Category Archives: Religious News

An ELCA Lutheran Pastor’s letter to his riled up congregation UPDATED with vote totals

My friend Susan Hogan has quoted a very lengthy letter in her blog, Pretty Good Lutherans. Go and read it. It is a pastoral letter from Pastor Eric Lemonholm to his congregation at Grace Lutheran Church of Detroit Lakes, Mn on the eve of its vote to withdraw from the ELCA.

I believe that it would be a serious mistake for Grace to leave the ELCA, and I urge you to prayerfully consider voting “No” on December 20. Let me tell you why.

That sums up his position, and he goes to great lengths to support it. It’s a sound and well reasoned letter and worth ten minutes to read it and much more to reflect on his wisdom.

UPDATE:

Apparently, the pastoral letter helped: the final vote yesterday was 98 to stay ELCA and 42 to leave. The 40% vote to leave fell far, far short of the 2/3 majority necessary to pass the resolution.

Good luck to Pastor Lemonholm and the congregants of Grace as they now begin the process of healing.

Deja Vu all over again

“Deja Vu all over again,” is attributed to Yogi Berra. Somehow, it fits.

There is a news report about the experiences of a small town Wisconsin congregation of the ELCA that brings back memories. The experience of St. John Lutheran Church of Edgar, Wisconsin mirrors that of my former church, Gethsemane Lutheran of Upsala, Minnesota, twenty-two years ago.

Late in 1987, the Gethsemane council voted 11-1 that Gethsemane would not join the ELCA on the occasion of the merger that would go into effect on Jan 1, 1988. My wife was the one dissenter.

Emotions were high, members were polarized and lay leaders in both congregations wanted to vote quickly to leave the ELCA. St. John congregational council members held a meeting that first week [after the 2009 Church wide assembly] and voted unanimously, with one abstention, to recommend the congregation leave the ELCA.

Several high tension congregational forums were held at Gethsemane. Opponents of the newly formed ELCA attacked Lutheran Social Services (LSS) as promoting pornography. The ELCA didn’t take the Bible seriously enough, it was said, since the ELCA used a watered-down word “inspired” instead of “inerrant”.

[St John in Edgar] held two congregational forums, on Oct. 18 and Nov. 1. The Oct. 18 forum was particularly nasty, with many members reported to be “yelling and screaming” at one another.

At the January 1988 Gethsemane annual congregational meeting, a motion was made to rescind the action of the Council (which was probably unconstitutional anyway), and the vote was approximately 60% to stay ELCA and 40% to leave. Many of the conservatives quit the council and quit service positions such as Sunday school teachers.

What happened next was a surprise to many. St. John members voted 106-67 on the proposal to leave the ELCA, but failed to achieve the required two-thirds by four votes. That night the council and other congregational leaders met and resigned their leadership positions. The one exception was the deacon who had earlier asked his colleagues to slow down.

New leadership emerged at Gethsemane, and members stepped forward to replace those who had resigned from the council, to teach Sunday school, and to accept other responsibilities. While the conservatives stopped giving benevolence, others dramatically increased their financial support of the congregation.

[The first Sunday worship after the St John vote] was another surprise: 145 people showed up for worship — the most that had been there since [the assembly]. “We had people come back who had stopped coming at least since the Oct. 18 meeting,” [Pastor Sowell] said. With a shortage of Sunday School teachers, the result of the previous week’s resignations, six people volunteered on the spot to teach, Sowell said. Since that time, “dozens and dozens” of members have stepped forward to volunteer for various roles at St. John.

A refreshing spirit of hope and “can do” lifted Gethsemane in the next several years despite the departure of most the conservatives who formed their own Free Lutheran congregation.

“The next Sunday I saw such warmth in the people that were left. We’ve seen a real consensus of people who really wanted to make this work.”

In the 90’s, Gethsemane took on a building project to replace their 100 year old building. Half the necessary funds were raised during a fund drive, and the balance on the mortgage is now nearly paid off on the brand new church building that went into service in 1997.

[T]he situation at St. John was “like a death and resurrection experience.”

“I have grown so much because of this,” [Pastor Sowell] said. “I have been carried by the prayers of my former congregation. People have called me out of the blue to say, ‘I’m praying for you.'”

“I am sure St. John is not only going to survive, it’s going to thrive,” Sowell said.

Based on my own experience at Gethsemane, I’m sure Pastor Sowell is absolutely correct. Good luck, Pastor Sowell, and the rest of the reinvigorated congregants of St. John’s. We’ll be praying for you. Check out Gethsemane’s website and see what’s happening at a congregation that survived and thrives still.

Mostly quiet on the Lutheran Core front

In this season of advent, the ELCA fires of the past view months have cooled. Perhaps they will blaze again after the holiday season, but except for the occasional news item about this congregation or that one voting to leave the ELCA, the heat has been turned down.

Lutheran Core released its December newsletter, which was little more than a recap of recent events. The newsletter and the Lutheran CORE blogpost of December 11 did offer a couple of gratuitous digs at the ELCA implying heresy. Seems Bishop Hanson offered the heretical view that the authors of Biblical books may not have had a twenty-first century understanding of homosexuality. Seems an ELCA liturgy celebrates a feminine image of the divine. Oh, the horror!

Seems to me that the following verses about Lady Wisdom (Sophia) are doubly meaningful in this context:

Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks; “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge.” Proverbs 1:20-22

The Lutheran CORE newsletter attempted again to justify and encourage the financial boycott of the ELCA. In his monthly newsletter, my own bishop here in the Southeastern Minnesota synod, Huck Usgaard, suggests three questions that congregations should ask of themselves.

Some have suggested withholding benevolence dollars or redirecting them. You will soon receive a year end report detailing many of the synod ministries from 2009. The simple truth is that these ministries will suffer if money is not forthcoming. If this is under consideration in your congregation, I would encourage you to ask questions like, “What are we trying to say?” “Who do we want to be impacted?” “Will our actions accomplish those goals?”

If the answer is to blackmail and inflict pain, then by all means withhold funds, but don’t expect to win friends and influence people.

The other new item of note in the Lutheran CORE newsletter was its support of the “Manhattan Declaration”—a pro-life and anti-gay document put forward by the “usual suspects” of American culture wars evangelicalism including Chuck Colson, Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer, and James Dobson:

If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, it is. It’s the right-wing’s new call to arms that is not only reviving the buzzword “culture wars,” but is a sign that conservative religious leaders will stoop to the lowest levels imaginable to make sure that LGBT people are pushed back into the closet and that women’s rights are sent back to the days of back alley abortions and “Mad Men” housewives.

What is the Manhattan Declaration? It’s a statement … that says conservative religious folks are called by God to go nuclear in order to prevent abortion, same-sex marriage, stem-cell research and a host of what they call “fundamental truths.”

How far to the right does Lutheran CORE intend to go?

Godfrey Diekmann and Hans Kung: voices unstilled

About fifteen years ago while studying with the Benedictines of St John’s School of Theology in Collegeville, Minnesota, I was privileged to be in the last Patristics (early church history) class taught by Father Godfrey Diekmann. Although his infectious good spirits made his class a real treat, Father Godfrey’s reputation was due to his role in twentieth century progressive Catholic history more so than as a professor.

As a young priest spending four years in Europe while studying for his doctorate in Rome, he heard Hitler speak to a youth rally.

He had a demogogic power to influence people. Within two minutes the entire crowd was ready to give their life for him. Of course, I was caught up in it, in spite of myself, and leaving the stadium I had to shake myself to get rid of the evil miasma. He had a terrible, terrible gift.

Later, as a worker in the civil rights movement, he was on the grandstand in Washington, not far from the podium, as Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I have a dream” speech. Godfrey characterized the experience as “one of the great moments of truth in my life.”

But Godfrey’s greatest contribution was as a progressive reformer in the liturgical movement of Roman Catholicism that resulted in the reforms of Vatican II. It was here that Godfrey crossed paths with a young professor from the University of Tübingen, Germany, named Hans Kung. In fact, they were two of the four blacklisted by Catholic University of Washington for their progressive Catholic views in the days leading up to the Council. The backlash from the blacklisting probably kept Godfrey from receiving an invitation to the Council, but it also helped sway public attitude away from the conservatives towards the reformers. From his base in Collegeville, Godfrey was a force behind the scenes of Vatican II, drafting many of the important documents.

Father Godfrey passed away in 2002 at the age of 93, but professor Kung carries on, even though the Vatican has long prevented him from teaching at Catholic institutions. In fact, December 18th is the thirtieth anniversary:

of the day when Pope John Paul II revoked the ecclesiastical right to teach (missio canonica) of Prof. Dr. Hans Kueng because of his proposals for reform in the Catholic church. In his book ‘Infallible? An inquiry’ published in 1970 after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and equally prompted by the encyclical ‘Humanae Vitae’ from 25 July 1968 Kueng raised the question if the papal ministry is indeed infallible. With this Kueng, like nobody else in our time, raised the question of truth in Christianity and kept it alive ever since.

In 2005, Kung published a scathing criticism of Pope John Paul II.

This Papacy has repeatedly declared its fidelity to Vatican II, in order to then betray it for reasons of political expediency. Council terms such as modernization, dialogue, and ecumenicalism have been replaced by emphasis on restoration, mastery, and obedience. The criteria for the nomination of Bishops is not at all in the spirit of the Gospel … Pastoral politics has allowed the moral and intellectual level of the episcopate to slip to dangerous levels. A mediocre, rigid, and more conservative episcopate will be the lasting legacy of this papacy.

Kung continues to be a progressive Catholic voice crying in the wilderness about obligatory celibacy, the role of women in the church, papal infallibility, and ecumenism. Carry on, Herr Doktor.

ELCA — Lutheran CORE scorecard OOPS UPDATE

According to a list posted on the Lutheran CORE website, 117 ELCA congregations have joined Lutheran Core to date. That means over 10,000 ELCA congregations haven’t joined CORE.

Just a bit of perspective.

UPDATE:

Oops. Turns out I had the number wrong. Seems that Urland Lutheran Church, of Cannon Falls, which is pretty near my stomping grounds in Northfield, Mn, is one of the 117 congregations listed on the CORE website, but they want off and CORE won’t let them.

An article in The Minnesota Independent has the story:

A Minnesota pastor says his church is incorrectly listed on the website of a conservative splinter group that’s breaking away from the Evangelical Church in America (ELCA) over the church’s recent votes on homosexuality, but that group is refusing to rectify the error.

Pastor Arthur Sharot of Urland Lutheran Church in Cannon Falls has asked Lutheran CORE to remove his church’s name from the group’s CORE Congregations page — a list of churches that support its “Common Confession” — but Lutheran CORE says Sharot’s congregation must take a vote in order to get its name removed.

CORE’s position is that years ago Urland, before the arrival of pastor Sharot, joined a group called Lutheran Churches of the Common Confession, which later merged into Lutheran CORE, unbeknownst to Urland. Even a call from the Congregational Council chairman couldn’t convince CORE to remove Urland from its list. The news article contained the following:

Lutheran CORE’s own founding and connections show that it is more controversial than first appearances reveal. In 2008, Chavez became the director of Lutheran CORE and before that he was director of WordAlone, a group that spawned CORE. WordAlone believes the ELCA is losing its “Christ-centered focus,” in part because of “the push for approval of sexual relationships outside of marriage.” Chavez is currently the vice president of WordAlone, which shares an office with Lutheran CORE in New Brighton.

“WordAlone holds some controversial views about homosexuality,” says the news article, which then lists a number of the controversial views of WordAlone gleaned from the WordAlone website, including:

Reparative therapy works
Homosexuals are inherently promiscuous
Homosexuals actively recruit
Children of same-sex couples are more likely to be gay
A personal relationship with Jesus will help break demonic strongholds

Flat earth society, where are you?

NJ Poll reports religious attitudes toward marriage equality

Four decades ago, the gay rights movement burst onto the scene in the Stonewall riots of Greenwich Village. As we near year’s end in 2009, we close the fourth decade of gay rights activism and the first decade of the twenty-first century. You’ve come a long way, baby.

A handful of states now offer marriage equality, either through court decree or legislative fiat. A handful more allow civil unions. The Matthew Shepherd bill extended hate crimes protection to sexual orientation. “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” in the military is likely to be phased out soon.

Several branches of Judaism and several of Christianity allow gay clergy and blessings of same-gender unions. This summer, the Episcopal church opened the episcopate to gays, and a lesbian bishop was elected in California just a week ago. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) became the largest religious denomination anywhere in the world to allow gay clergy in committed relationships and to allow blessing of same-gender unions. Their Swedish counterpart, the Lutheran Church of Sweden, also elected a lesbian bishop this year.

But the battles rage on. The worldwide Anglican communion and its leader, the Archbishop of Canterbury, are harshly critical of their American communion partner, the Episcopal church. A dissident group of Lutherans called Lutheran Core is making a lot of noise and siphoning off members, congregations and especially funds from the ELCA. Gay rights is both a secular and a religious issue, and religious organizations have played major roles in the outcomes of public ballot initiatives in California in 2008 (Mormon) and Maine in 2009 (Catholic), which narrowly rejected marriage equality.

As the year comes to a close, the focus shifts to New Jersey where a marriage equality bill is moving through the legislature. A new public opinion poll in that state offers fascinating insight into the overlap of the religious and the secular (hat tip to Irish blogger Terence Weldon for first posting about this poll overnight). The poll was conducted by Rutgers University, and is posted on the University’s media relations site.

Despite opposition from the Catholic Church, New Jersey Catholics generally support legalizing gay marriage, according to a Rutgers-Eagleton Poll released today. Among Catholics, 48 percent support gay marriage, while 40 percent oppose and 12 percent are undecided. Protestants hold the opposite view, with only 34 percent supporting and 55 percent opposing gay marriage; 11 percent are undecided. Jewish respondents support gay marriage, 56 percent to 40 percent, with 4 percent undecided, while those with no religion preference are the most supportive, at 85 percent to only 10 percent opposed (5 percent undecided).

The Protestant numbers are skewed a bit by lumping evangelicals and non-evangelicals together. The evangelicals are strongly negative, but the main line Protestant numbers approximate the favorable figures for both Catholics and Jews (47% favorable, 37% unfavorable). Equally interesting is the finding that none of the religious groups, including the evangelicals, consider this issue to be of major importance.

“While the issue matters to a very small but passionate group on both sides, by far, most New Jerseyans of all stripes think there are more critical issues that need to be addressed,” Redlawsk said. “This suggests that regardless how a legislator votes, at the next election, this vote will be far less important to potential re-election than most other issues the Legislature will deal with.

Will health care be skewered by Catholics? UPDATED

Word out of Washington this morning is that progressive and moderate Democrats have fashioned a compromise on health care reform acceptable to both camps. The odds for passage of a health care reform bill just went up. Yet, a formidable hurdle remains, and that is the Stupak amendment in the House version and the whole issue of abortion politics. A day earlier, the Senate voted to kill a similar amendment, but the 54-45 vote is considerably less than the 60 votes the Dems may need for ultimate passage of health care reform.

Should abortion politics factor into the debate at all? Majority leader Harry Reid apparently gave an impassioned floor speech, suggesting this bill is about health care access and is not, and should not be, about abortion rights or restrictions. It appears those crafting the legislation are bending over to ensure the bill will be abortion neutral: access to abortion is neither expanded nor restricted relative to the status quo, which begs the question: Is this the time and place for the pro-life movement to attempt inroads against Roe v Wade?

Front and center is the American Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops, who have historically been for health care reform but against abortion rights. Here is where the rubber meets the road. Will the bishops sacrifice universal health care on the altar of pro-life?

In a hard hitting post in National Catholic Weekly, Joe Ferullo blasts single-issue Bishops.

U.S. Catholic bishops are in danger of finding themselves on the sidelines of history, regarded as a single-issue constituency with no view toward the greater good … the bishops have the influence to help push through a change in public policy they have sought for decades: universal health care coverage. Instead, they have become enmeshed in abortion politics, threatening to undermine a bill that would help ten of millions.

The blog post refers to an column in the Los Angeles Times, which quotes Kathleen Kennedy Townsend:

“As Catholics, are we so laser-focused on the issue of abortion that we are willing to join the ‘tea-partyers’ and the like to bring down the healthcare reform bill? And at the enormous expense of million of Americans who suffer every day” without healthcare?

Thomas Rutten, the LA Times columnist, offers this summation:

[If the bishops] abandon their church’s historic support for universal healthcare, rather than accept an abortion compromise that preserves a 33-year-old status quo, they’ll have done more than turn themselves into a single-issue constituency. They’ll have broken with a long tradition of not disdaining what is inarguably good in pursuit of unattainable perfection, which has been a hallmark of modern Catholicism’s contribution to American politics.

The tea party rabble can be dismissed as unthinking know-nothings (“Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”) We expect more reasoned pragmatism from an esteemed body such as the Conference of Bishops.

UPDATE:

Congresswoman Lois Capps is right in the middle of the efforts to keep the health care reform bill “abortion neutral”. Today she offered an op-ed piece to suggest the bill (read Stupak amendment) has been hijacked by those with a pro-life agenda to add restrictions to abortion access beyond what exists in the current status quo. Here is a portion, but I commend her entire piece.

I didn’t believe that health reform legislation was the place to promote either a pro-choice or anti-choice agenda. The focus needs to be on getting insurance to the nearly 50 million Americans without it and ensuring stability of coverage for the rest of us.

Unfortunately, the Stupak-Pitts amendment that replaced my amendment during House Floor consideration goes well beyond the status quo and is in no way the simple extension of the Hyde amendment its proponents claim. It would result in a major step backwards for women’s control over their reproductive lives.

We need to strike a balance on this issue so health reform isn’t a casualty of divisive abortion politics. That’s what my amendment did and that’s what the Senate bill proposes. Congress would be wise to send the President a bill reflecting this common ground approach and I will work hard to see that happens.

Voice of the Faithful calls for heads to roll in Irish sex abuse scandal

Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) is an American group of progressive Catholics that advocates for clergy reform in light of clergy sexual abuse scandals. With the recent release of the Dublin report that not only details a history of clergy abuse in Ireland but also a pattern of cover up by the Catholic hierarchy, call for reform rages anew.

See my recent post about Catholics and sex, which discussed the recent report from Ireland.

The online Irish Times reported on the story of the VOTF (Ireland) representatives who delivered a letter to the papal nuncio demanding that Pope Benedict remove certain bishops complicit in the cover up.

The open letter to Pope Benedict also called on him to remove the bishops who “enabled abuse” and urged him to bring in a culture of accountability.

During a protest at the apostolic nunciature in Dublin, the 10 protesters also called on papal nuncio Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza to apologise for the failure of his predecessor to co-operate with the Murphy commission. They also asked for him to fully co-operate with the commission from now on.

They were part of Voice of the Faithful Ireland, a group of Catholics that wants to see structural change in the church and a more active role for lay members.

The following is from a VOTF press release announcing that the Pope will hold a summit:

On Monday we learned that Pope Benedict will hold a summit with top Irish bishops on Friday to discuss the findings of the Murphy Report on the Dublin Archdiocese.
Over the weekend, a small group from Voice of the Faithful Ireland delivered a letter to the Papal Nuncio there asking the pope to remove the bishops who enabled the abuse and bring an end to the culture of secrecy in the church.

We are joining our Irish affiliate in calling for accountability as Pope Benedict prepares to meet with Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, Cardinal Sean Brady of Armagh, President of the Irish Bishop’s conference, and Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, the papal nuncio in Ireland. We have highlighted our call with a video that briefly recounts what we face in light of the Church’s refusal to hold accountable those bishops who covered up initial sex abuse and still refuse to open all the records pertaining to such abuse.

ELCA Bishop Hanson hosts town hall meeting

Late Sunday afternoon, Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson hosted an online town hall meeting. The ELCA news service reported that 3,148 computers logged in to follow the proceedings, which were held in the old bookstore of the ELCA offices in Chicago. Participants who were present and who asked questions reported that their questions were not pre-screened.

Key points made by the Bishop included:

Plans are underway to plant thirteen new congregations in multi-ethnic communities.
“Global mission has been part of the foundational identity of Lutherans since they came to this country.”
The effect of the financial boycott pushed by Lutheran CORE is that, “mission and ministry is diminished throughout the world and throughout this church.”
The church wrestles with social statements but when ratified can and should be used by congregations as teaching and discussion tools.
“Youth ministry is alive and well in this church.”
“Advent a time a prayer, for me,” Bishop Hanson said.

One pastor reported that the Facebook chat that accompanied the town hall meeting was hijacked by ugly comments from persons refusing to listen to the discussion.

The town meeting will be available again for download or on demand viewing as a webcast on the ELCA website by 4:30 this afternoon.

Bishop Hanson is the third presiding Bishop since the formation of the ELCA over twenty years ago. The first two, Herbert Chilstrom and H. George Anderson, recently issued a joint statement that included the following comments:

In recent months, our society and this church have been sailing through rough waters. Personal income is down for many; some are unemployed. We recognize that some sisters and brothers in Christ were disappointed in the decisions regarding human sexuality at the churchwide assembly, although we believe they were the right decisions. As a result, some have withdrawn or reduced support for our mission. The consequences of these events are painful. This church’s mission and ministry have been diminished.

Our troubled world needs the Good News of the Gospel and all that flows from it. Our differences must not divide us at a time like this. We are absolutely certain that we can continue to live together and serve as one family in the ELCA.

This is why we are calling on you, our brothers and sisters in the faith, to pray daily for the unity of this church and its mission.

Meanwhile, Pastor Donna Simon of Kansas City offers the following commentary on her blog, under the title “Would Jesus withhold mission support?:

Some of those who stand in great certitude about what Jesus would do are withholding their money from their ELCA congregations. Whole congregations are withholding mission support from the ELCA churchwide organization.

Forty-five people lost their jobs at churchwide, in part as a result of this withheld support. Budget cuts are more complex, of course–it’s a bad economy and we continue to decline overall.

But a whole bunch of those people lost their jobs because of financial blackmail. Maybe that’s harsh, but I don’t think so, and if it is, then it is deservedly harsh. Our congregation disagreed with decisions made by churchwide for years, and never once voted to withhold funds. We would have considered it unjust. I would have considered it immoral. A good portion of the money that goes to churchwide funds disaster response, water programs in the 2/3 world, the ELCA World Hunger Appeal.

Catholics and sex

The official Catholic view about sex is a huge topic and far beyond the scope of a blog post. Yet, there are a number of news items or blog posts flying about cyberspace that are worthy of comment.

Celibate priesthood:

A December 3 post in Catholicism in the 21st Century blog contains a link to the Futurechurch website and the announcement of a new initiative: Optional Celibacy: So All Can Be At the Table.

We are launching an international electronic and paper postcard campaign asking Cardinal Hummes at the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome to open discussion of optional celibacy at the highest levels of the Church. We will also approach national bishops conferences, priest organizations and international reform groups for support in requesting discussion of changing celibacy rules to include both a married and celibate priesthood in the Latin rite of the Roman Catholic Church.

Although the Vatican’s recent invitation to disaffected Anglicans to join Roman Catholicism has been widely dissed as rank sheep stealing (see my posts here and here), does it not open the door a wee bit to married clergy? If the Vatican is willing to accept married Anglican priests en masse, should they not also be more considerate of in-house proposals for a married priesthood?

As an aside, another recent article in Catholicism in the 21st Century blog is rather juicy, entitled “In the Catholic Church it is men who tell women how they should understand themselves as women.”

Gays will never go to heaven:

“Transsexuals and homosexuals will never enter the kingdom of heaven and it is not me who says this, but Saint Paul,” said Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, a Mexican cardinal and emeritus president of the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Health (1996-2009).

On this one, at least, the Vatican quickly issued a correction to Cardinal Barragan’s views. Catholic blogger James Martin in America Magazine, the national Catholic weekly, quotes a Vatican spokesman, Father Lombardi:

“It would be better, for example, to refer to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which does talk about homosexual acts as ‘disordered,’ but takes into account the fact that ‘the number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible, ‘” Father Lombardi wrote. Homosexuals “must be welcomed with respect and sensitivity, and ‘every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided,'” he wrote, quoting the catechism.

“Disordered,” yes. Go straight to hell, no. At least it’s something. Or, is it?

The Queering the Church blog quotes gay theologian James Alison:

The experience of many gay people is that the Church in some way or other, kills us. Typically in official discourse we are a “they”, dangerous people whose most notable characteristic is not a shared humanity, but a tendency to commit acts considered to be gravely objectively disordered. Typically our inclusion within the structure of church life comes at a very high price: that of agreeing not to speak honestly … The message is: you’re fine just so long as you don’t rock the boat through talking too frankly, which is the same as saying “you’re protected while you play the game our way, but the moment that something “comes to light”, you’re out.

In this the non-explicit message of the ecclesiastical mechanism is exactly the reverse of the explicit message of the Church. The explicit message is: God loves you just as you are, and it is from where you are that you are invited to prepare with us the banquet of the kingdom. The latent message is: God loves you as long as you hide what you are and deny yourself the search for the integrity and transparency of life and of virtues which it is your task to teach to others.”

Sex Abuse saga continues:

Just as the American Catholic church puts a few years behind the height of the clergy abuse scandal, the Dublin Archdiocese Commission report hits the news, and the scab is pricked anew. Journey to a New Pentecost blog offers the following quote from the report:

The Commission has no doubt that clerical child sexual abuse was covered up by the Archdiocese of Dublin and other Church authorities over much of the period covered by the Commission’s remit. The structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated that cover-up. The State authorities facilitated the cover up by not fulfilling their responsibilities to ensure that the law was applied equally to all and allowing the Church institutions to be beyond the reach of the normal law enforcement processes. The welfare of children, which should have been the first priority, was not even a factor to be considered in the early stages. Instead the focus was on the avoidance of scandal and the preservation of the good name, status and assets of the institution and of what the institution regarded as its most important members – the priests. In the mid 1990s, a light began to be shone on the scandal and the cover up. Gradually, the story has unfolded. It is the responsibility of the State to ensure that no similar institutional immunity is ever allowed to occur again. This can be ensured only if all institutions are open to scrutiny and not accorded an exempted status by any organs of the State.

With this report from Ireland, it is worth repeating that a preliminary report to the American Council of Bishops issued just a few weeks ago suggests that the reasons for child sexual abuse are unrelated to gay-straight issues.

Because this post is already long, it will not consider women’s ordination or the Vatican clampdown on nuns in America. But it could. It all comes down to sexuality.

Is the Roman Catholic hierarchy pathologically disordered?

The Catholic catechism calls gays “disordered”. Is the finger pointing in the wrong direction?

A hard hitting op-ed piece appearing in today’s Irish Times, entitled Papal Princes immune to censure, thinks so:

The Catholic Church’s hypocrisy starts right at the top of the organisation, writes JASON BERRY

THE DUBLIN diocesan report spotlights the crisis tearing at the Catholic Church’s central nervous system. At issue is the Vatican’s pathological obsession with protecting guilty church officials.

The Vatican ignores justice to protect bishops in their role as regents to the pope.

Finally, in another Irish Times op-ed, quoted here from The Progressive Catholic Voice blog, clinical psychologist Maureen Gaffney goes right to the heart of the matter. In what strikes me as an Irish woman daring to shout that the papal emperor wears no clothes, Gaffney suggests that the fundamental problem is that the Catholic church is stuck in an antiquated and destructive view of human sexuality that leads to negative outcomes for each of the issues addressed here.

That will require the church to face up to a much more profound problem – the church’s own teaching on sexuality.

Consider the list of issues the church has failed to deal with credibly since the 1960s: premarital and extramarital sex; remarriage; contraception; divorce; homosexuality; the role of women in ministry and women’s ordination; and the celibacy of the clergy. All have to do with sexuality.

Very few Catholics are looking to the church for moral guidelines in relation to any of these questions anymore. And why would they? After all, the church’s teaching on sexuality continues to insist that all intentionally sought sexual pleasure outside marriage is gravely sinful, and that every act of sexual intercourse within marriage must remain open to the transmission of life. The last pope, and most probably the present, took the view that intercourse, even in marriage, is not only “incomplete”, but even ceases to be an act of love, if contraception is used. Such pronouncements are so much at variance with the lived experience of most people as to undermine terminally the church’s credibility in the area of intimate relationships.

[The church] must confront the root cause of the problem – that the Catholic Church is a powerful homo-social institution, where men are submissive to a hierarchical authority and where women are incidental and dispensable. It’s the purest form of a male hierarchy, reflected in the striking fact that we all collectively refer it to as “the Hierarchy.”

It has all the characteristics of the worst kind of such an institution: rigid in social structure; preoccupied by power; ruthless in suppressing internal dissent; in thrall to status, titles, and insignia, with an accompanying culture of narcissism and entitlement; and at a great psychological distance from human intimacy and suffering.
Most strikingly, it is a culture which is fearful and disdainful of women. As theologian William M Shea observes, “fear of women, and perhaps hatred of them, may well be just what we have to work out of the Catholic system”. Until that institutional misogyny is confronted, the church will be unable to confront the unresolved issue of its teaching on sexuality and the sexuality of the clergy. Instead, celibacy will continue to be used as a prop to the dysfunctional homo-social hierarchy. The hierarchy will continue to project its fear of women on to an obsessive effort to exert control over their wombs, their fertility and their unruly sexual desires. That is the psychology of exclusion.