Amy Welborn is mightily ticked off that I dared to quote the Catechism about Terri Schiavo. Since I am now in her mind not a Catholic, how can I refer to such a text? One of her Catholic readers goes even further: “Reading Andrew Sullivan making arguments from the catechism is like hearing Adolf Hitler give an exegesis on a passage from the Talmud.” Now that’s the voice of Christian dialogue. Mark Shea, a man who also claims to represent Catholicism in its orthodox form, emotes:
T’aint complicated. Everything–I mean *everything*–in Andrew’s world is ordered toward the defense, protection and promotion of One Little Thing. This was just one more opportunity to take a swipe at the thing that poses the biggest threat to that. His task here is not to teach Catholic ethics, but to obfuscate, confuse, blur and denigrate. A day or two ago he was trying to somehow construe the defense of Terri’s life in support of gay marriage. It’s all about l’il willie for Andrew.
That last quote is a wonderful insight into the minds of the Ratzingerites. The legal right of a husband to determine the future of his incapacitated wife, and the difficult balance between keeping someone alive who is in a vegetative state for decades and letting them die with dignity: this is all really about my penis. Puh-lease. Again, I’d give the benefit of the doubt to keeping Schiavo alive. But the extremism and absolutism of her advocates is unnerving. All I was trying to do by quoting the Catechism is to show that even under Ratzinger, there is an understanding of a balance here. It isn’t life-at-all-costs, which is how some of these people are sounding. I also find it odd that Welborn seems to believe that someone who does not subscribe to Cardinal Ratzinger’s sexual ethics (i.e. a huge majority of American Catholics) is thereby ruled inadmissable in any debate about Catholic ethics on life and death. Here’s how she puts it:
But really, if you reject the whole of the Church’s teaching on sexuality (and he does – remember his defenses of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s past sexual outrages?) – don’t, and I mean DON’T come at me quoting the Catechism. Just don’t.
That’s how Ratzinger sees it, of course. He is the sole guardian of truth; debate is pointless; all that is required is obedience; and those who are disobedient are barred from even speaking in the Catholic conversation. But to see this rigidity echoed among some lay-people shows the extent to which anti-intellectualism truly has taken hold. (For the record, I did not defend Schwarzenegger’s alleged sexual gropings. I called them gross and wrong. I merely defended his consensual past sex life and opposed the campaign to use his sexual past to prevent his election.)
The Dish 