Progressive Christians have a hard time getting their views into mainstream discourse. Popular media, eager for sensationalism, far prefers the religious right to the religious left. For progressive Catholics, saddled with a church leadership that creeps further to the right every year, it's as difficult as for anyone.
Even though progressive values are the Catholic mainstream, if not the mainstream of Church leadership.
So, I had to be pleased to see that National Catholic Reporter, the nation's lefty Catholic bi-weekly, print an opinion piece this week in support of marriage equality, penned by Robert McClory, one of the country's most visible progressive Catholics, if such a thing could be said to exist. (He's also an emeritus professor of journalism at Northwestern University.)
Before I offer some excerpts, I want to explain that the context here is criticism against Chicago archbishop Francis George, who happens to be a cardinal and a powerful prelate in the Church hierarchy, as well as a loud and vociferous opponent of gay marriage.
Cardinal George, along with many ultra right-wing Catholic bishops, was appointed to the episcopacy by John Paul II who, though widely revered as a hero against Communism, instigated a conservative revolution within the Catholic church, especially in America, that still has parishes and dioceses reeling.
Cardinal George has been fighting the marriage equality movement in Illinois with a variety of specious claims, among which is that it is an "affront to reason." That's not all, though. Opposition to marriage equality is just one of many moves he has made in recent years as he has tried to use his pulpit to compel American Catholics to return to "authentic Catholic teaching" ...
Something known to most people as "the 14th century."
Here's some of the text:
At least since the late Middle Ages, the Catholic church has presented marriage as having two ends or purposes: a primary purpose, the procreation and education of children; and a secondary purpose, the mutual love, care and support of the spouses. In Catholic moral teaching, this secondary purpose tended to be taken lightly. It even got obscured by an overpowering obsession with the primary purpose. The most exacting details concerning the proper and improper uses of sex seized much of the attention of the people who wrote the manuals about such things, celibate priests with degrees in moral theology. The obsession was passed on to bishops and pastors.
...
[Yet] when the subject of Christian marriage was taken up by the bishops at the Second Vatican Council in its document on "The Church in the Modern World," they made a point of not repeating the old formula. In fact, they first discussed mutual self-giving and sharing as essential to marriage and only after spoke of its role in increasing and multiplying the human family. The bishops decided not to use any primary or secondary terminology in the document, and just to make the matter clear, insisted that "procreation does not make the other ends of marriage of less account" and that marriage was "not instituted solely for procreation."
...
The question now is why these people in committed gay relationships should not be eligible for the same benefits society grants to those in committed straight relationships? And why should this relationship not be called marriage -- a different kind of marriage, for sure, but a union that serves society's needs in practical and useful ways? And why should the church be so uptight about what's happening? Gay Catholic couples are daily fulfilling that central requirement of Christian marriage, love and fidelity. Would it kill the hierarchy to at least acknowledge these facts? George and other prelates and priests who cling to a failing theology and an outmoded anthropology are only further degrading their authority.
When McClory talks about degradation of the authority of Church leaders, he is talking about precisely the phenomenon that causes American Catholics to vote with their feet:
The demands of Church leaders is so contrary to all evidence and reason that to continue to follow them takes an enormous willingness to live in the absurd. Those of us who continue to be Catholics are left to cringe in embarrassment (and shame) as the Church plunges into social attitudes ever more regressive and more resistent to reason.
And as one commenter on the article notes:
Cardinal George's actions are also an affront to comity and ecumenism. What right does the Catholic Church have to try to impose its rules on marriage onto people of other faiths? If the Catholic Church doesn't want anything to do with same-sex marriages:
Just don't perform them.