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.
