Joan Chittister on Expulsion from Family and Minority Wisdom: Critical Questions for the John Paul II Era of Catholic Apologetics

When I posted yesterday about the recent NCR editorial re: the story of Bishop Morris in Australia, I had planned to post a follow-up about Joan Chittister's latest NCR essay, "Expulsions from Religious Orders, Family, and Minority Wisdom."  I thought of posting a comment about Chittister's piece because it's, to my mind, a perfect counterpoint to the discussion of what Benedict is doing to Bishop Morris, and of the inexorable, draconian logic of patriarchal hierarchy that underlies the pope's actions in this case.

And then I thought better of saying the same thing twice--and at length--in two postings in one day.  So I've decided to say the same thing twice in two postings on subsequent days.  Today, I want to pay attention to John Chittister's alternative logic, alternative vision for how the church might be structured and how its leaders might behave, as she articulates these in her latest NCR essay.  Alternative to how the men in charge in Rome now want to do things, that is . . . .

Chittister is commenting on the punishment Benedict is dealing out to Fr. Roy Bourgeois for his defense of women's ordination.  Bourgeois' dissent is not in question.  Nor is the right of the institution's leaders to punish him for dissent in question.  As Chittister points out, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhöffer, Franz Jägerstätter, Edith Stein, Dorothy Day: all contravened the prevailing cultural or religious mores of their time and place, and all paid a price.  All challenged institutions and laws governing the societies in which they lived, and all were subject to reprisal by the lawmakers of those societies.

The fact that institutions like the Vatican punish, and have the right to punish, is undeniable in the case of Fr. Bourgeois.  What's up for discussion, however, Chittister notes, is how Pope Benedict is choosing to punish Fr. Bourgeois for supporting women's ordination.  He is choosing not merely to remove his liturgical faculties or limit his priestly functions.  

He's choosing, instead, to decree that Bourgeois's religious community, Maryknoll--his family of the past 40 years--expel him.  Repudiate him.  Treat him as a non-person.  Take away his pension, access to financial support, and the entire network of sustenance that any good family provides any family member.

As I observed yesterday, according to the inexorable, draconian patriarchal logic that governs the hierarchical system of Roman Catholicism, the penalty for refusing to give unquestioning obedience to any and all orders that come down the chain of command from the top is precisely such expulsion: 

In an absolutist hierarchy whose central virtue is unquestioning obedience, no one in the chain of command dares to make decisions independent of the man above him.  He does not dare to give even the suggestion of asking questions or disobeying, because the reprisal is too great.  It is immediate expulsion from the hierarchical system itself.

The kind of punishment being dished out now to Fr. Bourgeois by Pope Benedict is entirely consistent with the logic of the system of governance on whose maintenance Benedict is banking the future of the church.  In fact, a patriarchal hierarchical system of governance grounded in belief that the man on top has every right in the world to issue orders and demand that they be obeyed with implicit and unthinking obedience: this kind of system has no choice except to expel a dissenter from its ranks.

To treat him or her as a non-person.  As someone who no longer exists for the family.  Someone who is dead to the family.

Whereas (and, again, I noted this in what I wrote yesterday), this kind of system does not regard the infractions of those who contravene many other kinds of moral norms with anywhere near the same severity with which it regards the failure to obey.  One can contravene other central moral norms of the institution--even norms forbidding the adult sexual molestation of children--and still find a home within the institution, provided one remains obedient.  Obedient to the man on top, that is.

One can still be a family member if one abuses children or protects the abusers of children, if one remains obedient to the all-powerful father figure who issues the commands from the top of the hierarchical structure.  And so Chittister points out that though Fr. Bourgeois is being savagely expelled from the family in which he has lived and to which he has contributed for 40 years, because he supports the call of women to be ordained,

After all, the Vatican did not expel pedophile priests or abusing bishops from the secular priesthood for violating children. In some cases, in fact, they protected the perpetrators repeatedly and even refused to defrock them -- civil law or no civil law. And are, apparently, doing it even now. Only behavior related to women’s issues, it seems, qualifies for expulsion.

And for many Catholics and many morally sensitive observers of things Catholic, this is where the severe cognitive dissonance I noted yesterday enters the picture.  By the choices Benedict is making as pope, by his behavior and the priorities for our church to which his behavior points, by the insistence on beatifying John Paul II post-haste: we're being asked to believe that a Catholic leader who has sexually molested a minor or protected a priest who has molested a minor is a better moral exemplar than one who has dared to call for open discussion of the question of women's ordination.

We're being asked by our current religious leader to rank a Cardinal Law or Rigali or an Archbishop Chaput or a John Paul II as higher on the moral scale, more significant in the moral scheme of things, than a Fr. Roy Bourgois.  Or a Sr. Elizabeth Johnson.  Or a Bishop William Morris.

And to many of us, something seems radically awry in the moral calibration on which this picture depends.  Something seems very wrong with this picture--and with the institutional logic (driven by patriarchial presuppositions rather than gospel mandates) that paints this picture for us.

As Joan Chittister points out, there are other ways to see things, and other ways to do things, than how Rome now sees and does things.  She points to the Talmudic tradition, in which minority wisdom (i.e., the viewpoints of dissenters) is carefully recorded and preserved.  Preserved because, in the course of historical development, it often happens that the viewpoint of the embattled dissenter turns out to be the one viewpoint that an institution or society sorely needed to preserve its humanity, at a particular point in history.  It turns out that Franz Jägerstätter was right about the meaning of the Nazi period and the Catholic pastoral officials, the successors of the apostles, who urged him to deny his conscience and obey the command of the Fatherland to give Nazi military service were wrong in the moral scheme of things.

Chittister's argument here (and the moral example of Bl. Jägerstätter and countless other similar examples over the course of history) implicitly counter the prevailing logic of those now promoting and defending the restorationist purge mounted by this pope and the previous one in the Catholic church.  I have hesitated to write much about this prevailing logic (which is an apologetic for the patriarchal logic sustaining the hierachical system of Catholicism as it is now arranged) because this logic is, frankly, crude.  It's not worth a great deal of intellectual effort.  It is not intellectually compelling, for anyone with a beyond-parochial knowledge base or outlook on the world.

And yet it is powerfully represented in the contemporary Catholic church and many of its most ardent defenders, particularly among Catholic youth who identify as John Paul II youth, and who have been schooled (and very badly so) in the John Paul II era of catechesis.  This logic goes something like this: we would not have gotten to the point we have reached in the development of Catholic truth, if what we now have is not correct.  If it's not true.  If it doesn't represent God's will for the Catholic church.

Truth wins, after all.  We have  won in history, and those minority positions and the dissenters who have defended them have lost, because our truth is the truth.  And theirs is error.  And not only does their minority error deserve altogether to be expunged from the record, but they themselves, the dissenters, deserve to be expelled from the Catholic family.  Forgotten.  Treated as dead.

To question any facet of what we now have is to question an entire system on which the Catholic church's claim to represent Christ in the world stands.  We cannot and will not change 2,000 years of Catholic truth merely because tired old liberals of the 1960s and the Vatican II era want to dismantle our system of divinely ordained truth.  The longer this truth has played out in our church and in the world, the more certain we are that it is God's truth at work through the Catholic church in the world.  The very fact that it is old--2,000 years old, we maintain--points to its legitimacy as divine truth.

There's so much wrong with this set of crude presuppositions, with this crude apologetic of the John Paul II generation in the Catholic church, that I hardly know where to begin to discuss what's wrong.  Or how to begin countering claims and presuppositions so laughably devoid of any historical basis or elementary logic that they hardly merit intellectual effort.

If one did want to stoop to an intellectual response to such a non-intellectual grab bag of ill-conceived notions about the Catholic church, what it teaches, what it has done over the course of history, here are some of the obvious points I think one might make in response to the prevailing logic of the new generation of apologists for Catholic truth, with their crude, defiant insistence that their truth has won and is validated as the truth simply because it has stamped out dissenting opinions (along with one brother and sister Catholic after another, ho happens to hold those opinions):

Those 2,000 year-old "truths" being defended by the John Paul II generation of apologists are not by any means what the church has held and taught forever.  The primary way in which those "truths" reach the current generation of younger Catholic is through the catechism.

Jesus would not recognize the catechism.  He would be mystified by what he would read in the catechism--by its enumeration of "truths" he supposedly delivered to the church as the deposit of faith to be safeguarded by the successors of the apostles generation after generation in the church.  The catechism would make no sense to him, as a devout Jew.  The notion of truth on which it depends--the notion that divine truth can be bundled up into little syllogistic package-statements and delivered as a "deposit" to be parroted and ardently defended by generation upon generation of faithful Catholics: that notion is worlds removed from the Jewish notion of religious truth with which Jesus's thinking was imbued.

The idea that someone walking into any Catholic church in the world today, and participating in its liturgical worship, is somehow doing and acting as followers of Jesus did and acted in the New Testament period is laughable.  The notion that any liturgical forms or ecclesial gewgaws venerated by Catholics today faithfully replicate the practice of New Testament Christians, who met in house churches for eucharistic celebrations that occurred in the context of meals, is so historically naive as to be absurd.

The belief that what the church says in its current catechism is what it has always taught, for 2,000 years, and that church teaching has not changed (over and over and over again) is equally absurd for anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of history.  What the church has taught and how those teachings have been formulated over the course of 2,000 years of complex history have changed repeatedly.  Change is, in fact, one of the most elementary truths of the church from its foundational period, from the time in which Paul corrected Peter when Peter argued that the community could not change, could not discard the Jewish mold in which the church was born, in its interaction with Gentile culture.

The church is commanded to change and has been commanded to change from its very inception, since it is commanded to go into all cultures and proclaim the gospel to every culture in the world.  That mission makes no sense if the church cannot constantly reframe how it sees and does things, in ever-shifting cultural contexts.

The belief that "the bishops may be bastards, but they're our bastards"; that the church is incapable of cruelty and had no role in the Inquisition or in promoting holy wars, etc.; that priests, bishops, and religious cannot be and have not been capable of extreme cruelty at many points in history; that the church clings to solid, unchanging truth while the state is constantly knocking about to find truth and is the real source of error and cruelty in the world: all these childish beliefs make sense only if Catholics choose to ignore reams and reams of easily accessed historical information available to any half-educated person with a desire to learn today.

Younger Catholics, Catholics miseducated in the John Paul II era of Catholic truth, pay a higher and higher intellectual and moral price for their refusal to engage the obvious and intellectually compelling critical arguments of many of their co-religionists and the culture at large today.  That price is the price of negotiating the cognitive dissonance created by, say, the expulsion of Fr. Bourgeois from a religious community for supporting women's ordination, while Cardinal Law, who protected one serial pedophile after another, lives in "spendorous surroundings" in Rome, in the following way: Catholic truth is the truth, and the bishops are our bishops.  And so any other truth that competes with the official narrative of the church must ipso facto not be truth at all, or must be tarnished truth.  Tarnished like what passes for truth in non-Catholic religious traditions that have departed from the successors of the apostles and have lost access to the deposit of faith in which real and complete truth is locked up.

And so we John Paul II apologists have to cut and paste, clip and patch, in order to ignore the many plain truths coming our way every day from the media, the internet, the world around us, the classroom--anywhere--as we cling to the truth taught to us only by the church.  The same truth it has taught to us for 2,000 years.  Which is mediated to us only by the bishops as successors of the apostles.  Who have the keys that lock and unlock the deposit of faith in which these salvific, unchanging truths are stored.

And we will defend that truth at all costs, and those who dispense it to us, no matter how cruel our defense begins to appear to people of good will, including some brother and sister Catholics, because that truth has prevailed.  We've won.  We won when John Paul II was beatified.

And only winners have the truth.  That's what truth is, by definition.  It's what wins in history.  Losers, by definition, have departed from the truth.  And in grinding the faces of the losers in the ground, we Catholic apologists modeling our practice of the faith on Bl. John Paul II's practice are actually doing a holy thing, since we're defending and vindicating the truth on which the salvation of all humanity depends.

This is, in a nutshell, the kind of crude logic I hear the John Paul II generation of Catholic apologists using, as they interact on various blogs these days (including this blog), and in other venues of discussion where the topic of Catholic truth is on the table.  It's embarrassing.  It's naive.  It demands a tremendously dehumanizing intellectual and moral price from those who push these arguments.  It is morally repulsive in its bellicose triumphalistic claim that truth is what wins in history and what loses is ipso facto untruth.

But it also happens to be the position that has "won" in the church, and it's an absolutely perfect fit for the logic of patriarchal hierarchy on which the governance system of the church depends.  And it will therefore not only not disappear now that John Paul II has been beatified, but it will continue to grow within the Catholic church.  It will continue to grow because it's being deliberately massaged from the top/center of the church now.

All things considered, I think Joan Chittister might just be right: a wiser and more humane institution might find other ways to deal with minority opinions.  Opinions which, though vanquished for the nonce, often turn out to have pointed the way to real humanity, while the dominant opinion of an era turns out to have pointed in quite the opposite direction.

The graphic is a photograph of Fr. Roy Bourgeois protesting at the School of the Americas, 1999.

National Catholic Reporter on Firing of Bishop William M. Morris: Pope's Priorities Now Clear

National Catholic Reporter has published an editorial addressing the recent firing of Australian bishop William M. Morris.  As the title of the editorial suggests, if anyone still remains in doubt about Pope Benedict's priorities for his church, she or he need doubt no longer: the priorities are clear after this action.  It's all about extending an "intellectual chill" in the church that goes beyond the excommunication of Fr. Roy Bourgeois for supporting women's ordination or the condemnation of Sr. Elizabeth Johnson's magisterial work on the theology of God.  

It's about suppressing any and all dissent, even the kind of pastoral thinking out loud that Bishop Morris did in the 2006 pastoral letter to his diocese that has resulted in his dismissal.  It's about asserting absolute control over any and all intraeccesial conversations, from the top or center of the church, and assuring that if those conversations don't march lock-step with the top/center, they're squelched.  Squelched along with the hapless brothers and sisters in Christ mounting the conversations because they imagine that the gospels (and Holy Spirit) have inspired them to do so.

A powerful excerpt from this powerful editorial statement:

First, it turns out it’s really not that difficult for the pope to give a bishop a pink slip. In the course of the quarter-century clergy sexual abuse cover-up, there’s been considerable handwringing over just this question. Bishops don’t “work for” the pope, we have been told. Bishops are “fathers” to their flock – with all the unconditional love and commitment that entails – not employees subject to the whims, well-intentioned or otherwise, of the boss. Canonical procedures must be followed.

Apparently, that’s just so much hooey. If the pope and his advisers care deeply about an issue about which a bishop has publicly raised questions – such as women priests and optional celibacy – a way can be found to dismiss that bishop.

And – noteworthy because it goes to some underlying issues – a bishop who acts against church teaching and law related to sexually abusive priests apparently need fear no such reprisal.

Philadelphia Cardinal Justin Rigali, for example, continues a life befitting a prince in splendorous surroundings, even as his flouting of church procedures (and perhaps civil law) resulted in nearly 30 diocesan priests facing administrative suspension and heat from local prosecutors.

And not to forget Cardinal Bernard Law, orchestrator of the Boston clergy abuse cover-up. His punishment?  An extended Roman holiday and a healthy pension. Meanwhile, Morris gets the door.

The pope’s priorities are clear. 

The context presupposed by the preceding remarks: one of the ploys the Vatican and some dioceses have sought to use to evade moral and legal responsibility for priests sexually abusing minors, who are permitted to remain in ministry after their abuse has become known, is the argument that bishops and priests don’t work for any big boss above them.  They are independent contractors, as it were.  And so those above them in the tightly controlled hierarchical system according to which Catholic governance is structured are not in any way responsible for the actions of those beneath.

As anyone who has given even cursory thought to the behavior of ethically challenged, morality-eliding corporations recognizes, this tactic of shielding the top or center from responsibility is a common evasive tactic of any corporate structure that is a rigidly structured hierarchy.  This evasive technique is a by-product of hierarchy, a predictable response precisely of organizations structured as top-down (or center-to-margins) hierarchies.  

Hierarchical corporate structures place supreme emphasis on the obligation of everyone in the hierarchical chain of command to obey everyone above him.  I use the male pronoun deliberately here, because these tightly controlled hierarchies demanding implicit, absolute obedience down the chain of command are far and away more typical of male-dominated institutions than female ones.  They’re common in institutions that have historically been male-bonded fraternities, like the military, the police, corporate boards, etc.  And the Catholic church. 

In most of those secular institutions, of course, change has been underway throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, and the rigid mechanisms of control are being vigorously challenged, primarily by women seeking full inclusion in the social and economic structures of various societies.  In the Catholic church, however, the structures of absolute control have grown only ever more stolidly authoritarian at this point in history, precisely in response to the claim of many women that they are called by the Spirit to be ordained ministers, and thereby to enter (and, from the viewpoint of the patriarchal system itself, to interrupt) the hierarchical chain of Catholic governance.

The response of the leaders of the Catholic church to that claim of many Catholic women and those in solidarity with women seeking ordination has been to fossilize the structures of control, the hierarchical mechanisms, even more decisively.  It has been to reassert the hierarchical motif within the Catholic system of governance, and, following Bl. John Paul II, whose ultimate response to the question of ordaining women was to decree that he could not change what God had set up within the church even if he wanted to do so, to call that inflexible patriarchal reassertion divine inspiration, an affirmation of what the Catholic church has always believed and practiced, which no pope has the right to change.

This reflexive gesture of self-protective, self-perpetuating patriarchy within the Catholic governing structures, in response to the valid claims of women to share in the ministerial life (and governing responsibility) of the Catholic church, locks the leadership of the Catholic church into patterns of patriarchal response typical of male hierarchical communities at their morally grossest.  To return to the evasive technique of the Vatican and bishops faced with questions about their moral and legal responsibility for priests abusing minors: one of the effects of the decision of the past two popes to hinge the future of their church on the maintenance of patriarchy as a divinely instituted ecclesial order for Catholicism is that Catholic governance structures are now ever more faithfully aping the behavior of male hierarchical institutions at their ethical worst, in secular society.

When faced with questions about the responsibility of those on top (or at the center) for those down the chain of command, leaders of rigidly structured hierarchies completely dependent on unquestioning obedience as the primary virtue of the leadership structure always, predictably shield the top or center from responsibility.  Though everyone observing the behavior of the structure under consideration, and examining how it fits together, knows that in the tightly controlled hierarchy, no decision ever takes place or can take place without the knowledge and consent of the man at the top/center.

Since total control of the top/center man is what the entire system is all about.  And total unquestioning obedience of every other link in the chain is what it’s all about as a corollary.  In an absolutist hierarchy whose central virtue is unquestioning obedience, no one in the chain of command dares to make decisions independent of the man above him.  He does not dare to give even the suggestion of asking questions or disobeying, because the reprisal is too great.  It is immediate expulsion from the hierarchical system itself.

And so here’s the situation that results from the decision of Popes John Paul II and Benedict to structure the Catholic church even more hierarchically, more patriarchally, than has been the case in the past: as the NCR editorial notes, while good, pastorally astute bishops (or priests or theologians) like Bishop Morris or Fr. Bourgeois or Sr. Elizabeth Johnson are chewed up and thrown away by the current system of Catholic governance, morally shady, ethically disreputable characters like Archbishop Chaput or Cardinals Rigali and Law thrive.  They are held up by the system as exemplars of its primary virtue: unquestioning obedience.

Cardinals Rigali and Law continue to live in “splendorous surroundings” despite their clear, undeniable protection of priests sexually abusing children, while Bishop Morris is out on his ear.  And the Catholic faithful are asked to identify Chaput, Rigali, and Law as moral heroes (they have, after all, served the church well through their unquestioning obedience), while they’re asked to view Bourgeois, Johnson, and Morris as morally questionable renegades.

Something’s wrong with this picture, with the picture the official Catholic church wants to paint for itself and adherents at this point in history—it’s morally wrong, in the view of increasing numbers of faithful Catholics.  Because we can see with our own eyes that those being chewed up and spit out by the rotten system have a moral integrity that vastly exceeds the integrity of the men being held up to us as moral exemplars.  And we find ourselves in a moral and spiritual bind, as a result.

When such harsh cognitive dissonance develops—particularly around central symbols of who or what is a moral exemplar—in an institution that claims to teach and exemplify moral values, here’s what usually happens: morally thinking, morally sensitive, upright people tend to shy away from the institution, and look elsewhere for sustenance for their moral lives.  But as they do so, true believers energized by the demand for absolute unquestioning obedience turn to the institution in question even more decisively, because it feeds their psychological need for unquestioning obedience.

The beatification of John Paul II is a rallying cry—a battle cry—of Benedict to the latter group, to carry the day for the Catholic church in the 21st century.  As Tom Fox notes in a statement today about the Bishop Morris story, Morris knew that he was to be fired the day following the beatification of John Paul II.  Pope Benedict himself told Morris this in a meeting 14 months ago (for further background information, see Anthea Gleeson’s interview with Bishiop Morris in The Chronicle [Toowoomba, Australia] and Tom Roberts and Joshua McElwee in this recent NCR article).

The date of Bishop Morris’s sacking was chosen deliberately by Pope Benedict to follow immediately on the beatification of the previous pope.  It was chosen, in other words, to be a concrete demonstration of what that beatification means for the whole church, and a signal to the true believers within the church who have called for the heads of Morris, Bourgeois, Johnson and others that they won a victory with this beatification.

And that, no matter what many Catholics or people of good will think, the leaders of the Catholic church will continue to demand that we regard Chaput, Rigali, and Law as unalloyed exemplars of the Catholic moral life in the 21st century.  Precisely as they also demand that we see Bl. John Paul II such an unalloyed exemplar.

This is a bold decision on the part of Benedict to continue at all cost hinging the future of the Catholic church on its remnant elements (and, it always has to be said when we speak of the remnant church, on the powerful economic European and American economic elites driving these Vatican decisions), on the ever diminishing cadre of true believers willing to identify unquestioning obedience as the central virtue of the Christian life.  Even if Jesus does inconveniently say that love is the primary calling of those who walk in his path of discipleship, and is the primary characteristic by which those called by his name must be known.

Mary Hunt on U.S. Bishops' Condemnation of Elizabeth Johnson: All about Power

In her inimitable, straight-to-the-point way, theologian Mary Hunt dissects the U.S. Catholic bishops' recent action against theologian Elizabeth Johnson's book Quest for the Living God.  Hunt's analysis doesn't contain any information that hasn't already appeared in other accounts.  But as always, better than other tellings of the story, it drives right to the heart of the matter, framing the USCCB's condemnation of Johnson as an assertion of naked power at a time when the bishops' moral and teaching authority could not be in more disrepute, due to their handling of the abuse crisis.

And it's not at all without significance, Hunt notes, that the bishops are targeting a feminist theologian right now, one who has argued for women's ordination.  As she points out, groups like her WATER have long made the connections between clericalism and other issues that demand moral analysis from the standpoint of justice, and it is, in large part, the willingness of feminist theologians and women's activist groups to challenge the Catholic system of clericalism and connect it, through critical analysis, to other insupportable forms of injustice that incurs Rome's wrath.  These challenges are challenges to the claims of the clerical system to wield unilateral power in defining Catholicism--the kind of power on which Michael Sean Winters continues to insist authentic Catholicity is based.*

The Elizabeth Johnson story is, Hunt thinks, all about the Vatican and bishops asserting their right to define what is or is not Catholic, who is in and who is out, at a point in history when many Catholics--notably feminist thinkers--challenge the clerical system's right to unilateral ownership of the symbols and definition of Catholicism:

At issue here is not theology but power—the power to name theology ‘Catholic’. Countless interpretations of Dr. Johnson’s work later, the bishops’ point is simply to insist that they alone are the arbiters of all things Catholic. It doesn’t matter that many don’t understand, much less appreciate, contemporary theological method, nor that Elizabeth Johnson is hardly outré in feminist theological circles. What matters here is the fact that she writes and teaches at Fordham University, a social location that matches her commitments to theologize in the heart of the tradition.

The whole point of this exercise in my view is to send a message to the larger academic community that only those who toe the doctrinal line, absolutely and without any wiggle room, are theologically acceptable.

And as Mary Hunt's outstanding analysis of the Elizabeth Johnson story and what it means at a fundamental level appears, the board of the leading Catholic theological society in the U.S., the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA), has also issued a statement.  As this statement notes, the bishops' action in Johnson's case violated their own rules requiring dialogue with a theologian before her book was condemned.  The U.S. bishops, in dialogue with U.S. Catholic theologians, had worked out a system that permits theologians to know when questions have been raised about their work, and what those questions are.  The system worked out for the U.S. also creates a place for theologians under investigation to engage in dialogue with the bishops as the bishops scrutinize their work.

None of this happened in the case of Elizabeth Johnson.  Because what happened with Johnson is not really about the integrity of her work or the soundness of her theology.  It is really about power, pure and simple: naked power.  It is about the assertion of power over others at a point in history at which the claim to power of those doing the asserting is being robustly challenged, particularly by feminist thinkers.

For me personally, there's a grand irony in reading the CTSA statement side by side with Hunt's truth-telling analysis.  This irony points to some of the key tensions between groups on the cutting edge of theological reflection, like Hunt's WATER group, and centrist Catholic organizations like CTSA, which in my view do not and cannot point the way to a vibrant future for the American Catholic church.  To explain this I'll have to tell a personal story.

I know a number of the current CTSA board members personally.  I was in grad school with them, in fact.  And though one of these CTSA members now has exceptionally strong power to include Steve and me as Catholic theologians pushed to the margins of the academy in a way we have not been included in the past, neither she nor the other person whom we know on the CTSA board has ever lifted a finger to see we're included.  And they don't intend to do so.

To the contrary: the CTSA member with great power to include us told us after we were both fired at Belmont Abbey College that, though she deplored what that school did to us and how it was done, we had not played the political game adroitly.  We had, in other words, brought our own humiliation and marginalization down on our heads--by not pretending and hiding successfully enough.  

We had outed ourselves--the unforgivable sin, for a Catholic institution--simply by being.  By being gay.  By being a gay couple.  By living together.  By not apologizing for doing so.  And so, though neither of us had ever made any public statement at all about our sexual orientation or our relationship, we had not played the game adroitly enough because we had not dissimulated successfully enough.

This analysis--you weren't politically savvy, and look what happened--defends the system wielding unjust power and using ethically shabby methods to target gay folks working in Catholic institutions.  It blames the victim.  It's the kind of analysis centrists, who continue to cozy up to the power of the center and thereby gain positions of authority there, love to dole out to those on the margins.  This is how centrists get their power, and why they don't ever intend effectively to challenge the presuppositions on which the unjust power of ruling elites is based: when push comes to shove, they always defend the system itself, only mildly criticizing the operations of its power when those have been grossly unethical. 

But never breaking with that system or mounting any effective, honest analysis of it.  And blaming those hapless and powerless people who find themselves caught in the machinations of the power system, chewed up, and spit out--blaming these victims for what the merciless machine does to them.

And there's more.  The other CTSA board member Steve and I know well was one of our closest friends all through graduate school.  She was a close friend, that is, until Belmont Abbey fired us and pushed us out of the closet.

When that happened, we became like lepers whom she could not, would not touch.  We would go to CTSA national meetings, see this friend in hallways during meetings, say hello, and she would run--literally scamper--to get away from us.  The one time we actually managed to corner her and talk to her about what had happened to us as Catholic theologians, she said to us, "Well, now you'll have to find your community of support in the gay community.  Not the Catholic church."

This woman is a nun.  We were astonished at this conclusion: we Catholics can't offer you support as gay human beings who belong to our church every bit as much as we do.  You'll have to look for it somewhere else--outside the church, where support for your kind of people exists.  I do not want or intend to remain your friend, now that you are out of the closet.  Catholics can't offer that kind of friendship (and certainly not jobs and health care benefits) to those who are openly and unapologetically gay.  You're going to have to make your way in the world now without the support of the body of Christ--which continues to preach about the obligation to love everyone and challenge discrimination against anyone, and which promotes everyone's right to have bread on the table and access to health care.

Just not gays working in Catholic institutions, though, you understand.  Those statements stop applying in that case.  We are family.  You are not.  Your "gay lifestyle"--your open, honest acknowledgment of your God-given identity, your refusal to apologize for it.  That's the impediment we can't get around.  Keeping it well-hidden wouldn't be a problem for the family at all, since, God knows, there's enough closeted homosexuality in Catholic episcopal palaces and rectories and convents and the Vatican to sink a fleet of good-sized battleships, if they were loaded full of all the closet cases about which we wink--because they remain in the closet.

All of this is in my mind right now as I read Mary Hunt's article about Elizabeth Johnson side by side with the CTSA statement about the Johnson case because of another comment I recall this former friend who is now on the CTSA board making to me.  At some point not long before our firing at Belmont Abbey, I happened to mention to her that I was in touch with Mary Hunt, who was involved in the editorial process for an article of mine soon to be published in a journal.

When she heard this, my then-friend raised her eyebrows and said, "Mary Hunt.  I'd leave her alone.  And WATER.  They're way out on the margins."  

What she meant, of course, was, "Mary Hunt is a lesbian.  Lesbians don't really have a place in the bosom of the church.  As I do.  Lesbians and lesbian feminists find their support network in the gay community.  The church can't embrace them and offer them support."

As I say, reading Mary Hunt's article alongside the CTSA board's statement about Elizabeth Johnson makes me think about the two very different futures for American Catholicism both documents envisage, and for which they're working.  One of the two is still so situated within, comfortable with, the institution it mildly criticizes, that it blinds itself to the significant shortcomings of that institution which make it impossible for the institution to proclaim the gospel effectively at this point in history.

Quite specifically, the centrist model imagines it can defend women and the rights of women while remaining totally silent about heterosexism and homophobia--about the considerable heterosexism and homophobia still embedded in Catholic institutions, which completely undercuts those institutions' claims to be about justice for women or anyone else.  

I spent a good bit of time this weekend talking back and forth at this Commonweal thread about racism, the churches, and politics.  And, as any reader who has the patience to slog through the comments here will discover, in the context of that back-and-forth dialogue, one contributor who surely knew--since my username is William Lindsey--that I'm a male (and who would, if [s]he follows Commonweal threads often, also know I'm a gay male), decided at some point to shift to a she/he construction in talking about me.  Because (s)he bitterly disliked what I was saying in the conversation.

This anonymous contributor, j.a.m., has been on other Commonweal threads recently making nasty comments about feminism and women's rights.  And then, surprisingly, another contributor, Gerelyn (Hollingsworth), who also often appears on Commonweal threads making statements that appear to support women's rights, suddenly weighed in, criticizing several other contributors who called j.a.m.'s bluff--because he was gay-bashing--and sided with j.a.m.!  She sided with a Commonweal contributor who frequently knocks women and feminist theology.  Which she claims to support.

The Catholic "feminist" sided with the Catholic anti-feminist against the gay man.  And she took to task the other contributors in the thread, William Fitzgerald and Mary, who had called j.a.m.'s bluff in a hilarious way (by beginning to identify j.a.m. himself with female pronouns) due to his or her nasty gender-switching attack on me, which was intended to discredit anything I said.  And, above all, to tell me I'm not welcome in respectable Catholic conservations of the center--the real name of the game when these attacks take place.

This is an interesting exchange, isn't it?  At one level, what's most interesting about it, perhaps, is the freedom people still seem to enjoy in centrist Catholic circles that want to claim intellectual credibility to use these adolescent tactics to disempower someone who's gay.  The gender-switching game with the pronouns: that's embarrassingly crude and embarrassingly immature.  It wouldn't fly in most other intellectual circles that want to claim any credibility in the academy at large.  That it can still fly in Catholic centrist circles says a lot about where we are (or aren't), as American Catholics right now.  It says a lot about how stuck in adolescence the club of the American Catholic center is.

And also interesting is the pretense of some Catholic intellectuals that it's possible to be feminists and then collude with homophobic prejudice that is, when it targets gay men, all about using crude anti-feminist stereotypes to attack men imagined as women.  The gender analysis of Catholic "feminists" who can't recognize that homophobia targeting gay men is rooted in the very system of insupportable claims men make about male entitlement and male superiority as they deny rights to women: this is not very sophisticated gender analysis at all.

Mary Hunt does and has long made those connections.  And for that reason, I see her and those with whom she stands as important signposts to the future for the American Catholic church.  Though I was warned against her years ago by someone who is now a CTSA board member and who is now claiming to stand in support of Elizabeth Johnson and Johnson's feminist theology, I'm rather happy, on the whole, to have ended up out on the margins with Hunt and not in the center with my former friends in CTSA.

The air feels more salubrious out on the disreputable verges where we ragtag and thrown-away folks are told we belong.

* For Mary Hunt's very effective response to Michael Sean Winters about who defines Catholic identity and how that defining gets done, see this Religion Dispatches article--and see my summary of this debate in this Bilgrimage posting.

Women's Ordination and Abolition of Celibacy: Probing the Theological (and Gender) Issues

 

It's instructive to read Mary Hunt's latest essay at Religion Dispatches, which asks if women priests will change the Catholic church, side by side with a number of articles that have appeared in the days following the Thomas Euteneuer story, all of which focus on the need of the Catholic church to reconsider its ban on non-celibate clergy.  Recently, Alberto Cutie, a former Catholic priest in Miami who left the Catholic church to marry last year when his relationship to a woman became known, and who is now an Episcopal priest, published a statement about his new book Dilemma: A Priest's Struggle Between Faith and Love.

Cutie argues that a "culture of (open) secrecy" is alive and well in the clerical sector of the Catholic church, and that many priests are involved in relationships with adults, about which bishops often know, and which they tolerate as long as the relationships remain secret--even when their secrecy is an open secret within clerical ranks.  Cutie also cites the case of Fr. Euteneuer, maintaining that Euteneuer was involved in "some sort of sexual relationship with an adult woman" about which both church officials and his own employer, Human Life International, knew but refused to disclose information until forced to do so.

Maureen Fiedler has made a similar point, arguing that Euteneuer's story is "nothing new," but is an old story--priest breaks vow of celibacy--regarding priests violating their obligation of celibacy with adult women.  Fiedler recently interviewed Cutie, who maintains that, in addition to maintaining open secrets about the many priests involved in relationships with other adults, the hierarchy officially frowns on gay seminarians while knowing full well that seminaries are full of gay candidates for ordination, and that there is a "Pink Mafia" within the hierarchy which promotes and protects gay priests and bishops.

Both Fiedler and Cutie call for the church to reconsider its demand that priests commit themselves to celibacy in order to be ordained.  And I say it's instructive to read these post-Euteneuer articles side by side with Mary Hunt's essay on women's ordination for the following reason: in Hunt's view, abolishing the vow of celibacy is hardly all that the Catholic church needs to do in order to return the priesthood to some semblance of scriptural and theological cogency.

It needs, instead, to reconsider the meaning of priestly ministry by placing clerical ministry within the context of the priesthood of all believers--within the context of what Hunt calls the communitarian dimension of ministry, in which all Christians, ordained and non-ordained, are involved.  And it needs, therefore, to link ordination and clerical life to the many forms of ministry within the Christian community that challenge the domination of one group of people by another, of poor people by rich people, of women by men, of gay people by straight ones.

Hunt is dubious about the push to ordain women as long as the structures of clerical life remain intact within the Catholic church, and as long as the insupportable theological foundation on which these structures rest remains unquestioned.  Her fear--and in my view, she is absolutely correct to wonder about this--is that ordaining women while the current structures and the present theology of priestly ministry remain unchanged will only plug women as objects into a badly faltering clerical system that needs warm bodies to fill holes.

It will only, that is, succeed in exploiting women even more than they are already being exploited by the Catholic church.  And it will replicate, with female bodies, a toxic theology of priesthood in which priests are little lords in the kingdom of Catholicism, and lay people are their surfs.

And in my view, Cutie's critique tends in precisely that direction--though I strongly support the drive to make celibacy optional within the Catholic church.  In my view, Cutie's understanding of the gender dynamics within the Catholic church rather uncritically bolsters popular cultural preconceptions about the roles of men and women in the world, in which men predictably come out on top and women on bottom.

I don't hear--I don't see--the radical edge of gender critique in Cutie's story that, in my view, is absolutely indispensable for the reform of the Catholic church and of all Christian churches that have invested so heavily, at this point in history, in gender roles that accord higher status to men and second-tier status to women.  And it is for this reason, I think, that Albert Cutie is spectacularly missing a key point in Fr. Euteneuer's story, which cannot be missed if we want to understand the story aright and make it the beginning of an honest and fruitful conversation about the church we have become at this point in history.

That point is this: Thomas Euteneuer was not just any heterosexual priest involved in "some sort of relationship" with a consenting adult woman.  He was a high-profile, glamor-boy priest (not unlike Cutie himself) who gained extraordinary power and privilege by playing the gender game right, and by presenting himself as a symbol of machismo in the many Catholic media circles that high-profiled him.

And he turned around and used that power and privilege--and the macho status that bought the power and privilege--to abuse a woman or women under his pastoral care.  Far from being a consensual adult relationship, his relationship was, per his own statement about it, one that took advantage of his pastoral charge of a vulnerable woman.  It was, in short, an abusive relationship and not a healthy adult relationship, and abusive in a quite specific way that regards women as objects to be used by heterosexual men, who are entitled to dominate and use women precisely because they are "normal" heterosexual men. 

And the only reason Catholic liberals are now defending that "adult" relationship is this: a surface reading of it reinforces the gender stereotypes, and the unhealthy and erroneous assumptions about sexual orientation, on which much liberal Catholic analysis of the Catholic church depends.  Analysis in which a vicious pink Mafia of closeted gay bishops have turned the priesthood into a misogynistic enclave of gay, women-hating priests.

Which needs real men, married men, to reform it, men of the ilk of Alberto Cutie.  And, God help us, Thomas Euteneuer. 

Another Blast from the Past: Reflections on the Legacy of John Paul II, Superstar

Another blast from the past.  This journal entry is one I wrote on 13 April 2005, following the death of John Paul II and in the midst of the deliberations about the pope to succeed him.  It's one that seems to me still pertinent: 

Encounter at newspaper kiosk: I want to buy the issue of Newsweek commemorating John Paul II.  My friend Ralph has told me it has articles about his suppression of theologians:

Kiosk lady: Whatcha lookin for, hon?

Me: The issue of Newsweek commemorating the pope after his death.  But (pointing to the issue on the newsstand) I'm not sure it's this or the next issue.

Kiosk lady: What's the article about?

Me: Well, an assessment of his legacy.

Kiosk lady: Yeah, they're saying he cured that guy of cancer.

Me: Uh, huh.  But the article I'm looking for is about his effect on theologians.

Kiosk lady: Blank look.

What does it mean, in this age of mass media and image manipulation, to be made a saint?  JPII and the circle around him used the media more adroitly than any other pope throughout history.  Already there are cries for his canonization--for the church to bypass its five-year rule and make him an instant saint.

It will happen, by hook or by crook.  The curial leaders need a saint now--desperately so.  The Catholic right does--its carefully tailored, carefully sanitized view of JPII that purges from his moral witness any of his numerous references to the evils of capital punishment and rapacious unfettered capitalism.  Mater si, magistra no.

Today's paper has an essay about a recent meeting of Christian-right bigwigs that included Ms. Schlafly.  One of those in attendance quoted Stalin with approval re: Justice Kennedy, who's now the target of right-wing ire for casting the swing vote on "their" issues on the Supreme Court.  Stalin once said, vis-a-vis an opponent, "No man, no problem."  The context of the quote clearly indicates that Stalin was referring to an actual purge, an execution of his critic.

This gathering of the Christian right went on record fiercely opposed to making adolescents immune from the death penalty.  In the name of protesting a culture of death, the Christian right is deeply invested in death--the death of its enemies.

The attack on the judiciary has deep symbolic import for the future of the American democratic system and of American culture.  That system was set up with checks and balances in which an independent judiciary plays a key role.  Judges are supposed to be above special interest.  They are supposed to be immune to being bought.

Unlike elected officials, who are susceptible to pressure from the electorate they represent, judges are supposed to apply legal principles fairly, impartially, even when those principles are unpopular or inconvenient even for the judge to follow.

Abolishing an independent judiciary and compelling judges to adhere to religious orthodoxy oaths would turn American into a theocracy.  This is what the religious right wants, and, as with any fascist movement, when it cannot attain control by fair means, by democratic process, it's willing to remove the velvet glove and reveal the iron fist.

Segue to Rome and the canonization of JPII: throughout the reign of JPII, we witnessed a clumsy step-dance in which church leaders alternately cozened the masses with bread-and-circus imagery, and took off the velvet glove to show the iron fist.  Fascism intertwined with the soul of Catholicism.  It has always been a welcome guest at the table of Catholic leaders--the sometimes errant relation who is nevertheless always welcomed with open arms, when he shows up again at the door, home from his travels.

With socialism, it's not so, though he may with more justification claim to be the true heir of the Christian tradition.  He's the disreputable shirttail cousin the church claims not to recognize on the street.  But that's another story . . . .

The tremendous irony of the papal reign of JPII: in the name of defending tradition, he eviscerated key aspects of the tradition.  His was a fascist reign, one that can justifiably claim an authentic Catholic lineage (but as with fascism) one that betrays key principles of that lineage.

JPII made decisions by mere fiat.  Those close to him say that his decision-making style was not to read carefully composed documents providing him with detailed information about the nuances of difficult situations.  These he waved away . . . and went into the chapel to pray, emerging with a decision.  The decision.  His decision.  His decision as God's word.  His word as the exclusive word of God for the church.

JPII as John Paul Superstar: the media star who bussed babies and stopped to kiss the ground of every country he visited was, in his secret chambers, a benign dictator.  Or perhaps not so benign.

When God spoke from the mouth of JPII, swords flashed forth--for some people.  Theologians felt the lash of his words: you may not discuss women's ordination; your show is over--go home.  Women felt the sting: accept your second-class citizenship in church and world; God (who speaks exclusively through men) so ordains it.

Gays and lesbians suffered under this man: you are intrinsically disordered; you represent an incomparable threat to the wholesomeness of Christian culture, because you are polluted and stinking of corruption.  The poor seeking better lives through political action in Latin American watched with dismay as one progressive bishop after another, who had dared to raise his voice against ruthless regimes as no poor person might raise his own voice, was replaced by bishops who regularly dined at the tables of dictators.  

And survivors of clerical abuse . . . !

The disconnect between who JPII in his actual practice of the faith as leader of the church and representative of Jesus in the world, and the media superstar image so carefully groomed by his advisors and the media, is astonishing.  One wonders why church leaders would even try, now.

Why the sudden push to canonize JPII?  At least two factors are at work, I suspect.  One is the deeply repressed awareness that the media circus will end.  There will inevitably be assessments--sober, honest ones--of this man's legacy, which point to his betrayal of key Catholic values.  In authentic Catholicism, no one is the exclusive voice of God.  God speaks throughout the community, often in those despised by the community. Bishops, who are church-leadership-on-the-ground, have a crucial role in discerning the Spirit throughout the church.  Their voices should count, too.  Canonizing JPII immediately would be a preemptive strike that would choke unsettling questions about his leadership style . . .  choke refractory and embarrassing conversation before it finds its feet.

The other impulse for JPII's immediate canonization is fascist.  Continuation of fascist control requires, well, more fascism.  It is in the nature of fascism to keep extending its control.  It cannot brook opposition: no man, no problem.

There is a possibility, with a new pope, that JPII's betrayal of key Catholic principles--collegiality, for instance--will be recognized and addressed.  If that occurs, what else will become apparent, once the JPII Superstar mask is removed?

What else lurks within the deepest recess of church leadership, that would prove extremely embarrassing if allowed to surface?  The abuse crisis is an indicator of what more remains to be recognized.  The choice to give Bernard Law a high profile in the ceremonies commemorating JPII was deliberate: it was a statement that, if Ratzinger and his cronies have their way, the fascist legacy will continue.

Those calling for exposure of the scary underbelly of the Roman church must be checked at all costs, many of those in the papal conclave will no doubt conclude.  What the whistle-blowers have the ability to reveal is too stark, too damning.  Now if ever, is the time to strike: the iron is hot.  It will cool eventually.  Already, secretive organizations seeking to thwart new revelations from the inside, heavily funded by well-heeled fascist Catholics, are cropping up.  They are modeled on other secretive fascist organizations.  Opus Bono Sacerdoti is one of them.  Ostensibly, this organization arose as a grassroots response of Catholic laity concerned about giving accused priests a fair hearing.  Its ability to garner immediate high-profile support in the church--Richard John Neuhaus, for instance--and to gain national media attention, says otherwise.