8 Ugly Sins of the Catholic Church
By Valerie Tarico, AlterNet
Posted on June 11, 2012, Printed on June 14, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/155828/8_ugly_sins_of_the_catholic_church
Did the Catholic Bishops wince last week when their leader, anti-contraception Cardinal Timothy Dolan, was exposed for paying pedophiles to disappear? One
can only hope. After all, these are men who claim to speak for God.
They have direct access to the White House, where they regularly weigh
in on issues ranging from military policy to bioethics, and they expect
us all to listen – not because of relevant expertise or elected
standing, but because of their moral authority.
Ahem.
If
pedophile payouts weren’t enough to convince you that this “moral”
authority is often anything but moral, take a look at some of their
other sins against compassion and basic decency.
1. Excommunicating doctors and nuns for saving lives. In
2009, a 27-year-old mom, pregnant with her fifth child, was rushed to a
Phoenix hospital, St. Josephs, where her doctors said she would almost
certainly die unless her pregnancy was aborted immediately. The nun in
charge approved the emergency procedure, and the woman survived. The
local bishop promptly excommunicated the nun. "There
are some situations where the mother may in fact die along with her
child. But — and this is the Catholic perspective — you can't do evil to
bring about good. The end does not justify the means," said Rev. John
Ehrich, the medical ethics director for the Diocese of Phoenix.
How far
are the Church authorities willing to take this “moral” logic? In Brazil
last year, with Vatican backing, the Church excommunicated a mother and
doctor for saving the life of a 9-year-old rape victim who was pregnant
with twins. (At four months pregnant, the girl weighed 80 pounds.) Cardinal Giovanni Batista Re, who heads the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, said “life must always be protected.” Perhaps Mr. Batista Re can explain the Vatican’s 1,500-year tradition of “just war.”
2. Protecting even non-Catholic sex-offenders against child victims. As
we have seen, the moral priorities of the bishops are laid naked when
they decide who to excommunicate and who not. The doctor and the mother
of the pregnant 9-year-old got the boot for approving an abortion, but
not the stepfather who had sexually assaulted the child, probably over a
period of years. A similar contrast can be seen between the case of the
Phoenix nun and hundreds of pedophile priests who were allowed to
remain Catholic even after they finally were identified and removed from
the Church payrolls.
It gets worse. In New York, a bill that would give child molestation victims more time to file charges has been blocked seven times by
the Catholic hierarchy led by none other than Cardinal Dolan. Why? "We
feel this is terribly unjust, we feel it singles out the church, and it
would be devastating for the life of the church.” In other words,
regardless of whether the abuse really happened or what the consequences
were for victims, what matters is how much additional lawsuits might
cost the Church. Isn’t that the ends justifying the means?
3. Using churches to organize gay haters. When
the Washington State legislature approved marriage equality this
spring, fundamentalist Christians across the state organized to reverse
the legislation. Even though three quarters of American Catholics think that gay marriage or civil unions should be legal, Archbishop
Peter Sartain jumped to the front of the pack, decreeing that Western
Washington parishes under his "moral authority" should gather signatures
for an anti-equality initiative. To their credit, a number of priests refused, and a group called Catholics for Marriage Equality is raising money for ads. In contrast to the Catholic League, which has made the
degrading argument that sex between priests and adolescent boys is
consensual homosexuality, lay Catholics appear to know the difference.
4. Lying about contraceptives to poor Africans. Of
all the mortal sins committed by the men of the cloth, the most
devastatingly lethal in the last 30 years has been the Catholic
hierarchy’s outspoken opposition to condom use in Africa. In 2003,
the president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family
publicly lied about
the efficacy of condoms in preventing both pregnancy and HIV: “The AIDS
virus is roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon. The
spermatozoon can easily pass through the 'net' that is formed by the
condom.” The archbishop of Nairobi told people that condoms were spreading HIV. Some priests told parishioners that condoms were impregnated with the virus.
The
motivation for such flagrant falsehoods? The Church has practiced
competitive pro-natalism for centuries, but lately anti-contraceptive
edicts have been ignored by most educated European and American
Catholics, and Italy has the second lowest birthrate in the Western
World, at 1.3 per woman. The bishops see this as a “catastrophe” and are looking to Africa as “a reservoir of life for the Church.” They wrap their opposition to contraception in lofty moral language such as that offered by Pope John Paul II: It
seems profoundly damaging to the dignity of the human being, and for
this reason morally illicit, to support a prevention of AIDS that is
based on a recourse to means and remedies that violate an authentically
human sense of sexuality. As late as 2009, John Paul’s successor, Benedict, continued to tell poor African Catholics that condoms were “wrong” and even suggested that they were making the epidemic worse. With god-knows –how-many lives lost and children orphaned, he finally softened his stance in 2010.
5. Obstructing patient access to accurate information and services in secular hospitals. In rural Arizona near the Mexican border, women delivering babies by cesarean section were refused tubal
ligations because their independent hospital was negotiating a merger
with a healthcare network run by Catholics. Worse, when a woman arrived at the same hospital in
the middle of a miscarriage and need a surgical abortion to complete
the process, she was forced to travel by ambulance to Tucson, 80 miles
away, risking hemorrhage on the way. All over the U.S. secular and
Catholic-run health systems are merging, and patients are quietly losing
the right to make medical decisions based on the best scientific
information available and the dictates of their own conscience.
Even
when the Catholic-owned hospital is a small part of the merger,
administrators insist that Catholic directives apply to the system as a
whole. These directives prohibit not only abortions but also
contraceptives, vasectomies and tubal ligations, some kinds of fertility
treatment, and compliance with end-of-life patient directives. Ectopic
pregnancies cannot be handled in keeping with the medical standard of
care. As biotechnologies and treatments relevant to the beginning and
end of life advance, we can expect the list to grow longer. Patients
cannot trust that they will be told other options are available
elsewhere.
One of
the bitter ironies here is that even wholly “Catholic” hospitals and
charities are staffed primarily by non-Catholics and largely provide
services to people of other faiths or of none, paid for with tax
dollars. In healthcare much of the money flows from Medicare and
Medicaid. In 2010, non-medical affiliates of Catholic Charities received 62 percent of annual revenue from the taxpayers – nearly $2.9 billion. Only 3 percent came
from church donations, with the remainder coming from investments,
program fees, community donations and in-kind contributions. And yet all
of those dollars get directed according to the dictates of bishop
conscience rather than individual conscience.
6. Slapping down nuns. Catholic
charities and hospitals are at some competitive advantage in part
because of hard-working nuns, many of whom have skills and
responsibilities that exceed their compensation. The bishops are the
Catholic Church’s 1 percent; the nuns are managers and service workers
--and many have taken the kind of poverty vows that America’s 1 percent
is trying to impose on the rest. Because many nuns live in the real
world, where suffering and morality are complex, they often make care-based decisions
and take nuanced positions on moral questions that the Council of
Bishops resolves by appealing to dogma and authority.
In
April, the Vatican decided to remind the nuns who’s on top. Rome issued
an 8-page assessment accusing the Leadership Conference of Women
Religious of disagreeing with the bishops and of “radical feminism.” It
appears that their labors on behalf of poor, vulnerable people had
distracted them from a more Christian priority: controlling other
people’s sex lives—oh, and standing up against the ordination of women.
The Archbishop assigned by
the Vatican to rein in unruly American nuns is none other than Peter
Sartain of Seattle, the same moral authority who has declared a holy
crusade against gay marriage.
7. Bullying girl scouts. Unlike the Boy Scouts, who recently earned media and public attention by
booting out a gay den-mother, the Girl Scouts have been stubbornly
inclusive and focused on preparing girls for leadership. For example,
last year a Colorado troop included a trans-gender 7-year-old. That’s a
problem for the Bishops, and since up to a quarter of
American Girl Scouts are Catholic kids with troops housed in churches,
they see it as their problem. To make matters worse, the American Girl
Scouts refused to leave their international umbrella, the World
Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, which has stated that
young women "need an environment where they can freely and openly
discuss issues of sex and sexuality." The World Association would
appear to believe the data that girls who can’t manage their sexuality
and fertility are more likely to end up in poverty than leadership positions.
Then again, maybe that’s what the church hierarchy is after. According to an article last
month at the Huffington Post, “The new inquiry will be conducted by
the bishops' Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth. It
will look into the Scouts' 'possible problematic relationships with
other organizations' and various 'problematic' program materials,
according to a letter sent by the committee chairman, Bishop Kevin
Rhoades of Fort Wayne, Ind., to his fellow bishops." We’re talking about
an organization run by women for girls facing an all-male inquisition.
In today’s Catholic church, leadership still requires a y chromosome.
8. Purging popular and scholarly interfaith bridge builders. Lest
some reader assert that the sins of the Bishops are all a consequence
of sexual repression – some contorted pursuit of sexual purity that
degrades both sex and compassion—it is important to note that the
current cohort of Church authorities are as obsessed with doctrinal
purity as sexual purity. It would take me many paragraphs to describe
their tireless pursuit of purity as well as retired Anglican bishop,
John Shelby Spong, does in one:
Hans Kung, probably the best read theologian of the 20th century, was removed from his position as a Catholic theologian at Tubingen
because his mind could not be twisted into the medieval concepts
required by his church. This action was carried out by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
who at that time under Pope John Paul II held the office that in
another time gave us the Inquisition. Matthew Fox, one of the most
popular retreat and meditation leaders and an environmental activist,
was then silenced by the same Cardinal Ratzinger.
Professor Charles Curran, one of America’s best known ethicists, was
removed from his tenured professorship at Catholic University in
Washington, D.C., also by the same Cardinal Ratzinger. Father Leonardo Boff,
the best known Latin American liberation theologian, was forced to
renounce his ordination in order to continue his work for justice among
the poor of Latin America by the same Cardinal Ratzinger. Next we learn that the Vatican, now headed by Cardinal Ratzinger
under his new name Pope Benedict XVI, has ordered the removal of a book
from all Catholic schools and universities written by a popular female
theologian at Fordham University, Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson. Now the
nuns are to be investigated. Conformity trumps truth in every direction.
The
Catholic tradition defines deadly or “cardinal” sins as those from which
all other sins derive. In addition to lust, gluttony, wrath, sloth and
envy, the traditional seven include pride and greed, which, to my mind,
drive much of the appalling behavior in this list. If an attempt to
assert autocratic control over the spiritual and physical lives of lay
people isn’t pride, I don’t know what is. And if a willingness to
silence child victims to protect church assets isn’t greed, I don’t know
what greed is. The BBC’s revelation last month of money laundering in the Vatican Bank pales by comparison.
To me,
ultimately, the sins of the Catholic bishops are “deadly sins” because
they kill people, whether pregnant mothers or depressed gay teens or
African families, or simply desperate people who are forced into greater
desperation by “moral” priorities that distract from real questions of
wellbeing and harm.
What the
Bishops will have to account for when they meet their maker, none of us
can say. For some American Catholics, the process of holding them to
account has already started. The Women Religious have pushed back
against the condescending “assessment” issued by the Vatican. Small
groups of lay Catholics have rallied to
their support. Picketers meet monthly outside Sartain’s cathedral to
protest his stance against equality. The Franciscan brothers issued a statement of solidarity with the nuns, many of whom have remained solidly focused on economic justice instead of sexual transgressions.
Given the arrogant cruelty of
Church leaders, criticism to date has been remarkably tempered. As the
Bishops flash their moral authority in the White House and media and
pulpit, clothed in white robes and draped in crimson,
they should be glad they aren’t eyeball to eyeball with Jesus himself.
As the writer of Matthew tells it, he called out the corrupt religious
leaders of his day in no uncertain terms: Woe to you, teachers of
the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs,
which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead
men's bones and everything unclean.
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons.
She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old
Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles
can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.
© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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