Category Archives: Theological Debate

05/18/13

Church lecture on morality? What a joke (Opinion)

Veiled threats by the Catholic hierarchy to excommunicate politicians who support the proposed abortion legislation are clerical comedy at its blackest.

moralityAs administrators of a private club, governed by self-generated rules, bishops and cardinals are perfectly entitled to formulate their own membership policies (within the law, of course).

But the excommunication tactic involves a darkly hilarious proposition – that good standing with the Vatican is synonymous with morality.

Anyone convinced by this quaint notion should break the habit of a lifetime and open their eyes.

On any given Sunday, many of the country’s most twisted crooks can be found in churches of various kinds.

Sometimes, the worst offender is the degenerate priest on the altar; sometimes, it’s the corrupt TD in the front pew.

In the more salubrious parishes, it’s the gangster banker who likes to showcase his spiritual side by leading the prayers of the faithful.

This is not to say that believers are more prone to greed or deceit than anybody else but rather that the greedy and deceitful frequently disguise themselves by infiltrating the company of believers.

Hiding in plain sight is a well established law-evasion technique; in holy Catholic Ireland, the strategy has been refined to involve hiding within the sight of God.

Excommunication would be an excellent idea if church authorities started with the real reprobates and worked downwards – just like Jesus did when He decided to cleanse the temple.

Complete Article HERE!

05/6/13

Catholic church excommunicates Brazil priest for liberal views

File under: Insulated, monolithic, callous, tone deaf church power structure

By Paulo Prada

The Catholic Church has excommunicated a Brazilian priest after he defended homosexuality, open marriage and other practices counter to Church teaching in online videos.

Roberto-Francisco-DanielIn a statement released late on Monday, the priest’s diocese said Father Roberto Francisco Daniel, known to local parishioners as Padre Beto, had “in the name of ‘freedom of expression’ betrayed the promise of fealty to the Church.”

The priest “injured the Church with grave statements counter to the dogma of Catholic faith and morality.” The actions amount to “heresy and schism,” the statement said, the penalty for which is excommunication, or expulsion from the Church.

The rare punishment follows what Daniel’s bishop and the priest himself said were repeated rebukes about the videos and other public activities, such as a radio broadcast and local newspaper column, in which he challenged Church doctrine.

The 47-year-old cleric, who studied theology in Germany, is popular in the southeastern city of Bauru, where he has been a priest since 2001. He is known for his rock T-shirts, a silver stud pierced through his right ear and his habit of posing, as on his official Facebook page, with a glass of beer.

On Facebook and Twitter, Daniel posted a brief statement about the excommunication: “I feel honored to belong to the long list of people who have been murdered and burned alive for thinking and searching for knowledge.”

SPREAD OF MODERATE VIEWS

Daniel’s excommunication, which prompted headlines across Brazil and protests in social media, illustrates the rising influence of more moderate social views in Brazil, Latin America’s biggest country, and much of the rest of the region.

Progressive stances on sexuality, birth control, scientific research and other delicate topics for the Church are increasingly common in Latin America, home to 42 percent of the world’s Catholics, more than any other region worldwide.

The shifting views are among the many challenges faced by Pope Francis, an Argentine who ascended in March to become the first Latin American pope in history.

The excommunication comes just two months before Francis is scheduled to attend World Youth Day, expected to attract as many as 2 million young Catholics to Rio de Janeiro.

Though Francis is known to be a traditionalist on social issues and Church doctrine, his appointment raised hopes that the first non-European pope in 13 centuries would do more than his predecessors to modernize Catholicism.

But Daniel’s beliefs clearly went too far for church leaders.

In one of the recent videos he posted on YouTube.com and his own Website, the priest said a married person who chose to have an affair, heterosexual or otherwise, would not be unfaithful as long as that person’s spouse allowed it. “If someone is in an extramarital relationship and that relationship is accepted by the spouse, then faithfulness still exists there,” he said.

A “REBEL SON”

In a telephone interview, Daniel said his statements “are personal reflections that should be considered and discussed in the dialogue of the church.” The excommunication, he said, is “the sad act of a lukewarm and disengaged church that is out of touch with today’s society.”

The diocese retained a church expert in canonical law to oversee the excommunication process. The diocese also initiated a separate process at the Vatican through which Daniel will be stripped of clerical authority.

Last Tuesday, Bishop Caetano Ferrari gave Daniel a letter asking him to take the videos offline and publicly retract his statements. In an interview posted on the diocese Web site shortly afterward, Ferrari called Daniel “brilliant,” but characterized him as a “rebel son” who “crosses the line.”

On Monday, Daniel said he went to the diocese headquarters planning to renounce his clerical duties rather than retract any of his comments. But before he had a chance, the bishop and canonical expert made him face a committee of Church officials.

“It was a trial,” Daniel said. “I told them I was not there to be tried, that I had not been indicted.”

Shortly afterward, the Church issued the statement announcing his excommunication.

Complete Article HERE!

04/28/13

Kentucky woman ordained as priest in defiance of Catholic church

By Peter Smith

In defiance of Roman Catholic authority and doctrine, the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests ordained its first Louisville-area priest on Saturday.

Rosemarie Smead weeps openly as almost entire congregation comes to lay their hands on her head in blessing, as she was ordained Roman Catholic priest during Celebration of Ordination in LouisvilleRosemarie Smead of Bedford, Ky., a retired Indiana University Southeast counselor-education professor, was ordained during the two-hour service hosted by a bishop of the movement, Bridget Mary Meehan.

Several other women priests in the movement, in white robes and red stoles, gathered from around the country to participate in a ceremony patterned on traditional Catholic ordination liturgy but suffused with feminist imagery. About 200 people attended the service at St. Andrew United Church of Christ, most of them coming forward to lay hands on Smead in blessing.

The Vatican has stated that as a matter of unchangeable doctrine, the Roman Catholic Church must follow the example of Jesus, who appointed only men as his apostles.

It says anyone who participates in a ceremony purporting to ordain a woman is automatically excommunicated. Louisville Archbishop Joseph Kurtz reiterated that stance in a statement saying the association has no connection to the Roman Catholic Church and that Catholics should not support or participate in Saturday’s event.

Janice Sevre-Duszynska of Lexington, Ky., a priest in the women’s ordination movement, gave opening remarks Saturday, saying there is archaeological and documentary evidence that the early church ordained women — interpretations that have been disputed by supporters of male-only ordination.

Meehan said the decade-old Women Priest movement is an act of justice defying what she called an unjust Vatican law. She said the movement’s bishops were ordained by an unidentified bishop in communion with Rome.

“Sexism in church and society is sinful and should always be challenged,” Meehan said. She said if women were in Catholic leadership, the church’s position against artificial birth control would be lifted.

The liturgy included invocations to numerous female Catholic saints, to God as mother and father and to “Christ-Sophia,” invoking a biblical term for divine wisdom that service leaders said reflects the feminine aspect of God.

After a series of solemn ordination vows, Smead prostrated herself before the altar for several minutes during quiet music and prayer. Participants presented Smead with ceremonial vestments of priestly ministry, and Meehan anointed her hands with oil.

“You’re in for quite a spiritual adventure,” Meehan told Smead.

“It’s just so overwhelming,” Smead said afterward. Smead, who previously lived as a cloistered nun, marched for civil rights and worked for years with troubled youth in Alabama before a quarter-century career at IUS, said the ordination “just raised up 70 years of longing in me to be able to fulfill this.”

Two of Smead’s former IUS students gave testimonials during the ordination, lauding her for providing career and personal guidance, and a niece, nephew and in-law of Smead read Scriptures.

The Rev. Jimmy Watson, pastor of St. Andrew, said the church agreed to host the service after considering a passage in the book of Acts in which the apostle Peter was told by God to bring the gospel to Gentiles.

“I knew there would be some pressure not to do something so illegal,” Watson said. “… We decided that we could not stand in God’s way.”

Complete Article HERE!

04/17/13

Pope Francis and the American Sisters

By MARY E. HUNT

The jury is still out on Pope Francis in a pontificate that may well be shaped by women. A month after Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was named Bishop of Rome, his Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Most Rev. Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, met with the presidents of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella group of American nuns that had come under doctrinal scrutiny and been found wanting.

VATICAN-NUNS/Archbishop Mueller claimed that he had “recently discussed the Doctrinal Assessment with Pope Francis, who reaffirmed the findings of the Assessment and the program of reform for this Conference of Major Superiors.” On the face of it, this means that Archbishop J. Peter Sartain, Bishop Leonard P. Blair, and Bishop Thomas John Paprocki, who were named to enforce the terms the Congregation’s findings against the LCWR, are given carte blanche to do so. There may be more to this than meets the eye.

LCWR’s statement on the meeting includes just the facts and a dignified conclusion: “The conversation was open and frank. We pray that these conversations may bear fruit for the good of the Church.” Pundits are left to parse the rest.

It is early in a pontificate to make definitive judgments. Jesuits, I am informed, usually wait 100 days before making major decisions in their new positions. Perhaps Francis is observing the custom, hence some warrant for the bated-breath approach of some progressive pundits. As an inveterate pope watcher and advocate for justice for women, let me offer a few insights to guide future evaluation.

First, the early impressions of Francis are positive on several fronts. His much vaunted simple lifestyle, his decision to live in community, wear black shoes, pay the hotel bill he owed, ride the cardinals’ bus, worry about the well-being of the Swiss Guards, and forsake the white ermine-collared mozzetta (part of the papal wardrobe) all stand in deep contrast to the customs of his immediate predecessor popes. Although a reasonable person might conclude that the bar is hopelessly low in this regard.

In recent years, we were treated to cardinals wearing long trains (cappa magna). We endured stories of a sumptuous 80th birthday party for disgraced Boston Cardinal Bernard Law at one of Rome’s four-star restaurants. We know that Benedict and his colleagues were harsh on nuns whose lifestyles they would do well to emulate.

I expect a good deal more from Francis than the friendly but still largely cosmetic changes he has instituted. Gradualists will disagree with me, but I think it is time for Catholics to grow up and realize that royalty does not become us. The church is a service organization whose primary stakeholders are people who are poor. Their needs, and not the whims of pampered prelates, are the priority. Nothing less is acceptable. Raise the bar for heaven’s sake.

Second, on things that enthusiasts say are different in the months since the new pope took office: they are not all that different. Take, for example, the washing of two women’s feet at the Holy Thursday celebration. Granted, one of them was Muslim, and granted, the current pope may not be one for grand gestures (in which case they all would have been women in retribution), but is the liturgical act of washing two women out of 12 in 2000 years really the sign of the ‘feministization’ of the Roman Catholic Church? Not by my lights.

Rather than washing feet, I suggest looking Catholic women in the eye and saying, “You are my sister, equal in every way to me,” and then changing structures accordingly. To atone for centuries of discrimination against women will take more than four clean female feet. I despair of those who say, “It is a start,” to which I respond, “Obviously, but how pitifully inadequate.”

Naming a committee of nine Cardinals to advise Pope Francis on reforming the Curia and administering an unwieldy bureaucracy is also touted as a big change. However, this sort of kitchen cabinet looks to me like a kind of steering committee of the cardinals, hardly a revolutionary idea. Note the lack of lay people, women, and, God-forbid, young people on the list. I am hard pressed to think that certain cardinals did not have a pope’s ear before this. The Vatican’s spokesman emphasized the advisory nature of the group, further assuring that nothing has really changed. I am getting ready to rest my case though I long to be proven wrong.

Third, the meeting with the LCWR presidents needs to be read critically in light of the theo-politics of the moment. I can imagine that the Archbishop Mueller’s of this world are scrambling to figure out where to go next. This is a crowd accustomed to taking orders from the top, and when they cannot be sure just what the top wants they must be very nervous.

Nonetheless, I take the man at his word that he had some communication with the pope, which gave him the impression that it was fine to go full steam ahead with the hostile take-over of LCWR. What we do not know is the nature of the conversation. Maybe it was part of a long, soul-searching discussion into the wee hours of the morning by men who agonized over how to apologize sufficiently to the women for taking their time and impugning the reputations. More likely, it was a short, pedestrian mention by an overeager cleric who simply had to tell Su Santidad that he was planning to meet with the women. I can imagine that the Pope, distracted by concerns of poverty, ecocide, and war said “have a good meeting” which the Archbishop interpreted as license to continue with the oppression of women religious. Time will tell which it was, or something in between. For now, the bureaucracy grinds on with the women’s organization still under a cloud.

More telling, perhaps, will be the action or lack of it against women religious more broadly. The doctrinal investigation of LCWR was insult, but injury came in the form of an Apostolic Visitation (something akin to a convening a grand jury with the presumption that something is wrong) of virtually all of the communities whose leaders belong to LCWR.

A ray of hope is seen in the recent appointment of José Rodríguez Carballo, the leader of Franciscan men worldwide as the secretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (memo to curial reformers: shorten the names of these outfits). That is the group that undertook the snooping into the lives and institutions of women religious. Archbishop Carballo, a member of a religious congregation himself, is expected to be a pastoral sort. But let optimists not pass over the fact that he serves under the Prefect Cardinal João Braz de Aviz who succeeded Cardinal Franc Rodé who started the whole operation.

If the Vatican under Pope Francis is smart, they will conveniently forget that this unfortunate chapter of church history ever took place. If they are wise, they will thank Mother Mary Clare Mallia, A.S.C.J., and her collaborators who did their bidding and move on, and apologize to the women’s communities for intruding on their space and time. Then I will say there is hope for this papacy. But if LCWR is left to twist in the wind, if the rest of the active communities that were subject to the indignity of a visitation are left hanging, can we say this pope is different from any other pope?

I urge that if women are not welcomed into all forms of ministry, decision making, and administration of the Roman Catholic Church in the very near future—I mean a year, max two, not a lifetime—then the jury find this pope as guilty as the rest in the ‘disappearance’ of half of the Catholic community. Maybe we will be surprised, and I will be the first one to rejoice that my skepticism was unwarranted.

Meanwhile, as one who is not accustomed to drinking the Kool-Aid, I suggest that the nuns lawyer up and all Catholic women go on with our ministries as we have been doing for decades, as if nothing has happened.

Complete Article HERE!

04/4/13

Pope stresses “fundamental” importance of women in Church

Pope Francis emphasised the “fundamental” importance of women in the Roman Catholic Church on Wednesday, saying they were the first witnesses of Christ and have a special role in spreading the faith.

By Naomi O’Leary
The pontiff’s decision a week ago to include women in a traditional foot-washing ritual drew ire from traditionalists, who see the custom as a re-enactment of Jesus washing the feet of his apostles and said it should therefore be limited to men.

Pope Francis gestures as he speaks during a weekly general audience in Saint Peter's Basilica, at the VaticanFrancis, elected last month as the first non-European pope in 1,300 years, said women had always had a special mission in the Church as “first witnesses” of Christ’s resurrection, and because they pass belief onto their children and grandchildren.

“In the Church, and in the journey of faith, women have had and still have a special role in opening doors to the Lord,” Francis told thousands of pilgrims at his weekly audience in S. Peter’s Square.

He said that in the Bible, women were not recorded as witnesses to Christ’s resurrection because of the Jewish Law of the time that did not consider women or children to be reliable witnesses.

“In the Gospels, however, women have a primary, fundamental role … The evangelists simply narrate what happened: the women were the first witnesses. This tells us that God does not choose according to human criteria.”

See the pope’s full address here: (HERE).

It was the second time Francis had spoken of women’s role as witnesses to the resurrection of Christ, a subject of bedrock importance to the Catholic faith.

His Easter Vigil address on Saturday reached out to women and urged believers not to fear change.

REFORM

“This is very encouraging,” said Marinella Perroni, a theologian and leading member of the Association of Italian Women Theologians, which promotes female experts on religion and their visibility in the Church.

“Pope Francis is taking up, with a stronger emphasis, the teaching of previous popes about the role of women in the foundation of faith and the resurrection of Jesus,” Perroni told Reuters.

“The fact that the Pope acknowledges that the progressive removal of female figures from the tradition of the resurrection…is due to human judgments, distant from those of God…introduces a decidedly new element compared to the previous papacy.”

Supporters of liberal reform of the Church have called on the institution to give a greater voice to women and recognise their importance to the largest religious denomination in the world.

Some groups call for women to be ordained as priests, which the Vatican says is wrong as Jesus Christ willingly chose only men as his apostles. Advocates of a female priesthood reject this position, saying Jesus was merely conforming to the customs of his times.

The election of Francis, an Argentinean, last month came in the wake of another break with tradition when predecessor Pope Benedict became one of the few pontiffs in history to resign.

His 76-year old successor has set a new tone for the papacy, earning a reputation for simplicity by shunning some ornate items of traditional dress, using informal language in his addresses, and so far choosing to live in a simple residence rather than the regal papal apartments.

Sources inside the Vatican have said Francis could reform the Vatican’s bureaucracy and restructure or even close down the Vatican’s bank following a series of scandals at the heart of the Holy See that damaged the Church’s reputation.

Complete Article HERE!

03/26/13

My Prayer: Let Women Be Priests

By ROY BOURGEOIS

AFTER serving as a Roman Catholic priest for 40 years, I was expelled from the priesthood last November because of my public support for the ordination of women.

Father Roy Bougeois from Georgia poses with a group of Roman Catholic activist in front of the VaticanCatholic priests say that the call to be a priest comes from God. As a young priest, I began to ask myself and my fellow priests: “Who are we, as men, to say that our call from God is authentic, but God’s call to women is not?” Isn’t our all-powerful God, who created the cosmos, capable of empowering a woman to be a priest?

Let’s face it. The problem is not with God, but with an all-male clerical culture that views women as lesser than men. Though I am not optimistic, I pray that the newly elected Pope Francis will rethink this antiquated and unholy doctrine.

I am 74 years old. I first felt God calling me to be a priest when I was serving in the Navy in Vietnam. I was accepted into the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers in New York and was ordained in 1972. After working with the poor of Bolivia for five years, I returned to the United States. In my years of ministry, I met many devout Catholic women who told me about their calling to the priesthood.

Their eagerness to serve God began to keep me awake at night. As Catholics, we are taught that men and women are created equal: “There is neither male nor female. In Christ you are one” (Galatians 3:28).

While Christ did not ordain any priests himself, as the Catholic scholar Garry Wills has pointed out in a controversial new book, the last two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, stressed that the all-male priesthood is “our tradition” and that men and women are equal, but have different roles.

Their reasons for barring women from ordination bring back memories of my childhood in Louisiana. For 12 years I attended segregated schools and worshiped in a Catholic church that reserved the last five pews for blacks. We justified our prejudice by saying this was “our tradition” and that we were “separate but equal.” During all those years, I cannot remember one white person — not a teacher, parent, priest or student (myself included) — who dared to say, “There is a problem here, and it’s called racism.”

Where there is injustice, silence is complicity. What I have witnessed is a grave injustice against women, my church and our God, who called both men and women to be priests. I could not be silent. Sexism, like racism, is a sin. And no matter how hard we may try to justify discrimination against others, in the end, it is not the way of a loving God who created everyone of equal worth and dignity.

In sermons and talks, starting in the last decade, I called for the ordination of women. I even participated in the ordination of one. This poked the beehive of church patriarchy. In the fall of 2008, I received a letter from the Vatican stating that I was “causing grave scandal” in the Church and that I had 30 days to recant my public support for the ordination of women or I would be excommunicated.

Last month, in announcing his resignation, Pope Benedict said he made his decision after examining his conscience before God. In a similar fashion, in November 2008, I wrote the Vatican saying that human conscience is sacred because it always urges us to do what is right and what is just. And after examining my conscience before God, I could not repudiate my beliefs.

Four years went by, and I did not get a response from the Vatican. Though I had formally been excommunicated, I remained a priest with my Maryknoll Order and went about my ministry calling for gender equality in the Catholic Church. But last November, I received a telephone call from Maryknoll headquarters informing me that they had received an official letter from the Vatican. The letter said that I had been expelled from the priesthood and the Maryknoll community.

This phone call was one of the most difficult and painful moments of my life. But I have come to realize that what I have gone through is but a glimpse of what women in the church and in society have experienced for centuries.

A New York Times/CBS poll this month reported that 70 percent of Catholics in the United States believed that Pope Francis should allow women to be priests. In the midst of my sorrow and sadness, I am filled with hope, because I know that one day women in my church will be ordained — just as those segregated schools and churches in Louisiana are now integrated.

I have but one simple request for our new pope. I respectfully ask that he announce to the 1.2 billion Catholics around the world: “For many years we have been praying for God to send us more vocations to the priesthood. Our prayers have been answered. Our loving God, who created us equal, is calling women to be priests in our Church. Let us welcome them and give thanks to God.”

Complete Article HERE!

03/26/13

Silent or supportive, U.S. conservatives give gay marriage momentum

By Peter Henderson

On a frosty December night last year, about two dozen guests slipped into the Alta Club, a century-old private retreat a block away from the temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that dominates Salt Lake City.

Two men, who didn’t know each other, were the reason for the dinner: church lobbyist Bill Evans and gay rights leader Rick Jacobs. Evans was a point man for the church’s successful effort to pass California’s gay marriage ban, known as Prop 8, in 2008. Jacobs, leader of Courage Campaign, produced a 2008 commercial against the ban showing Mormon missionaries ransacking the home of a lesbian couple.

silent supportPolitics was not on the agenda – just getting to know each other. “The two hit it off,” said host Greg Prince, a medical researcher and church member who had come to know both men. He noted that less than a month before the dinner, the church had launched a website with a major change in its view of gays: the site said homosexuality was not a choice.

“There has been a shift of some tectonic plate somewhere,” Prince said.

Shifting attitudes among some conservatives and many businesses is altering the landscape around gay marriage, long considered a uniquely liberal and political issue, at one of its most crucial junctures – its review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the court’s nine justices will hear arguments on the constitutionality of Prop 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act, which excludes gay couples from federal benefits.

Some jurists look to societal changes when interpreting the law, and scholars speculate that Justice Anthony Kennedy, the possible swing vote in the divided court, will be pondering increased public support for gay marriage.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released last week found 63 percent of Americans supported gay marriage or civil unions.

While the Mormon Church has backed “traditional marriage” in Supreme Court briefs, it has been silent in recent ballot battles and has not promoted fundraising as it has in the past.

Republicans like Senator Rob Portman of Ohio are supporting gay marriage and publicly conflicting with party leaders, such as House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner. Portman this month said he had switched position on the issue after his son told him he was gay.

Corporations, including Goldman Sachs, whose chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, has campaigned in support of gay marriage, have joined the battle, arguing in briefs to the court that federal policy of not allowing gay marriage is bad for business.

The issue is far from settled, however. Gay marriage opponents have been written off as dinosaurs before, including in California, and most states ban same-sex weddings. But the momentum has been moving towards the proponents of gay marriage.

MORMON MONEY, NO MORE

Money has played a huge part in the pivot, both in terms of the financing of campaigns in favor of gay marriage and the funding of opposition groups.

When the New York State Senate voted to approve gay marriage in 2011, four Republicans joined Democrats. Republicans led by hedge fund manager Paul Singer, whose son is gay, gave the four financial and moral support, and in the 2012 national race, Singer led a political action committee that spent more than $2 million to help pro-gay marriage Republicans.

“You have billionaires telling Republicans ‘Vote our way and you’ll receive more money than you’ve ever seen,’” said Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, the leader of the movement to stop gay marriage. “That was new.”

Pro-gay marriage groups have routed their opponents financially, outraising them three-to-one in November 2012 ballot races that legalized same-sex marriage in three more states, bringing the total to nine states and the District of Columbia.

The single biggest fundraising change between 2008 and 2012 was the disappearance from the political arena of the mightiest foe of gay marriage – the Mormon Church.

While the church has petitioned the Supreme Court in favor of Prop 8, it has focused its public messages about gays on personal issues of respect and love rather than politics.

In the four November 2012 votes – Maine, Maryland, Washington and Minnesota – the top ballot committees raised about $30 million for gay marriage and $10 million against it. The $20 million difference between the two campaigns last year is close to several estimates of what the Mormon Church and its supporters gave to California’s Prop 8 in 2008.

More than 800 Utahns gave $2.7 million to support Prop 8 in 2008, state campaign finance records show. In 2012, a total of 16 Utahns gave $1,264 to the main ballot committees against gay marriage.

“The Mormon Church left as a major funder,” concluded Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the biggest gay rights group.

Frank Schubert, who ran the 2008 and 2012 anti-gay-marriage campaigns, downplayed the Church hierarchy’s silence last year. “Not having a direct statement encouraging people to get involved in the campaign naturally would result in fewer people getting involved in the campaigns, but there were fewer Mormons in these states to begin with, and there was never any expectation that they would be involved.”

California Mormon Brooke Crosland, 27, gave $1,000 in 2008 for Prop 8 and made campaign phone calls, but she stayed out of politics in 2012. She described a personal search for understanding, which she saw reflected in the church. “I feel like the ideal for a child is a father and a mother, but I also feel under the law we should have equal rights,” she said.

Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, whose portrait of gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk won an Academy Award, was approached for informal talks by Mormon officials after he narrated a documentary critical of the church called “8: The Mormon Proposition.” Church officials were surprised to learn that he, a young, gay man, deeply wanted a family. “That was this big ‘ah ha’ moment,” he said.

But Black said the initial invitation came only after the church was pilloried in public. “They didn’t contact me after making ‘Milk’. They contacted me after making ’8: The Mormon Proposition’,” said Black, who was raised a Mormon. He since has introduced HRC leader Griffin to church officials, at the December dinner and a concert following, while continuing talks.

Church spokesman Michael Purdy said its hospitality did not signal a change in position. “Being committed to marriage between a man and a woman does not mean that we do not love and care for all of God’s children. Having conversations with gay rights leaders, speaking about compassion and respect for all, and inviting people to attend a concert do not equal pulling back from supporting traditional marriage due to negative publicity during Prop 8,” he wrote by email.

Meanwhile, gay marriage fans and foes agree that same-sex-union proponents have improved their fundraising. Ted Olson, President George W. Bush’s Solicitor General, made it ok for conservatives to support gay marriage when he agreed to take the Prop 8 case, said Margaret Hoover, a pro-gay-marriage Republican activist.

When former Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman in 2010 came out as gay, it was critical mass. “Nightingales don’t sing unless they hear another nightingale singing. As soon they hear one, another one sings, and another one sings,” said Hoover.

Dozens of Republican leaders, including former California candidate for governor Meg Whitman and former presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, have signed a brief to the Supreme Court in favor of gay marriage.

Some 278 businesses, including Goldman Sachs and hotelier Marriott International, whose chairman and major stockholder is Mormon, have signed a similar brief opposing the Defense of Marriage Act. (Thomson Reuters, the parent of Reuters News, is part of that group.)

UNEXPECTED CONVERTS

The person credited by all sides with cementing the victory in California for the gay marriage ban was a little schoolgirl who told her mother she had just been taught, “I can marry a princess!” The girl was in a commercial for Prop 8, and for years Evan Wolfson, president of Freedom to Marry, has been asked whether he could beat the “Princess” ad.

Wolfson, a fundraising and strategy leader for most recent ballot campaigns in favor of gay marriage, said the answer was chiefly to change his own side’s message, rather than chase the opposition. The pro-gay-marriage campaign, which in 2008 had largely focused on appealing to voters to give gays rights because it said they deserved them, took a more personal tone, he said, of affirming the idea of equal rights and respecting loving couples.

That strategy had some unexpected converts.

David Blankenhorn, founder of the family-focused Institute for American Values think tank, was the prime witness in 2010 in the opening round of the federal trial of Prop. 8. Blankenhorn struck up unlikely friendships with gays while debating the issue in public, and he was sitting at his desk one day last year, when one called and told him to go to a website with a strident, anti-gay article.

“He said, ‘Are you sure that this is the side you are on?’” Blankenhorn recalled. He put down the phone, and in that moment realized he had already changed his mind.

“I have a kind of intellectual reason for shifting from one foot to the other foot,” he said “But I really, honestly think that it was through just personal interactions… if you want to stick with your position, don’t get to know people who disagree with you.”

Gay marriage foe Brown says he is not worried by polls that show gay marriage support snowballing. It’s all about how you ask the question, he said, and a majority of voters do not want to redefine marriage. His side has always been behind in the money battle, he added, but has had some banner successes.

Politicians can see the danger of switching sides, he said. Of the four New York State Senate Republicans who voted for same-sex marriage, only one returned to office, despite financial backing from sources as diverse as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) union, Wall Street Republicans, and libertarian David Koch.

Back in California, Rick Jacobs, the Courage Campaign chief, thinks Prop 8 was the best thing that ever happened to his movement. People sat up and started paying attention when liberal California overturned its own state Supreme Court and took away the right to marry, he said, and the court fight has kept the issue alive.

“It not only galvanized a lot of people who didn’t really care about it before that – gay people – but it also galvanized straight people,” he said. “People said, ‘wait a minute, we don’t like voting on people’s rights.’”

The night in Salt Lake City left little doubt things had changed since 2008. After the dinner, the gay rights leaders all headed over to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s Christmas spectacular. It was the hottest ticket in town and, as guests of the church, they had VIP seats.

Complete Article HERE!

03/20/13

Theology Has Consequences: What Policies Will Pope Francis Champion?

By Mary E. Hunt

Now that the smoke has cleared from St. Peter’s Square, the future of the Roman Catholic Church is on the minds of many. Catholics are eternally hopeful, so the news of the papal election of an Argentine Jesuit, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a man of simple personal ways, engendered a certain enthusiasm.

My first official act in the new pontificate was to call a wise octogenarian friend in Buenos Aires, my favorite city in the world, to join in that country’s pride and get an initial assessment of the man. Her reaction was what I would have expected from a Catholic in Boston if Cardinal Bernard Law had been elected. Her one word that stood out was “scary.”

Francis smilingProgressive Catholics had low expectations of the conclave since only what went in would come out, only hand-picked conservative, toe-the-party-line types were electors. Moreover, the process was flawed on the face of it by the lack of women, young people, and lay people. It was flawed by a dearth of democracy. Not even the seagull that sat on the chimney awaiting the decision was enough to persuade that the Holy Spirit was really in charge.

Structural changes in the kyriarchal model of church are needed so that many voices can be heard and many people can participate in decision-making in base communities, parishes, regions, and indeed in global conversations among the more than one billion Catholics. Short of this, no amount of cleaning up the curia or leading by personal asceticism, which are both expected of Pope Francis, will suffice for more than cosmetic changes. Leaving aside the ermine-lined cloak that his predecessor favored is symbolically notable but not institution changing.

The papal selection process, long thought to be secret, is now quite transparent. Once the white smoke rose, but before the name was announced, the Italian Bishops’ Conference tipped off the world in their email of congratulations to Cardinal Angelo Scola of Milan. Oops! He was not elected pope, even though he was widely considered the choice of the Pope Emeritus and those who want the curia reformed. Instead, the second highest vote getter at the previous conclave (2005) that picked Benedict XVI was chosen this time. Cardinal Bergoglio was apparently more acceptable to left, right, and center of a very conservative group of electors.

Geography is destiny. A cursory look at the Roman Catholic Church worldwide shows more than 400 million Catholics in Latin America, 125 million each in Asia and Africa, 265 million in Europe, 100 million in North America, and 8 million in Oceana. A Latin American pope is a good business decision, consistent with what an economist suggested as part of a wholesale makeover of the institution. The European Catholic Church has simply lost market share (from 65 percent a century ago to 24 percent now). The Global South is the church’s future. So a Latin American pope is a logical choice. But let the record show that this one comes from a country where Mass attendance numbers are more like France today than Italy of old. Argentina is an increasingly secular democracy where Cardinal Bergoglio grew used to being on the losing side of social change efforts, including divorce and same-sex marriage, which are now legal there. Argentina is Argentina.

After completing a doctoral dissertation in which I compared Latin American liberation theology and U.S. feminist theology, I spent 1980-81 as a visiting professor at ISEDET, the ecumenical Protestant seminary in Buenos Aires. I volunteered at Servicio Paz y Justicia led by Adolfo Perez Esquivel, where I got an education about social justice. The “Dirty War” was raging. Religious people were working feverishly to find thousands of people who had been “disappeared” and prevent others from suffering the same fate. Many Catholic priests perished; Jews suffered disproportionately to their numbers in the population.

Our faculty, some members of the Lutheran school, and those of Seminario Rabinico Latinoamericano led brilliantly by Conservative Rabbi Marshall Myer (to whom Jacobo Timmerman dedicated his stirring book, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number) met monthly for lunch and discussion of how we could be useful in a difficult situation. I do not recall any Jesuits in attendance. Plans to host a weekend meeting at our school focused on human rights and youth resulted in the firebombing of the ISEDET library in November 1980 with the loss of 2,000 books. I learned close up and personal that theology has consequences.

The controversy over then Cardinal Bergoglio’s role in the kidnapping of two Jesuits during this period is instructive. As a Jesuit leader, Padre Jorge, as he liked to be known informally, opposed liberation theology and the ecclesial model of base communities that was consistent with it. In my view, he opposed the most creative, politically-useful, scripturally-sound way of thinking about how people who were made poor by the avarice of others could change their context and bring about justice.

Instead of putting the public weight of the Jesuit order behind the efforts of some of his brothers in slums and shantytowns (and the women who were involved in both theological and pastoral work from this perspective), he ordered Jesuits to stick with parish assignments. The two priests in question chose to cast their lot with the poor instead of obey the dictates of the order.

Did the Jesuit superior-now-Pope Francis call the military dictators and agree to their kidnapping? No one is accusing him of this. Adolfo Perez Esquivel, a human rights champion and Nobel Peace Laureate (1980) knew the scene so I trust his word. He says that the now pope was not involved with the military. There were bishops who played tennis with the generals, but Bergoglio was not one of them. In fact, Padre Jorge is alleged to have intervened with military leaders for the release of the two Jesuits. But this is small comfort.

The larger conservative theological program—which was in public opposition to the best efforts of church people to bring about justice by living out liberation theology principles—helped to create the dangerous situation in the first place. To apologize thirty years later and say the institutional church did not do enough does not bring back the disappeared. Theology has consequences. Moral do-overs are few and far between.

The hierarchical church’s behavior was to Argentina what the sex abuse cases and episcopal cover-up have been for U.S. Catholics, namely the straw that broke the camel’s back. I am haunted by a picture of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, mothers of the disappeared, who went to the church center where the bishops were on retreat to clamor for their help in finding their children. The picture shows a line of police between the mothers and the bishops, the mothers on one side of the fence and the bishops on the other. The institutional church in Argentina has never recovered its credibility. To the contrary, it is further eroded by similar instances of being on the wrong side of the history of justice.

The election of a doctrinally conservative pope, even one with the winning simplicity of his namesake, is especially dangerous in today’s media-saturated world where image too often trumps substance. It is easy to rejoice in the lack of gross glitter that has come to characterize the institutional church while being distracted from how theological positions deepen and entrench social injustice. A kinder, gentler pope who puts the weight of the Roman Catholic hierarchal church behind efforts to prevent divorce, abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage—as Mr. Bergoglio did in his country—is, as my Argentine colleague observed, scary. While he may clean up some of the bureaucratic mess in the curia, he shows no evidence from his Argentina actions that he will be any more responsive than his predecessor to changing policies and structures that oppress the world’s poor, the majority of whom are women and children.

There is something perverse about opposing condom use and then washing the feet of people with HIV/AIDS. There is something suspect about opposing reproductive health care for women who may not want to get pregnant and then generously insisting on the legal baptism of children whose parents are not married. There is something dubious about calling the hierarchical church to a simpler way of being and ignoring the many women whose ministerial service would enhance its output. The Spanish expression that comes to mind is “what you give with the wrist, you erase with the elbow.” This seems to be the Jesuitical pattern of the new pope.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people kill themselves because Catholic hierarchs tell them that their sexuality is “intrinsically morally disordered.” Women die from unsafe, illegal abortions because the Catholic hierarchy spends millions of dollars opposing legislation that would make their choices safer. Survivors of sexual abuse by clergy live tortured lives because the cleric-centric structures of the church favor their abusers. While a few nuns famously ride the bus, the Vatican’s current crackdown on women religious makes most of them feel as if they have been thrown under the bus. Theology does indeed have consequences.

It is early to opine about the pontificate of Pope Francis. Catholics, including this one, are a hopeful lot. Five thousand journalists in Rome for the conclave should have asked more critical questions. My observation is that the recent papal election only serves to reinforce and reinscribe the Vatican’s power. In the absence of a religious counter-narrative, at a time when progressive Catholic voices are all but silenced, the papal theatrics—complete with an appealing hero triumphing in the end—keep the focus on the personal and spiritual, off the political and theological. It is time to reverse that pattern before any more people disappear.

Complete Article HERE!

03/18/13

Hans Küng on Election of Pope Francis

By Michael Enright

For such a conservative group of middle-aged and elderly men, the Princes of the Church do seem to have a few surprises up the sleeves of their vestments. The 115 cardinals sequestered themselves in the Sistine Chapel on Tuesday, and emerged on Wednesday with tidings of a new Pope – and not one very many people expected.

Hans Küng wird 80Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected Pontiff and rechristened himself Pope Francis, signifying his humility and support for the poor and oppressed. He’s the first Jesuit to be made pope, and the first non-European in twelve hundred years to become heir to St. Peter.

Last week, Michael Enright interviewed the preeminent Catholic theologian, Hans Küng, about the crisis in the Catholic Church and the need for reform and liberalization (click here to read).

At the time, Dr. Küng wasn’t very optimistic about the prospects of the current cohort of cardinals choosing a reform-minded Pope. But the election of Francis has restored hope in many of the faithful, that reform in the Vatican might be possible.

We checking in with Dr. Küng again for his thoughts on Pope Francis. Micheal Enright spoke to Dr. Küng from his office in Tübingen, Germany.

Complete Article and audio clip HERE!