The Current Derangement of Catholic Teaching

I wish I could fire off yet another sarcasm- and irony-filled rant...

but I just can’t.

As it turns out, umbrage (which is my general default posture) is a hill too high for a spirit weighted down by witness. Outrage, it seems, turns watery when diluted by plain sadness.

So, here it is plainly…

Not long ago I had the opportunity to work with a few hundred students from a number of highly acclaimed (and very expensive) Catholic schools from a few exceedingly prosperous regions of the country (schools which will go without further identification here for obvious reasons). These amazingly articulate and generally intensely aware students were able to formulate highly sophisticated and nuanced positions over a wide variety of public issues (for those keeping score, this would not be the sad part). Whether articulating defenses of teaching both Darwin and Genesis in public schools (arguing well for Darwin in science class, Genesis in social studies, and for the commensurability of Church teachings on Biblical creation with scientific accounts of the origins of universe and man), or offering incredibly well-reasoned arguments regarding the necessity of laws banning abortion (on both religious and secular-moral grounds), or making the case for protecting in law the exclusive status of traditional heterosexual marriage (again on both religious and secular-moral grounds), these students demonstrated solid understanding and tolerant respect for the logic and concerns of opposing views even as they held firmly to their own.

However (and here’s where all that ‘weight of witness’ and such comes in), when matters of economic justice arose, these same gifted students suddenly became entirely unable (not just unwilling—unable) to credit any reasonableness to positions advocating public responsibility and government intervention, shallowly dismissing such positions as ‘socialist’with no further ado. Note here that they were not simply opposed to such government policies; on these issues, unlike their ability to give a fair account of opposing arguments regarding cultural issues, they were fixedly unable to reconcile socially guaranteed health care, public assistance for low income families, or the provision of public services for undocumented workers with either Church teachings on social justice or with more general principles of secular morality.

Regarding all such issues, the positions taken and reasoning generally demonstrated by these highly educated students of prestigious Catholic schools were indistinguishable from those of the most ardent libertarian ideologues. More importantly, on these issues the students' otherwise highly complex critical thinking skills completely abandoned them as they became rigid bullhorns blaring neoliberal economic slogans.

Moreover, these students seemed unable to see any contradiction between their firm moral insistence that the vulnerability of the unborn demands public protection through law, and their fierce advocacy of the most merciless policies regarding the poor and the powerless. On long-term unemployment benefits, for instance, they showed near unanimous approval of one student’s challenge: "Why should my parents who have worked hard and acted responsibly have their tax dollars go to support people who've made bad decisions?" One otherwise brilliant student's comment on Social Security reform was astonishing: "I hate to sound utilitarian, but I just don't think we can afford to have our very limited public resources go to support people who have become economically unproductive." (So much, I guess, for the antique idea of imitating the example of Christ who, when offered an easy way out, chose the Cross...)

The unpleasant truth is that statements like the ones made by this group of students are not dramatically unlike those that can be routinely heard coming from among any significantly diverse body of students. But for me, to hear it so nakedly, simplistically, and unanimously expressed from this particular group of students was heartbreaking: All of these students acknowledged having taken high school level courses on the Church’s teachings regarding social justice, but nearly all claim to have understood these teachings to apply to the responsibility of Catholics to undertake acts of personal, private, individual charity. As they understood their lessons, social justice doctrine need not involve supporting public provision for the poor and the powerless.

Indeed, these students made clear their nearly unanimously held view that government cannot be trusted to act morally and that tax-supported public care stands in conflict with private acts of charity, which they deemed to be morally superior. Students signaled strong agreement with one otherwise well-informed young woman’s proclamation regarding the basis of her hostility to public assistance programs: Giving the federal government tax dollars to fund social programs would, in her view, ‘just give them more money they can use to pay to abort the babies of the poor.’

(!)

Has any bible-waving, snake-handling christian conservative ever shown signs of being more misinformed (or disinfomred) about the use of government revenues? Could any child raised in a fundamentalist Protestant community or taught in a rightwing Christian factory-school have mouthed that formulation more precisely than this child raised in the 2000 year old Church of the poor?

My reactions while working with these students took rollercoaster swings from tremendous affection (like all teenagers, these were sweet, funny, ironic, anarchic people whose energy and sideways look at the actions of adults is an endless source of cheer and optimism), to open-mouthed awe (as I said, these kids were brilliant), to anger and resentment (their assumptions of privilege and entitlement were unbridled and enormous), and finally to a deep sadness—a sadness I cannot shake; a sadness so profound it squashes my capacity to even mount a rant of outrage.

So, again plainly…

For me what I witnessed was the product of either systematic indoctrination in an incompetent version of Christian morality, or the product of careless—even reckless—negligence in Catholic social teaching. But here it is crucial to note that this miseducation is not being carried out in some isolated, poorly staffed parochial school whose faculty doesn't know any better. All these schools are highly regarded for their uncompromising academic rigor; at least three are Jesuit prep schools blessed with worldclass academics serving on faculty.

Nor are these the unfortunate children of some unsophisticated rustbelt Catholic community. These are the children of doctors, lawyers, academicians, and so forth. All-in-all, the Church's best and brightest children being taught by the Church's best and brightest educators.

And here we come to the crux of my concern, for it is just this that keeps me alienated from the Church of my childhood: These students have been subjected to an education that reflects—and reflects precisely—the Vatican’s cold hypocrisies and bloodless retreat from the central message of Christ's Gospel—a near abandonment of action on Christianity's core values and the Church’s core mission in the world; a retreat from action coupled with a realignment of the Church’s focus that together are rotting the heart of contemporary Catholicism. The 'thinking' of the Church, exactly like that of these the best of Catholic educated students in the nation, has become literally deranged over issues of sex and gender. By the evidence of their students' learning (by their fruits you shall know them), these elite schools have allowed themselves to become to the Gospels eerily parallel to what Wahabist madrasah schools are to Islam, the Prophet Muhammad, and the teachings of the Qur'an.

Like fundamentalist Islam, the Official Church has long since lost its way in its long and noble struggle to respond to the considerable challenges of modernity and materialism and to lead the resistance to their corrosive influence.

Oh, for a certainty Catholic teaching and learning has done a spectacular job of reconciling itself with the findings of modern science (and here I mean no irony whatsoever) and has recently (in Church-time terms) played a crucial role in creating much needed space in modernity for thought like that of Teilhard de Chardin (whom it once condemned but now seems to have re-embraced).

But on matters of private morality and secular law the Church has become entirely unhinged. It now seems bent on addressing its power intolerantly to what it perceives as the decadent behavior of persons while only muttering inaudible whining complaints regarding the patent amoralism of modernity’s economic institutions, the systematic immorality of their practices, and the barbarous indignity of the conditions that modern economic arrangements perpetrate and perpetuate upon persons and communities.

Like Her students’ well-reasoned moral arguments supporting the use of law to protect the innocent and powerless unborn, at the very moment the Church loses its will and its voice concerning protecting and empowering the poor and powerless born, its moral reasoning on abortion (and contraception) is revealed as perhaps nothing more than hypocritical posturing: The Vatican’s concern for babies takes on a distinctly false note and one can only wonder if the real concerns—like those of the grotesque Islamic clerics who want women to cover so men won’t be tempted to sin—aren't really more about controlling the sexual behavior of women.

(Of course, both the Church’s and radical-Islam's retarded vocalizations on LGBT issues speak for themselves.)

To be sure, there is a gaping chasm of difference between the metaphorical stones that the Church would have the law throw at those it deems to have fallen victim to the moral degeneracy of modernity and the very real stones that the Taliban and their ilk would throw at violators of their dark and paranoiac version of Islamic law; yet in the savageness of its intolerance, the Church seems now to be drifting into the same wide lane bound for the same lost off-ramp as those fringe radical clerics (of both Shia and Sunni sects) who advocate a 'return' to a twisted version of Sharia Law, sharing with them the same particular and peculiar focus on matters of sexuality and women.

Note here the many convergences among those who allow themselves to become deranged by fear and hatred of transgressions against traditional sexual morality--convergences which make strange ideological (if wholly unconscious) bedfellows of otherwise hostile camps: Sunni and Shia; Catholic, Baptist and Pentecostal. While unable to get over differences on crucial questions regarding the precise meaning of holy symbols, the name of the supreme being, the status and identity of the prophet-savior, the exact nature of salvation, and whatnot, everyone from all stripes and flavors of fundamentalist faith seem to agree on their intransigent moral intolerance for people who do unsanctioned stuff with their body parts.

Like political Islam, the Vatican now chooses to use its moral authority to focus the attention of the faithful on the Gospels' scant concerns regarding who sleeps with whom (and on what women do to deal with unwanted pregnancies). And while political Islam works to use what power it can to force governments in the Muslim world to bend to its vision, the Vatican now flexes its considerable political clout to bring governments in the Christian world to heel on matters of sexuality and women—in the name of reestablishing a culture of life, you see—while expending not one lira of political capital for public responsibility for social justice (or what some folks would call the preferential option and basic Catholic Social Teaching).

I want to be clear here, I am not making a religious argument on behalf of particular public policies of care and provision: as those close to me know, I do not believe that anyone's religious beliefs merit consideration as evidence for useful and just public policy--it seems obvious to me thatin any culturally plural democracy  all such disputes can and must be addressed through deliberation over empirical claims and through secular-moral discourse.

I know, however, that my personal internal moral basis of my secular claims--everything I believe about policies of justice and the social responsibility of democratic government--arose out of simple catechism lessons I learned long before I was old enough to know anything about such things as 'the workers' struggle', capital's inevitable exploitation of labor, the inherent wisdom of the notion of 'public utility', and so on and so forth.  (And here I must confess that even at the age of ten I was much less interested or attentive in lessons about the Mysteries than when we studied the examples of Christ's condemnation of hypocrisy and of his  mercy; his warning that he would judge harshly based on how we had treated the 'these my least brethren'; the Church's warning that when we come to judgment, if we have put nothing in the hands of the poor, Christ will say "therefore you have found nothing in my presence"; the litany of mercy for our brothers and sisters by which we are judged, "..you gave me to eat, ...you gave me to drink, ...you took me in, ...you covered me, ...you visited me, ...you came to me"...)

Later, even during my most sincere periods of atheism, I was inspired and reaffirmed throughout the horrible 1980s by reading my father's copies of Maryknoll magazine where I found surprising stories of the courageous work against oppression undertaken by Fathers and Sisters and Catholic missionaries in the killing grounds of Central American.

Over the years, while my rejection of my faith has moderated, my outrage at the Vatican has grown apace.  I have always been secretly proud of the moral stance for economic justice taken by many of the Catholic faithful in spite of the Official Church's abandonment or even obstruction of their work. I have never stopped feeling admiration for the faithful who saw their religious instruction as a command to social action. I have never stopped hoping that I would wake up one day and a new Pope would turn the attention of the Christian faithful worlwide to Christ's demonstration of a lavish and abundant mercy and task us to do likewise--not just as a matter of personal sacrifice, but also with a determination to use those tools equal both to the challenge and to the opponents of justice.

Ironically, over the years (since growing out of a reactionary impulse to atheism), the more I have beome aware of the genesis of my adult commitments from my childhood understandings of the Church's teachings, the more alienated I have become from the Church. That has been the trajectory that has given momentum to my increasing anger at the long series of reactionary Popes and at the ongoing moral incompetence of the Official Church.

But now...

Now after witnessing how the Church's dementia has twisted what is typically the idealism of its brightest youth, its most vibrant flowers, into a sophisticated but coldly hypocritical and ill-informed cynicism  about commonweal and social good, about public provision and public utility, about human care manifested in human institutions and social arrangements, about social justice itself, I feel a simple, wearying grief.

And so I wonder: Is it finally time for me to stop fretting and hand-ringing about the direction of the Catholic Church, to grow up and stop flinging feces at the indifferent edifice of the Official Church and simply accept that it will not change course; it will not become the towering force for justice that it could be; it will not give its fullest cry to the state's fundamental responsibilities for care and provision; it will not moderate and bring balance to its now obsessive concerns with human sex and sexuality; it will never engage in a real, soul-searching and cleaning investigation of the terms and conditions of surrender to Truth and Reconciliation regarding its culpability in sins and crimes of its past?

Is it time now to just move on?