Yesterday was a lost day between eldercare duties and dealing with sleep deficit. It ended with me choosing to be diverted by something my volunteer example of pseudo-lefty stupidity said, which led me to the comment threads of Eschaton, the risen and fallen baby-blue blog which, I'll give it credit, taught me a lot about the many ways in which a secular, anti-religious left will always, always fail.
So I spent several minutes there last night and, yes, I saw a brief discussion of one of the few adults there, David Derbes', comment that Prof. Melissa Murray as seen on Ari Melber's show would make a good Supreme Court member, young, black, female, progressive . . . and the discussion quickly went to the question of whether or not she was Catholic (I don't generally associate the name "Murray" with Catholicism, all the Murrays I knew were Yankee WASPs). Derbes said he had no idea if that were the case.
It was a fairly short and fairly innocuous comment chat, though it's seldom,very seldom that the word "Catholic" comes up at Eschaton without it being used as an invective or a disqualifier or in some other negative context. I suppose it might be a comment on the supposedly absurd number of Catholics on the Court just now. The list I found online of the current court says that there are five members of it who are Catholic and though Neil Gorsuch attends an Episcopal church he was raised as a Catholic. Though I'd also read that Clarence Thomas also attended an especially right wing Anglican-style Episcopal church at one point I have no idea what he calls himself. He, as all the Republicans on the court, vote a solidly Mammonist line, and, of course, that means their Christianity doesn't impinge on their legal work.
I will admit that does seem like a high number of Catholics though it's clear, since one of those Catholics is Sonya Sotomayor, you can't accuse all of them voting in the lockstep which traditional American anti-Catholicism has always said was to be feared. I would point out that the four or five others seldom vote in line with Catholic social teaching, except on matters of reproductive rights, you could never intuit the official teachings of the bishops or even the last two very conservative Popes. And that's not to mention the real Catholic church, The People.
It is odd that there is only one official Protestant member of the current court (Gorsuch) though earlier in the history of it an all WASP court wasn't considered odd. I believe for a short period after Stevens retired there were no Protestants on the court but am not interested enough to check that. If the question is one of percentage of the population, no one comments on the proportional "over-representation" of Jews on the court, a third, currently, whereas Jews are estimated to be 1.4% of the population. Which shows how stupid such thinking is. If that were the case then there would be no Jews on the Court, Muslims would also not be represented, not to mention atheists, about the smallest religious minority commonly measured in surveys. Some say that one of the Jewish members of the court, Stephen Breyer is the lone atheist on the court. I don't know if he's actually confirmed that or not. I'd certainly rather have him there than the one Episcopalian and all but one of those listed as Catholics. But not because of their religious affiliation.
What was on display on the supposedly leftish-liberalish blog was petty anti-Catholicism. That is one form of bigotry which has never been out of style with the college-credentialed, play-lefties or even the old-line college-credentialed secular liberals I knew. Back in the 60s, even at the height of Catholic liberalism (something which never faded as secular liberalism did) mocking Catholicism was everything from de rigueur to, at least, a not disqualifying form of bigotry in such circles. There's nothing so old fashioned as an old play-lefty trying to be au courant. They're as predictably repetitious as the Christmas decorations you got when your parents died.
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I hadn't intended to write about this until I read an article posted this morning at The National Catholic Reporter, it was an article of responses* by readers to a proposal that the media start distinguishing between the Catholic hierarchy, the bishops and cardinals and popes and the Catholic Church, which is, in its broadest sense, The People, certainly for the purposes of the media, the living population of Catholics. The responses were to an article by Thomas Reese published a month ago.
It is time to stop using the term "Catholic Church" as a synonym for "Catholic hierarchy."
We all do it. "The church teaches such and such." "The church lobbied against gay marriage." "The church failed to protect children." "The church is homophobic and sexist." "The church is authoritarian." "I hate the church."
The word "church" has multiple meanings. One theologian counted more than a dozen different ways "church" was used in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, referring to everything from a building to the Mystical Body of Christ.
"Church" is the word we use to translate the Greek word "ekklesia," which originally had the meaning of an assembly called together by a secular authority.
In the New Testament, the term is used more than 100 times — to refer to Christians assembled for the Eucharist, to a local congregation (such as the church at Corinth) or to all the people of God united as a body with Christ as its head.
The leaders of the community were not "the church," but the apostles, bishops, presbyters and elders.
Language matters.
Yes it does, especially when it comes to denigrating an entire group estimated to be 1.2 billion people.
I have tried, every time it comes up, to distinguish between Putin and the crime regime he heads and the Russian People who are the primary focus of his crimes.
It's a practice I try to follow whenever the group is one of involuntary membership who are not characterized by a leadership they have chosen to have.
I remember in the 1980s taking a tour of the House of Commons in London. The tour guide pointed to a plaque on the wall in honor of a minister "who was killed by the Irish Catholics." Not the IRA, not the Provos, not the terrorists, but the Irish Catholics.
I will break in and say that the anti-Catholicism in the United States is heavily informed by the centuries long program of British anti-Catholicism, something mounted on behalf of the power and wealth of the British elites, having little to do with religion and much to do, especially in the early years of it, with the Tudor era theft of church property among the Royals and nobility and the various power factions that wanted anyone with any connections to Catholicism kept from the throne. A lot of it is just that, adopted by American bigots, many of them atheists many of them not even that but would-be people of fashion who use their bigotry as social bonding with various elites.
Today we do the same thing when we say, "Muslims are killing Christians."
Saying that the Catholic Church did not protect children is just as wrong. It was the bishops. It was the hierarchy.
We should not blame the the people of God for the sins of the hierarchy. In many other churches, the people have some say in selecting their leadership and therefore have some responsibility for their hierarchy's actions. Not so in the Catholic Church, where new leaders are chosen by current leaders.
That last point is important, the leadership of the Catholic Church, the body of unmarried men who hold the power and govern it are a self-selected group. Like the membership of such bodies as the National Academy of Sciences, there is a strong tendency in such ruling elites to become unlike the universal set which they are supposed to represent. Though in the case of the Catholic hierarchy, restricted to ordained, unmarried men, that leadership is radically unlike the large majority of lay Catholics, Women religious, and even many, perhaps most of those in the priesthood who are faithful to their responsibilities to The People and who have never broken their vows of chastity in any way.
After what I wrote on Christmas Eve about the need to see The Incarnation in a much broader, much more audaciously expansive and central role, as the salvation of all of the universe, it's a modest proposal to agree with Thomas Reese that "The Church" should mean The People, perhaps not even only the Catholic People. I think once you get beyond the various hierarchies and power players in religion, people whose primary goals are entirely secular power and wealth, you find a lot less division than you get if you concentrate all of your attention on the ruling elites. I've taken a lot of encouragement from the officially excommunicated Roman Catholic Women Priests under various and, I believe, inter-collaborating groups around the world. They are characterized by small communities who meet in house churches, the way that Paul talks about in his epistles. Back when that was The Church, or, better, The Churches. Not that it was perfect, Paul's epistles are generally written in response to problems of backsliding out of the radicalism of the Gospel of Jesus and back into pagan (we call it "secular" today) society and habits.
A lot of the scandal of sex abuse is a direct result of an isolated, restrictive leadership, faced with a shortage of males willing to forego marriage leading to an anomalous and in some ways peculiar, self-selected group of men being the incoming population of priests,** the disastrously centralizing and ideological papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI appointing some of the worst bishops and cardinals in modern history, those appointed with an eye towards support for the upper limits of power and with a devotion to the neo-medieval views that most Catholics don't support, etc.
For all of the promise that the election of Pope Francis has brought, for all of his best intentions, it has proven impossible to turn that decades in the making disaster on a dime. Francis's predilection to act collaboratively with local bishops and national conferences of bishops might have worked if those hadn't been stacked with Vatican hacks and outright gangsters like Raymond Burke and if the right-wing Catholic establishment, financed by a small group of Catholic billionaires and millionaires and having a well established media presence hadn't been attacking every positive move Francis has tried to make. There are and have long been a relatively small but dangerous fascist presence in the Catholic church, among wealthy Catholics, among those who politicize the power of the Church while ignoring the Gospel and Epistles and the social teaching of the Church, that fascism has a dangerous representation in the hierarchy which both John Paul II and Benedict XVI irresponsibly promoted. And they have attacked Pope Francis, viciously. While the survivors groups and ex-Catholics in the media have attacked him in another direction.
If Pope Francis or his successor wanted to risk schism (which is the alternative to the gradual erosion which will result if radical reform isn't implemented) they could use the power they're unwisely given to make change all on their own. Maybe that will happen, I wouldn't count on it because after five years, Francis hasn't done that. His Christmas Eve message to clergy who have committed sexual abuse to turn themselves in to civil authorities as a means of circumventing the unwillingness of bishops and other authorities cover-ups is good, though I doubt many will take that command to heart. It might happen but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Maybe the Church will have to give up the edifice complex that comes with owning huge churches and properties and go back to being a house church. It came to something like that in Latin America with the base-communities that became an alternative to the all too often power-seeking and corrupt hierarchy there. I don't know. If Pope Francis or his immediate successor don't do something radical - which will include opening up the priesthood to married men and women, opening actual church governance to more than unmarried, ordained men - I would expect that's what will come. The existence of the Roman Catholic Women Priests, excommunicated or not, proves that the Catholic Church is already wider than what is officially admitted. And that's only one part of that larger reality which is already there.
* I think this reader response among many good ones, is closest to what I think is the heart of the problem.
The article "Note to Newspaper Editors" speaks of the church contrasted to the Roman Catholic male hierarchy, well and good, but the author misses completely the necessary and righteous transformation that needs to happen for a healthy, holy church to grow. What has happened within the Roman Catholic Church is much more profound than being "the mess we are in today" as the author glibly states the case. Language, words do matter.
My note to newspaper editors is that what is generally called the Roman Catholic Church should now appropriately be called the Roman Catholic Crime Syndicate not the Catholic hierarchy. The Catholic hierarchy — all the way to the pope, bless him — is a now daily demonstrated criminal enterprise! Many of the hierarchy need to be finally prosecuted and put in jail. By any legal definition many are criminals, twisted thugs.
I grew up in an Irish Catholic family with uncles as priests and aunts as nuns. I was schooled by Dominican Nuns and Jesuits. As a former altar boy, the whole male hierarchy makes me nauseous.
Women priests and married clergy are the only way for a healthy church to rise up out of all the untold suffering. Bringing laity into all decision-making processes is important, but it's a small measure next to the deeper transformations necessary to cure the disease.
Or just burn the whole thing down.
The never-ending revelations of perverted men covering up other criminals who they know are destroying children's lives has to stop. There is really nothing else worth talking about regarding the Roman Catholic Church at this point, until that happens.
KEVIN FETHERSTON
Seattle, Washington
Remember, this is a point of view from within The Church, it's not heretical, it's not even that unusual.
** Of course, I would never want to condemn all male, celibate Catholic priests in that way, though it's undeniable that such odd rules for inclusion will tend to skew those who become priests in odd directions. I don't know but I always have a feeling that the younger priests who came into it inspired by John Paul II and Benedict contain an unusual number of those invested in hierarchical power concentration and political conservatism. They aren't generally the social justice and peace Church of my parents generation.
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