“I am in complete agreement with your assessment of John Paul’s papacy. I am a 48-year-old female physician, who did missionary work in Kenya after I graduated from Notre Dame. My husband did mission work in Chile, during his 7-year stint as a seminarian. As someone who is a mandated reporter of child abuse, I have been stunned by the lack of outrage over the sexual abuse scandal in the Church. To many of my fellow Catholics, it is as if nothing happened. You are right that John Paul had an obligation to denounce this incredible evil, yet did nothing. Cronyism overcame any issues of morality.
You are also right-on about the psychosexual issues among the clergy. My husband’s ex-colleagues, now ordained, are really messed up. They have trouble talking to women, or they are in denial about their homosexuality, or they are at some sort of adolescent phase sexually. On many levels, they are just weird people. I know of no priest who sees what a problem this is. And I know of no one who is willing to publicly state what a very high price our Church pays for a celibate clergy. Add to this my and my husband’s experiences in the Third World, where clergy often laugh at celibacy, while having sexual relations (sometimes coercive) with many women. The whole situation is a mess and needs to be addressed, and urgently. But where shall we find such a priest?
Meanwhile, most believers’ ignorance of these issues does not portend well. But thank you for speaking out. The emperor, indeed, had no clothes.” And the emperor just forbade anyone from pointing it out.
THE GENDER DEBATE: What Larry Summers started, Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke continue. This is a fascinating debate – conducted at the high level it needs to be.
CONSERVATISM AGAIN: It seems odd to argue that my “conservatism of doubt” is entirely solipsistic when I’ve explained that it could indeed be marshalled as an argument against the Iraq war and against gay marriage. But let me address a more serious point, made by Ross Douthat. Ross’s complaint is the following:
The trouble, though, is that if “cultural consensus” is your main standard of political judgment, you’re going to 1) be slow to recognize actual-existing-injustice (as conservatives were with race, and conservatives-of-doubt are with abortion), and 2) be willing to accept innovations simply because the weight of cultural opinion militates in their favor.
I think you have to concede the former point. It will never be within the conservative’s temperament to see a blinding moral cause and do all he can to bring it about as soon as possible. In that sense, my own moral fervor about marriage rights, for example, is not very conservative, even if you could very plausibly argue that the argument is, in many ways, a conservative one. When I see do-nothing conservatives objecting to gay marriage from purely Hayekian, don’t-rock-the-boat grounds, I can recognize a genuinely conservative argument. (And, as Jonah rightly points out, the unprogrammatic nature of conservatism does indeed mean that many of us will live with some element of contradiction and that many of us will be able to disagree on prudential issues in politics, while sharing broadly the same tradition.)
A QUESTION OF TRUTH: My issue with Ross is that conservatives of doubt tend to believe that Burkean organic change in society isn’t merely random. The point about free societies, free markets and free minds is that their combined effect may well be to enlighten us about certain subjects. Doubt is the prerequisite of truth. I don’t buy the Millite idea of inevitable progress. But I do believe that one by-product of a free society is the advance of science and a better understanding of human nature. So we do not view women as we did a century ago. This is not simply a random, relativist change: it’s because we now know the truth about the equality of women, we experience it daily, and our blind prejudices and cruelties have far less power. (The nuances, of course, are now up for debate.) Ditto with race. And, so some extent, with abortion. Our ability, for example, to see the development of a fetus, to understand its development with far greater precision and detail than ever before, has inevitably sharpened our awareness of its humannness. We are way ahead of Aquinas here, who was basing “natural” law on what amounted to biological ignorance. And the reason our view of homosexuality has changed is not because we are somehow losing our sense of what is true or false: it is because we have a better, more informed view of what is true and false. This is not relativism. It is the accretion of truth. The real case against the Church’s position on homosexuality, for example, is not that it is cruel or callous or bigoted (although it is close to all those things). It is that it is untrue. It is untrue that gay people are “objectively disordered,” whatever that phrase is supposed to mean. They are merely different in ways we are only beginning to understand properly, and a century’s worth of personal testimony, scientific research and social reality has buttressed that claim enormously. There is a world of difference between believing that gay people are straight people with desires to do terrible things with their bodies and believing that homosexuality is innate, unchangeable and that homosexual persons have dignity as children of God. That difference – that change in understanding – has even been embraced by Catholic magisterium as recently as 1975, proving, yet again, that the notion that Catholicism cannot change, or that every single part of its teachings must be equally adhered to by all the faithful rests on a complete misreading of Catholicism. Of course, some cultural change may indeed be based on falsehood or misunderstanding. But a conservative of doubt embraces freedom in part because it advances truth better than any other system. The choice is not therefore between fundamentalism and relativism, as Benedict would have it. The choice is between political freedom that allows for the accretion of truth and political dogmatism that tries to shut down the debate in favor of “absolutes.” (Yes, that’s why I too believe Roe was a terrible decision.)
The Dish 