, their cults celebrated because ordinary Christians found a holy man or woman to be a worthy intercessor with God. But by the 12th century, the popes had achieved a sufficient grip on spiritual power in the West to put an end to such promiscuous beatifications, and established their own canonical control over the making (and unmaking) of saints.

Now that we're in the third millennium, they have taken the next step, from controlling the process to turning themselves into the modern saints par excellence. Medieval Catholics would have considered this ridiculous. In the 11th century, St. Peter Damian, a monk and cardinal whom Dante places in one of the highest circles of Paradise, famously referred to his friend and rival Hildebrand (who became Gregory VII) as "my holy Satan"--alluding to the sin of pride that was the cause of Satan's fall. An old friend of mine, a medievalist and former monk, once applied the phrase to John Paul II.

Being head of the Roman Catholic Church didn't use to turn you into a saint, but then the pope didn't use to be the most famous Christian in the world and a visible performer on the international stage. Never in history has the Vatican wielded more authority over its far-flung dominions. Celebrity is a powerful thing.  

Anyone who imagines that the Catholic bishops will end up supporting health care reform should go over to On Faith and take a look at this post by their spokeswoman, Sr. Mary Ann Walsh. Insisting that her bosses have supported reform "for decades," Walsh goes on to complain that

the present state of affairs is enough to make you sick. The gamesmanship in Congress relates more to politics than health and has created serious problems.

As things stand, Walsh claims, "health care reform it is not." There follows a litany of what has the the bishops worried: abortion and "conscience rights"; a failure to provide for immigrants, legal and illegal; and too high costs for ordinary citizens. The bottom line:

We need health care reform in America and we're close to attaining it, but if decent health care becomes a matter of politics over the public good, we'll all lose. That's enough to make you sick.

Whatever one's views of the individual pieces, the critique as a whole is disingenuous nonsense. For example, on abortion, according to Walsh, the bishops want reform to include the current Hyde Amendment standard but insist on the Stupak provision of the House bill, which (as pro-lifer Michael Sean Winters points out) goes beyond Hyde in making it "impossible for women, with their own money, to purchase health insurance that covers abortions." At the same time, the Senate bill is criticized as unfair because it "does not allow undocumented persons to buy insurance with their own money."

Beyond such deception and inconsistency, the refusal to acknowledge the signal accomplishments of the reform bills as they stand--the expanded coverage, above all--is striking. Health care reform "it is not"? Give me a break.

But worst of all is the claim that somehow what's happened so far is "politics" undermining "the public good." If anything is clear from this whole process, it's that the bishops have been up to their eyeballs in lobbying for their positions on the life issues. And that their effective politicking has made it more difficult for progressives to advance the other items on the agenda that the bishops say they want--and has led to some unlovely compromises and concessions.

Like anyone else, the bishops are entitled to play the game as hard as they want. But not to acknowledge that they're doing so is simple dishonesty. It's enough to make you sick.

Over at Politics Daily, David Gibson offers a well-balanced assessment of the reported (and partly denied) split over health care reform between the Catholic bishops and the nuns and hospitalers who do Catholic health care. Key graphs:

On the other hand, the CHA and the religious orders of nuns that generally operate Catholic hospitals tend to be more pragmatic, weighing particular problems with the greater good that can be achieved and focusing on the political process as a way to resolve any problems either now or through future legislation. It is a difference one often sees between pastors who often deal with people where they are and bishops who often deal in abstractions and whose priority is to defend principles from erosion. Both can be effective approaches in political negotiations.

But there is also little doubt that Keehan and the Catholic hospitals, like many Catholic activists promoting the church's social justice teachings, are far more supportive than the hierarchy of Obama's agenda and see the prospect of health care reform as representing a major, albeit imperfect, advance in the common good.

What's not clear to me is whether the bishops have given more than lip service to advance the reform legislation. Did they, for example, put any pressure on wavering House members to vote for the Stupak-laden bill that passed by a mere handful of votes last month? Or did they use the absence of coverage for undocumented immigrants--a complete non-starter--as just an excuse to keep withholding the hem of their garment?