Catholic Church Tries To Have Its Cake And Eat It Too
The Catholic Church announced today that it cannot bless same-sex unions because God “cannot bless sin.” This had apparently become an open question in the aftermath of Pope Francis briefly flirting with the idea that gay couples were just as legitimate as straight couples; Francis had appeared to endorse marriage equality within the civil/legal context in an interview with a Mexican broadcaster. That interview, which was immediately buried by Vatican censors before resurfacing to conservative fury, had briefly given gay Catholics hope that their love and commitment to one another might eventually achieve the sort of standing that straight marriage enjoys within the church. However, the Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith wanted to make sure that nobody confused the Pope’s apparent endorsement of civil equality with anything bordering on internal institutional equality.
Having apparently recognized that its decades of pronouncements about the threat of gay people generally and gay marriage specifically were increasing falling on deaf ears, the Church’s announcement tried to achieve the religious twofer of insisting that a refusal to formally recognize gay relationships should in no way be understood to be a judgment upon gay people themselves. This though is a no-man’s land of a position that ends up making everybody unhappy. Those in support of gay marriage will be infuriated by the Church’s refusal to recognize that gay couples are of equal worth to straight couples; bigots opposed to gay marriage will be infuriated by the Church’s insistence that opposing gay marriage does not mean that the institution hates gay people. There is not now and never will be some sort of tolerable middle ground between equality and inequality; they cannot exist simultaneously no matter how desperately the church apparently wants them to. And if this seems like a familiar conundrum for the church, well, that is because it very much is.
The Church is forever insisting that it ought to get to have and eat its cake. It simultaneously wants credit for the good that it promises to do going forward and ignorance of the evil that it has done up until now. The most searing example of this offer is its…well…let’s use the word “handling” because that seems like the politest word that could be chosen…handling of its worldwide sexual abuse scandal. In that, the Church has continued trying to walk a fine line between wanting credit for its occasional statements acknowledging the institution’s seemingly never-ending nightmare and outrageous scheming to avoid enduring any sort of substantive consequence for its decisions to enable and abet that nightmare’s occurrence.
The Church’s attempted handling of gay marriage via the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s announcement is no different. The institution is, of course, welcome to hope that there is a way to convince people that both things are true: that gay marriage is bad, but that gay people are good. Surely, it believes, insisting that the church does not hate gay people will outweigh its ongoing insistence that some love is not the equal of other love. Surely this will be the time that saying the right thing will outweighs doing the wrong thing.
But, as it will eventually turn out, the former cannot do the latter. People notice monstrous hypocrisy no matter how aggressively that monstrous hypocrisy is hand-waved away. This is why things like this will keep popping up:
From 2014 to 2017, an average of 39% of Catholics reported attending church in the past seven days. This is down from an average of 45% from 2005 to 2008 and represents a steep decline from 75% in 1955
If that seems bad, well, one could counter that it is not nearly enough given everything that the Catholic Church has been responsible for. That might even be true; it is genuinely shocking how many people have stood by an organization liable for so much suffering. But the Church’s drip-drip-drip decline is the reality of its internal corrosion. And today’s half-hearted announcement will do nothing to change its institutional trajectory nor its waning cultural authority.
“bigots opposed to gay marriage will be infuriated by the Church’s insistence that opposing gay marriage does not mean that the institution hates gay people.”
No. I know a lot of Catholics that you’d consider bigots, and no. Not a bit. Have you talked to Catholics who oppose gay marriage? Like, say, me?Report
And what would you say? That two penises in a marriage or two vaginas in a marriage are NOT an expression of Godly love? Which is funny in as much as Christ never weighed in for or against homosexuality in his teachings in the gospels. Never. He told us there were two great commandments – loving God with everything you have and loving your neighbor as yourself. Full stop. As long as two people are doing that, then the number of like anatomical parts doesn’t seem to matter to me. That it matters to the Catholic Church is about human imposed dogma – dogma which until 1968 said ordinary people couldn’t read the bible and Mass had to be said in Latin – an language Christ had zero faculty with as an Aramaic Jew.Report
Clearly you’re a Protestant (mostly just kidding).Report
Indeed, and with three uncles and a grandfather who were ordained in the Presbyterian Church, I grew up having roast preacher for Sunday lunch. I also grew up in the shadow of Jimmy Swaggart’s 600 Flags Over Jesus/World Ministries, in the only state where the Parish is still a unit of civil government. My avocational interest in Christianity is only slightly less broad then my interest in politics.Report
I’m not surprised. I am vaguely conversant in the habits and modes of the religious, in a similar manner/reason to how rabbits are vaguely conversant in the habits and modes of birds of prey, and I thought you sounded very protestant in that comment. Very “hard line from believer to Jesus”ish.Report
What would I say? That I unconditionally oppose gay marriage and unconditionally love gay people. Sam seems to think those two statements are in conflict, but they’re not. To the extent that society has accepted the paradigm of “being” gay without committing homosexual acts, the Church has always held those two statements as true. This news story constitutes zero change, and creates zero conflict.Report
And the Catholic Church has always gotten that tension WRONG on the basis of scripture. That aside, those statements ARE in conflict because you don’t unconditionally love gay people. You love them only as long as they are celibate and don’t seek permanent unions growing from their love. The instant they do that you stop loving them because you support a dogma – again not based in Christ’s teachings – that says they are second class citizens undeserving of that union again based on a count of penises and vaginas. Given Catholic history of challenging anti-miscegenation laws I expected better in this instance as well.Report
Do you only love those whose every action you approve of? Do you think God only loves those whose every action He approves of?Report
Those are supposed to be really easy questions, you know. Maybe you’re not online, but since you haven’t answered and since you mentioned Presbyterianism, I have to ask, you know that God is capable of love, right? Not like ruthless Calvinist love, but love despite our sins? If you get that, you don’t have to misread the OT, NT, and church history in order to accept His love for gay people.Report
It isn’t His love that’s in question.Report
Well, first of all, I’m aware that this subthread is a digression from my main point, which is that Sam sees a contradiction where Catholics wouldn’t. But since Christians are supposed to love as God loves, and Philip said that I can’t unconditionally love someone unless I hold that all their actions are correct, then it does raise the question of whether God can be said to love us unconditionally despite our sins.Report
As it happens I wasn’t online.
God loves unconditionally. He overlooks our sins to embrace us. Catholics do not. Catholics in fact use the alleged sin of homosexuality (which again – Christ NEVER Mentions) as a cudgel against gay people. Catholic dogma is quite clear – “Practicing” homosexuals can not receive communion, which of necessity separates them from the Body and Blood. “Practicing” homosexuals can not marry in the church or hold church office. Again that’s church dogma, not Christ’s actual teachings – because He’s SILENT on homosexuality.
And let’s be clear – homosexual persons aren’t “practicing.” its not a hair color choice. It’s who they are. And genesis tells us “man” was made in God’s image, so homosexuals are as divine in God’s eyes as heterosexuals. Which means the Catholic Church’s choice to deny their humanity on the Basis of counts of penises or vaginas in a relationship is to deny their divinity.Report
You do not “unconditionally love gay people” if you think they’re less than straight people.Report
I don’t think they’re less than straight people.Report
Your church does.Report
No.Report
Straight people can marry. Gay people can’t.
Straight people can receive communion. gay people can’t unless they are celibate.
How is that not “less?”Report
For most of human history, we’ve understood that people have desires, but those desires don’t define them. My sexual identity is an important part of who I am, and it’s: male. My sexual orientation is really two things, my interest in men and my interest in women. I happen to have one of the more common of combinations, high female low male. Whatever my combination of scores, I’m called to live a chaste life, which means no sexual acts with anyone I’m not married to. Marriage exists for two purposes, unity and the possibility of children. Anyone able to enter into a marriage for unity and the possibility of children can get married (mostly – I can’t marry my goddaughter); anyone who can’t, can’t.
Anyone who stumbles in chastity has to repent and seek sacramental forgiveness before receiving communion.Report
I’ll grant you the unity part, but the kids? Not so much. A widow and a widower who marry won’t have kids. Someone who marries someone with a medical impairment won’t have kids. Plenty of Gay couples either adopt kids or enter into marriage with a kid or more in tow from a former relationship.
And homosexuals only “stumble” in chastity because the Catholic Church insists they remain chaste, instead of granting them blessings in who they are. Created in God’s image seems to cover the idea that their sexuality is not “sin.”
And again – this is all a dogmatic choice the church – and you – continue to make. It is not based in Jesus’ teachings; its not in the 10 Commandments. Its a choice by the Church that marginalizes believers based on their innate state unless they make a volitional choice that actively denies their innate state.Report
You do think they’re less than straight people. You’ve said as much above.Report
You and Philip can keep asserting this, but it’s not true. There’s not much point in me reiterating it.
There’s a strong parallel between a small group of modern Americans saying the Church doesn’t teach what it teaches, and a couple of commenters saying that I don’t believe what I believe.Report
The Church teaches that unless homosexuals remain chaste they must be cut off form the Body and Blood and denies communion. The Church thus teaches that homosexual persons must deny who they are to be welcomed into the Church family fully. As long as you agree with that – and repeatedly you have – your assertions of unconditional love of homosexuals comes off unconvincing at best.Report
Pinky,
I appreciate very much that you, like the church, would like to have it both ways, but you have wildly different standards for two groups of people based upon nothing more than who they happen to love. One of those standards is lower; the other is higher. Claiming that you think both are equal is undermined by your stance here. So, to reiterate: you think gay people are less than straight people.Report
That’s not a very fair or accurate summary of conservative Catholic thought on SSM, Sam.
IIRC the conservative Catholic position is that there’s no such thing as straight people or gay people, there’s just people. People can have sex with the opposite sex or with the same sex. Conservative Catholic theology says that all such sex is sinful except for procreative sex performed within the Catholic institution of marriage. Gay sex, which is definitionally non-procreative, thus isn’t acceptable, nor is non-procreative straight sex or procreative straight sex outside of marriage. It’s all sinful and equally wrong in the Conservative Catholic book.
So, alleging Catholics view gay people as “less than” straight people is kind of goofy. Sort of like secular government thinking jaywalkers are “less than” people who walk in the crosswalks. It doesn’t make sense. Sin, like jaywalking, is something you do, not something you are in Catholic theology. If Bob Cheeks was still around he’d probably say that thinking otherwise was gnostic.
Good times.Report
“That’s not a very fair or accurate summary of conservative Catholic thought on SSM, Sam.”
Your mistake is assuming that he considers the Catholic Church desiring of fairness or accuracy.Report
“Equal” would mean the Church would refuse to marry two 90 year olds because they clearly can’t reproduce.
Or “equal” would mean the Church comes down hard on everyone who isn’t following the Church’s rules on all-sex-must-be-whatever.
Or “equal” would be letting gays get married and then forgiving them having sex at every confession, just like the Church does with everyone else.Report
If we were discussing the policies of a government department or even a public company or something I’d be right there with you. But the religious doctrines of a church? No. Leave the papists alone.Report
“Reconciliation through the sacrament of Penance can be granted only to those who have repented for having violated the sign of the covenant and of fidelity to Christ, and who are committed to living in complete continence.”
That’s the Catechism talking about divorced and remarried people. The Church’s teaching is equal, but not what you describe.Report
First, you’re ignoring annulment.
Hmm… sources differ on how often that works, I can see 50% but the NYT claims 70%.
Now the Pope made getting an annulment much easier about 7 years ago presumably those numbers have gone up. Further lots of people don’t bother.
2nd, divorced and remarried hardly applies to anyone right out of the box, certainly not children.
3rd, Everyone else is allowed to promise they’ll be good and be forgiven.
So if I see the Priest and confess every week that I’ve had sex outside of wedlock and used contraception, then no problem even if both of you know it’s going to happen again.
If you want to be really secure you can find a Priest who doesn’t speak your language so he’ll be forgiving sins he can’t understand.Report
The Church’s teaching is equal regarding the sanctity of marriage and the need for contrition, even if the specific situations are different.
Would a priest continue to give absolution if you had no intention to stop sinning? I don’t know. If you have no intention to stop sinning, then it’s not a good confession. The key is resolution to stop sinning.Report
Speaking as someone who goes to church often, I observe almost all the children of catholic families are born two or three years apart and in numbers that imply planning and birth control.
Exactly like they’re ignoring the church’s teachings on sex.
I don’t see why the gays should be held to a different standard.Report
You go to church often, but I’m guessing you don’t go to confession. Anyone ever arrest you, or check if your card’s been punched for the year?
If I see a married couple at church with two kids aged 7 and 3, I don’t know their story. If I see two guys at church together, I don’t know their story. I expect the priest to preach the Church’s teaching, and if anyone asks I’ll try my best to explain it, but I’m not here to guess about any stranger’s standing with God. I’m not going to shout “why aren’t you pregnant?” or “hey, you, you look gay!”. But I’m not going to say that artificial birth control or homosexual activity is moral.
I would ask you, though, since you’ve said that you don’t believe in the Church’s teachings, that you don’t receive communion, since you’re not really in full communion with the Church.Report
Half the people at the communion rail any given Sunday couldn’t tell you what most of the Catholic Church’s distinctive teachings were if the fate of their immortal souls depended on it. Half of those, if presented with a large number of those teachings without being told that they are the official teachings, would reject many of them.Report
Yup. Then, clad in jeans, polos, and other casual wear, they all peace out during the announcements to beat traffic in the parking lot.Report
I think that’s a broader question.
I’m sure there are some Church teachings I don’t know, or am a little bit off on. I’m sure you could trip me up on a multiple-choice quiz. But I accept the teaching authority of the Church. If the Council of Trent and I disagree on something, I have no problem backing down.
It’s the bishops’ job to put out the right teaching, and it’s my job to accept it and understand it to the best of my ability. But that’s not my only job. Odds are it’s far more important that I feed the hungry than I remember the difference between Marcionism and Manichaeism. But of course I’m on the hook for the obvious, important stuff.
ETA: This is also kind of a reply to Dark Matter’s comment below. If you’re doing something blatantly wrong, and you know it’s blatantly wrong, it counts against you.Report
The church’s sex scandals showcased this isn’t true.
The 50th time you bang a child, you’re allowed to promise you’ll never do it again (just like you promised the previous 49 times) and God will believe you.
That “God will believe you” part is why you can go confess to a Priest who doesn’t speak English or who is stone-drunk-unconscious (actual church teaching btw). The Priest provides a connection to God, it’s God who is doing the forgiving.
For me, I can go confess that I sometimes question God and I’m good.
I give money and bring my hoard of girls to church, my wife does a lot of organizing, ergo I’m held up as a good Catholic.Report
Apply that standard of proof to gays and gay marriage should be fine. You don’t know they’re not celibate.
Me and everyone else.
I’m unusually willing to talk about this sort of thing, but the BULK of the pew shows evidence of not running their lives like the Church insists is needed.Report
You know love the sinner hate the sin doesn’t sound any better no matter how many words you use to pretty it upReport
I don’t really get the idea of inveigling at Catholics, or other religions for that matter, for their internal position on same sex marriage. If you think the Catholic position on SSM is abhorrent then don’t be(or stop being) a Catholic. So long as the Catholic Church doesn’t do the Evangelical two step of both forbidding SSM internally AND demanding that secular non-religious policy also adhere to their doctrine then I don’t see what why anyone should care.Report
This. There was never any reason to think that the Catholic Church itself, as a matter of its own house rules, would agree to treat same-sex marriage as sacramentally equivalent to mixed-sense marriage. It does, however, seem to have accepted the legitimacy of civil arrangements outside the Church, or at least decided that such arrangements are none of its business. That’s real progress, and as much as one might reasonably expect.Report
Agreed and we’re awfully close to winning the culture war. Now winning the culture peace.. that’s a whole new (and under explored) feat.Report
What I’ve noticed is that white liberal heterosexual men tend to be more aggressively anti-religious than other groups. I’m wondering if there is some sort of because they feel more free to be movement. Nearly all of my friends that rally against how bad religion is because of sexism or anti-sex teachings seem to be white heterosexual men.Report
Perhaps it’s just the modern mode. Possibly it’s just that young men in general tend to be looking for something to battle passionately against and religion is the boogie man of this era. Hard to say.Report
I think it is something similar to Yglesias’ observation that white liberals can be further left on race than many non-Whites because they have nothing to loose.Report
Maybe these theories are good. Or maybe it could be something about the nightmarish horrors of the Catholic Church maybe? Just a guess.Report
White liberal heterosexual women, by contrast, explain that they recently broke up because they started the conversation about what Moon Sign he was and then she found out that he was a Taurus Moon and then she explained that maybe that’s why they got into fights and he was so stubborn (mixing in with how he is a Virgo) when she’s an Aquarius and then when he clammed up and didn’t want to talk about it, she pushed it and said some things that maybe she regrets now (she’s got a Sagittarius Moon, you see) and when they both agreed to break up, she looked it up and they had sex on the second date when not only Mercury was in retrograde, but Venus was too.
It was doomed from the start, really.Report
That was good, almost as good as “I don’t believe in astrology. I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.”Report
Some of us white liberal heterosexual white men root our liberalism squarely in our Christian religion. You know, following the teachings of the guy who hung out with lepers and tax collectors, was probably in love with a former prostitute, turned the money changers out of the temple and told us all to love our neighbors as ourselves.Report
Yes, there are a number of pro-gay protestant faiths as I understand it. The Episcopal Church is protestant right? Makes sense that they would be. As I understand it the Catholics take a more round about route to Jesus than the Protestants do.Report
Leaving the Catholic Church to make its own internal decisions has routinely produced nightmarish outcomes. Refusing to criticize those internal decisions because they’re internal has routinely abetted nightmarish outcomes.Report
Leaving anyone to make their own internal decisions has routinely produced nightmarish outcomes and don’t get me started on having decisions imposed externally by the mass culture. Humans, dude, maybe the Catholics have a point when they say we’re all made from crooked timber.
As for policing the Catholics; they aren’t demanding secular society adhere to their rules on gay people which means gay people who don’t agree with Catholics can exit their Papist clubhouse and live perfectly decent lives as former Catholics. Any LGBT person or ally with a sense of history should embrace that deal with relief. To do otherwise is both the height of hypocrisy and also a step down the a very similar road to the one that led to the religious right getting routed from their commanding position in society. Leave the papists alone.Report
1. The next time either of us oversee a decades-long, global conspiracy to encourage and abet the sexual molestation of children, I’ll think about your idea that we’re all made from crooked timber. Until either of us do something that undeniably awful, I’m going to stick with the idea that maybe we AREN’T all made from crooked timber.
2. “Leave the Papists alone” is how we got the aforementioned criminal conspiracy. So, uhhh, no.Report
i support rico’ing the hell out of cardinals and bishops in a number of dioceses in this country, but that has nothing to do with the universal condition of human fallibility.Report
I’ll play those odds.Report
Equivocating criminal child abuse with the Catholic doctrine regarding gay people is facile on both an intellectual and practical level. Intellectually the two things utterly different and unrelated to each other and, as a practical matter, ham handedly bringing it up that way guarantees that the only people who’ll listen to you are people who already agree with you.
It also blows my mind that you’d uncritically assert that society as a whole should be empowered to be dictating terms to religions or other groups of people when, within easy living memory, that same society was dictating terms to LGBT people, minorities and women that were abhorrent. Do you honestly think that worm can’t turn again? Do you seriously think that liberal causes are so especially righteous that doing the exact thing that social conservatives did in the past will result in a different outcome for us?
Child abuse is a crime and an atrocity- prosecute the people who were involved in it and those who were aiding and abetting it. Having a religious doctrine that isn’t amiable to gay relationships within the laity is not a crime; it’s a religious doctrine- if you don’t like their religious doctrine then don’t be a Catholic. When it comes to their religious dogmas on gay people, in as much as they’re just bothering Catholics; leave the papists alone.Report
“the two things utterly different and unrelated to each other” except that both are the product of the same people making the same decisions within the same broader institution. We needn’t pretend like the one isn’t related to the other, or that both aren’t the result of a hierarchy that inexplicably believes that it knows best and that its knowing should never be questioned.
As for the idea that those who aid and abet child abuse should be prosecuted, I totally agree, but that hasn’t happened by any stretch of any imagination, precisely because the Catholic Church is an institution that has been trusted to police itself despite its total inability to do so, to say nothing of its total lack of any interest in doing so.
As for dictating terms to religions: the Church is welcome to continue believing and doing whatever it wants. Some random blogpost on some random website isn’t going to change that. But the idea that those decisions cannot be criticized? Cmon now.Report
If you’re a Catholic then criticize away, but the idea of non-Catholics carping about Catholic doctrine is one that sets me on edge.
Back in the day when we were trying so hard to drive the grasping fingers of the theocrats out of secular public policy the whine was always that “teh gayz are gonna come for our Bibles” or that “teh gayz are gonna force us to do gayz marriage”. It was rightly scorned at the time but discourse now days is edging uncomfortably in that direction and I don’t think it’s healthy or productive.Report
I would be very interested in seeing any discourse advocating for either of those two things.Report
The problem here is what do we do when a religion abuses it’s members.
The church is teaching that gay members are inherently sinful and they have the choice of living without love or spending all eternity being tortured.
The church would like families build their lives totally around the church. Some do. If that is someone’s family, friends, and upbringing from birth, then saying they can always leave sounds naive.Report
We already have a decision on that. It’s a combination of the 1st Amendment and SCOTUS holdings that the free exercise clause doesn’t grant a religious exception for generally applicable criminal laws.Report
Yes, but that’s just “the government won’t step in unless it’s illegal in other situations”.
The rest of society can, and should, “name and shame”.
The problem presented to society is often one of scale and “respectability”.Report
Sure, and I get it, but (and I feel odd as fish having to be the person to point this out) having wider society leaning on religious sects on matters of internal doctrine strikes me as really dangerous stuff. Also, it bears noting that the verdicts have been rolling in on religion vs love questions and, to religious conservatives’ horror, when people have to choose between loving their gay family members or being religious doctrinaires the former by and large wins out. Religiosity has been plunging steadily since this issue got moved front and center.Report
Cosigned.
At their heart, most of the world’s major religious faiths are exclusive and have pretty harsh ideas about what lies in store for non-members.
But we get along by not talking about it, and keeping that sort of stuff separate and distinct from our secular lives.
But echoing my earlier comments about the moral arc of the universe- could the 21st century see a resurgence of religious wars like the 16th?
Hell yeah, unless we choose to avoid that.Report
There is no better way to avoid that than by them agreeing with us.
“I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.”Report
Christianity in the West is becoming less and less of a force in public policy, Catholicism included. The reality among the laity outside of some highly committed groups is not that different from what I imagine most mainline Protestant sects have become. People go and get what they need out of it and leave the rest.
Really the most bizarre part of this entire discussion is the idea that there is some kind of hardcore enforcement of these things going on. No one is walking around grilling people on what mortal sins they’ve committed lately or taking petitions for excommunication or whatever Sam thinks is happening. No one is there who doesn’t want to be and I’ve never seen any particular interested in persecuting gay people. think the Church knows it has lost on most of these issues and is walking a fine line of trying to hold to principle without driving more people away.Report
If we count the Middle East’s various problems (and Al Quida) as being religious then religious wars have never gone away.
WW2 arguably had religious elements. Adolf seriously tried to present himself as a holy warrior.
I’m also strongly inclined to call Communism a religion because of it’s magical thinking. If that works then the Cold War was also religious.
Now if you mean “could the Catholic Church fire up wars” my expectation is probably not. They’re not powerful enough any more and they’re aiming for the “peace” market.Report
…Highly religious parents are significantly more likely than their less-religious counterparts to reject their children for being gay – a finding that social-service workers believe goes a long way toward explaining why LGBT people make up roughly five percent of the youth population overall, but an estimated 40 percent of the homeless-youth population. The Center for American Progress has reported that there are between 320,000 and 400,000 homeless LGBT youths in the United States. (all a quote)
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-forsaken-a-rising-number-of-homeless-gay-teens-are-being-cast-out-by-religious-families-46746/
That link is grim reading btw.Report
Indeed, no argument there. Religion has been used as an excuse to immiserate countless LGBT people and LGBT youth certainly have bourn the no small amount of the blows.
That is why it’s emphatically important for LGBT people that the liberal era we’re currently enjoying endures and deepens. When I look at things that could end said liberal there are two scenarios I worry about:
-Liberalism devolves into a form of religion itself and provokes actual religious conflict or
-Liberalism becomes illiberal, overreaches, and provokes a generational counterculture that re-empowers the religious right.
Trying to dictate matters of doctrine internal to Christian faith groups when we’ve already achieved most of our goals in secular society? I genuinely worry about that because it’s hypocritical, it’s illiberal and it advances both of those nightmare scenarios. I’m not worried about kids today but if things go overboard what are their kids going to rebel against?
Also, persecution over matters of faith? Political and social pressure to dictate doctrine? That is old school. That is a plane that the old faiths were bred down to their bones to perform on. You drop to that level and you’re playing by organized religions rules in their home stadium. If you read social conservatives very much you can almost hear the anticipation. They want persecution. A crowd of angry wokesters baying at their door? Martyrdom? They’d be so fishing happy.
No. What I want for religions that hate LGBT is silence. Polite indifference. Vaguely befuddled incomprehension from anyone they perform their anti LGBT doctrines around. The world turning on and not ending, with them relegated to the sidelines. The sound of dust slowly settling on empty pews.Report
No, not really. They want an enemy to rally against. That includes proclaiming that they’re being victimized.
Presenting them as the bad guys would be a real problem. With the law, that’s everything from being arrested for bilking their followers to sex crimes.
For legal but name and shame, that’s probably showcasing their victims and letting them tell their stories.Report
You aren’t reading the right ones then. The militant “we can still win the culture war, rah rah!!” ones want an enemy to rally against. The realistics “We’ve lost the culture wars!” ones want to be martyred. You can almost hear the panting anticipation when they talk about the coming persecutions. Christianity was born as a persecuted religious sect; new persecutions would be somewhat like coming home for it.Report
Listen, if the persecutions don’t involve hungry lions or other apex predators, or regular bombing and missile attacks against Christian neighborhoods, or Catholic schoolkids getting chased by angry mobs, I don’t want to hear any whining about ‘Persecutions’.Report
No, but we also have to ask the question about what persecution is really happening to gay people with this kind of approach from the church. Essentially they’re saying ‘our religious stance on this isn’t changing, but we will not fight against full equality in the secular/civil sphere.’ This is important especially where parts of the Catholic church will still go out and fight in the civil realm on things like abortion or the death penalty.
Some might see this kind of outcome regarding tolerance of homosexuality as the essence of freedom. Live and let live, etc. Others of course believe there can be no righteousness without total victory of a particular view forcefully imposed on all aspects of culture and society, including the traditionally private sphere. Without even getting into whether winning that fight is possible or moral it seems like a crazy undertaking. This is especially where gay equality is more ascendant every day, including among Catholic laity, if the polls are to be believed. I can’t speak for gay people but I’m pretty sure the world we’re living in is damn close to and maybe in some ways surpassing the kind of victory dreamed of by early gay rights supporters. Why anyone would want to threaten that by trying to force changes from the outside to millenia plus old, internal religious dogma is beyond me.Report
IMHO, big picture the Church needs enemies to justify its existence and the gays are a soft target which historically can be condemned without losing too many people.
I’d have no problem with this if the Church were a voluntary for adults’ organization, but it’s not. There are people who are born both gay and into the church.
Thus the Church ends up encouraging/committing child abuse. Teaching children that they’re evil. Strongly religious families kick out children for little reason. Often there is community pressure to do so.
Pointing out that this is heinous and up there with the Church’s sex crimes is fair game even if it’s legal and always will be.Report
the Church needs enemies to justify its existence
Is this something that has been true since Rome or is this something that has only kicked in recently or did we sort of ease into this position as the Reformation congealed or what?Report
Dark, this is so far disconnected from the reality of what’s going on in the Church it’s almost hilarious to read. The Catholic Church is struggling to maintain relevance in the West in large part because of its insistence on traditional rules around sex, marriage, and procreation. Gay rights is at best a side issue in that much larger context. The Church doesn’t need enemies for relevance, it needs to find a way to stop the bleeding of members who just don’t see how birth control in the context of monogamous heterosexual marriage can be a mortal sin. Throw in the actual child abuse scandals and you’ve got empty pews all over the place. Catholics are right there with the rest of society on increasing acceptance of gay people/SSM, regardless of the official teachings.
The core people the Church needs to survive are well assimilated, average middle class people who literally do not follow and struggle to see value in any of these rules anymore. They are not looking to their religion for people to hate. They’re looking for solace, not a chance to join the bedroom police.
As for the idea that anyone raised in a religion they grow up not to agree with has been the victim of child abuse- give me a break. That’s called life dude, so it is now, so it always will be. Many people grow up to have different values and morals than their parents. And no I’m not talking about religiously inspired beatings or whatever, but being raised in a traditional household is not ipso facto abuse. It’s beyond preposterous to imply it is.Report
You’ll notice I’ve not taken a position on the Church’s statement regarding LGBT relationships/marriage. My position is largely aligned with North, in that so long as they aren’t pushing for that position to be encoded in law, they are free to hold what opinion they want.
But if Christians want to go on and whine about how they are persecuted, and that ‘persecution’ is largely of the form that they are not allowed to enjoy complete social dominance of all their opinions or traditions, and only get partial dominance, then I am going to insist upon seeing some second class citizen type stuff, or violence against them, etc.
Otherwise, I’ll need to pull the old Inigo quote regarding word definitions…Report
Well I agree and I think the probability of devout Christians of any stripe suffering more than hurt feelings in polite society over this stuff is pretty slim. I think we could all benefit if we could check all of this ‘but I’m the real victim’ baggage at the door.Report
Agreed, the victim card has been long maxed out, and the bank is looking for payments.Report
Those kinds of parents always find an excuse. It used to be sex and pregnancy (I knew a family where one of the girls was kicked out because she was having sex with her fiance’, and this was back in the early 90’s). I’m sure sex and pregnancy are still an excuse, along with LGBTQ, mental health, etc.
My Monster-in-law kicked my wife out at age 14 because she refused to hate her father.Report
You realize that the Roman Catholic Church has literally a billion members across the world in every country? These members range from people that want the Catholic Church more liberal to like it as it is to want even more reactionary. The Pope isn’t some monarch that can announce things and everybody follows it and leaves in happiness forever.Report
The Pope isn’t some monarch that can announce things and everybody follows it and leaves in happiness forever.
If they want to be good Catholics, they will follow what the Pope says.
And the Pope should follow what I say, if he wants to be a good person.Report
It is? A BILLION? Holy moly! I hadn’t realized that at all! I assumed it was a couple hundred, tops. Maybe a thousand? But a billion though? Wowie Zowie! *low whistle*Report
1.33 Billion.
Out of about 2.4 Billion Christians.Report
Wow! Somebody should update the WIkipedia page!Report
My sarcasm might not be working because I can’t tell if this genuine astonishment at the size of the Catholic laity or not.Report
The Roman Catholic Church is nearly two thousand years old and has nearly a billion members. Some Catholics are totally liberal and not-practicing and many are very traditional and really devote. The job of any Pope is going to keep this big complicated group together because organizations always seek to keep themselves going. So you aren’t going to get a Pope that just comes out an unleashes a bunch of liberal reforms that appeals to well-off afluent but not really practicing Catholics in developed liberal democracies because that would start a big revolt in the church. Likewise, a conservative Pope is never going to impose full tradition anymore for similar reasons. Instead you will get this really awkward dance with modernity.Report
Crap like this is why I oppose Biden becoming President.
What if he secretly agrees with the Pope?
We can’t risk it. Vote 3rd Party!
Edit: It occurred to me that we can have Biden become Anglican. We should call on him to give his opinion on the Pope here and, if it’s in disagreement (WHICH WE KNOW IT WILL BE), we can ask him to convert.Report
Who’s doing these Jaybird parodies? They’re not very good.Report
If there were a President who said that he was a member of Gamergate, would you be okay with that?
Well, we’ve got a President who claims to be a member of the Catholic Church.Report
Man, you you’ll blow a fuse when you hear about the Supreme Court.Report
As a former Catholic, I know better than to take membership in the Church — as it likes to call itself — as a sign of anything morally significant. Didn’t Jesus have something to say about fruit?
Is this Jaybird or the parodist?Report
Oh, you’re a former Catholic instead of someone who claims to be proud to be one?
Why did you quit?
Should Biden similarly quit?Report
1. Yes.
2. None of your f*****g business.
3. I don’t see why, but it’s none of my f*****g business, either.Report
I think that’s between them and their Bishops. The Catholics have mechanisms for booting people out of the faith and, so far, they have elected not to use them.Report
I’m not suggesting that the Catholic Church boot Biden out. That would be silly.
I’m looking at the Catholic Church and wondering why Biden would still choose to remain affiliated instead of doing the principled thing and leaving like CJ did.Report
I wouldn’t go so far as to say my departure was “principled,” but that discussion is — perhaps — for another time. And I certainly wouldn’t call staying in the Church despite certain disagreements “unprincipled.” I have next to zero interest in the extent to which political figures accept the official rules of their faith as guidance in regard to their own lives as long as they don’t bother the rest of us.Report
Disagreements about what? Age of baptism? That’s okay.
Can principled people disagree about whether gay people deserve human rights?Report
Who made you the judge of what disagreements with one’s religious tradition are “okay”? The short answer to that is “nobody.”
As for your specific question, principled people do disagree about whether gay people deserve human rights. But one side is wrong. And Joe is on the right side. N.B. There is no human right to have an organization with membership rules, like a religion, accept you into the club.Report
Who made you the judge of what disagreements with one’s religious tradition are “okay”?
Anyone with Moral Agency is capable of looking at disagreements with religious traditions and saying “this one is silly and doesn’t matter” and “that one is evil and needs to go”.
You don’t need a judge (or a Pope) to hand that ability out.Report
Anyone with Moral Agency (TM) can judge, from the outside, what religious doctrines one considers right, wrong, merely silly, or evil. That’s why there are lots of different religions. And all that means is that you disagree with some of the teachings of some religion you don’t belong to. Which is fine.
But the real question is what disagreements among insiders are sufficient reason to leave the organization rather than stay and either fight to change the doctrine or ignore it. The phrase “Cafeteria Catholic” is surely one you’ve heard. Musing on Moral Agency (TM) doesn’t answer that question.Report
But the real question is what disagreements among insiders are sufficient reason to leave the organization rather than stay and either fight to change the doctrine or ignore it.
An excellent question.
There’s a lot of eating cake and then expecting to have it going on out there.Report
Well, I’m not Joe nor am I a Catholic but I would presume Biden believes in the big Catholic principles: that Jesus was the son of God; baptism, communion, blood and flesh, the holy trinity etc… so why wouldn’t he remain Catholic?
As for the more minor and derivative stuff, as far as we know, the majority of Catholics aren’t 100% in agreement with the Magisterium on those various items and yet somehow Catholicism survives.Report
Meh, I probably think that Biden does it as a habit and doesn’t think about it. He gets some comfort from the trappings come time for funerals or weddings and enjoys the sense of community and doesn’t put much more thought into it than that.
The membership in the organization? Heck yes!
The deeper metaphysics and theology? Well, you have to understand, it’s a metaphor. We live under a new covenant now. Perhaps even a new new covenant. It’s hard to put into words.Report
You seem to have a remarkable insight into the mind and soul of one Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. Let us hope you don’t use this power for evil.Report
It’s more of an “oh, another one” than anything particular to Biden.Report
Frankly, considering the Catholic Laity, it’d be far far more odd and suspect if Biden was in perfect agreement with Rome.Report
Polling on the subject suggests US Catholics are pretty pro legal SSM. Less so among the devout but still a majority. I’d never really thought that hard about it in a religious context despite being ‘Catholic enough’ for purposes of this discussion. I’m searching my mind to remember if I’ve ever seen anyone in Catholic land* get agitated about the issue and drawing a blank.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/322805/catholics-backed-sex-marriage-2011.aspx
*I’m an honorary member of the sort of lapsed but could never imagine being anything else drunken Irish sub-sect so ymmv, others may have different experiences.Report
Catholics the world over have a lot of disagreements on how to interpret and act out Church doctrine.
The biggest one in America, which doesn’t get much airtime, is the death penalty, followed by war. The Bishops are strongly opposed to it in nearly all circumstances, but the laity are much more supportive of it.
The religious views of a Scalia or Comey Barret are every bit as divergent with official doctrine than Biden.Report
Most of the families in my church have 3 or fewer children. This was also the case in the Catholic school/church I attended growing up. It suggests to me that there is a lot of household interpretation going on with respect to rules of the road around marriage, sex, etc., and that this is not a new thing.Report
rules of the road E.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4E6KtQg_z0Report
IMHO the biggest disagreement is contraception. The Church has very specific rules, the entire laity ignores them.Report
Maybe so.
FWIW, I think it actually speaks well of both the Church and the laity that there is this freedom to practice the doctrine differently.
It would be weird and creepy if a billion people agreed exactly, and deeply disturbing if the Church attempted to make them so.Report
The Church’s problem is they badly want to be popular & important and this is a divisive issue. Rome also wants to be in charge and America/Europe is largely pro-gay and becoming more so while the rest of the world is still anti-gay.
Getting a solution that works for both San Francisco and Africa is impossible. Given that the church has insisted this is an ethics issue (and that the Church is the sole source of “unchanging” ethics) they’re stuck.
Ideally they’d push the issue down to the individual churches, but that is directly opposed to the one-size-fits-all structure they want.Report
I think “We have a religious belief that we take very seriously but will not try to enforce in secular contexts” is great. I wish more religions took that stance.Report
I certainly wish the post-modern ones did.Report
Derridaism?Report
Gnosticism. Only without, you know, familiarity with gnosticism.Report
I think the idea that the Catholic Church does not want to get involved in secular society is greatly undermined by everything we know about the Catholic Church, both in America specifically and worldwide generally. The fact that many Catholics themselves are far away from their institution’s leadership does not change things.Report
In the very old days, the Church was the government, the educated class, the source of science/knowledge, and the absolute backbone for the organization of society.
Over time they lost various parts and they’re left with entertainment, identity, and a serious struggle to stay relevant.
Religious teachings aren’t supposed to need to do the heavy lifting for giving the Church power and control. This idea that the Church is the creator of ethics and morality would look very strange to the people of old.
The Church is supposed to be about power, real secular power.Report
Truth, and like so many “conservative” institutions its being confronted with a “liberal, democratic” world to which it doesn’t want to readily adapt.Report
I said “enforce” for a reason. The Pope has expressed support for legal SSM; this doesn’t contradict that.Report
There’s a reason his comments were buried.Report
This is still judging, on which love ranks better than the next. Last time I checked, that’s against the Catholic Church’s rules to judge, their God gets that option. I’ll stop here.Report
Has the Catholic Church ever even wrestled with the problem of evil?
Report
My girlfriend’s mom — and sometimes my girlfriend herself — would simply respond that, “God always has a plan.” So… bad things like murder or rape or slavery or the Holocaust are all part of God’s plan. And if we can’t see why he’d cause or permit or allow or choose not to stop such things, we are simply unable to understand God’s work and nature.
It’s a pretty foolproof logic in a way. If you buy into the whole God thing to begin with.Report
Takes us to some combo of “evil”, “powerless”, or “ignorant” though.Report
The problem with the inconsistent triad is usually resolved by acknowledging:
If you want it done fast and done right, it won’t be cheap.
If you want it done cheap and done right, it won’t be fast.
If you want it done cheap and done fast, it won’t be done right.
The simple answer is, of course, “there isn’t a God”. Therefore: no problem with power. No problem with goodness.
And, of course, our seeing “evil” is a version of pareidolia. It’s not a face. We just see faces everywhere, that’s all. We wanted a word for “my disapproval has significance”.
But then, on the other side of that, there’s the “maybe I was wrong about the god thing? Like, I didn’t understand some stuff? And evil does seem to exist? Even if we do have a lot of pareidolia?”
And that’s when the conversation gets interesting.
But the first conversation and the third conversation don’t tend to be fruitful when mixed.Report
If we can’t prove god, then he doesn’t influence anything we can test or measure. We can test or measure basically everything. That includes probability and medical care.
If praying for a good outcome helped 0.0001% of the time then every Fortune 500 company would have a department of prayer. If sacrificing animals helped 0.0001% then every Fortune 500 would be doing that.
You start expanding on what we can measure and just how cut throat business is and the conclusion is that no one, among the Billions of people we have, has gotten magic to work.
I don’t see any evidence that magic exists. God is a sub-set of that.Report
See? No problem.
Easy-peasy.Report
This is all somewhat beside the point but the Catholics (and the religious in general) have grappled with this stuff a lot. Google theodicy to get started if you’re genuinely interested.Report
They grapple with this because they start with the conclusion “we Priests are absolutely needed to deal with God” and try to work backward from that to where the world is.
If you start with the world as it exists and work forward, then it’s a lot simpler.Report
Sure, most people don’t ever ponder the existence of evil until they’ve been priests for a while.Report
That’s totally possible. Maybe you’d be happier as a protestant, or a Muslim (unlikely). The atheists’ certainly would agree with you on some stuff and I would modestly say that agnosticism has much to recommend it. It doesn’t sound like you’d get along well as a Catholic.Report
🙂
Definition of atheist: a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God or gods.
Definition of agnostic: a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena; a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God.
When I said “I see no evidence magic exists” I was deep into atheist territory.
If you say “I’m not convinced” then you’re an atheist.Report
Heh, I’m not going down the are agnostics athiests rabbit hole; we’d have more luck arguing if God is necessarily evil.Report
If God is necessarily evil, why do good things happen?
Check and mate, Gnostics!Report
Dark Lord Sauron is evil.
Gandalf is good.
No matter how much we believe in them, they remain fictional.
This line of thought can be applied to tens of thousands of gods.
If you want to make an exception for one of them, you need to point to more than a book.Report
By dictionary definitions, the threshold for being an atheist is very low. However, a lot don’t identify as such.Report
I have no desire to use a wheel that I did not reinvent!Report
“Has the Catholic Church ever even wrestled with the problem of evil?”
Of course you know that Augustine, Aquinas, et cetera, have wrestled with it, so I don’t know what you’re asking. But more interesting to me is the idea that the question is the heart of the Catholic Church, because the answer is somehow found on the Cross.Report