Tag: Take Back The Chruch

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Toledo woman attempts to heed call to be priest

Beverly Bingle is on a mission impossible.

A “cradle Catholic” who retired from the Toledo Catholic Diocese after serving as a pastoral associate at Blessed Sacrament Parish, Ms. Bingle feels that God is calling her to be a priest — a Roman Catholic priest.

She knows the rules, of course, stated clearly and concisely in Canon Law 1024: “Only a baptized male validly receives sacred ordination.”

And she knows church tradition.

But the deeply spiritual Toledoan with a doctorate in ministry from Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit has been unable to shake the feeling that God wants her to be a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, to which she has belonged for all of her 68 years.

A no-frills type who shuns makeup, Ms. Bingle lives in a scruffy part of North Toledo where she plants a huge garden in her backyard and gives the harvest away to anyone in need.

Her calling to the priesthood is something she has wrestled with for years, she said, but the feeling began to intensify about a year ago when she “stumbled across” a group called Roman Catholic Womenpriests.

Members consider the group a renewal movement that is fully and legitimately part of the Roman Catholic Church. Their motto is “a new model of ministry in a renewed church.”

The female priests and supporters assert that the women’s ordination was in proper Apostolic Succession because the movement started when a male Roman Catholic bishop ordained seven female priests on the Danube River in Germany in 2002. A year later, the same bishop ordained two women as bishops.

Members and supporters of Roman Catholic Womenpriests believe Canon Law 1024 is in error, and like other unjust laws in history, including slavery, will be changed — eventually. But they refuse to sit idly by, awaiting what would be a seismic shift in church law and tradition.

About 90 women in the United States have been ordained thus far in the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement, and five women have been ordained bishops. There are other female priests and bishops around the globe.

Female priests serve their flocks in different settings, including hospitals and nursing homes, with many presiding at weekly liturgies in rented or donated Protestant spaces.

Ms. Bingle has applied and has been accepted into the organization’s priestly formation program and is on track to be ordained sometime in 2013.

Three other women in the Toledo area are studying for the Roman Catholic priesthood, according to Ms. Bingle, but they are not ready to go public. Two are likely to be “catacomb priests” who never go public, and a third now works for the Toledo Diocese and fears she could lose her job and retirement benefits if the church finds out, Ms. Bingle said.

Taking a risk

Anyone who openly defies church law takes risk, including punishment from the church and harassment from traditional-minded Roman Catholics.

The Vatican has forbidden discussion of women’s ordination and has ruled that anyone who takes part in the ordination of female priests is automatically excommunicated by that action.

Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, in a statement explaining the church’s ban on female priests, cited Pope John Paul II’s 1994 apostolic letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, which said unequivocally that women cannot be ordained.

“The church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and … this judgment is to be definitively held by all the church’s faithful,” Bishop Blair said in quoting the pope’s letter.

Anyone who attempts to confer a sacred order on a woman, and any woman who attempts to receive a sacred order, incurs “excommunication immediately,” the measures necessary “to protect the nature and validity of the Sacrament of Holy Orders,” Bishop Blair said.

“The ordination of women is not possible, not because women are somehow unfit to carry out the functions of a priest, but because on the level of sacramental signs it is not the choice that the Lord has made.”

Pope John Paul’s 1994 letter effectively closed the debate on female priests because the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith deemed it to have “definitive” status.

Some theologians question the Vatican’s finding, however, saying the late pontiff’s letter would be more appropriately defined as “authoritative” — a critical distinction in the church world that would give the document less weight.

Female priests and their supporters say they are not concerned by threats or acts of excommunication, the Catholic Church’s harshest penalty that deprives a person of all participation in church society.

“They probably would excommunicate me already because I’m attempting to be ordained,” Ms. Bingle said. “But they can’t put you in jail anymore. And they can’t burn you at the stake.”

And in Ms. Bingle’s view, she would reject excommunication because she believes it is based on an unjust law.

“I would not consider myself excommunicated. In my opinion, my conscience tells me I am still a good practicing Catholic in good standing,” she said.

‘Badges of honor’

Bishop Bridget Mary Meehan of Sarasota, Fla., said she has received several letters of excommunication.

She said she considers them “badges of honor” because Pope Benedict XVI has canonized two excommunicated nuns, Mother Theodore Guerin and Mary MacKillop. “He is making excommunication the fast track to sainthood,” Bishop Meehan said in an interview.

Sydney Condray, 72, a Toledo author who has a doctorate in education administration, is weighing whether to seek ordination as a priest.

A widow, Ms. Condray said she feels “a call to a leadership role, and the priesthood is a call to leadership within a community.”

She believes Canon Law 1024 is “based on wrong assumptions; therefore their conclusions are wrong. I am not under any obligation to agree with things that make no sense to me. We have women who are leaders of countries, leaders of corporations, doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs.”

“It is an anachronism to require that only people of the male gender can be priests. Why, because they have exterior plumbing? Yes, Jesus was a man. But he was a man of Aramaic descent. Why not limit the priesthood to males of Aramaic descent? It can get that ridiculous,” Ms. Condray said.

The Rev. Roy Bourgeois, a Catholic priest from Louisiana who belongs to the Maryknoll Missionary order, is one of the only Roman Catholic priests in the United States who has publicly supported women’s ordination. He told The Blade in an interview that he feels he has no choice but to speak out because church law is wrong.

“In Catholicism, we all learn about the primacy of conscience. My conscience compelled me to break my silence on this issue, on this teaching,” Father Bourgeois said. “Silence is the voice of complicity. Now, when I broke my silence, I of course got in big trouble with the Vatican. However, I have refused to recant my belief in support of the ordination of women. I believe that our church teaching defies faith and reason and simply cannot stand up to scrutiny.”

Father Bourgeois got involved in a showdown with church authorities after he gave the homily at the ordination of Janice Sevre-Duszynska in Lexington, Ky., on Aug. 9, 2008. The priest has been threatened with dismissal and excommunication but as of this writing, Father Bourgeois remains a Roman Catholic priest in good standing.

Shortly after participating in Ms. Sevre-Duszynska’s ordination, “I received a very serious letter from the Vatican stating that I would be excommunicated automatically if I did not recant my support of women’s ordination as priests,” Father Bourgeois said. “I responded by saying that I cannot recant. Sexism, like racism, is a sin, and no matter how hard we may try to justify discrimination against women it is not the way of God but of men in their quest for power.”

He has not heard further from Rome, he said. His Maryknoll superiors, meanwhile, sent him two warning letters last year demanding that he recant, which he has refused to do. The order took a vote earlier this year to dismiss him, Father Bourgeois said, but the motion did not have enough votes to pass.

‘A grave injustice’

For Father Bourgeois, 73, a Roman Catholic priest for 40 years, the ban on women’s ordination is “a grave injustice.”

“The question I had to ask myself and my fellow priests is an all-important question that they refuse to answer, and it’s who are we, as men, to say that our call from God is authentic but your call as women is not. Who are we to reject God’s call of women to the priesthood?

“What I discovered after a lot of study and reflection is that the root of our church’s teaching is sexism. A grave injustice is being done against women and against God, who I believe without any doubt calls both men and women to the priesthood.”

Bishop Joan Houk of Pittsburgh, who heads the Great Waters Region of Roman Catholic Womenpriests, which includes Ohio, was a Roman pastoral director and pastoral associate in Kentucky, where for 5½ years she ran two Roman Catholic parishes that had no pastors.

“I preached. I did funerals that did not have Eucharistic liturgies. I took my turn doing hospital chaplaincy, but I was not able to use holy oils. I was not able to hear confessions or preside at Eucharist. I did a couple of baptisms, but I could not do weddings.”

Bishop Houk, a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a master of divinity degree, said the ministry restrictions placed on her because of her gender became increasingly difficult to bear.

“It was extremely painful,” Bishop Houk, 71, said. “I never realized that it would be that painful. … I thought, ‘If I was ordained I could give them the sacraments.'”

In March, 2005, she was inspired to pursue ordination after hearing Bishop Patricia Fresen, a bishop and a native of South Africa, talk about apartheid.

“I had believed that someday the Catholic Church would ordain women,” Bishop Houk said. “I had been waiting, and then I saw that things were getting more rigid against any possibility of us getting ordained. And then I heard Patricia say that when you try everything and it doesn’t work, then sometimes what you have to do is break the law. It became very clear to me right then that that was something I needed to do. I needed to break the law.”

Opening the door

Roman Catholic Womenpriests reject several other Roman Catholic teachings. They allow priests to be married, and they ordain homosexuals, for example.

Several married men have been ordained in the movement.

“The only thing that matters is that they are called by God to the priesthood,” Bishop Houk said.

She is a Roman Catholic Womanpriest for a small community in the Pittsburgh area.

“When I see what the sacraments can do for these people through me, it’s very rewarding,” Bishop Houk said. “Now when I see what I can do for other people, I cannot worry about the Vatican and whether they will someday validate women’s ordinations. I can’t worry about their theological arguments. What I am concerned about is what I can do for people today. And I am doing it and I am at peace with that.”

Bishop Meehan, 64, of Sarasota, Fla., was one of the first eight women ordained in the United States, in a July, 2006, ceremony on a boat at the confluence of three rivers in Pittsburgh. She was ordained a bishop three years later.

She grew up in Ireland in a devout Catholic family, where “faith was woven into everything you are, and everything you were about,” Bishop Meehan said. “It was part of your whole being.”

After years of struggling with a calling to the priesthood, she saw a door open when nine women were ordained Roman Catholic priests in 2002 in a ceremony on the Danube River. Among them was Dagmar Celeste, a former first lady of Ohio.

“We don’t have to wait for permission anymore, Bishop Meehan said. “We’re not putting up with second-class citizenship. We are refusing to sit in the back of the bus. We are taking our rightful role. We are not leaving the church. No, we are leading the church.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Occupy SF: 75 Arrested in Catholic Church Occupation

The San Francisco Archdiocese made it very clear they are there to serve God, not the 99 percent. The religious leaders yesterday afternoon ordered police to start rounding up occupiers and arresting them a day after protesters descended on the church’s vacant building on Turk Street, pledging to turn the site into a permanent space for the homeless.

Initially, SF Catholics had instructed police to hold off on messing with occupiers, which gave protesters plenty of time to start prepping for a fight; when police did raid the building, they found the gates had been heavily barricaded along with piles of bricks, chairs, and buckets of paint on the rooftop. “There was concern that these items were going to be used as weapons against police officers,” said Sgt. Michael Andraychak.

When police entered the building, occupiers retreated into rooms, many that had also been barricaded from the inside. Others locked themselves on the second floor, and one person jumped from the roof and was arrested by police upon his landing.

On Sunday, Occupiers had stormed the building, which the church said was still being used as a music facility for the nearby Sacred Heart Cathedral High School. Occupiers began making themselves at home, handing out flyers, announcing the “grand opening” of the building as the “San Francisco Commune” while activists organized the space for homeless folks in need of shelter.

When police raided the site on Monday afternoon, they did find mattresses, bedrolls, a makeshift medical room, and a kitchen — all signs that occupiers had long-term plans for the two-story building. But there were also signs of miscreants in the group. Police found disturbing graffiti inside the building, including anarchy symbols, the phrases, “Burn it down,” “New Social Order,” and “Kill Cops.” Officers also found white supremacy literature inside one of the rooms, Adraychak said.

By 6 p.m., police had mostly cleared the area, and some 75 protesters were arrested on suspicion of trespassing. Today the Archdiocese is out there assessing just how much money this 24-hour occupation will cost them — and church goers.

But let’s not jump to any conclusions about Catholics. In fact, there is an “Occupy Catholics” movement forming out there, which is working to seek justice for the 99 percent — in God’s eyes, of course.

Complete Article HERE!

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The Case for Gay Acceptance in the Catholic Church

The death penalty no longer applies to people who divorce or sleep with women during their periods, as described in the Bible. So why can’t attitudes on homosexuality change as well?

COMMENTARY
On St. Patrick’s Day I had the pleasure of speaking to about 350 Catholics who gathered together to attend a conference put on by New Ways Ministry, which is an effort to support the LGBT community in the Catholic Church. The women and men I spoke to included nuns and priests, children who had come out and parents who wanted to be supportive. Two female priests gave me special blessing and I left the meeting inspired by the devotion of those who attended.

New Ways Ministry has a critical mission, since changing the Church will help those who suffer from ill treatment not only here in the United States but around the world, where the Church has so much clout. The Church has millions of members in Africa and South America, where being gay or lesbian can lead to a death sentence.

Worse, the Church’s own teaching encourages bigotry and harm. Just last year, my father’s memorial, the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, gave its human rights award to Frank Mugisha, a gay activist in Uganda whose good friend had just been brutally killed in his own home. American missionaries have encouraged the discrimination Mugisha suffers. Refuting their religious arguments is critical, and so is making a moral and religious case for gays. What we need is a transformation of hearts and minds, not merely a change of laws.

The Catholic Church’s attitude towards homosexuality is at odds with its tradition of tolerance and understanding. The actual practice of the Church is true to this tradition. What other institution separates men and women and encourages them to live together in monasteries and convents where they can develop deep relationships with those who share their kind of love?

The fight for the dignity of the LGBT community is a fight for the soul of today’s Church. Some conservatives see the hierarchy’s current, traditional teaching on sex as the Church’s defining position. They don’t really like to talk about, or even be reminded of, the Church’s teachings on immigration, or protection of the environment, or the greed that produces financial meltdowns, all of which they would find distastefully liberal.

For them there is only one issue — sex, or pelvic politics as some call it. The Pope himself pointed this out on in visit to Mexico, where he said that “not a few Catholics have a certain schizophrenia with regard to individual and public morality…. In public life they follow paths that don’t respond to the great values necessary for the foundation of a just society.”

If we wish to change the Church, we must first convey our views in language, images, and theology that reach people where they are. And secondly, we should make it clear that disagreement with the hierarchy is a critical part of our history.

The fact that so many Americans see themselves as religious, as God-loving church goers, means we have a better chance of reaching them if we use a language, a book, and symbols they understand. Polls find that 85 percent say that they believe in God and 50 percent claim that they go to church every Sunday. The fact that only 25 percent do just goes to show that you can’t trust everybody’s self-reporting.

In The Good Book: The Bible’s Place in Our Lives, the recently deceased Peter Gomes describes interviews with 400 people who had been jailed for hate crimes against gays. None felt remorse. They thought gays were the devil, so fighting them was cause for pride, not shame or regret. Laws are important, but the moral case can be even more compelling.

When my father visited South Africa in 1966, he spoke with students in Cape Town about apartheid. They defended the abhorrent practice by pointing to Biblical passages that suggested that discrimination was fine. In an effort to reach them, my father asked, “Suppose you die, and you go up to heaven, and you enter the pearly gates, and suppose, just suppose when you get there, you find that God is black.” Today we can ask, “Suppose God is gay.”

My father grasped, as did John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, that in America the leader who wishes to enlarge freedom’s sphere must appeal to an audience’s religious beliefs as well as to their understanding of American liberty. This is what I wrote about in my book, Failing America’s Faithful. While researching it, I gained many insights into the Church and its history of both prejudice and tolerance.

The Great Awakening of the 1740s gave people the idea that they could find God within themselves and need not trust preachers. As one perceptive British writer pointed out, if they don’t need rectors, soon they won’t need British rulers. Sure enough, once Americans got used to trusting themselves, they did rebel. Then the Second Great Awakening, in the 1850, instilled in Americans the idea that not only did the divine reside within them, it also resided in women and slaves. The Abolitionist movement grew from that religious revival, as did the suffragettes.

A few years ago, I read the Bible from Genesis to Revelations, and to me the biggest revelation was how misogynistic it was. That made me realize that the Catholic Church was on to something when it allowed only educated priests to read the Bible. My mother’s generation was prohibited from reading the Bible, and when I told my grandmother that my father used to read the Bible to us, she was shocked, “Catholics don’t read the Bible,” she said. The Church figured that people could take passages out of context and come to unwarranted conclusions. This changed after Vatican II and now Catholic parishes offer Bible study classes.

But those outrageous passages did not deter either the abolitionists or the suffragettes. They boldly rejected them as cultural detritus. Instead, they asserted that the primary message was that all people were made in God’s image. Thus we are born to be free.

Unfortunately, a century later, in the 1970s, feminists and gay rights activists did not adopt the same strategy and tactics. I think this happened because their movement grew out of the non-religious part of the civil rights movement. Recall that the civil rights movement was split between the followers of Reverend Martin Luther King on the one hand and Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers on the other. The latter group felt that religion was weak. Why turn the other cheek? Why not fight back? This secular strain also attracted many intellectuals who were, to put it bluntly, uncomfortable with religion.

Happily, that has now changed. Women have entered schools of theology and can now show that Jesus was one of the first great feminists. Mary Magdalene is no longer thought of as a prostitute but as the “apostle to the apostles.” Gays, though, are still excluded.

Progressive Christian and Jewish believers have accepted gay rights. Theologians now argue that verses in Leviticus that call for the killing of men who sleep with men apply only to a particular historical moment. The death penalty no longer applies to people who divorce, curse their parents, or sleep with women during their period — rules that are also in Leviticus.

Obviously, some people continue to read scripture simply to sustain their preexisting prejudice against homosexuality and homosexuals. But theologians now point out that the word “homosexual” didn’t even exist until the 19th century, and it wasn’t included in the Bible until 1946.

Choose your passage. King David talks about sleeping with his friend Nathan as “better than sleeping with a woman.” The Ten Commandments don’t mention homosexuality. Nor does Jesus. In fact, our Lord teaches us that love of God and love of our fellow human being are the two most important commandments. He doesn’t exclude the love that one man can have for another, or one woman for another.

The 2000-year-old passages favored by Church authorities don’t hold up as being anti-gay. Not only is the hierarchy — the Church’s cardinals and bishops — imposing its own interpretations, its views are harmful to many men and women. I would hope that the lens through which one reads scripture would be one of love and openness to others, not fear and anger and meanness.

Contrary to conservative propaganda, though, the Vatican is not immovable. It has a long history of changing position to follow new understandings of society and morality. Usury is no longer a sin. Women are no longer considered “the devil’s gateway.” Railroads are no longer cursed as the work of the devil, and teaching that there is such a doctrine as “freedom of conscience” does not merit censure, as it did for John Courtney Murray in the 1950s: In fact, Vatican II now recognizes “freedom of conscience.” Pope John Paul II apologized for the Church’s treatment of women and its persecution of Galileo. Sex between husband and a wife is no longer just for procreation but has value in itself.

That history can continue with its position on gays — and the laity has a critical role to play in pushing for these changes. As Cardinal John Henry Newman, the foremost 19th-century Catholic theologian asserted, bishops have at times “failed in their confession of the faith.” There can be instances of “misguidance, delusion, hallucination.” He said that the body of the faithful has the “instinct for truth.”

Already, I have witnessed that instinct for truth in the argument over contraception. Despite the hierarchy’s position, 98 percent of Catholic women in the United States use contraception. I believe that Human Vitae was the Holy Ghost’s way to teach us that we must use our conscience, and not lazily rely on the hierarchy when it is in error.

At this time, when the hierarchy does not want to recognize that we are all made in the image and likeness of God, and that the one of the two most critical commandments is to love one another, it is critical to assert that God loves the LGBT community equally. Sometimes the Church moves slowly, sometimes quickly. The point is to make sure the voices of dissent are not quiet and the Holy Spirit can be heard.

Complete Article HERE!

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RGOD2: From exclusion to inclusion, making Catholicism truly universal

COMMENTARY

Pope Benedict’s statements on March 9 attracted significant media attention as the Roman Catholic Church in the United States prepares for battle to defend “traditional marriage” in several states while thwarting same gender marriages. His comments were seen by the LGBT community as another direct attack on us claiming we are “injurious to society.”

Injuring society has connotations of violence. Marriage has to be defended from those injurious qays, one might think. In reading the whole statement, however, the Pope is much more critical of heterosexuals than homosexuals, particularly those who live together “out of wedlock.” He is speaking about millions of people who outnumber us qays considerably.

When I was working as a parish priest, 99% of the heterosexual couples who came to me seeking marriage were already living together. Their relationships were honest, good and deserved the blessing of God, community and their families. To demonize them or to claim their relationships were injurious would have been far from the truth of my experience and indeed theirs.

They are our allies and represent a significant body of experience from responsible and caring human beings who are deeply troubled by the statistic that one out of two marriages fail in the USA. They are part of a movement to reform the way we express love and lifelong commitment and are trying to prevent the heartache and trauma caused by failed marriages that indeed can be very injurious to the men women and children who are victims of them.

However, the Holy Father felt it was important to instruct the bishops of Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota that the task of defending the sanctity of marriage and respect for human sexuality is among the most important pastoral duties of bishops today. In his statement, Pope Benedict recalled a quote from his letter Sacramentum Caritatis, in which he said:

[T]he good that the Church and society as a whole expect from marriage and from the family founded on marriage is so great as to call for full pastoral commitment to this particular area. Marriage and the family are institutions that must be promoted and defended from every possible misrepresentation of their true nature, since whatever is injurious to them is injurious to society itself.

I grew up in a Northern Irish Protestant home where Roman Catholicism was misunderstood and deeply feared. My grandmother was Roman Catholic and my brother married a devout Roman Catholic who brought up her children in her faith tradition.

Even though most families were “mixed marriages” or were only a generation away from them, the hostility directed towards the Catholic community and misrepresentation of them in Northern Irish society was similar to the prejudice that was directed towards LGBT people. We had to find out for ourselves what Catholics were really like. This was difficult given we attended separate schools and lived in segregated neighborhoods. I had very few Catholic friends growing up and did not set foot in a Catholic church until I was in my mid-teens.

The parallel to fear and misrepresentation of LGBT people is worth noting. We can hate Catholics universally in the same way LGBT people can be feared or hated universally. Just because the Pope says we are “injurious to society,” we should not see Catholicism as something intrinsically evil. I have found the process of getting to know people and what their religious beliefs mean to them can be enriching.

I have two wonderful Catholic friends who exemplify what is best about their faith and they would not agree with the Holy Father’s position on a whole range of issues yet are still devoutly Catholic.

Maxensia serves a very poor community in the Centre of Kampala. She is HIV-positive and has gathered 3,000 Ugandan women who care for a loved one with AIDS. She is deeply involved in the life of her Catholic community as well and serves on a number of church bodies.

She told me of an experience where a woman who was HIV-negative had the courage to stand in a conference rooms of clergy, bishops and lay leaders and asked them to respond to her dilemma of how she can have sex with her HIV-positive husband. Maxensia’s voice still rises in amazement at the response of the conference to this weeping woman.

“No one could give her an answer,” she told me. This convinced her more than anything that the church’s position on a whole range of sexual issues was indeed injurious from both a personal pastoral perspective and a deeply flawed societal policy. Sometimes the response of the church can be so outrageously unjust or out of touch that the victim wins new allies.

Maxensia has become an ally of the LGBT community as a result of how the Church treats married couples who are positive and negative and desperately seek responsible encouragement to live out their love and commitment. When I returned to Uganda in 2010 after a 13-year absence for fear of the homophobes there, the population of this relatively small country had risen from 20 million to 33 million. The churches and the government were encouraging their people to breed like rabbits. More than anything I saw in Kampala, the rise of religious-based homophobia, a corrupt and violent government or the rise of HIV, population growth on this scale scared the hell out of me. This is totally unsustainable and opens the Ugandan society to issues of food scarcity and security. What is more injurious to family life than war and famine?

My second Catholic heroine, professor Margaret Farley, works from the ivory tower of Yale University as a former ethics professor but has spent a lot of time on women’s developing higher education in Africa. I met her several years ago at a conference in Dublin where she was presenting a 21st century view of Catholic sacramental marriage that included same gender couples. Brilliantly informed and cool as a cucumber, she appeared on Irish television where she would calmly state why she disagreed with the Pope and could still remain a faithful Catholic.

Her book “Just Love” moves the concepts of justice to the forefront of the Catholic understanding of marriage. For example, she reinterprets the Catholic position on procreation more broadly to include couples who may not be able to have children but can still be “fruitful” by caring for other people’s children. I want to revisit her position in another column because she convinced me that marriage is indeed a sacrament and she would also claim most heterosexual Catholic marriages are not actually sacramental by her definition, particularly around issues of mutuality. So I want to come back to this because it is enormously valuable in the current debate.

Farley’s theological framework on marriage was deeply influential on my understanding of marriage as we entered into the debate on Proposition 8 in California. She would have been a great advocate for the LGBT community if we had “leaned into the wind” on defining marriage from a religious perspective and not only about a civil partnership.

From Kampala to Yale, there are wonderful examples of deeply caring inclusive Catholics who represent a significant yet not dominant voice of the Church’s witness. They remain Catholics but do not agree with the present policies of the Papal Curia. They are a kind of “loyal opposition” and remain thorns in the flesh of certainty and conformity.

My life and my spirituality are enriched by knowing them and their courage to be themselves is an inspiration. They have helped me break out of my own cultural ignorance and affirmed our common humanity. Jesus had many confrontations with the clergy of his day and he commented that they “heaped huge burdens on people’s shoulders without offering as finger to lift them.” I can recognize similar traits in some of the clergy and institutions in the 21st century and need to be vigilant about my own participation in this “holier than thou” mentality which is ultimately deeply injurious to all of us.

Complete Article HERE!

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Bishops and their flock at odds over religious liberty concerns

In a bit of coincidental timing, less than 24 hours after the U.S. bishops released a new statement promising a vigilant effort to defend religious freedom a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) reveals that 57 percent of Catholics don’t seem to think their liberty is really in danger.

The bishops’ latest statement contains more of the same arguments they’ve been making in recent weeks–that the issue is not about contraception, nor are they engaging in a partisan battle. Their efforts are instead spurred by a general concern over religious liberty for all faith-based institutions, which they believe has been greatly eroded by the government’s health care coverage mandate. Sister Mary Ann Walsh, director of media relations for the bishops’ conference, told the Washington Post that the bishops are prepared to move ahead with a full-scale media campaign on the issue in the coming weeks.

That’s likely because they were already aware of the same trend the PRRI study finds: the majority of Catholics simply aren’t in agreement with the bishops on this issue.”Catholics overall are generally more supportive than the general public of the contraception coverage requirements,” the study says. It finds that roughly 6-in-10 Catholics think the mandate should apply to religiously-affiliated hospitals, universities, social service agencies, and privately owned small businesses, which are the same institutions that the bishops argue should be exempt.

Walsh dismisses the findings as being a case of researchers asking the wrong question. “If you were to ask, ‘Should the government force churches to violate their religious beliefs?’, you’d get different results,” she said. That may be true, but it is comparing apples and oranges if people don’t buy the premise that the mandate is actually an infringement upon religious liberty. Even among those polled who did say that religious liberty is being threatened, only 6 percent specifically named the contraception mandate as the reason.

In a memo to the media after the release of the bishops’ statement, Jesuit Father Tom Reese notes that their argument hinges on a very broad understanding of what constitutes “religious freedom,” particularly their insistence that private employers should also be exempt from the federal law if they feel it violates their conscience.

“The statement infers that religious liberty is an absolute right that cannot be restricted,” Reese says. “If this were true, Mormons and Muslims could practice polygamy and those who believe God demands the separation of the races should be exempted from civil rights legislation… The application of civil rights and labor laws to faith-based institutions is more complicated.”

In fact the interpretation of all First Amendment rights, including religious liberty, is quite complicated. The justices of the highest court in the land have long disagreed with one another over the application and scope of those rights. It should come as no surprise then–nor should it be considered a sin–that faithful members of the Catholic Church would also differ in their interpretation of religious freedom rights.

The bishops have the right and responsibility to speak to the faithful on the church’s moral and social teachings. They can’t expect, however, that all who follow the teachings of the Catholic Church will be in agreement on matters of constitutional law.

Complete Article HERE!