Tending the flock

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that I have no problem speaking my mind about political matters. Religion, on the other hand, is a bit of a collar-puller. I've always been reluctant to talk about faith, because I think it's a really personal thing, and also something that can cause otherwise rational people to think and behave quite irrationally (for example, I'll cite, oh, all of human history). But, here it goes. Recent political events have prompted some pretty wacky stuff to come out of the Catholic Church, the faith tradition that I was raised in. And quite frankly, it's all bullshit.

One of the most insidious trends in recent years has been the co-opting of the Eucharist as a political cudgel. You saw it in 2004, when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, encouraged denying Holy Communion to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, a Catholic senator who supports legal abortion. After the most recent election, you saw a Catholic priest in South Carolina go a step further, telling his parish

"Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exists constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil, and those Catholics who do so place themselves outside of the full communion of Christ's Church and under the judgment of divine law. Persons in this condition should not receive Holy Communion until and unless they are reconciled to God in the Sacrament of Penance, lest they eat and drink their own condemnation."

Eat and drink their own condemnation, he said. For the faithful who believe that women have the right to choose what goes on with their own bodies, one of the Church's most sacred rites becomes their condemnation. Wrap your head about that.

Then, we've got James Francis Cardinal Stafford, who serves as Major Penitentiary in the Roman Curia (and presumably has the ear of the Pope). In a talk at Catholic University, the Cardinal called President-elect Barack Obama “aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic,“ and said “For the next few years, Gethsemane will not be marginal. We will know that garden." Maybe I'm just jaded, but that "apocalyptic" sounds quite a bit like a pernicious dogwhistle to all the lunatics who believe that Barack Obama is the anti-Christ. In this blogger's myopic opinion, Cardinal Stafford should have been a little more candid: "For the next few years, Armageddon will not be marginal. We will know that valley." Why sugarcoat things, you know?

Then there's this bit of folly:

"Guidelines for the Use of Psychology in the Admission and Formation of Candidates for the Priesthood," released Oct. 30 by the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education, not only reiterates the teaching that men with "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies are unworthy of ordination, it also urges seminaries to enlist the aid of psychologists in screening candidates for homosexuality and other "psychic disturbances."

You read that right. "Homosexuality and other 'psychic disturbances.'" Interesting choice of words there. Since in order to refer to "other" psychic disturbances, you have to have one psychic disturbance to begin with. Homosexuality is most definitely not one. And it's alright for the Church to bar gay men from entering the priesthood. Young men are banging down the doors of the cathedral to become priests, so the Church can afford to cling to anachronistic junk-scientific bigotry.

I understand that the Church has a right to run itself the way it sees fit. And I'm sure, as that L.A. Times editorial says, there are plenty of esoteric theological reasons for the decisions the Church makes. But I think the question begs to be asked: are these the horses that the Church is hitching itself to? Fire-and-brimstone-style hostility towards those who support reproductive rights, and blind, counterproductive homophobia? Is the great balance sheet of "intrinsic evil" so heavily loaded on the side of abortion that it outweighs a host of other things that reasonable people find to be evil, like torture, and war, and state-sanctioned killing, and antipathy to the poor and infirm?

I don't mean to frame this as a "Jesus was a liberal" or "God's on our side" thing. What I wonder, though, is why Catholics aren't threatened by their leaders with condemnation if they vote for candidates who vigorously support torture and war. I also wonder how the Church can justify shooting itself in the foot by denying ordination to gay men when it's literally starving for people to fill the ranks of the priesthood. The Catholic Church isn't the only guilty party here; so much of what passes for Christian values in our discourse is just hatred gussied up in a moth-eaten Old Testament veil.

I often wonder if I'm reading the same Bible as everyone else. I hear a lot about condemnation and sin and anger, but I don't hear a lot about love and forgiveness and service. I mean, doesn't it say in the first letter to the Corinthians "If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing"? Didn't Christ Himself say in a parable "Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me"? Doesn't the first letter of John say "Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us"? No one has ever seen God. Not me. Not you. Not the pope. Not the woman walking out of the abortion clinic, or the man protesting outside of it. We're all in the same boat here in this world. We ought to love one another.

I think those are the important parts of the Bible. There's a lot more like that. We'd all do well to remember.