Catholic Bishops Endanger Church Tax Exempt Status

COMMENTARY

New York Archbishop and United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) president Timothy Dolan recently wrote to Barak Obama asking the president to sign the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA): “We cannot be silent, however, when federal steps harmful to marriage, the laws defending it, and religious freedom continue apace.”

Can the marriages of some really “harm” those of others? Does Dolan not recognize how much support there is among active, practicing Roman Catholics for same-sex marriage? Does he really not know that scores of LGBT Catholics on the Communion lines at his own masses at St. Patrick’s Cathedral are married? That many work in Catholic ministry? That some are raising their children in the church? Dolan’s diocesan schools are filled with families in which there are only one or two children? Can he be naïve enough to imagine that this is accomplished through Natural Family Planning (NFP) alone? (NFP is the method of birth control the Vatican recommends and which its parishes often teach.)

Like much of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, Timothy Dolan is out of touch with who we American Catholics actually are.

He has every right not to remain silent, but the bishops’ presumption (fantasy?) that a majority of active U.S. Catholics will lend support to Vatican efforts to restrict the reproductive and marriage rights of non-Catholics is alarming — especially since so many active Catholics exercise those very freedoms. Furthermore, although the pope and his bishops may truly believe a zygote is a “preborn child,” the truth is that a great number of active Catholics do not, and they vote, in great numbers, accordingly.

There’s a reason the Vatican appointed the cigar-smoking, baseball-loving, borderline-charming Dolan to serve as shepherd of the Sodom and Gomorrah that is New York City. The passing of same-sex marriage rights legislation in his state and the reproductive health aspects of the new health care mandate present New York’s top priest with fresh opportunity to make his mark as the defender of the faith in the U.S. On Sept. 30, Timothy Dolan, in his capacity of USCCB president, announced the formation of a sub-committee whose task will be to respond to the “erosion of freedom of religion in America”: “…the new subcommittee would be one of several initiatives designed to strengthen the conference’s response and bring together a broad cross-section of churches and legal scholars to oppose attacks on the First Amendment.”

Dolan is fronting this crusade, and the degree of difficulty involved makes going out on a limb with a shaky “First Amendment” argument worth the gamble. He has appointed a Connecticut Bishop, William Lori, to head up the new committee. Unfortunately the first association many Catholics have with the “Diocese of Bridgeport” is its notorious status as a locus of sexual abuse. (In 2001, the Diocese of Bridgeport settled in 23 civil sex abuse cases, and there, according to Bishop Accountability.org, Timothy Dolan’s predecessor is alleged to have allowed priests facing multiple accusations to continue in ministry.)

The USCCB is now lobbying hard to make same-sex civil marriage illegal in the U.S. and to deny (Catholic and not) employees in agencies run by the church medical coverage for contraception and sterilization. And they want Catholics in the pews to help. The bishops can count on the holy-father-knows-best Roman Catholic fringe to serve as hoplites in what the hierarchy-friendly Catholic News Service calls the “culture wars”. They’d follow the Borgia pope into hell. However, the bishops will lack critical Roman Catholic mass in these “culture wars,” and their strongest support for DOMA may come from “bring-your-gun-to-church” and “God hates fags” so-called “Christian” churches. Progressive Roman Catholics, who tend support LGBT marriage and view family planning as a moral responsibility and not a sin, are likely to think the First Amendment angle disingenuous and inane. Moderate Catholics, who might not long ago have had the USCCB’s back in a such controversies as DOMA or the health care mandate, are alienated and sickened by the pedophilia crisis. They can no longer be counted on to fall in line behind the bishops.

Were so much not at stake, I’d find Dolan’s recent foray into First Amendment advocacy amusing. Has he read the First Amendment? For he appears to miss the point. The First Amendment does not guarantee one religion the right to obtain religious liberty by stripping others of theirs.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

Many religions recognized and sanctified same-sex marriages long before same-sex marriage was legal in any state in the U.S. What (legal or moral) right has Timothy Dolan to tear lawful marriages asunder? Or to nullify covenants consecrated by Reform Jewish or Christian rites? Dolan’s campaign to (in effect) annul same-sex marriages reflects neither the spirit of ecumenism nor that of secular law as it pertains to marriage.

Same-sex couples in states in which equal-marriage legislation has passed are family now.

Furthermore, many atheists hold marriage equality (for lack of a better word, I say) “sacred.” Under the First Amendment, atheist LGBT and straight Americans enjoy the right not to be subject to religious law. DOMA wold impose religious law on everyone. This is an affront to all who take seriously the principle of separation between church and state. Though same-sex marriages are legal in the state of New York, no law compels Timothy Dolan to recognize them, and the First Amendment protects his right to refuse to marry LGBT Catholics in his church.

The consternation of the conflicted “believer” working at the marriage license bureau who finds processing marriage licenses for LGBT couples distasteful is nothing new. Many a court clerk during the Civil Rights Era no doubt endured a similar kind of anguish when required to process marriage licenses for heterosexual interracial couples. People allow moral discernment to shape their decisions about employment all the time. Marriage Bureau employees who find gay marriage distasteful must either suck it up or seek employment that better accommodates their prejudice.

Dolan is quoted in the National Catholic Register as having said the following: “If the label of “bigot” sticks to us — especially in court — because of our teaching on marriage, we’ll have church-state conflicts for years to come as a result.”

The archbishop is right to worry. The “label of bigot” will stick. The best way to defend against being called a bigot is to not be one.

Dolan is not nearly so interested in the First Amendment protections as he is in holding the Vatican’s doctrinal/political ground. The Roman Catholic hierarchy is under attack from within and without. Dolan is taking his shot. He’s hoping that cloaking bigotry the finery of constitutional protections might make him and his hierarchy appear more freedom-forward and perhaps a tad less medieval. But blurring, perforating, crossing and erasing the line of demarcation between church and state won’t win the archbishop any points with most American Catholics. And outside the church, Dolan’s First Amendment-based power play is likely to come off as the Captain Queeg-like snit of a “religious leader” who knows his ship is going down.

Dolan is playing the “good cop” role now, but “bad cops” surround him. On the matter of the health care mandate, Daniel N. DiNardo, chairman of the U.S. bishop’s pro-life committee was quick to whip out the shiv. He said this on Sept. 26, about a month after the USCCB announced its dissatsifaction with the terms of the the federal health care mandate:

“Under the new rule our institutions would be free to act in accord with Catholic teaching on life and procreation only if they were to stop hiring and serving non-Catholics. … Although this new rule gives the agency the discretion to authorize a ‘religious’ exemption, it is so narrow as to exclude most Catholic social service agencies and healthcare providers.”
The ultra hierarchy-friendly Catholic News Agency’s choice of the word “warned” says a lot. It’s code for “Give us what we want or we’ll stop healing, clothing, feeding, sheltering and offering hospice to non-Catholics.”

Another bishop, Bishop David A. Zubik of Pittsburg, weighed in with a similar kind of warning in a Sept. 15 letter to Human Health Services (HHS) secretary Kathleen Sibelius;
…Catholic Charities in his diocese alone has served over 80,000 people last year 
”without regard to the religious belief” of those they ministered to.

But “under this [health care] mandate, Catholic Charities of Pittsburgh would either be forced to cease to exist or restrict its employees and its wide ranging social services to practicing Catholics alone.”
Essentially, Bishops Zubik and DiNardo are floating ultimata. They don’t come right out and say so, but the implication in Zubik’s case is that the bishops might have little choice but to add to the suffering and hardship of 80,000 people currently under the care of Catholic Charities. Not much Christ in that.

Thank God this vicious game of chicken won’t work. The public relations fallout would be disastrous if the bishops were to make good on such threats. Even the most conservative of Catholics would be ambivalent about such tactics because even daily-mass-attending, novena-praying rosary ladies who oppose abortion know that sacrificing sick, hungry, homeless “born” children to the supposed greater good of preserving the lives of zygotes and embryos would constitute a sin as grave as any.

That any bishop thinks it acceptable to use works of mercy as leverage is troubling and indicates just how estranged from Christian ideals many of the Catholic bishops are. From a public relations standpoint, the utter lack of diplomacy in such expressions as Zubik’s reveals how out of touch the Catholic hierarchy is with what the worlds sees when it beholds the church.

Much of the world now views the Roman Catholic Church as a corrupt organization led by a there-but-for-the grace-of-extradition-agreements-go-I pontiff. Were Ratzinger not head of a sovereign state, the world might well have witnessed his perp walk by now. The damning Cloyne Report turned the most pious Catholic nation in Europe against the hierarchy. The Vatican is on Amnesty International’s list of torturers for its human rights violations/crimes against children. The Center for Constitutional Rights and SNAP (Survivors Network of Persons Abused by Priests) are filing suit against the Vatican in the International Criminal Courts. Yet, even as it faces the possibility of a trial at the Hague, the Vatican continues to show poor faith in addressing the hundreds of thousands of brutal crimes against its own children.

Catholics in the pews are repulsed by this, and have grown weary of pro forma expressions of contrition for the anguish pedophile priests inflicted and which bishops facilitated. These apologies are never more tainted than when topped off with not-so-gentle reminders that justice (i.e. damages) for each and every victim would bankrupt the church.

The Vatican may be rich, but the church has money problems.

In the Brooklyn (N.Y.) diocese, where I worship, Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio has used his weekly column to urge Catholics in Brooklyn and Queens to vote against the Child Victim’s Act in the New York State Assembly. Payouts, we have been told, would bankrupt the diocese. DiMarzio has publicly threatened to close parishes whose members fail to vote his way. He recorded robocalls for a local politician. His politicking is, at least, risky behavior, and, at worst, possibly a violation of tax law. The aforementioned attempts at clerical blackmail, though unseemly, may be blessings in disguise, however, because they show the world who these “religious leaders” really are and where they stand on the church/state divide.

I take great pride in the work my church does on behalf of the aged, infirm, indigent and marginalized in the city where I live. My own experience working in social justice ministry has offered me opportunity to see closely how fervently devoted we (Catholics) are in it, yet I believe the world outside the church would indeed pick up the slack were the bishops to take their ball and go home.

Bishops play a dangerous game when they threaten to use the leverage they think they have to bring secular law in line with canon law. The church receives much financial support from the government in the form of tax exemptions. I don’t want to see my diocese or any other lose its tax exempt status, but the bishops are pushing their luck — which could soon run out, along with the money. The bishops would do well to bear in mind that they are called to be teachers and priests, not emperors. They play fast and loose with their tax-exempt status at their own peril and their recklessness in this puts needy people of all faiths — and no faith — at risk. Political power can be expensive. The religious freedom argument cuts both ways.

Full Article HERE!

The Church may be less powerful but Ratzinger is not letting go of his authority

“There are historical examples which show that the missionary testimony of a “non-worldly” Church emerges more clearly. Freed from its burdens and from material and political privileges, the Church can dedicate itself more fully and in a truly Christian way to the world; it can truly be open to the world. It can live with more fluency again its call to the ministry of worshipping God and serving others”: this is somewhat surprising appeal launched by Pope Benedict XVI in Fribourg, at the end of his recent trip to Germany.

Words that have profoundly affected Roman Catholics, and not just German ones, and that probably will continue to cause discussion and reflection for months to come.

The Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister summed up the issues raised by Pope Ratzinger’s speech: “Before his third trip to his homeland, Benedict XVI had never put such strong emphasis on the ideal of a Church poor in structures, wealth, power. At the same time, however, he has also insisted on the duty of a vigorous ‘public presence’ of this same Church. Are the two things compatible?”

Vatican Insider asked church historian Daniele Menozzi, professor at the Scuola Normale of Pisa, where the pope’s appeal to a “non-worldly” Church comes from – and what impact could it have on its present and future.

What – if any – are the historical precedents of the Pope’s appeal?

The invitation to the Church to free itself from the “material and political burdens” in order to rediscover the authenticity of her spiritual message, is linked to a very long tradition. Benedict XVI summed up his intervention by recalling the need for a “purification and inner reform” of the Church. Frequently in the bi-millenial history of Catholicism, voices have emerged from within the church community, denouncing a “deformation”, and calling for her to return to a purer “form”.

To which Church do they wish to “go back” when making these appeals?

Typically, these appeals have been based on concrete models of historical reference, in particular the calls have harked back to the “Ecclesiae primitivae forma” (the early Church, ed). In Ratzinger’s speech, instead, he makes an analogy between the worldly poverty of the Church and the tribe of Levi. This Old-Testament paradigm is rather vague: it gives the impression of a literary, rhetorical reference more than of a line of effective intervention.

The call to return to the origins is a current that has never run out …

The search for a link between the spiritual renewal of the Church and the recovery of its missionary capacity spans many seasons of Church history. Just think of the debates leading to the Gregorian reform of the eleventh century, or the Catholic reform movement that precedes and accompanies the Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent, to then become inextricably intertwined with the counter-Reformation’s proposals. In more recent times, some members of the current that would later be condemned in 1907 as the modernist heresy – one may recall for instance the novel The Saint, by Fogazzaro – formulated the belief that dialogue with the modern world passed through a spiritualization of the ecclesiastical institution. But perhaps the most immediate precedent is the hope for a “Church of the poor” that a group of Council fathers, in the wake of some aspects of Johannine teaching, launched during Vatican II, going so far as to define elements of structural reform of the ecclesiastical institution.

How successful have these impulses been in the past?

Every moment has its irreducible specificity. Results have varied but I think you can make two general observations. First, the appeal to spiritualize the Catholic presence in history has been effective when it has been made by the heads of ecclesiastical government. The case of the “Church of the poor” is significant: Paul VI entrusts the study of this theme to a committee that later submitts to him some specific suggestions, but he doesn’t welcome their proposal and so it sinks. Second, the success is linked to institutional changes: the missionary thrust of the post-Tridentine Church was founded on establishing religious orders whose initial intent was to reject any worldly inducement, to devote themselves to the salvation of men and the glory of God.

For the pope, “history comes to the help of the Church through the various epochs of secularization, which have contributed in an essential way to its purification and internal reform. The secularisations, in fact – whether the expropriation of Church property or the cancellation of privileges or anything like that – every time meant a profound liberation of the Church from worldly forms of life: she is stripped, so to speak, of her earthly riches and goes back to fully embracing her poverty on earth. ” Is this recognition is a turning point?

The Pope’s address is ambiguous. On the one hand – while using the term “secularization” in a very surprising way, to indicate also the worldliness of the Church – he is taking, compared to his predecessor, a major step: instead of equating secularization with secularism, and therefore judging it fundamentally antithetical to Catholicism, it is being brought back, as it was in the teaching of Paul VI, to its social and political dimensions, and in this context, reread in a providential key. On the other hand, however, this providentialist interpretation of secularization – a sort of divine intervention in history to purify the Church from imperfections and falls – deprives the phenomenon of its real historical significance, preventing one from grasping that through it, man has conquered, to the detriment of directives given by the Magisterium, the self-determination of institutions of the political community.

The Holy See is engaged in a difficult dialogue with the Lefebvrists who say they want the Church to return to the ‘truth’ lost by Vatican II. But the history of the Church which they have in mind seems different from that of Ratzinger …

For the schismatic community, the structures that the Church has taken on in the past two centuries in antithesis to the society that emerged from the French Revolution constitute an indispensable part of Catholic tradition. Among these structures there is also recourse to the coercive power of civil law to enforce the practice of truth: their opposition to the right to religious freedom is the most obvious sign of this. In Benedict XVI’s view, the Catholic presence in the modern world is possible without a confessional state, but civil law cannot but recognize those rights that belong to man’s nature as a divine creature. Differences exist, but they are less profound than might at first appear.

Could the speech at Freiburg be read as a keynote of a ‘second phase’ of his pontificate?

In recent years, Benedict XVI has identified as an aspect of the Church’s presence in the contemporary world the construction of a neo-Christianity, in which it is for the Papacy, the custodian and interpreter of natural law, to define the fundamental structures of the human consortium. It does not seem that the appeal to the Church and freeing herself from claims of power entail a revision of his governing program. The very vagueness of the call seems to indicate that he does not intend to take that route. It seems to me, rather, that the Pope wants to encourage believers to operate in the world with complete detachment from worldly things. Of course we cannot underestimate this request to correct deviations and abuses, some of which the Pope himself has denounced. However, this line does not call into question the central claim of Ratzinger’s papacy: attributing to the Church the authority to establish, at a universal level, the correct forms of human coexistence. It seems, on the contrary, aimed at strengthening the Church’s capacity to attract and take hold, freeing her from those aspects of moral unworthiness of its protagonists who tarnish her image.

Full Article HERE!

Questions Continue about Who Owns Jesus: Phoenix and Madison Dioceses Take Communion Cup from Laity

Brilliant COMMENTARY from our friends at Bilgrimage. If you’re not reading him every day, you should be.

Back in January, I posted about New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed piece reflecting on (among other things) the struggle that has gone on recently in the Catholic diocese of Phoenix, in which Bishop Thomas Olmsted excommunicated a nun, Sister Margaret McBride, ministering at St. Joseph’s hospital and then yanked the title “Catholic” from the hospital. Because Sister Margaret and St. Joseph’s had come to a different decision of informed conscience than his own . . . .

My posting notes that Kristof sees this situation, and many others occurring in the Catholic church worldwide these days, as a situation of “tussling over Jesus” in which the fundamental question at stake is, Who owns Jesus? I wrote,

And so, Kristof proposes, Catholics today are tussling over Jesus–over where Jesus is to be found, over what fidelity to Jesus demands in contemporary culture. Over who controls the central symbols of Catholic faith, who defines the meanings of those symbols. Whose word and experience counts, as we read the gospels and apply them to our lives. Who owns Jesus.

And as a posting I made about a month before Kristof’s article appeared also notes, another fundamental (and related) question at the heart of the Olmsted story is, Who owns the sacraments? In that posting, I said,

[T]he recent move of some bishops to deny the Eucharist to Catholics whose political views they judge to be illicit–as if sacraments are candy the father-bishop hands out to good children–raises a profound theological question: who owns the sacraments?

It’s clear the bishops think they do. It’s also abundantly clear from longstanding and rich Catholic tradition that the sacraments “belong” to the entire church, to the people of God. In the name of defending tradition, bishops using the sacraments as a political tool are undermining Catholic tradition.

And now there’s this: as Zoe Ryan reports yesterday in National Catholic Reporter, the Phoenix diocese has just announced plans to begin withholding the eucharistic cup, the communion wine, from Catholics in that diocese, altering the arrangement of communion under both species that had obtained for years following the reforms of Vatican II. Taking back the communion cup, that is to say. There were strong theological reasons, flowing from the reforms of the council, to begin offering communion under both species to the laity, including the renewed understanding of the church as the people of God and the fact that many of the other Christian churches with whom the Catholic church is in ecumenical dialogue practice communion under both species.

It now appears, too, that the diocese of Madison, Wisconsin, is poised to follow the action of Phoenix in this regard.

So, as I read about what’s happening in Phoenix and Madison, the question still remains for me: who owns the sacraments? Who owns Jesus? Do bishops and clergy own the sacraments and Jesus? Or do Jesus and the sacraments belong to the people of God?

And is there so much of Jesus to go around, that a bishop can argue with a straight face that yanking a bit of Jesus away from the faithful is a savvy and compassionate pastoral move? And when they find they can yank the communion cup away from the faithful, as they’ve yanked all communion from Sister Margaret and the title “Catholic” away from St. Joseph’s, what will they take away from the people of God next?

Because there’s an inexorable and wearily predictable logic always at work in the behavior of autocratic systems like that of the Catholic hierarchy (or the Franco regime, or Soviet communism, or the Taliban in Afghanistan): what they find they can take away, they will take away. Since the logic of autocracy absolutely depends on the claim that the autocrat has a right to total control over the central symbols of the social system, over its goods, and yes, over its people.

Remember: though Phoenix diocesan officials are spouting a lot of hot air about the compelling theological reasons for taking the communion cup from the faithful, and though their centrist and right-wing supporters on Catholic blogs are eager to help them spout that hot air, no one at all is asking for these liturgical changes. No one, that is, except a fringe group of the Catholic far-right, to whom Rome and the bishops prefer to listen.

Just asking some questions I’ve long been asking. Ones I intend to keep on asking.

Full Article HERE!

Cooperation in Evil

MAYBE it’s the Mario Lanza in him. But Nino Scalia relishes being operatically imprudent.

The Supreme Court justice’s latest supreme lapse of judgment involves poking his nose in a local legal wrangle about the place where I slept for four years: the Catholic University dorms.

In a speech last weekend at Duquesne University Law School, a Catholic institution in Pittsburgh, Justice Scalia defended religion in public life.

“Our educational establishment these days, while so tolerant of and even insistent on diversity in all other aspects of life, seems bent on eliminating the diversity of moral judgment, particularly moral judgment based on religious views,” the devout Catholic said.

As an example, he cited the lawsuit filed by the “notoriously litigious” George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf against Catholic U.’s new ban on coed dorms.

In June, the president of Catholic U., John Garvey, wrote an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal explaining why, as a father of five, he felt the need to resort to a “countercultural” and “slightly old-fashioned remedy,” ending 25 years of coed dorms. He said he believed single-sex dorms would “improve the practice of virtue,” reducing binge drinking and “the culture of hooking up.”

Using a formula that’s the inverse of “Sex and the City,” Garvey wrote: “Rates of depression reach 20 percent for young women who have had two or more sexual partners in the last year, almost double the rate for women who have had none. Sexually active young men do more poorly than abstainers in their academic work.”

He made note of the sad slide from proud feminism to proud sluttiness. “I would have thought that young women would have a civilizing influence on young men,” he wrote. “Yet the causal arrow seems to run the other way.”

Banzhaf, who calls Garvey’s arguments “totally secular,” pronounced himself “astonished that a justice of the nation’s highest court would single out and prejudge a legal proceeding which could set an important precedent, and could one day even come before the U.S. Supreme Court.”

As the Supreme Court gets ready to go into session on Monday, its six Catholic justices were set to merge church and state by attending the traditional first-Sunday-in-October Red Mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. (It’s hard to believe there’s no Protestant on the Supreme Court.) Through the years, the presiding clergy have aimed their homilies against abortion, gay marriage and “humanism.” Justices of other faiths have attended; but as Dahlia Lithwick wrote in Slate, “Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stopped attending the Red Mass altogether after hearing her very first homily, which she has described as ‘outrageously anti-abortion.’ ”

In 2007, there was a kerfuffle about Catholic dominance on the court because the five justices who pushed to uphold the ban on “partial-birth abortion” were all Catholic men appointed by conservative presidents.

The church has aggressively meddled in politics on abortion, trying to defeat candidates who support abortion rights and prevent some liberal politicians from receiving Communion. But American bishops have been inconsistent in preaching their values.

They do not try to bring down politicians who supported the Iraq war, even though Pope John Paul II spoke out against it and sent a Vatican cardinal to warn W. that the war would be a “disaster” that would “destroy human life.” They do not express outrage at Republican audiences that cheer for executions, or target pols who brag on the death penalty, even though John Paul issued an encyclical against “the culture of death,” saying modern states have so many ways to protect citizens that the necessity for executions is “very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”

Scalia, confident in his own infallibility, dissented. As he wrote in a religious journal in 2002, he does not find the death penalty immoral, and he believes that as the “minister of God,” government has powers to get “revenge” and “execute wrath.” He’s clearly more an Old Testament guy than New, or he would know that some prisoners get falsely accused and nailed to the cross (Matthew 26:59-66).

Now Scalia has dissented from the opinion of a second pope on the issue. Pope Benedict sent Georgia state officials a letter last month asking for clemency for Troy Davis, but the very Catholic Supreme Court denied a last-minute stay of execution.

In his Duquesne speech, Scalia said: “If I thought that Catholic doctrine held the death penalty to be immoral, I would resign. I could not be a part of a system that imposes it.”

My family priest, Father Kevin O’Neil, teaches about “cooperation in evil” in Catholic moral theology. If you facilitate something that has been deemed wrong, like taking a human life, are you cooperating in evil?

Maybe the Supreme Court should ask itself that question. Are you “cooperating in evil,” Justice Scalia?

Full Article HERE!