A Holy War on Women

            Even presuming a heart brimming with Christian charity and a willingness to give others the maximum benefit of doubt, it’s hard to understand the logic of Vatican thinking.  Maybe those silly hats they wear have choked off oxygen to their brains. Whatever is happening, it makes no sense.  My initial reaction was to title this posting: “Dumb and Dumber.”  But, in deference to good taste, I declined.

In case you missed it, the Vatican is now cracking down on American nuns who, it says, have been influenced by “radical feminism,” as evidenced by their falling “out of step” with church teaching on homosexuality and women’s ordination, as Catholic columnist Melinda Henneberger reported in today’s Washington Post.

American nuns?   The crown jewel of the Catholic Church?  Laborers in the vineyard who are doing the work of the Gospel:  feeding the hungry, ministering to the sick and the poor, educating the disadvantaged in America’s inner cities?  Are you kidding me?  Say it isn’t so, Holy Father…  Sorry, no help there because recently Pope Benedict XVI, in a Holy Week address, chastised priests – males, no less -- who even had the audacity to raise the topic of women priests.

Ironically, the Holy Father thought it fit to raise this issue on Holy Thursday even as Christians were commemorating the passion of Christ – a time when women showed the courage to stand firm with Him during those ghastly days while his male “disciples” scattered like scared rabbits.  Whom did Jesus appear to first after his resurrection?  Yes, a woman -- Mary Magdalene, of all people.   And who carried the good message to the trembling disciples hiding out in an upper room?  A woman, of course.   And this is the Jesus who wanted to restrict the successors to his disciples to a male-only fraternity?

I have concluded regrettably that the Vatican and its disciples walking lockstep throughout the world have either lost their way or lost their minds – or maybe both.  To be fair, they all haven’t lost their minds.  Benedict XVI, for example, is a brilliant man – and a brilliant theologian – whose publications on Jesus and his message are wonderful.  But, I have concluded that he, along with others in the Catholic hierarchy in Rome and throughout the world, are trapped in a bureaucracy of fear and “creeping infallibility,” a term I saw recently but can’t remember where I saw it.  They have concluded they can’t be wrong and so they will do whatever it takes to stay the course and stay on message.  How sad.  Who would want to belong to an organization that could never be wrong?

A few weeks ago, during a liturgy at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Washington D.C., I was listening to the Gospel story about the woman at the well, and  I couldn’t help but imagine how a Vatican representative of a bishop from the U.S. Catholic Bishops conference, for example, would have handled the situation Jesus ran into.  The reading was from John’s gospel (John, Chapter 4, 9-19) and it had to do with Jesus striking up a conversation with a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well in the town of Sychar. 

For non-Christian readers, the story involves a rather playful conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman, underscoring the deeply human, compassionate and caring side of Jesus.  First of all, for Jesus to be having a conversation with a Samaritan woman at all would have been regarded as deeply scandalous to both Jews and Samaritans at the time.  Moreover, the conversation revealed that the woman had been married five times, and the man she was living with at the time was not her husband.  So, Jesus was violating some serious taboos here, as He was not reluctant to do on so many occasions.

Yet, He never made the woman feel ashamed or degraded, nor did He suggest that she had to clean up her act and get right with the law and authorities before she was worthy of the living water He was offering.  This story, as with so many stories throughout all four Gospels, illustrate the Good News that Jesus came to bring – that God loves us broken human beings, no matter how messed up our lives are and no matter where we come from or what country or tribe we belong to.  He came to save, not to condemn.

Now, for a moment, imagine, as I did at that Mass, a representative from the Vatican or from the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference dealing with the Samaritan woman at the well.  It doesn’t take a wild imagination to suggest it would have played out as a dramatically different story.  

Circling the wagons when their authority is being threatened is not unique to fearful Catholic Church prelates.  It’s true of all deeply entrenched bureaucracies.  And, sadly or amusingly, depending on your perspective, the enemies they are supposedly trying to keep at bay are standing right next to them, inside the circle.  Pogo was spot on:  we have met the enemy and he is us.

Meantime, Catholic nuns and other women live out their lives in accordance with the Good News as they understand it and carry on despite the Catholic hierarchy.  They know a side show when they see it.

Gerald E. Lavey

IT’S ALL IN OUR HEADS

Some readers of this blog – maybe two or three of you – have asked where I have been the past couple of months since I last posted something on my blog http://ecclesiaetpublica.blogspot.com

Rest assured, I am still this side of the grass and enjoying the gift of retirement and advancing age with a woman I still dearly love after 44 years of marriage. Fortunate lad that I am, I am told she still loves me as well. Life is good.

Actually, what has kept me from blogging these past couple of months is ennui. I am tired of hearing myself rant against right-wing conservatives in politics and in the Catholic Church. In other words, I got tired of myself and decided to take a break. And, if I am not mistaken, I heard a sigh of relief as well from some beleaguered souls on my blog distribution list.

In the intervening period, I have actually made an effort – albeit half-heartedly -- to understand the conservative point of view, reading every day the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal, for example. Heroically, I even managed to read a column or two by Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post. Unfortunately, that hasn’t helped; I still don’t get that way of thinking. The only change is that I grind my teeth more.

Then, an article appeared in the Washington Post a couple of days ago that helped explain the differences between liberals and conservatives. It’s called “Liberals and Conservatives Don’t Just Vote Differently. They Think Differently.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/liberals-and-conservatives-dont-just-vote-differently-they-think-differently/2012/04/12/gIQAzb1kDT_story.html

As the author Chris Mooney observes, “Liberals and conservatives have access to the same information, yet they hold wildly incompatible views on issues ranging from global warning to whether the president was born in the United States to whether his stimulus package created any jobs.” It’s not just that, he continues, “Partisanship creates stunning intellectual contortions and inconsistencies.” An example that comes to my mind is the “individual mandate” in the Affordable Care Act. Originally that was a Republican position, but now it is roundly reviled by the same people who not too long ago supported it. "None of these things make any sense," Mooney goes on to say, "unless you view them through the lens of political psychology.”

As research has shown, he says, liberals and conservatives “process information in divergent ways and to differ on any number of psychological traits.” Generally, “liberals score higher on a personality measure called ‘openness to experience’…. This means liberals tend to be the kind of people who want to try new things, including new music, books, restaurants and vacation spots – and new ideas.”

Conservatives, on the other hand, “tend to be less open,” he writes, “less exploratory, less in need of change – and more conscientious, a trait that indicates they appreciate order and structure in their lives.”

This does not mean liberals are right and conservatives are wrong, or that liberals are good and conservatives are bad. But, it does help explain for me why intelligent, supposedly well educated people persist in believing, for example, that God created the world in six days. Literally speaking. No hedging allowed there because every word of the Bible is literally true, they maintain. Some of these creationists are fellow Catholics who will not listen to arguments for evolution, even though the last two conservative Popes had declared evolution to be indisputably, scientifically true, beyond question.

In the secular realm, global warming is another example, as is our cockamamie tax system which favors the top 1 percent of Americans, and yet middle and lower income conservatives in the Tea Party continue to support it even though they are the ones who are getting the short end of the stick.

The list is virtually endless, but there is no point belaboring the issue.

Where does that leave a hard core liberal like me? Pretty much where I am on the political spectrum – hopefully not so smug and a tad less judgmental about conservatives’ motivation, but certainly crystal clear on how I tend to vote in the November election, at both the local and national level.

Much more about all of the above in upcoming postings. Stay tuned.

Gerald E. Lavey