CATHLOPALIANS
A Roman Catholic writer named Tim Padgett, the Miami and Latin American bureau chief for TIME, wishes that Roman Catholic bishops would quit being so damned obstinate about abortion and calling it human life and stuff:
Shouldn’t our national abortion conversation stop obsessing on the pro-life/pro-choice extremes and focus on the reasonable, conscience-driven approach that cohorts like Catholics are in fact taking? Isn’t it time we stopped thinking of Catholics as a gauge of abortion opposition and instead as a barometer of how Americans think abortion rights should be kept humanely legal and humanely limited? The bishops this week recast their condemnation of abortion rights in terms of “religious liberty.” But when only 3% of U.S. Catholics have even read the bishops’ guide for voting in elections, according to Fordham University, I think we can say that Catholics are indeed practicing religious liberty — just not the kind the bishops want us to.
Like the members of a certain British-derived, overly-influential, mainline American Protestant church that shall remain nameless, Tim seems to believe that God both has and needs a Congress.
Shouldn’t our national abortion conversation stop obsessing on the pro-life/pro-choice extremes and focus on the reasonable, conscience-driven approach that cohorts like Catholics are in fact taking? Isn’t it time we stopped thinking of Catholics as a gauge of abortion opposition and instead as a barometer of how Americans think abortion rights should be kept humanely legal and humanely limited? The bishops this week recast their condemnation of abortion rights in terms of “religious liberty.” But when only 3% of U.S. Catholics have even read the bishops’ guide for voting in elections, according to Fordham University, I think we can say that Catholics are indeed practicing religious liberty — just not the kind the bishops want us to.
Like the members of a certain British-derived, overly-influential, mainline American Protestant church that shall remain nameless, Tim seems to believe that God both has and needs a Congress.
The bishops themselves are partly to blame for this: their crusade to demonize abortion rights and any politician who defends them has backfired, because it has forced Catholics to engage the matter all the more deeply. And most Catholics do so not via hierarchical regimentation but via human reason, as our faith tells us to. Because Catholicism richly contemplates Jesus’ human as well as divine nature, it emphasizes our God-given reason as the door to faith. We embrace our church’s protection-of-human-life impulse; but I think most Catholics have rationally concluded that no matter how we feel about abortion personally or spiritually, we cannot in good conscience call abortion in the early stage of pregnancy — when more than 90% of all abortions occur in the U.S. — murder in a legal sense.
But while the Catholic bishops have to toe the Vatican line, the Catholic laity doesn’t. Most of us have long since discarded Rome’s primitive homunculus model in favor of more modern and reliable science demonstrating that until a fetus develops a central nervous system and cerebral cortex – after the first trimester – it cannot be regarded as a sentient being let alone a human being. To many of us, the moral and legal “threshold” should be “sentiency,” or the ability to feel pain, as philosophers Daniel Dombrowski and Robert Deltete wrote in their 2000 book A Brief, Liberal Catholic Defense of Abortion.
So what should the bishops do now? Keep their mouths shut, basically, since they’ve been wrong about so much else.
But while the Catholic bishops have to toe the Vatican line, the Catholic laity doesn’t. Most of us have long since discarded Rome’s primitive homunculus model in favor of more modern and reliable science demonstrating that until a fetus develops a central nervous system and cerebral cortex – after the first trimester – it cannot be regarded as a sentient being let alone a human being. To many of us, the moral and legal “threshold” should be “sentiency,” or the ability to feel pain, as philosophers Daniel Dombrowski and Robert Deltete wrote in their 2000 book A Brief, Liberal Catholic Defense of Abortion.
So what should the bishops do now? Keep their mouths shut, basically, since they’ve been wrong about so much else.
There is social as well as scientific awareness involved, says Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics For Choice in Washington, D.C. “Catholics tend to side with the underdog, the oppressed,” O’Brien argues, “and many of us feel that even if we wouldn’t make that decision [abortion] for ourselves, we don’t want to see a woman who does feel she has to make it victimized by not having legal access to it.” He also notes that ever since Rome’s senseless refusal in 1968 to condone birth control, most Catholics have resolved to “make our own decisions about the pelvic zone.”
I’ll let this journal’s Catholic readership eviscerate Padgett’s theological nitwittery and confine myself to a few general observations. I think it’s fair to say that a significant number of American churchgoers from all churches couldn’t give you a cogent explanation of why they spend their Sundays where they do if you put a gun to their heads.
Why? Because the question doesn’t really interest them. They were born into their churches and all Christian churches are basically interchangeable as far as they’re concerned. They’ll learn whatever they have to learn in order to be considered full members of their church and let it go at that.
Or they were brought up in Church A but became engaged to someone who was brought up in Church B and rather likes it there. Since they can’t theologically argue why Church A is correct and Church B is not and since Church B is a Christian church, what difference does it make whether they spend their Sundays in Church A or in Church B?
I was like that. In 1956, like two of my older siblings, I was baptized an Episcopalian because my mother was attending an Episcopal church when I came into the world and my father couldn’t have cared less where I was baptized or even if I was baptized at all.
But eventually, I started asking myself the same question kids everywhere ask themselves on Sunday mornings. Why am I here? What am I doing this for? When it was explained to me one winter evening (by Billy Graham, someone outside of the tradition, as they say), my question underwent a subtle change.
“Why am I here?” became “Why am I here?”
Why am I an Episcopalian? As the Episcopalian descent into brain-dead universalism picked up speed, “because my mother was” became less and less compelling a reason to stick around.
Tim Padgett reads like he not only never got to the same place I did, it never occurred to him to begin the trip. He’s a Catholic because his parents were or because his hot girlfriend slash wife was. He’s learned all the right lines and convinced himself that he’s just as “spiritual” as anyone else.
But it is a curious “spirituality” that finds nothing odd about the idea that Christian doctrine can and should be established by majority vote. You could probably poll Catholic churches from one end of this country to the other and find a significant number of Catholic males who would love to be able to boink anyone they wanted to guilt-free.
So the bishops should drop anti-adultery lectures then? For that matter, if your poll allowed for anonymous answers, you could probably find a fair number of Catholics who believe the same thing about the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as the Episcopal Organization does.
Adios Eucharistic Adoration and, well…the Eucharist?
Theological approaches like Padgett’s cut both ways. Suppose Tim was interviewing a Roman Catholic US president and asked her why her administration wasn’t spending more money to help the poor and needy, citing several examples of Catholic teaching and papal writings on the subject to back himself up.
“Well, I don’t believe that teaching applies in this particular instance,” says the President.
“But you claim to be a devout Catholic!” Tim triumphantly exclaims. He think’s he’s just rhetorically nailed the frickin’ President of the frickin’ United States. How frickin’ good is this going to look? “How can you pick and choose Catholic doctrine like that?!”
“The same way you can,” the President smugly replies. As Jim Rome puts it, “Scoreboard. Look up at it.”
I’ll let this journal’s Catholic readership eviscerate Padgett’s theological nitwittery and confine myself to a few general observations. I think it’s fair to say that a significant number of American churchgoers from all churches couldn’t give you a cogent explanation of why they spend their Sundays where they do if you put a gun to their heads.
Why? Because the question doesn’t really interest them. They were born into their churches and all Christian churches are basically interchangeable as far as they’re concerned. They’ll learn whatever they have to learn in order to be considered full members of their church and let it go at that.
Or they were brought up in Church A but became engaged to someone who was brought up in Church B and rather likes it there. Since they can’t theologically argue why Church A is correct and Church B is not and since Church B is a Christian church, what difference does it make whether they spend their Sundays in Church A or in Church B?
I was like that. In 1956, like two of my older siblings, I was baptized an Episcopalian because my mother was attending an Episcopal church when I came into the world and my father couldn’t have cared less where I was baptized or even if I was baptized at all.
But eventually, I started asking myself the same question kids everywhere ask themselves on Sunday mornings. Why am I here? What am I doing this for? When it was explained to me one winter evening (by Billy Graham, someone outside of the tradition, as they say), my question underwent a subtle change.
“Why am I here?” became “Why am I here?”
Why am I an Episcopalian? As the Episcopalian descent into brain-dead universalism picked up speed, “because my mother was” became less and less compelling a reason to stick around.
Tim Padgett reads like he not only never got to the same place I did, it never occurred to him to begin the trip. He’s a Catholic because his parents were or because his hot girlfriend slash wife was. He’s learned all the right lines and convinced himself that he’s just as “spiritual” as anyone else.
But it is a curious “spirituality” that finds nothing odd about the idea that Christian doctrine can and should be established by majority vote. You could probably poll Catholic churches from one end of this country to the other and find a significant number of Catholic males who would love to be able to boink anyone they wanted to guilt-free.
So the bishops should drop anti-adultery lectures then? For that matter, if your poll allowed for anonymous answers, you could probably find a fair number of Catholics who believe the same thing about the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as the Episcopal Organization does.
Adios Eucharistic Adoration and, well…the Eucharist?
Theological approaches like Padgett’s cut both ways. Suppose Tim was interviewing a Roman Catholic US president and asked her why her administration wasn’t spending more money to help the poor and needy, citing several examples of Catholic teaching and papal writings on the subject to back himself up.
“Well, I don’t believe that teaching applies in this particular instance,” says the President.
“But you claim to be a devout Catholic!” Tim triumphantly exclaims. He think’s he’s just rhetorically nailed the frickin’ President of the frickin’ United States. How frickin’ good is this going to look? “How can you pick and choose Catholic doctrine like that?!”
“The same way you can,” the President smugly replies. As Jim Rome puts it, “Scoreboard. Look up at it.”
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