The Pope and Abortion

For the next year, the pope will permit priests to offer forgiveness to women who have had abortions during a year of jubilee.

This is not a completely radical change. Certain confessors could already offer absolution. But this does signify a different sort of approach, one Pope Francis has been known for, prioritizing the pastoral to the doctrinal. It also lifts the other crucial part of Catholicism: the virtue of staying connected.

I’m not sure how many Catholics women will take advantage of this option: as Catholics for Choice remarked, Catholic women have been making alternative arrangements for some years now. After all, in some historically catholic countries, women do get abortions.

One may believe abortion is morally repugnant but should be safe and legal. A Catholic in a secular nation state might fall into such category (as might black Jewish, philosophers in the preceding link). I think such a view, while apparently contradictory, is practical and realistic. I am not of that school, but that is where I seek some mutual understanding with more devout Catholic or others who find the procedure itself signals something, in our culture at least, is wrong.

Unlike the liberal tradition, the Catholic one does not elevate choice as the highest moral good. Instead, in its deeply communitarian ethos, it understands persons as relational. It comes to it’s anti-abortion position not as the evangelcals do, but because the fundamental moral unit is never just a single person.

It is not a view that is particularly appealing in this age.

But it explains why the church holds both views that are anti-commerce and anti-abortion. Bodies, and their lives, should not be abandoned or sold, and abortion is one choice along many others that diminishes our shared life. They note also, that being pro-choice does not make one a feminist: patriarchy itself can elevate the abortion of fetuses, especially those of girls. That said, although these are arguments can sharpen the issues, in our broken world such decisions must remain medical decisions that women make with their doctors.

The pope’s move should be understood not as a change in the church’s view toward abortion, but a clarification of a pastor’s role. In this way it seems very Anglican. The benefit is that it seeks to diminish the shame and acknowledge the reality of women who make such choices.

This instruction should not, of course, be anything new to Anglicans. Our theology already tends to arise from the pastoral, the practical, and the liturgical. We can give thanks that the Pope has decided to take a cue from the Anglican playbook.

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Cuba Libre!

Our policy against Cuba has always been one of those issues that gets me into fits. I start ranting, my head begins to ache, and I get lost in a morass of incomprehensibility, because the policy is incomprehensible.

But yesterday I was liberated from that.

Now if someone can only end the war on drugs; and explain to me how financing stadiums helps cities.

I agree, of course, that the Cuban state has been poisonous; it has also been at war. But no matter how one thinks of Castro’s legacy, the embargo was not successful, and it was only internal American politics that stalled our ability to move forward.

That the Vatican was essential to the reestablishment of diplomatic relations illustrates how the church can use its power well. The church has always had a useful diplomatic role to play; it is different because it does not have an army, and like most organizations with a degree of moral heft, it can be ignored. It also has built up relationships over a longer period of time than most states. Granted, it makes choices the way any other institution makes choices, but because its stakeholders are different, it’s perspective is valuable. Although I disagree with the Vatican on almost everything they say, in particular, about sex, in the role of encouraging people to collaborate and work together, I’m glad to see how it’s doing the work.

I’m ready to book my trip.

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Renegade Priest

It looks like there’s a renegade priest in St. Louis.

It started as a property dispute (isn’t it always, really, about money?).  A parish, with enormous private resources, is worried the archdiocese will spend the parish’s money to pay for diocesan scandals.  They refuse to hand over the money.  So the archdiocese withholds communion.  And then a young progressive priest, Marek Bozek, then holds renegade masses.

He gets excommunicated.

But he still says mass.   He starts sharing what he really thinks.  The church grows.

Clearly the church didn’t recognize  that the parish didn’t trust them.   They simply said, “hand over $8 million.  We know what to do with it.”  It doesn’t sound like they gave the congregation any alternative or included them in the decision making.  That’s arrogance.

They also didn’t seem to understand that withholding communion would not be a particularly effective way to… build trust.

By pushing the envelope and behaving with a heavy hand, the laity has found some new power.  They’ve also shown they’re willing to tell the archdiocese to “shove it.”   Why?  Because there’s no evidence the archdiocese gives a damn about its flock.

It may be that there is a cult of personality around Fr. Bozek.  That is often what happens when the order, the diocesan bureaucracy becomes an object of scorn.    It may be what currently sustains the parish, and it’s current vitality may not survive without him.  But with some charity, forgiveness, and a little humility, the church might find some creative solutions to this mess.

Still, the archdioceses’ current behavior is shameful, a perfect example of why there are so many frustrated RC laity.

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Obama at Notre Dame

The problem is not abortion: it is capitalism. Although I am pro-choice, it is because I disagree that criminalizing women would actually encourage restraint. I post this as someone who believes, also, that a commercial society is a free society. But the biggest threat to churches is capitalism.

From the conservative commentator Patrick Deneen.

Catholicism is a religion of memory and tradition: at every mass we recall the saints and martyrs, the founders of the Church and its greatest heroes – inculcating as if by second nature a familiarity with past generations and our expectation for ones that follow. As Chesterton wrote, we must inhabit a democracy of “the living, the dead, and the not-yet-born.” A Catholic culture is replete with stories passed down from the past and conveyed to the future – after all, we have all the best storytellers, from Dante and Shakespeare (yes, he was) to Percy and O’Connor – and, of course, Chesterton. All this is to say, the dead and the not-yet-born live among us – they are not forgotten or ignored, but among us as sure as the people who share our lives in neighborhoods and communities. This was precisely the point of Jody’s fine essay on why we need to live near cemeteries. Most of us, however, are in living arrangements where the dead are kept distant and apart from us – just as we separate all of the various aspects of life, disaggregating shopping from work from recreation from home. And even in the home, we are likely to be texting or emailing Facebook “friends” or hanging on the edge of our seats to see who gets kicked off American Idol. Much of the time, we are not even home when we are home.

A Catholic culture would inculcate a certain kind of character: one of respect, self-restraint, responsibility, humility, thrift, moderation, self-sacrifice. Courtship and marriage would be encouraged among the young. Divorce would be well-nigh non-existent. Such a culture would not valorize materialism, but understand that things of this world is not to be wholly embraced. At the heart of our culture would not be – as Jody suggests – opposition to abortion – which is, after all, negative – but rather the things that abortion is not: family, Church, community, memory, tradition, continuity of past, present and future. Culture is affirmation, not simply denial.

Our culture is driven by a different ethic altogether: mobility, markers of material or political success, a fetish for technological innovation and distraction, a media that is almost wholly visual and which portrays no past and no future (Read Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, especially his chapter “Now, this…”), a valorization of choice in ALL things hourly reinforced by advertising that is ubiquitous and insidious. Our culture is one in which previous generations are forgotten – an acceptable price of progress – and even the relationship of parents to children is either chummy friendliness or marked by the knowing sarcasm and irony of youth toward obsolescence (just watch an hour of the Disney channel for confirmation). The abortion of children is to be expected as a consequence of THIS culture: in a culture in which I define my own future in accordance with will and desire, and in which that which is personally inconvenient to me is as disposable as most everything else I use for my convenience everyday, sex is a consumer product and abortion is the trash. Disenchantment and utility defines my relationship to ALL things, in the end.

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