The American Bishops and Their Plight (+) Sat Mar 17, 2012 at 11:30:19 AM CDT I began with

a necessary disclaimer. I am myself Catholic and will be after I finish this posting. Nothing here is sufficient to drive me away from the rich spiritual life I find in the Church, sometimes in spite of the institution itself. The Church, in the end , is bigger than the episcopacy, or the most current occupant of the Vatican. Additionally, I am not so self-righteous or vain as to believe I am always right and the Church always wrong. In the end, though, I must answer to my conscience and my God. Let Cardinal Dolan [ president of the Catholic bishops' conference]provide the summation of the Great Women's Health care war as the church officially sees it: Religious Freedom and Protecting Health care for Women and Children Episodes like that occur all over Ethiopia, as well as other impoverished, thirsty countries throughout the third world, because of CRS "fresh water projects." Villagers benefit; crops flourish; livestock fatten; all the people drink; but the girls are the happiest because they're free and can now improve their lives. When it comes to the health of women, their babies, and their children, the Catholic Church is there, the most effective private provider of such care anywhere around. [snip] The marketers advise them that, if they can reduce the issue to one of contraception, stereotyping the Church as opposed to women's rights, they have a chance of clouding the towering issue of the First Freedom. But the Church should not be the ones on the defensive here. We're on the offensive when it comes to women's health, education, and welfare, here at home, and throughout the world. We hardly need lectures on this issue from senators. We just want to be left alone to live out the imperatives of our faith to serve, teach, heal, feed, and care for others. We cherish this, our earthly home, America, for its enshrined freedom to do so. Those really concerned about women's health would be better off defending the Church's freedom to continue its work. He cites chapter and verse of Church good deeds in the Third World to

buttress his claim, that the church is on the side of women, always has been , always will be. The examples and the work he cites are exemplary and fully worthy of the best traditions of Catholic social justice in action. But good works do not simply cancel out bad ones, there is no moral balancing equation that lets me do wrong or blindly persist in unwise and even harmful policies and positions jut because I engage in good ones. And so, I must ask, where was this eternally vigilant regard for women when the Church opposed condom use in Africa, because it promoted immorality so some such. In the name of blind abstraction it helped expose wives , all sexually active African women to the virus ! Well, the Church did catch up eventually. How many died ,in the mean time, because you were in love with your doctrine, and ignored its real world consequences? [from November 23, 2010] After Condom Remarks, Vatican Confirms Shift Pope Benedict XVI clearly acknowledged on Tuesday that the need to prevent diseases like AIDS could outweigh the church's long opposition to the use of condoms. Related It was a significant and stunning personal pronouncement from the conservative pope after more than two decades of heated debate inside the Roman Catholic Church and condemnation by health workers who said the church's ban on prophylactics was morally indefensible during the AIDS crisis. Perpetual regard for women? Where was it during the decades of institutional cover up of child abuse, boys and girls? Cardinal sins Cardinal Dolan criticized a legislative proposal that would, for a year, drop the statute of limitations for filing civil claims for sexual offenses, allowing for lawsuits by people who say they were abused long ago. The cardinal said he was concerned that a flood of lawsuits over abuse by priests could drain the church of money it is using for charitable purposes. "I think we bishops have been very contrite in admitting that the church did not handle this well at all in the past," he said. "But we bristle sometimes in that the church does not get the credit, now being in the vanguard of reform. It does bother us that the church continues to be a whipping boy." Hmm. Maybe the church is still "a whipping boy" because the church is still

trying to screw over victims -- as evidenced by the other article in the NYT... That article is about the harassment suit against Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) that Donohue was going on about. I don't know the answer to this one entirely. The Cardinal does have a point - that if the claims bankrupt the Church its other good works will end as well. The problem with having too much empathy for the good cardinal's plight is the ham handed way this scandal was handled from day one, when it might (?!?) have been possible to prevent the avalanche of claims with contrite apologies, swift reforms, more openness and less cover up. At the least this undercuts the good Cardinals protestations of perpetual regard for women and children. Finally, where is this perpetual regard as poverty and despair claim more and more living children? The bishops had a letter read from the pulpits of America as part of their conflict over contraception provision. They condemn and excommunicate politicians for advocating the radical proposition that women are fully capable of making their own, conscience based, morally responsible decision about their own bodies. Where is this volume of outrage for the politicians they help elect when they vote to cut assistance to the hungry? Health care for children, public education funding ? The reason is , in my view, that the unborn are the perfect victims for the Church to defend. I do not claim that the Church is insincere in its position. I respect their views, even if I reach different conclusions. Still it is cheap righteousness nevertheless. The unborn do not made it hard to be on their side by murdering anyone or being accused of it. The unborn do not embarrass you or cause rumblings among your conservative believers by being labelled "welfare queens". The unborn do not act like surly , angry teenagers, who, failing to overcome their initial handicaps of poverty and want and even hunger, become gang bangers or common criminals. Where is the outrage over the death penalty and all these other social injustices to match that over Obama's Health Care mandate? Where is the outrage over politicians you supported, sometimes, not so subtlety , when they scorn the poor, heap more burdens on their backs and blame them for their plight. Did you even hear about the published request to Congress to not cut aid to the poor in the remaining session of Congress? I did, but

purely by accident. Recently, I heard another in the series of yearly official Roe v Wade sermons. For the first time in forever the priest actually spoke of the whole fabric of life issues, giving the abortion controversy its due but chiding us all for the toleration of hunger and disease and all the other threats to life in the whole world! What was singular about this sermon was the fact it was so rare, and that is a real tragedy. Let EJ Dionne have the last words: Catholicism Is Not the Tea Party at Prayer Then, right-wing bishops and allied staff at the bishops' conference took control[after the Obama compromise on the Health Care mandate] . For weeks, Catholics at Sunday Mass were confronted with attacks that, at the most extreme, cast administration officials as communist-style apparatchiks intent on destroying Roman Catholicism. You think I exaggerate? In his diocesan newspaper, Cardinal Francis George, archbishop of Chicago, wrote: "The provision of health care should not demand 'giving up' religious liberty. Liberty of religion is more than freedom of worship. Freedom of worship was guaranteed in the Constitution of the former Soviet Union. You could go to church, if you could find one. The church, however, could do nothing except conduct religious rites in places of worship -- no schools, religious publications, health care institutions, organized charity, ministry for justice and the works of mercy that flow naturally from a living faith. All of these were co-opted by the government. We fought a long Cold War to defeat that vision of society." My goodness, does Obama want to bring the Commies back? [snip] Cardinal Dolan is more moderate than Cardinal George, but he offered an unfortunate metaphor in a March 3 speech on Long Island. "I suppose we could say there might be some doctor who would say to a man who is suffering some sort of sexual dysfunction, 'You ought to start visiting a prostitute to help you, and I will write you a prescription, and I hope the government will pay for it.'" Did Cardinal Dolan really want to suggest to faithfully married Catholic

women and men who decide to limit the size of their families that there is any moral equivalence between wanting contraception coverage and visiting a prostitute? Presumably not. But then why even reach for such an outlandish comparison? And finally: Catholicism Is Not the Tea Party at Prayer "Is it [the church] abandoning its historical style of being a leaven in society to become a strident critic of government?" he asked. "Have the bishops given up on their conviction that there can be disagreement among Catholics on the application of principle to policy? Do they now believe that there must be unanimity even on political strategy?" Tags: bishops, Catholic Church, social justice, health care, (All Tags) :: Add/Edit Tags on this Post