Category: Human Rights

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Bad Faith: The Catholic Hierarchy’s Pointless Campaign Against LGBT Rights

Commentary…

In early July, Archbishop Jose H. Gomez of Los Angeles opposed a modest piece of legislation that requires schools in that state to include lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people, and other previously excluded groups, in their social studies curricula.

The archbishop argued that he was merely supporting parents’ rights to make decisions regarding their children’s education. But Catholics who pay attention to our bishops’ energetic campaign to thwart any legislation that legitimizes (or in this instance, even recognizes) same-gender attraction are familiar with this ruse.

Our hierarchy has a habit of invoking noble sounding principles but applying them only when they can be used against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington did something similar last year when he announced that the legalization of same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia had forced him to stop offering health insurance to the spouses of new employees of Catholic Charities. The marriage equality law, he explained, would force him to extend benefits to gay and lesbian couples, and since this violated the church’s teaching on marriage, he could not do it.

There is Sin, and then There is Gay Sin

To take this argument seriously, one has to overlook the fact that Catholic Charities already offered benefits to the spouses of employees who had not been married in the Catholic Church, or who had been remarried without benefit of an annulment. These are also clear violations of the Church’s teaching on marriage. But Wuerl’s harsh and unloving stance is typical of a hierarchy that behaves as though there is sin, and then there is gay sin—and gay sin is much worse.

Catholics faithful to the scriptural admonition to love mercy, do justice, and walk humbly with their God, have become increasingly alienated by bishops who seem obsessed with pushing a narrow anti-gay agenda to the exclusion even of simple charity. Our bishops were in the small minority of religious leaders who failed to speak out when a wave of anti-gay bullying, some of which led to suicides, swept the country last year. At a time when seemingly every organization in the United States was finding a way to tell young lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people that “It Gets Better,” our hierarchy, to our shame, was silent.

In their zeal to deny any form of legitimacy to same-sex relationships, the bishops have neglected more urgent pastoral duties. Catholic schools and parishes are closing by the dozen in dioceses across the country, yet somehow the hierarchy and its allies in the Knights of Columbus have found millions of dollars to spend in one state after another opposing marriage equality, or its weaker cousin, the civil union.

Leaders Without Followers

The rhetoric our bishops employ in these campaigns is hardly pastoral. Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, referred to same-sex marriage as “an Orwellian nightmare” and an “ominous threat.” He compared his state’s government to North Korea’s during New York’s recent debate on marriage equality. Then, upon losing the debate, this prince of the Church, with a palace on Fifth Avenue, proclaimed himself a victim of intolerance.

We are well acquainted with the history of anti-Catholic bigotry in this country, and keenly aware of what our forebears in the faith suffered at the hands of hateful fellow citizens. But we find it reprehensible when that legacy is invoked by those who themselves advocate discrimination and repression. If you are the Catholic parent of LGBT daughter or son, you know firsthand that it is your child’s sexual identity, and not a belief in the Immaculate Conception, that puts them at risk for beatings and taunting. Archbishop Dolan and his colleagues should stop pretending that they face anything like the intolerance that our children do.

A Gay-Friendly Church?

The one fortunate aspect of the bishop’s campaign against LGBT people is that it has been singularly ineffective. Polling by the Public Religion Research Institute makes clear that almost three-quarters of Catholics support either marriage equality or civil unions, and that we back legal protections for LGBT people in the workplace (73 percent), in the military (63 percent), and in adoptions (60 percent) by significant margins.

We are, in other words, an extremely gay-friendly church; and while it has taken a while for this fact to filter out beneath the bluster of our bishops and their lobbyists, political leaders have begun to take note. A Catholic governor and Catholic legislators made marriage equality a reality in New York. A Catholic governor and legislators passed civil unions into law in Illinois. Heavily Catholic Rhode Island passed a civil union bill over the protests of Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, and a Catholic governor has promised to permit same-sex couples to marry in Maryland, if the legislature will only put the bill on his desk.

A few days after Archbishop Gomez announced his opposition to the legislation requiring California schools to give an accurate recounting of the nation’s history. Gov. Jerry Brown, a Roman Catholic, signed it into law.

Those of us who support equality for LGBT people in civil society do so not in spite of our Catholic faith but because of it. We learned in childhood that Jesus moved freely among the outcast and the marginalized, that he warned his followers to judge not lest they be judged, and that he taught that our neighbor was not the priest who passed the beaten traveller on the other side of the road to avoid ritual impurity, but the hated Samaritan who bound up his wounds, and paid for his care.

We learned later that the Church’s teachings on social justice compelled us to act as advocates for fairness, justice, and individual dignity, that its teachings on politics instructed us to vote for the common good, and that in making moral decisions, we were to follow the promptings of our own well-formed consciences.

There are times, it seems, when our hierarchy is so committed to cultivating political power, and deploying our Church’s resources in contemporary culture wars, that they expect us to forget all of this. We won’t.

As Philadelphia Burns

Last week, the Vatican announced that it had appointed Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver as the new archbishop of Philadelphia. The clergy abuse scandal that has badly damaged the hierarchy’s credibility is still spinning out of control in Philadelphia, and Pope Benedict XVI clearly thinks that Archbishop Chaput is the right man for a difficult job.

We would only note that in his previous post, he supported a parish priest who expelled a girl from a Catholic school because her parents were lesbians. The archbishop argued that parents must be able to cooperate with Catholic schools in the education of their children, and that those who do not embrace Church doctrine cannot do so.

This was not an argument he employed against Protestants, or non-Christians, or children whose parents had remarried after a divorce. It was employed exclusively against lesbian parents. Because in the theological universe that our bishops are constructing to support their personal biases, there is sin, and then there is gay sin, and gay sin is so much worse.

http://tinyurl.com/3htna7s

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Homosexuality divides the German Church

What space do homosexuals have within the Catholic Church? Ten years after the law on same sex civil unions was introduced in Germany on 1 August 2001, the question divides German bishops. On the one hand there are those who, like the Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Reinhard Marx, is convinced that homosexuals “are part” of the church community and are also welcome to work in the parish. On the other hand those who, like Franz-Josef Overbeck, who besides being the Bishop of Essen is also the military Bishop of the Bundeswehr, believes that homosexuality is “a sin.”

“All who want to participate, open up to the Gospel and join the community of the Church, are welcome,” Marx said, in an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung. “I cannot bless a gay relationship, but I can pray for people who request it. It would be a big step if each were integrated, but this has not yet been achieved everywhere,” he explained, admitting to mistakes the Church has made in the way it has dealt with homosexuals so far: “the Church has not always adopted the right tone.” A phrase which can also be seen as a self-criticism: a few weeks ago, at the first meeting of the so-called “Dialogue Process” on the future of the Church in Mannheim, Marx had spoken, referring to homosexuals, as ” failed people.” A phrase that had raised criticism and which the Archbishop later corrected. In his interview with the Süddeutsche Marx, however, reaffirmed the Church’s position that sexuality must be considered part of marriage between man and woman.

Overbeck, who at 47 is the youngest Bishop of the Catholic Church in Germany, has shown a different approach. “Homosexuality is a sin,” he said in April 2010 in a talk show on German public television conducted by the well-known journalist Anne Will (a declared homosexual). Since then, his position has not changed. On that occasion, Overbeck recalled in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung published two days after the interview to Marx, “I expressed what the conviction of the Catholic Church is: practiced homosexuality is objectively sinful, even if gay people must be treated with respect.” Overbeck recalled having discussed in the Bishop’s residence with several representatives of gay and lesbian associations. In the end, he recalls, “we did not reach an agreement.”

http://tinyurl.com/3kwcbbs

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The Church Doesn’t Get It

Why Bishop Chaput is not the answer

The testimony before a grand jury in 2003 and 2004 of Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, during the D.A.’s investigation of clerical sexual abuse, is now online courtesy of the Inquirer; it was filed as part of the current trial of Monsignor William Lynn. Reading Bevilacqua’s actual words is important, to get the feel of who he was, his thinking, and the way he should run his archdiocese.

There’s another reason we should read what he said. The problem that the archdiocese of Philadelphia faces is not merely that it has been run by men who were far more concerned with protecting pedophile priests and the Church itself than the children who were raped by those priests. If that were the case, the solution would be straightforward: You get rid of those men at the top. But the problem is far deeper than a few Cardinals who are morally bankrupt. And that is what the Church refuses to understand.

Bevilacqua’s testimony is telling. At one point over many hours and many days, assistant D.A. Charlie Gallagher asked the Cardinal several times why–when a priest who had sexually abused a parishioner was removed–Bevilacqua did not inform that parish as to why their spiritual leader was gone.

Charlie Gallagher: “Don’t you think it would have been advisable to do that, to find out if he had abused anyone else?”

Cardinal Bevilacqua: “I repeat what I said before–we did not see it was necessary because no one was held back from reporting it.”

Gallagher: “Weren’t you concerned about whether or not there were other victims in that parish?”

Bevilacqua: “Oh, I’d be concerned about any victim, but there’s–if they wanted to come to us, they could have come anytime.”

Gallagher: “So you left it all up to these innocent children to come forward and make these claims; is that correct?”

Bevilacqua: “Their families. I don’t see–there was no restriction on anybody. They could come any time at all.”

Gallagher: “I’m not questioning the restriction … put upon the other parishioners. All I’m asking is: Don’t you think it would have been wise to go back to that parish to find out if there were other victims in that parish?”

Bevilacqua: “No, I didn’t think it was necessary, and I don’t see why we had to do that.”

That exchange, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg. We now know the story, of how the Church protected priests who raped children by moving them around to other parishes, where they went on their merry way raping more children. But I cite the above because of Bevilacqua’s chilling tone, and how it nails his monumentally skewed priorities.

So can this scandal be solved by the retirements of Cardinals Bevilacqua and Justin Rigali, and by bringing in Bishop Charles Chaput, who supposedly has a good record on sexual abuse (though there are serious questions about that)? In short, will Chaput’s aggressive brand of Catholicism move the archdiocese past the current mess?

No. Because the mindset and actions of Cardinal Bevilacqua–and his successor Rigali, who punted on the problem–are a symptom of a crisis even deeper than priests who rape children being protected and allowed to rape more children.

We are too far down the road of understanding institutional power for the Church to do anything but openly admit not just the facts of abuse, not just the awful way it has dealt with that abuse, but the most basic truth that everyone can now see: That the Church as an organization–as an institution with power held tightly at the top, with maintenance of that power the abiding concern–must fundamentally change.

I invite you: Take a look at that grand jury testimony of Cardinal Bevilacqua. His attitude merely reflects how power is organized and maintained in his Church. So it is beside the point to grade Bishop Chaput on what he did in Denver, or to put much stock in him reinvigorating the local faithful, because what this archdiocese needs, what the Church needs, is the radical understanding that its own power structure has gone haywire. In fact, it has been haywire, and the sexual abuse scandal, like the Arab spring, as messy as it is, as painful as it is, speaks to a changing world: In this case, the Church is no longer powerful enough to mute victims, and it must start listening to them. And to parishioners.

Watch, many are saying about Bishop Chaput: This guy is a firebrand. No such thing as Catholic lite from him. But Chaput’s style of faith, as charged and beautiful as it may be, is not the answer; his appointment, in fact, is an end run on the crisis. Because back to the fundamentals in an authoritarian way, which is what Chaput really offers as head of the archdiocese, is exactly the style that got the Church into this mess over the past few centuries. How long will it take to understand that?

http://tinyurl.com/3fzrbvc

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Vatican investigates gay-friendly Mexican bishop

Bishop Raul Vera Lopez of Saltillo, Mexico has told a Mexican newspaper he has received “a series of questions” from the Vatican about his support for the San Elredo community, which holds positions on homosexuality that are contrary to Church teaching.

“There has been a call from the Vatican and I am ready to clear things up … I have to respond to a series of questions that Vatican City has sent me about my work with homosexuals,” Bishop Vera told the newspaper Zocalo.

He said the Vatican inquiry has come about “because a Catholic agency based in Peru, ACI Prensa, has made false claims that I promote homosexual relations.”

ACI Prensa is Catholic News Agency’s Spanish-language sister publication.

He accused ACI Prensa of distorting his work. “They allege that I am against the magisterium of the Church and unfortunately they are driven by prejudice and phobias against the homosexual community.”

The request for clarification from the Holy See, he insisted, “is because this Catholic news agency has said outrageous things.”

Bishop Vera told the newspaper, “In the Diocese of Saltillo, we have very clear objectives. We work with (the gay community) to help them recover their human dignity, which is frequently attacked at home and in society, and they are treated like scum.”

“I am not against the magisterium of the Church, nor do I promote dishonesty. It would go against my principles to promote depravity and immorality,” he said.

In response to the Vatican inquiry, the coordinator of the San Elredo community, Noe Ruiz, told Zocalo the group would be willing to leave the diocese in order to prevent the work of Bishop Vera from being hindered.

“If tomorrow they come tell Bishop Raul Vera, ‘You are endangering your work in Saltillo because of such a small community, a network of barely 600 people,’ it would not be worth the risk,” he said.

In March of this year, Bishop Vera published a statement on the diocesan website expressing support for the “sexual, family and religious diversity forum.” The event was aimed at “eradicating what some sectors of the Church believe about homosexuality” — especially the belief “that homosexual actions are contrary to God.”

Father Robert Coogan, the American priest who founded San Elredo, maintained that the group’s work is not contrary to the teachings of the Church.

He added: “How can a person with same-sex attraction have a fulfilling life? And the only answer the Catechism gives is to tell them to be celibate, and that is not enough.

http://tinyurl.com/444zngg

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A Frock Does Not a Priest Make

Roy Bourgeois is a former missionary, a Nobel Prize nominee, a Vietnam vet with a Purple Heart and a Maryknoll priest, who founded and now presides over SOA Watch, a grassroots organization that is seeking to close down the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).

WHINSEC (formerly “School of the Americas”) is an academy for torture whose alumni include Manuel Noriega; many of Augusto Pinochet’s generals; the leaders of the 2009 military coup in Honduras; and Roberto d’Aubuisson, the commander of El Salvador’s notorious death squads — the same death squads that executed tens of thousands of Salvadoran civilians, including three nuns and the church worker they raped before murdering. (Two of the nuns were friends of Father Bourgeois.) That same year, SOA-trained assassins murdered Archbishop Romero. The name of the school has changed but the work of father Bourgeois and others continues to be consecrated to putting WHINSEC/SOA, which continues to train assassins, out of business.

Roy Bourgeois made the front page of this past Saturday’s New York Times, and I was glad for the good news at hand: 157 priests signed a statement in support of Father Roy Bourgeois, whom the Vatican has begun to defrock. The 157 have not necessarily signed on in favor of women’s ordination — but rather to protest the punishment of a priest for speaking out on a matter of conscience.

The Vatican began its crusade to defrock Father Bourgeois in November of 2008 with the threat of excommunication. (Read Bourgeois’s response.) In April of this year, Father Bourgeois received his first “canonical warning,” which was signed by Rev. Edward M. Dougherty, the Superior General of the Maryknoll order. The Maryknoll have a tradition of taking the Christ-like part of the priest’s vocation seriously; therefore, we can assume that Vatican made Father Dougherty an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Usually (and especially in recent years), when we hear about the defrocking of a Roman Catholic priest, an accusation of sexual misconduct is involved. Not so in this case. Had Father Bourgeois raped an altar boy, he would not now be hanging on to his frock by a thread.

Father Bourgeois has been ordered by the Vatican to recant — to formally, publicly, withdraw — his support for women’s ordination. If he refuses to cave, Bourgeois will be laicized by Ratzinger & Co. Father Bourgeois’s transgression, as the Vatican sees it, is not merely that he is a proponent of women’s ordination, but that he has been present at the ordination rites and liturgies.

According to the New York Times, Father Bourgeois explained why he cannot recant in an interview this past week:

“I see this very clearly as an issue of sexism, and like racism, it’s a sin. … It cannot be justified, no matter how hard we priests and church leaders, beginning with the pope, might try to justify the exclusion of women as equals. It is not the way of God. It is the way of men.”
I have been following (and writing about) the persecution of Father Bourgeois for a while, and it seems to me that the Vatican’s determination to crack down on priests who support the ordination of women, when seen alongside its (relative) indifference to the plight of adults who were raped as children by Catholic clerics, is self-serving and twisted. Even the Knights of Columbus set are beginning to be troubled by this bizarre juxtaposition, and that more and more Catholics are beginning to see the pontiff and his team as a gang of mean, power-drunk perverts who aren’t all that interested in God.

Sure, there are ultra-conservative, lockstep Roman Catholics who take a strict construction approach to embracing dogma and doctrine. They’d follow the Borgia pope to the letter, too. But most Catholics are not that, and even the most conservative of us — because we tend to agree that the current Vatican teaching which upholds the obligation of Catholics to discern is correct — are, to some degree, pick-and-choose Catholics.

Even Catholics who oppose the ordination of women are beginning to notice that there’s something not quite right about defrocking a missionary veteran with a Purple Heart as hundreds of bishops who pimped out children continue to minister amok, frocks intact.

The July 23 Times piece quotes Christopher Ruddy, an associate professor of theology at the Catholic University of America, as saying the following:
“I don’t think anything will come of it…”

Ruddy goes on to explain that church teaching on the “nonordination of women” may come under the heading of “infallible teaching.”
Maybe Professor Ruddy is right about the infallible teaching aspect. But I think a lot has already “come of it.” More than 150 signatures is something. These priests have publicly confirmed what people in parishes all over the world know: that there is widespread support among practicing Catholics for the ordination of women.

I sat beside a friend who is a Catholic priest this past weekend at a dinner party. We were talking about women’s ordination. One of his remarks should shed a particular light: “[The Vatican] won’t even talk about it.”

We have all experienced some version of this kind of refusal to talk in our personal lives. An argument transpires. Logic falters, stubbornness sets it, fear of losing the argument takes over and the one losing the debate walks away.

That the Vatican won’t ordain women might possibly be a matter of infallible doctrine. The refusal to engage, however, is not. The refusal to even engage is a sign of weakness. The refusal to engage is evidence of bigotry and fear.

The argument against women’s ordination is a lousy one. Arbitrary and flimsy, it’s a variation on “because we said so.” The prohibition is a man-made “law” grounded in medieval, temporal politics. It’s man-made policy based on broad interpretations and misinterpretations of select, ancient, translated, retranslated and mistranslated texts. The argument against women’s ordination is fueled by greed and a juvenile fear of the power, strength and sexuality of women.

In street terms: the pontiff and his boys — they got nothin’.

The pontiff can take his shot at Bourgeois, but he won’t land a punch.

According to the Vatican’s own doctrine, it is God who turns men into priests. “Defrocking” Father Roy Bourgeois will not render Father Bourgeois any less a priest. The dress does not make the man a priest.

So Ratzinger and his boys in lace will just have to be satisfied with the hope they might yet rob a 72-year-old Nobel Peace Prize nominee of his medical insurance and modest retirement plan.

And they probably will be because that’s who they are.

http://tinyurl.com/3q5unzs