Category: Old Dish

There’s a lot of evidence in this country that shows that American lay Catholics tend to be one of the more tolerant and socially liberal populations. As a practicing Catholic until it became impossible for me a year and a half ago, I always found actual Catholics, especially priests (every church I attended from Harvard’s to St Matthews in Washington had gay priests), to be extremely compassionate, tolerant and understanding of their gay fellow human beings. My own large Irish-Catholic family has been incredibly supportive; and I know of many, many others. Here’s a recent poll on Australian lay Catholics saying the same thing. Most Catholics put the ban on all gay relationships on the same plane as the ban on contraception – and, theologically, it’s rooted in the same idea that all sexual expression must be open to procreation. So they could live with it, however dumb. It dealt with acts, after all; it didn’t single out a group of people for discrimination and stigma. But the new proposed policy of banning all gay priests regardless of their celibacy or record or abilities is very different. Many Catholics were brought up, as I was, with a deep sense of the sin of bigotry, of prejudice, and of judging people for who they are rather than by what they do and how they live. I’d say this was one of the deepest lessons my devout mother and grandmother taught me. As a barely literate Irish-Catholic immigrant in Britain in the 1930s, my grandmother knew what prejudice was. And she knew her faith opposed it. Today, the hierarchy that represents that faith is actually practising it – proudly and in daylight. Western lay Catholics must rise up and demand their faith not be tarnished by this stain. This is not about homosexuality as such. It’s about the moral integrity of Catholicism itself.

“Iraq must be a smashing success – and it’s obviously driving the press absolutely crazy – when Bush can hold a presser with Talabani and field only Louisiana disaster relief questions.” – an emailer approvingly cited by Glenn Reynolds yesterday.

“More than 100 people were killed in a string of bombings and ambushes in Iraq today in the worst large scale violence since May and June, and the Al Qaeda group in Iraq said that it was launching a nationwide campaign of suicide bombings in retaliation for an American-Iraqi military offensive against insurgents in the northern city of Tal Afar.” – New York Times, today.

The ruling Republicans cannot get more self-congratulatory or off-key, we have Tom DeLay saying that there’s no fat left in the U.S. budget. Er, Mr DeLay, you have presided over the biggest explosion in pork and government spending in living memory. You and your president, in an astonishingly swift five years, have managed to add $2 trillion to the debt we and the next generation will have to pay back in taxes or inflation. “No fat left to cut?” This is what conservatism has now come to mean: the worst aspects of big government liberalism with the worst aspects of meddling in the moral decisions of people’s private lives. And the people who have done this seem oblivious to it. I will remind you, Tom DeLay equated a balanced budget with fiscal sanity in the Clinton years. But now it’s his budget, and his constituents and interest groups who get to feed at the trough, and the sky is the limit. A reminder to fiscal conservatives: today’s GOP isn’t just not what it used to be; it’s your main enemy now. Conservatism has been hijacked by puritans and spendthrifts. Their unifying philosophy is meddling in other people’s lives and spending other people’s money.

“Two thoughts I have on the Church’s new anti-homosexuality doctrine for priests:

1) Apparently all priests are expected to want to have sex with women but then not do it. This, I assume, is why women can’t be priests. I wonder if there’s room for lesbians though…

2) A man who commits an act of cold blooded murder can repent, do penance, be forgiven for his sins, and then become a priest. A gay man who has remained celibate all his life cannot.”

(Actually, a repentant murderer does need a dispensation in order to become a priest. It’s not yet clear if such a dispensation would be required for a celibate homosexual.)

MIKE LEAVES: Kinsley exits the L.A. Times on a “bitter note.”

BLANCO’S REP: This looks like good news for the Louisiana governor.

He vests a right to privacy firmly in the Constitution and respects the precedent of Roe. I’m waiting for the right-wing revolt. But if the left can keep up its hysterical hostility, maybe Roberts can get through. Nothing I’ve heard so far has changed my basic view is that Roberts looks like an exceptionally good choice for SCOTUS. If he’s fine by me, why isn’t James Dobson having a conniption? Rick Santorum will surely have to vote against, no?

“Are we capable of dealing with a severe attack? That’s a very important question and it’s in the national interest that we find out what went on so we can better respond,” – president Bush, today. To be fair, he did say the following as well: “To the extent the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility.” I may have missed something, but I think that’s the first time in four and a half years that the president has taken responsibility for failure in his own government. And that is good and encouraging news. Maybe the cocoon has lifted a little.

It’s really good. The MSM is slowly catching on to what this medium can do …

“It’s one of the two or three best-known risks to the United States, is that the levees protecting New Orleans could break. I know that and I live in Washington. It’s also, I’m afraid to say, the only thing the President has said about this that anyone can remember. I mean, he didn’t get there – it isn’t that they didn’t fly to the city beforehand, which he could easily have done on that kind of warning, and say, “Look, I’m the President of the United States, we can’t lose or even risk losing one of our great historic cities. I have come to make sure that all the state and city officials have got everything they could possibly want in advance.” For example, a few piles of bottled water wouldn’t have come amiss if there’s going to be suddenly too much water but none of it drinkable. Elementary things like that. He didn’t do that. Then he did a fly-by from his holiday retreat, and then he got there too late and then he said something completely idiotic. So I really can’t see there is any forgiveness for that. And remember also, that he did interrupt his holiday not very long ago to pay attention to something that was none of his business at all as President. Namely, the alleged living condition of an actually dead woman named Terri Schiavo.” – Christopher Hitchens, telling the truth. Yes: the contrast between the president’s urgent response to the religious right on Schiavo and his lackadaisical early response to Katrina is striking. And telling.

A new poll (via Chrenkoff’s farewell) finds out – and I’d say it’s good news. Katrina and its aftermath should not prod us to take our eyes off the ball in Iraq. We are at a critical point. Pressing Syria to stop sending in terrorists is what we are left with in the wake of a botched occupation. But the Iraqis might still pull it off. Maybe the revelation that this super-power cannot even rescue its own citizens in a major U.S. city will prod the Iraqi leadership to become more proactive. here’s hoping. In the words of Zalmay Khalilzad, “Iraq is part of this region that we call a vital part of the world” that is “producing most of the security problems of this era. And the way to deal with it is to get Iraq right, first.” Amen. So please do.

The Vatican document will appear probably by the end of the year, but it appears that the decision has been made. The key point-man for reform of seminaries in the U.S., Archbishop Edwin O’Brien, has now made it clear that, in his words,

“I think anyone who has engaged in homosexual activity, or has strong homosexual inclinations, would be best not to apply to a seminary and not to be accepted into a seminary.” … Archbishop O’Brien, who is coordinating the visits to more than 220 U.S. seminaries and houses of formation, said even homosexuals who have been celibate for 10 or more years should not be admitted to seminaries.

The AP version of the story, where O’Brien prettifies his language, confirms the story. The reason? A response to the appalling clerical abuse of children and minors. Conflating homosexual orientation with pedophilia, and arguing that homosexual priests cannot be expected to maintain celibacy or refrain from raping children or minors, even if they have demonstrated such an ability for up to a decade or more, O’Brien takes the Catholic Church’s pretzel-like position on homosexuality to a new level of incoherence. Notice that what is being discriminated against here is not someone’s actions or behavior, but their very identity. Notice that the church is implying complete lack of self-control to all gay priests, regardless of their record or potential. Notice that in 1986, the Church officially rebutted the idea that gay men, let alone gay priests, cannot be expected to be celibate, let alone molest children. The notion that all gay men are sexually compulsive was, in the words of then-Cardinal Ratzinger, an “unfounded and demeaning assumption.” That “unfounded and demeaning assumption” is now church policy. The 1986 document also proclaimed that

the human person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her sexual orientation.

Yet all seminarians are now to be reduced and judged solely on their sexual orientation. Some of the basic principles of the Catholic faith – treating each individual as equally worthy in God’s eyes, judging people by what they do, not who they are – are being violated by this policy. The astonishing work of gay priests across the centuries and across the globe is being denied and stigmatized and ignored. This is a huge stain on the church – reminiscent of its long, terrible history of anti-Semitism.

HOW TO RESPOND? When you inhabit an institution which is governed by absolute authority, when its current gay priests – who may make up a third of all priests and bishops – have been ordered to be silent about their orientation, when they are forbidden from even dissenting openly about this disgusting new policy, it is up to the laity to respond. This is not just about homosexuality. It is about the integrity of Catholicism as a faith that abhors bigotry of any kind, that demonizes no one, that welcomes all to God’s banquet, that actually fights against injustice, rather than instituting and enforcing it. The imposition of bigotry is made all the worse, since it is primarily focused on scapegoating all homosexuals for the actions of a minority of child molesters, while leaving heterosexual child molesters free of any communal guilt, and protecting every heterosexual and homosexual authority figure who covered up the crimes of so many years and decades. I’ve been following the Church’s position on gay people for much of my adult life and can honestly say that this is something I never expected and a wound I never believed would be inflicted. To bar gay people in committed relationships from the church is one thing. To bar even celibate, faithful gays from the priesthood is quite another. It is also implicitly a statement that no gay man can, in practice, live a celibate life, which is to say that the entire basis of the Church’s doctrine about how gay men and women should live is false. If the church cannot expect celibacy from one of its own priests who has successfully stayed celibate for over a decade, what does it expect of the rest of us? Under this pope, I think, homosexual persons have become inherently morally sick, Untermenschen in his own language, moral lepers incapable of self-governance and liable to make the church “unclean.” They cannot marry or form stable relationships; they cannot remain celibate; and they are all potential molesters of children. What other logical inferences are possible from this new policy?

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “Conservatism nowadays is increasingly a creature of its technology. It is shaped – if I were a Marxist I might even say determined–by cable television and talk radio, with their absurd promotion of caricature and conflict, and by blogs, where the content ranges from Jesuitical disputes among hollow-cheeked obsessives to feats of self-advertisement and professional narcissism (Everyone’s been asking what I think about . . . You won’t want to miss my appearance tonight on . . . Be sure to click here for my latest . . . ) that would have been unthinkable in polite company as recently as a decade ago. Most conservative books are pseudo-books: ghostwritten pastiches whose primary purpose seems to be the photo of the “author” on the cover. What a tumble! From The Conservative Mind to Savage Nation; from Clifton White to Dick Morris; from Willmoore Kendall and Harry Jaffa to Sean Hannity and Mark Fuhrman–all in little more than a generation’s time. Whatever this is, it isn’t progress.” – Andy Ferguson, the Weekly Standard. Ross Douthat has a must-read post on the decade that Republicans have controlled the federal government.