Lax in enforcing church doctrine
Speaking of eccentric Catholic priests like Father Greg Boyle who care more about their oppressed and overwhelmed parishioners than they do about Vatican dogma, I’m reminded that Seattle had an archbishop like that thirty years ago…and that the Vatican sent an enforcer to suppress him.
Ever since the Vatican crackdown on Seattle Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen last summer [i.e. 1986], Patrick Jankanish has been coming alone to Sunday mass at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church.
“My wife was a convert {to Catholicism} before we were married nine years ago,” Jankanish told a visitor, adding that the couple has been deeply involved in the vigorous social justice program of the Jesuit parish on fashionable Capital Hill.
To the Jankanishes, Hunthausen is “very important in the justice community,” encouraging Christians to apply their faith to problems ranging from battered wives to nuclear warfare.
So when Rome charged that Hunthausen was lax in enforcing church doctrine and stripped him of significant powers last year, Jankanish’s wife Lisa “left the church,” he said.
Emphasis added. That’s a major reason I loathe and detest the Catholic church – that preference for evil reactionary “doctrine” over embracing actual people and their problems.
In disciplining Hunthausen, Pope John Paul II has made clear the depth of his determination to enforce strict doctrinal orthodoxy on the church in this country. The church in the United States has long been viewed by many at the Vatican, and by some home-grown critics as well, as too lax on moral questions, too accommodating to the permissive culture that surrounds it.
Too “lax, accommodating, permissive” on moral questions – that’s one way of looking at it, and another is that the church is far too narrow and authoritarian and reactionary on moral questions. In other words it’s not that we’re all lazy and sloppy about moral questions, it’s that the church is fucked up on moral questions. Its morality is bad and evil. The morality of people like Boyle and Hunthausen is better than the church’s. Not looser, not more relaxed, not easier – better.
Until last summer, Hunthausen, 65, was best known for his social activism and his aggressive antiwar stance. An implacable foe of nuclear arms — he once called the Trident nuclear submarine base here “the Auschwitz of Puget Sound” — he has led several antinuclear demonstrations and for the last few years he has engaged in a legal minuet with the Internal Revenue Service in which the government garnishees from the archdiocese the portion of his income tax he withholds in protest against nuclear weapons.
The Vatican says its action against Hunthausen was prompted not by his pacifist views but by his failure to enforce church doctrine forcefully.
He was lax, Rome said, pointing to such things as his failure to ensure that 6- and 7-year-olds made their first confession before first communion; his allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments; his not cracking down on Catholic hospitals that performed contraceptive sterilizations, and his permitting an organization of homosexual Catholics to celebrate mass in St. James Cathedral.
There you go – that’s not “lax,” it’s better. “Confession” to a priest is not the sort of thing that should be required of anyone at any time; divorced people should not be socially shunned; hospitals should perform contraceptive sterilizations if people request them; “homosexual” Catholics should not be socially shunned. The church’s morality is ugly and cruel.
So last year Rome installed a hand-picked auxiliary, Bishop Donald W. Wuerl, 46, and ordered Hunthausen to relinquish authority to him in five key areas, including education of priests, the liturgy, and church relations with health care institutions.
That last one is especially sinister. “Church relations with health care institutions”=the church’s interference with women’s reproductive healthcare and everyone’s access to contraception. The church should have nothing to do with any of that.
H/t Charles Sullivan
And we’ve seen how that crackdown on health care worked, too–such as the case of Margaret McBride, a nun who was (temporarily) excommunicated for approving an abortion to save the mother’s life.
If you haven’t already, you might consider adding the Franciscan Friar Richard Rohr to your list of unexpected heroes. He has frequently butted heads with the conservative elements in the Church on the issue of homosexuality, and has spent a lot of time working with felons in prison.
‘Good’ Catholics, like ‘good’ Muslims, may provide suitable inspirational stories, but they cannot alter the actual content of their religions. The Quran continues to say what it has said, with the additional load of toxic Hadith. The Bible has not altered (though Catholics cling to six books that everyone else knows are fake) and is burdened with centuries of incoherent, hair-splitting, theology.
Can religion ever reform itself? At any moment, some angry boy, steeped in the Holy Book, can discover that he’s the great avenging prophet and launch another catastrophe.
John, that’s kind of my thinking, too. I definitely am in favor of religious people doing nice things, it’s just a bit hard to swallow that they are doing it because religious. We see the same patterns of good and bad behavior in non-believers, and in people who believe in gods other than Jesus, so I think it’s safe to say there are other things making people good or bad, and then they read their actions backward into whatever group they feel super strong about being part of.
The main problem I have with nice, human, reasonable Catholics, Calvinists, Mormons, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, etc, is that it gives cover for the religion. It actually helps perpetuate the bad stuff in religion by making religion itself seem benign rather than benighted. It allows people to brush off those horrible events as perpetrated by someone who wasn’t a True (Christian, Muslim, Calvinist, Jew, Hindu, etc). If the people who do good in this world would start taking credit for the good they do, and acknowledge that it isn’t because Jesus (or FSM, or other deity of your choice), then we could start looking at the negative impacts of religion. Good behaviors attributed to religion actually enables bad behaviors attributed to religion, and prevents us from sorting out the real problems of the world by locking one subset of behaviors inside a giant padded bubble saying “Do not touch”.
Some of us have begun to poke that bubble, and the liberal Christians scream at least as loudly as the religious who would control all our behaviors into perpetuity under some rigid, arbitrary code of laws laid down by a fictional being, and kill those who won’t obey.
This is the problem I have with Jonathan Haidt’s formulation (5 moral axes: harm/care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity; conservatives value all 5 roughly equally; liberals consider only the first 2 to be moral concerns). Cede the first premise and you’re already a cryptoconservative, as i argue Haidt is. Conservatives protect as moral concerns what are only authoritarian values.
Same here. I’ve done several posts about my dislike of Haidt’s way of framing that.
I’m not sure he’s really crypto about his conservatism now though.