A Solution to the Catholic Church's Gay Marriage Dilemma

As the recent votes in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington State demonstrated, despite spending millions of dollars to oppose sames sex marriage, the Catholic Church hierarchy lost across the boards.  Worse yet from the perspective of the self-loathing closeted men in dresses at the Vatican, as demographics in America continue to change and the number of "nones" - those identifying with not institutional church - increases, the Church may well have passed the high water mark of its ability to have any meaningful impact on public opinion.  Especially in view of the sex abuse scandal that continues to explode around the globe, particularly in Australia most recently where a royal commission is being launched to investigate the Church.   A piece in the National Catholic Reporter proposes a simple solution to the dilemma facing the bitter old queens in Rome which, if they had any sense they'd embrace. Especially, because it is in perfect accord with the concept of religious freedom enshrined in the U. S. Constitution.  Here are excerpts:

[T]he teaching church further declares that any and every act of sexual union between a husband and wife must be "open" to the procreation of children, never closed by the use of artificial contraception.

Now comes civil society with an altogether different idea of marriage, namely the union of two persons, whether of the same or opposite sex, who love one another and are committed to a lifetime of faithfulness to one another. Furthermore, goes this position, a union of two persons of the same sex can be considered procreative, since such couples can, and often do, have children of their own through adoption, in vitro fertilization or other methods.

No, no, no, says the institutional church. "That's cheating. The procreative action must be biologically pure and in conformity with the 'natural law,' as defined by the church." This argument may be simple and clear to bishops and priests (though surely not all), but it is not self-evident to many millions of laypersons, including the vast majority of Catholics, as reliable polls of Catholic belief have testified since 1968.

So why can't the bishops accept two kinds of marriage, both founded on a commitment of love and fidelity by couples? One would be civil marriage open to both heterosexual and homosexual couples; the other would be religious, sacramental marriage available to heterosexual couples only. In both cases, the partners get all the societal benefits to which married people are entitled, and the church gets to maintain its position that gay and lesbian unions are disordered and unnatural. There's really no reason for the church to keep pushing to outlaw gay and lesbian marriages. And isn't such pressure a meddling of religion in the affairs of secular society by insisting a church definition of true marriage must be adopted and enforced by secular governments?

No, no no, says the church: Accepting gay and lesbian marriage will undercut traditional marriage and further promote relativism and the secularization of society. It happens that there is no proof whatsoever that gay marriages sabotage heterosexual unions. In fact, the evidence indicates that heterosexual unions are more than adept at sabotaging themselves.

[S]uch a compromise might work for a while, but for Catholics, it ignores the mastodon in the living room -- really, in the bedroom. As theologians have been saying (or trying to say) for decades, the whole church at some point must honestly face the fact that its moral teachings on marriage and sexuality are out of sync with reality and that Catholicism will continue its long slide into irrelevance until spirited discussion and debate move these matters out of the closet and into the center of the room.

One comment on the post may explain one of the Church hierarchy's big fears about gay marriage: legal same sex marriage combined with the lessening social stigma attached to being gay are making it increasingly difficult for the Church to recruit new clergy members.  As it is already, vocations for new priests have plummeted in America and increasingly priests are being imported from ignorant, uneducated areas of the world to fill the void.   Should homosexuality become largely stigma free (at least outside of Christofascist circles) and same sex couples be allowed to have equal marital rights with heterosexuals, the Church's recruitment efforts might collapse entirely.  What the bitter old men like Benedict XVI do not realize is that their anti-gay jihad is ultimately going to kill the Church in the western world because it is alienating the younger generations without which the Church has no future.

Virginia Priest Who Headed Child Protection Office Accused of Abuse

A couple of news stories underscore the continued moral bankruptcy of the Catholic Church leadership which continues to push anti-gay and anti-modernity jihads while continuing to ignore the sexual predators within the ranks of the priesthood. The latter problem is highlighted news coverage about the Catholic priest who headed the Diocese of Northern Virginia (an very reactionary diocese by the way) office responsible for protecting children from sexual abuse who has now been accused of abuse in the late 1990's. That's right, the late 1990's not some 30 or 40 years ago or more. Meanwhile, the Vatican is cracking down on American nuns who are not sufficiently anti-modernity and anti-gay. The only bright spot in this abysmal picture is that parishes are refusing to climb aboard the hierarchy's anti-gay train and one pastor received a standing ovation from his parishioners when he announced that the parish would not participate in the anti-same sex marriage campaign in Washington State. First these highlights from the Washington Post on the accused sexual predator:

The Catholic priest who headed the diocese’s Northern Virginia office responsible for protecting children from sexual abuse was placed on administrative leave Wednesday while he is investigated for alleged sexual misconduct with a teenage boy.

From 2004 until last year, [Rev. Terry W.] Specht was director of the Office of Child Protection and Safety, which trains church employees and volunteers to spot abuse and monitors youth activities “to ensure that all contact with young people is appropriate,” its Web site says.

Specht, a native of Pennsylvania, became a priest in Arlington in 1996. He worked with multiple ministries focused on youths. From 2000 to 2004, he was chaplain and assistant principal at the 1,000-student Paul VI Catholic High School, one of four Catholic secondary schools in the diocese.

Specht has been more visible than many priests, and until late Wednesday he maintained a Twitter account on which he posted and commented on various conservative issues, poking fun at President Obama and more liberal Catholics who support gay rights. The photo on the account was of a bulldog.

Neither he [diocesan spokesman Michael Donohue] nor the police would specify if the allegation involved one incident or more, or what sort of evidence was presented. Donohue said that an accusation itself would not automatically trigger the administrative-leave process. “The bishop has looked at the information provided from the very beginnings of this and made a determination that it was best to put Rev. Specht on the administrative leave,” he said.

Becky Ianni, an advocate for clergy sex-abuse survivors in Northern Virginia, said the allegation is disturbing. “It’s just frightening to think that this is the person educating people and perhaps he is a predator,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post is reporting on the Vatican's crack down on American nuns - who in my opinion seem to get the true Gospel message far better than the power and control hungry bitter old men in dresses in Rome. Here are some highlights on this sad issue:

WASHINGTON — The Vatican has launched a crackdown on the umbrella group that represents most of America’s 55,000 Catholic nuns, saying that the group was not speaking out strongly enough against gay marriage, abortion and women’s ordination.

Rome also chided the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) for sponsoring conferences that featured “a prevalence of certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”

The directive, which follows a two-year investigation by Rome, also comes as the Vatican appeared ready to welcome a controversial right-wing splinter group of Catholic traditionalists back into the fold, possibly by giving the group a special status so that they can continue to espouse their old-line rites and beliefs.

It added that “crucial” issues like “the church’s biblical view of family life and human sexuality, are not part of the LCWR agenda in a way that promotes church teaching. Moreover, occasional public statements by the LCWR that disagree with or challenge positions taken by the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals, are not compatible with its purpose.” Many bishops were angered when LCWR and Network, along with the Catholic Health Association, endorsed President Obama’s health care reform over the bishops’ objections.

In 2009 the Vatican launched a wide-ranging investigation of all women religious in the U.S., prompted by concern over their commitment to doctrine and tradition as well as the sharp decline in vocations. The number of nuns in America has dropped from 179,954 in 1965 to just 55,000 today.

I suspect the Vatican's actions will only serve to further reduce vocations. I truly look forward to the day Hispanic Catholic open their eyes to the moral bankruptcy of the Vatican and join the exodus of American Catholics from the Church. Once this happens, the Vatican will find it difficult to hide the step decline in membership in the American Church which has been masked by the influx of new Hispanic immigrants.

The Catholic Church's Attack on American Nuns

The hypocrisy of the Roman Catholic Church knows no limits. Fortunately, Newsweek has a pretty hard hitting story that looks at the Vatican's witch hunt against American nuns - even as the Vatican has coddled and covered up for priests for sexually molest children and youths. The moral disconnect at the Vatican is indeed mind numbing. As is the anti-woman mindset that has persisted for centuries. And in my view, both issues are affront to both common decency not to mention intellectual consistency. Sadly, the Church leadership continues to show little inclination to reform itself and the "good old boy system" that helped sexual abuse thrive world wide. Unless and until the media ruthlessly exposes the moral rot in Rome, I see little chance for the Church to change. With enough bad and/or salacious press, just maybe things will be forced to change. The other irony is that the Vatican is claiming that it has no control over Church operations in the USA in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, yet this inquisition argues otherwise. Here are some story highlights:
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Earlier this month, in something of a surprise, a nun at a Catholic hospital in Phoenix was excommunicated for approving a first-trimester abortion last year at that hospital to save the life of a critically ill patient. “An unborn child is not a disease,” said Bishop Thomas Olmsted of the Phoenix diocese. “While medical professionals should certainly try to save a pregnant mother’s life, the means by which they do it can never be by directly killing her unborn child.” The irony here is thick: it has taken years, sometimes decades, to bring sex-abusing priests to justice, but this observant sister, Margaret McBride, was excommunicated in a matter of months for making a compassionate and impossible decision for one of her parishioners.
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This decisive action against one nun in one ethically murky case comes as an “apostolic visitation,” or investigation, of all of America’s 60,000 religious sisters is underway. . . . Anxious observers and commentators worry that, as a result of the inquiry, nuns will be forced to take steps backward—into the head coverings and habits, for example, that were made optional after the Second Vatican Council in 1965. They worry further that sisters who have worked more or less independently for decades will have their independence curtailed: the church has been known to remove teachers from their posts, for example, for teaching an insufficiently orthodox theology. With dioceses still hurting for cash due to settlements from the sex-abuse crisis, they worry that with the number of sisters dwindling in the West, real estate that has belonged to a religious community for generations will be sold or reappropriated by the diocese.
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Between now and Christmas, 100 communities of American nuns will receive on-site visits from Vatican envoys; most of the 420 communities of American women have already filled out comprehensive questionnaires about their membership, their living arrangements, their mission, and their finances.

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Not two days after the publication in this magazine of “A Woman’s Place is in the Church,” which argued that the hierarchy in Rome needs to embrace modernity and include women at all levels of church management and decision making, I received an e-mail from a nun. “I just had to make this addition even though speaking up during this time of Visitation has its risks,” she wrote. The apostolic visit, “punitive by definition, demonstrates…that male church leaders are seeking to keep modernity at bay, keep women in a secondary place…It is so true that if women had any influence at all in our Church, the Church would be so much more whole and healthy.”
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[I]n our world, blind submission to authority is not a virtue but a vice. Just as modernity doesn’t want to accommodate insular groups of men who live behind guarded walls and make decisions that affect the domestic lives of half a billion people, it will also eventually reject what amounts to a kind of patriarchal apartheid, in which female clerics are given no voice in the power structure and yet are expected to submit to it.
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For more than a thousand years, becoming a nun was the best—and often the only—way for a young woman to get an education and to earn a modicum of independence. In the modern West, though, women have other options. In the United States, the number of religious sisters has shrunk by two thirds since 1965, to 59,600. (Worldwide, the collapse is not as dramatic: the number of sisters has dwindled by just one third over the same period, to 750,000.) And while sisters still outnumber priests across the globe, women’s desire to become nuns is plummeting. . . . It’s no wonder, really. When men have all the power, and they “investigate” women who seem to disrespect their authority, why not become a doctor, or a lawyer, or a stay-at-home mom, and submit to God without the authoritarian meddling?

Catholic Church Has Retrogressed Since Vatican II

A short Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal responding to a book review concerning the impact of Vatican II pretty scary data on what has happened to the Roman Catholic Church in the 40+ years since Vatican II. However, I believe that what has happened in terms of the decline in the number of priests and nuns has less to do with the impact of Vatican II that with the changes in the larger context of western society, including an increased refusal of the laity to just blindly follow the dictates of the senile, reactionary leadership of the Vatican. As much as Benedict XVI and his compatriots want to turn back to a 13th century world view and to cling to a "natural law" that science is showing to be false, rank and file Catholics in educated western societies are simply no longer buying the bullshit peddled by the Vatican. Only in the most uneducated and backward areas of the world is Church membership growing significantly. I believe that too will change as those Catholics attain higher levels of education and knowledge. Here are a few highlights:

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Kenneth C. Jones compiled an "Index of Leading Catholic Indicators: The Church Since Vatican II," published in 2003. Among his findings: While the number of priests in the U.S. more than doubled to 58,000 between 1930 and 1965, that number has fallen to 45,000, and by 2020 there will be only 31,000. In 1965, there were 180,000 Catholic nuns, but by 2002 that number had fallen to 75,000; Catholic marriages have fallen in number by one third since 1965, while the annual number of annulments rose from 338 in 1968 to 50,000 in 2002. (Regarding the annulment process, it is said that, for better or worse, psychological factors have been taken into consideration much more so post-Vatican II.) And, of course, we have the clergy sdecline in priests and nuns, decline in Catholic marriagesex abuse scandal that culminated in 2002 and continues to this day.

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Such statistics and events are sobering for any assenting Catholic. The cause? I submit that the zeitgeist and the activities of a number of morally corrupt churchmen are responsible for the problems in the Catholic Church since Vatican II and prior to the council, for that matter.