What Ecumenical Neighbors and Friends are Asking: Are Roman Catholic Bishops Killing Their Church?

John Shelby “Jack” Spong (born June 16, 1931) is a retired American Episcopalian bishop. He was formerly the Bishop of Newark, New Jersey. He is a contemporary, historical-critical theologian. A few days ago, on 23 February, Bishop Spong offered his reflections about his Roman Catholic brother bishops. I cite a few of his key observations.

His full reflection can be found here: http://johnshelbyspong.com/2012/02/23/the-roman-catholic-bishops-are-they-killing-their-church/

Bishop Spong: “I never thought I would live long enough to see birth control become a major political issue. Nor did I think I would ever hear the desire to provide women with safe and effective contraception be referred to as ‘a war on religion on the part of the Obama administration’….

“First, if the national polls are to be believed, about 98% of the American population uses contraception at some point in the course of their lives. That statistic appears to be true whether the users are Protestants, Roman Catholics, Evangelicals, Jews, non-believers or atheists!

“….The Roman Catholic Church’s leadership, however, still acts as if it has the power to dictate what public policy is or what it should be on this issue. Unable to gain the loyalty of those they call ‘the faithful’ they have now apparently decided that they will seek to impose their practices on the entirety of the nation’s citizenry. It is not working…. The idea that once emancipated from biological necessity women can now be coerced to return to the practices of yesterday is not just unrealistic, it is an act of violence!

“….In American politics, the Roman Catholic bishops have become increasingly aggressive on public issues over the last fifty years. When John F. Kennedy was seeking to become America’s first Catholic president in 1960, he assured a gathering of clergy in Houston that he would not seek to impose his religious rules upon this religiously pluralistic nation. That answer seemed quite satisfactory to Catholic bishops at that time. By 1984, however, when a Catholic woman, Geraldine Ferraro, was a candidate for the vice presidency, her position of separating her personal code from what was legally possible in the public arena was ruled by the Catholic bishops as no longer a satisfactory position for a Catholic to hold. John Kerry, as a practicing Roman Catholic, was told in his bid for the presidency in 2004 that he was forbidden to receive Communion because of his position of not repudiating the law that gave women the legal right to make their own abortion decisions.

“Now this Church’s bishops have taken that battle to what seems to be both a political and a religious absurdity. Though already given a ‘conscience’ exemption of not being required to provide contraceptive coverage in the health care offered to employees of Catholic churches, they are now demanding the right to impose that teaching on employees of their Catholic universities, hospitals and charitable institutions. Those institutions, while Catholic sponsored, serve a diverse population and receive public state and federal money to carry out their work. They have many non-Catholic employees and many Catholic employees who do not want Catholic teaching imposed upon their own health care decisions. The bishops have gone on to argue that any business run by a Roman Catholic CEO should also have the right to opt out of the requirement to provide contraceptive care to their employees.

“….The Roman Catholic Church’s recent history with the laws of this nation in regard to the criminal behavior of both abusing children and of protecting abusive priests had them asking for and receiving great leniency. Subpoenas of church records relating to the transfer of known child molesters have not been aggressively pursued. Cardinal Bernard Law, perhaps the guiltiest prelate in America of protecting abusers was allowed to move to the Vatican rather than have to answer his accusers or their attorneys under oath. Cardinal Law probably should be in jail today not in a respected post in the Vatican. This Church has a history of putting its own well-being ahead of its victims. Now they want to dictate the kind of health care available to women who are in their employ. I shake with rage at that suggestion and at that kind of self-serving duplicity.

“This Church has also carried out a destructive public campaign against justice and equality for gay and lesbian people over the last fifty years. They have used their money to defeat initiatives that would have provided equality before the law and end all forms of discrimination against homosexual people. They have done this based on Church teaching that defines homosexuality as deviant, a point of view regularly articulated by Pope Benedict XVI, despite the fact that this definition is almost universally dismissed as little more than dated ignorance in scientific and medical circles. How long do we tolerate religious ignorance that diminishes American citizens?

“….I never want to go back to the time when participation by Roman Catholics in public life was opposed because of their religion. I recall when one seat on the Supreme Court was designated ‘the Catholic seat.’ Today a literal majority of five of our Supreme Court justices (Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito) are Roman Catholics. If, however, the leaders of that church are going to use the political process to impose Catholic teaching on this entire nation then that attitude will surely compromise their ability to fulfill their oath of office. I had hoped that such a day had long gone from American life. The behavior of the Catholic bishops is surely reviving it. I am not willing to sacrifice the health of women or the constitutional rights of homosexual people to accommodate the dated attitudes of present Catholic leaders.

“….The vast majority of American Roman Catholics also seem to recognize that the leadership of their Church is simply badly out of date. I grieve that the present all-male leadership of the Catholic Church is bringing that Church into disrepute in a way that hurts the witness of the Christian faith, a faith that I too represent and treasure.

Yes I realize there have been typos in recent posts. There is not (yet) a problem with my brain. I am having problems with a new word processing program. Apologies to all readers for the annoyance….I will get it worked out!
– John

Today’s First and Second Readings:

“For those who’ve seen the place in better days, the Vatican looks deeply troubled. In the absence of strong leadership, internal tensions seem to be bursting into view. Even at the height of his powers, the pope took scant interest in governance. As he ages and becomes more limited, a sense of drift is mounting — a conviction that hard choices must await a new day, and probably a new pontiff.” (John Allen noting in a 24 February NCR aticle that the observation first made in 2004 is especially apt today.)

” ‘No one puts new wine into old wineskins,’ warns the gospel. ‘Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins.’ The ‘new wine’ that came forth from the Second Vatican Council – the rediscovery of episcopal collegiality and shared governance between the Pope and the bishops, the aware- ness of the Church being a communio of all the baptised, the full participation of the laity in the liturgy and the mission of the Church – risks being lost because the post-conciliar Church has not been able to provide ‘new wineskins’ or new structures to sustain such a kind of Church. The skins have not yet burst, but there are signs of them springing leaks, which the men in Rome are struggling to plug.” (Robert Mickens reporting in The Tablet on 25 February)

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The Homily:

As Robert Mickens from TheTablet, John Allen from NCR, and others have observed the institutional tectonic plates beneath the Vatican are shifting in a major historic way. Some observers speak of meltdown or an institutional implosion with tremendous international aftershocks….

Massimo Franco, Italian political writer for Corriere della Sera, has a new book which analyzes it all: C’era Una Volta Un Vaticano —- Once Upon a Time, There was a Vatican.

Franco, some may recall, wrote another best seller 2005 that analyzed relations between the Holy See and the United States. (Perhaps, after the 2012 US presidential elections, he can on a sequel on relations between the USCCB and the White House.) Anyway, back to the Vatican.

C’era Una Volta Un Vaticano sketches a kind of fin du régime life and spiit at the Vatican. (My sense too watching the recent consistory: everyone wrapped up in fancy party dress but not much of a party spirit.) Franco quotes Holy See diplomats who see themselves like the very last ambassadors to the Republic of Venice just before it collapsed in 1797.

Franco sees the Vatican meltdowns of the last five years as symptoms of a much deeper crisis. There are, John Allen observes, “signs of the end of an epoch, in which the Vatican represented the religious and moral sentiments of Western civilization, and the dawn of a new era in which Catholicism has become a minority subculture. Neither the Vatican nor the hierarchy more generally has figured out how to respond to this new world.”

I think my friend Robert Mickens says it best of all: “What no senior Vatican official seems willing to admit or able to grasp is that there may be something more serious going on. Certainly, there have been other moments of governing crises and lapses in the last few decades – and each time they were overcome. Each time also, as calls arose for change, the Pope would state that true church reform could only come about by ‘spiritual renewal’ and ‘internal conversion’….While Popes Paul VI and John Paul II made modest ‘reforms’ to the Roman Curia, they failed to address the lingering and deeper crisis. Quite simply, the crisis is this: the structures of the Catholic Church are no longer adequate for life in the modern world or responsive to the developments of the Church’s own ecclesiology and self-understanding.”

An implosion and a seismic shift for sure. On both sides of the Atlantic. And it is still rumbling deeply. When the air clears, perhaps we will see these days as days of grace when our institutional leaders rediscovered the church as a community of faith.

The American Catholic exodus is speeding up…Currently four people leave the American Catholic Church for every one who joins it. No other other religious group in the United States has a similar ratio. Baptists, for example, also have more people leaving than joining, but their ratio of 2-1……much better than Catholics.

Roughly 10% of all Americans are now former Catholics. Among these former U.S. Catholics, 65 percent say they just stopped believing their religion’s teachings … 58 percent say they are unhappy with church teaching on issues like abortion and homosexuality, and 48 percent are unhappy with their bishops’ teaching on birth control. Even more say they simply lost interest in the church and gradually drifted away.

In American Grace their study of American religious polarization and pluralism, Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell quote a member of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Acton, Massachusetts, where it is estimated that former Catholics make up nearly half the congregation. “If it weren’t for people leaving the Catholic Church,” he said, “the Episcopal Church would have died a long time ago in America.”

American Catholic customer service is slipping and customers are increasingly unhappy. There is a great hunger for more effective worship, better responses to spiritual needs, and greater pastoral creativity.

American Catholics are looking for bread and their bishops are handing them ornately decorated old stones.