Matters of Church and State

IT’S A TOSS UP

       As an American Catholic, it’s hard to decide which organization is the more frustrating– the U.S. Congress or the Vatican.  They both provide an enormous amount of material for bloggers, so I should be grateful.  At the moment, though, I think the Vatican is in the lead.  This could change tomorrow, so stay tuned.

         These two bodies are not dissimilar.  Both are dominated by self-important old men who have forgotten their original charter.  Both bodies have favorability ratings in the single digits.  The last time I checked, the Congress had an approval rating below 10 percent.  I don’t recall seeing a recent survey of Catholics on how they regard the Vatican, but it’s got to be at least that low. It’s too bad, for my purposes, that the members of Congress are not required to wear togas to match the quaint, irrelevant garb of the Catholic hierarchy.  The similarities would be even more striking.

         The latest incident that put the Vatican in first place in this exciting race to the bottom is its condemnation of a book entitled “Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,” whose author is Sister Margaret Farley, a respected theologian and “long-time Yale University scholar who recently retired,” as reported by the Washington Post.  This was a book published in 2006.  Until the Vatican spoke up, the book was ranked 142,982 by Amazon.com.  Now, in just a matter of days, the sales ranking jumped to No. 16 – and climbing.

         In 2011, the Vatican did a similar favor for Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson, Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University.  Dr. Johnson’s book, “Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in Theology of God” published in 2007, went relatively unnoticed except in academic circles until the Vatican announced that it found many of the book’s conclusions “incompatible with Catholic teaching.”  As a result, many regular practicing Catholics couldn’t wait to read it and jumped on-line to order it.  It’s a wonderful book, by the way, as I am sure is Sister Margaret Farley’s, which I ordered from Amazon.com yesterday.

Readers must wonder, as some of my Catholics and former Catholic friends have asked me, “Why are you still a Catholic?  Why don’t you just leave the Church?”  My answer is that I wouldn’t think of leaving the church, which is an amazing organization that daily goes about doing the work of the Gospel around the world, often despite the Vatican.  The Catholic Relief Services, to cite just one example, helps people in need in nearly 100 countries, without regard to race, religion or nationality.  Its website states: “Although our mission is rooted in the Catholic faith, our operations serve people based solely on need, regardless of their race, religion or ethnicity.”  In other words, they are Catholic, in the real sense of that word, meaning universal, all-embracing

         I would guess these workers in the vineyard pay little, if any, attention to what some Vatican watchdog agency says or does.  They’re too busy doing the real work of the Church.   

Actually, it’s an exciting time to be a Catholic.  I remember in the late 1950’s and early 1960s the excitement that so many of us felt when Pope John XXIII convened a Vatican Council to bring about an “aggiornamento,” i.e. to bring the Church up to date.  He wanted to “throw open the windows” to let fresh air in, he said.

Well, the Church is going through another “aggiornamento,” not by Papal design or Vatican initiative, but by the actions of Catholics – led in so many cases by the quiet example of Catholic nuns who were harshly criticized in a Vatican report earlier this year. The Vatican agency rebuked the nuns for adopting the ways of “radical feminism” and not paying enough attention to traditional Catholic teaching on such matters as abortion and gay marriage.

In a masterful and eloquent response to the Vatican criticism – as the June 6 New York Times reports -- a “group of Roman Catholic nuns is planning a bus trip across nine states this month, stopping at homeless shelters, food pantries, schools and health care facilities run by nuns to highlight their work with the nation’s poor and disenfranchised.”

Touché – once again proving that actions in the form of a good example speak louder than words.

Unfortunately, the Vatican will probably miss the point.  They’re too busy frantically closing the windows to any wind of change while failing to notice that the roof is coming off.

         Gerald E. Lavey