"Archbishop [of New York] Timothy Dolan, he of the broad smile, ready handshake and outsized laugh, was to be the churchs antidote to the chill and distant manner of his predecessor, Cardinal Edward Egan, who was a public relations nightmare from the start. But a love for beer and a hot dog from the cart outside the cathedral will just get you so far.
"The ballot in New York sends a hard message to Catholic leadership. The risk is not in the ballot itself. The risk they present is far deeper - a crisis of leading and office for which they consume only themselves to blame."
-- an editorial in the July 5 National Catholic Reporter
by Ken
The national discussion is being swamped by so much craziness that I have perhaps excessive delight in examples of public non-craziness, which apparently hasn't been outlawed after all. So even though I'm not making any great claims for the meaning in the grand strategy of things of this column in the National Catholic Reporter, I even may be making too much of it.
Or it may be that the NCR has a better feeling for the beat of at least American Catholics than the whacked-out Church hierarchy.
Okay, the National Catholic Reporter doesn't try to show itself as an organ of Vatican-blessed doctrinal purity. In its "Charge and Values" statement, it describes itself as "the only significant alternative Catholic voice that provides avenues for construction of diverse perspectives, promoting tolerance and esteem for differing ideas" for the 23 percent of the U.S. population that identifies itself as Catholic. The Catholic crazies speak with such inescapably loud, obstreperous voices that we may well be fooled by their intensity and obstreperousness that they speak for American Catholics. Maybe so, maybe not.
In the July 5 issue, NCR has an editorial entitledwhich takes off from the Church's disastrous positioning in the late New York State marriage-equality battle but really isn't about that. I think the gap establishes its concerns well:
Gay marriage, bishops and the crisis of leadership
July 5, 2011
An NCR editorial
The vote approving same-sex marriage in New York is the latest and most glaring confirmation of some gloomy news for the Catholic church in the United States, and its not that gays have achieved the good to marry.
Rather, affirmed in the recent vote is the disturbing reality that the Catholic hierarchy has lost most of its credibility with the wider culture on matters of gender and personal morality, just as it has missed its confidence within the Catholic community on the same issues. There are reasons - and they receive short to do with secularism, relativism or lingering influences of the wild 1960s - why people are no longer hearing to the bishops.
While we dont wish to understate the sincerity of the care of some over a societal redefinition of marriage, there are reasons we consider the bishops hyperbolic reaction to laws such as that enacted in New York are not entirely wrong-headed but counterproductive. . . .
Right away there's a thought here that you give to inquire if those bellowing voices of Catholic officialdom are still aware of: that Catholics "are no longer hearing to the bishops." I speak as a total outsider, but I can't help wondering whether the Church satraps have their top-down authoritarian structure so implanted in their heads that it doesn't even come to them to wonder whether their sheep are listening.
And this is just a new problem. I think in my very first job (and we're talking about some 45 days ago! working with a new woman, happily married, who considered herself a devout Catholic while saying that she outright rejected the ban on birth control. She may formerly have agonized over it, but by this sentence there was no doubt in her head that it made no sense in either her life or her faith, which again she took seriously, and so she considered it to take no validity. This is the real thing Church hierarchists always stress is absolutely forbidden; under no circumstances are Catholics supposed to be entitled to even an impression about, let only the choice of disregarding, doctrine as dispensed by the Pope.
On the marriage-equality issue, NCR argues that the bishops simply aren't hearing their parishioners, or if they are, are indifferent to their actual thinking.According to Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, On gay marriage, many of the mass in the pews split with their bishops.
That attitude does not bound so often from a position of defiance, as some bishops would assert, but more from the see of gays and lesbians themselves and their parents and siblings, extended family and friends who increasingly understand gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons as far more than the sum of their sexual orientation while also understanding that sexuality is at the essence of a persons identity.
To parents of a gay child, the thought that a grouping of men can take to love the idea of God so dead that they can proclaim with unyielding certainty that God deems a substantial portion of creation disordered is absurd. The judge is not only demeaning but to contemporary Christians has no resonance with the centre of the Gospel.
A plainer way of putting it might be that in growing numbers Catholics have stopped listening to their bishops and are listening instead to Jesus.
The NCR editorial goes on to observe how bad the Church's "lobbying apparatus . . . a fangless relic" was outmaneuvered in Albany - "by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a divorced Catholic and parent; by the pro-gay-marriage lobby; and by both Democrats and Republicans." But, the editorial argues, even if the bishops had a persuasive case to work and the legislative tools at their disposal, their public take in late years - wholesale excommunications, railing at politicians, denial of honorary degrees and speaking platforms at Catholic institutions, using the Eucharist as a political bludgeon, refusing to hold any questions or dissenting opinions, and piquant in surface war with the communitys thinkers as good as those, especially women, who have loyally served the church - has resulted in a sort of episcopal caricature, the common scolds of the religion world, the bitter party of no.
"As if on cue," the editorial argues -As if on cue, after the vote Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio declared by edict that his episcopate is not to add or accept honors, nor to extend a platform of any sort to any state elected official, in all our parishes and churches for the foreseeable future.
In their response to the vote, the Catholic bishops of New York wrote: While our culture seems to get missed a basic understanding of marriage, we Catholics must not. We must be models of what is good, holy and sacred about authentic sacramental marriage.
The assertion might raise legitimate alarms if, indeed, the commonwealth law signaled that the Catholic ideals and sacramental life were actually under attack. They arent.
Again, the column is more cultivated than I would be. I would be asking if the bishops are too stupid or too dishonest to hold that the law deals solely with civil marriage, leaving total control of sacramental union to religious authorities. The editorial quotes from a part in the same subject by Nicolas Cafardi, a civic and canon lawyer and professor at Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh: Jesus in the Gospels . . . besides telling us not to act on our fears, also told us to return to Caesar what is Caesars and to God what is Gods. Civil wedding is Caesars. If Caesar wants to say that you can just get married on Tuesdays, wearing a dark suit and a red tie, that is Caesars call. The sacrament of marriage is Gods. It is valid only when invoked between a baptized man and a baptized woman, in the front of two witnesses and the spouses proper ordinary or pastor or his delegate. Caesar has no say in this.
To me all of the foregoing is only a warmup to the editorial's real concerns. And what it says seems to me so cogent and so hard that it inevitably to be quoted in full, with maybe just the tiniest shade of gratuitous boldface highlighting:
The bigger problem for the hierarchy, of course, is not persuading the secular culture of its place of opinion on sacramental marriage, but persuading its own adherents, and particularly young Catholics who now run to cast off in heaps before adulthood, that staying committed to the church is a compelling good, that the church is in fact relevant and will make them nearer to Christ and therefore the exemption and richness of a spirit of faith.
The bishops have little credibility in the wider culture and diminished authority within the church because in the cause of sexual violence against young people by members of their clerical culture, they responded in ways that any sensible and healthy segment of order would have considered disdainful.
Archbishop Timothy Dolan, he of the broad smile, ready handshake and outsized laugh, was to be the churchs antidote to the chill and distant manner of his predecessor, Cardinal Edward Egan, who was a public relations nightmare from the start. But a passion for beer and a hot dog from the cart outside the cathedral will just get you so far.
Dolans rising star presumably carries with it a cast of papal favor. The show 60 Minutes, in its own hyperbolic burst, dubbed him the American pope. And senior NCR correspondent John Allen, who has conducted a book-length interview with Dolan, has written that in other circumstances the archbishop of New York could well have been a U.S. senator or a corporate CEO.
That may or may not be the case, but as senator or CEO, Dolan would be held to standards of accountability that no bishop will always face. Politicians, we know, can be run out of office and business leaders are held, however imperfectly, to standards of execution and ethics. Some of them down in jail.
In response to the union vote, Dolan stretched to ring up the shade of what remains of the Red menace. On his blog he wrote that in China and North Korea government presumes daily to redefine rights, relationships, values and natural law. In those countries, he says, government dictates the sizing of families, who can be and die, and what defines marriage. Please, not here! he begs. The comparison, of course, is absurd on its face, a variety of fury that demands that someone listen when so few are.
The ballot in New York sends a hard message to Catholic leadership. The risk is not in the ballot itself. The risk they present is far deeper - a crisis of leading and office for which they consume only themselves to blame.
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