Fortnight for Freedom, Day 11

I admit I'm having trouble coming up with material each day for this series opposing the U.S. Council of Bishops' campaign, Fortnight for Freedom, now in its eleventh day. My main thrust is toward seeking a revision of the teaching of the Church regarding sexual morality, because the main friction point that has provoked F4F is the question of the "contraception mandate" in the new health-insurance law. Can Catholic institutions such as social-service providers, hospitals, and universities be required to provide contraception coverage for their employees? Isn't that a violation of religious freedom?

I'm reading a book by Margaret A. Farley, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, that suggests how the Church — and everyone else, for that matter — can reinterpret the ethics of love and sex in light of the traditional search for justice. Being just requires that each of us unfailingly give each other person his or her "due" — that much I can relay to you at the present time. But it's taking a while for me to absorb this material in its entirety ... and I don't think I'll be able to continue commenting on Farley's ideas in any depth until after the F4F windup on July 4.

Meanwhile, this. The bishops are framing the "religious freedom" issue as a matter of "conscience," not precisely one of sexual morality. Shouldn't the Catholic head or heads of an institution or a business, they say, be able to conscientiously object to including contraception coverage in health insurance that he or she or they have to provide under the Obamacare mandate?

Thomas More (Paul Scofield) tells his
daughter Meg (Susannah York) that
God made Man "to serve Him
wittily, in the tangle of his mind."

A commentary by David DeCosse, "Bishops' conscience model makes light of practical reason," from the National Catholic Reporter on Jan. 23, 2012, questions that premise. DeCosse leads off with the photo and caption shown at left, a scene from the movie A Man for All Seasons.

In it, Thomas More is telling his daughter of his intention to avoid, if at all possible, a direct confrontation with King Henry VIII of England. The year is approximately 1532. Henry, whose court is in the general area of London, has sought More's complicity in opposing the pope in Rome on the matter of granting Henry a divorce. As a Catholic, More has objected to picking a fight with the pope ... yet in so doing, he has sought every possible way to avoid being outright disloyal to his secular monarch.

But the king's ministers have insisted on attempting to coerce More's capitulation, on penalty of death. Thomas More, having had every conscientious "out" removed from the equation, eventually paid the ultimate price. His homeland, England, became a Protestant country under the newly established Church of England, and More was eventually (in 1935) canonized a saint by the Catholic Church.

David DeCosse

But in David DeCosse's estimation, the lesson of the movie for us today is epitomized in this fuller quote of Thomas More's from the Robert Bolt screenplay:

God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind. If He suffers us to come to such a case that there is no escaping, then we may stand to our tackle as best we can, and, yes ... then we can clamor like champions, if we have the spittle for it. But it's God part, not our own, to bring ourselves to such a pass. Our natural business lies in escaping.

If I'm the Catholic head of a business or institution, then here's the big question: Is there any way I can use "practical reason" to sidestep the bishops' F4F call to "conscience" and comply in good faith with the contraception mandate? That's what DeCosse asks in his commentary.

DeCosse complains that

... the model of conscience used by most bishops is problematic [in that] it emphasizes obedience, law, and hierarchical authority and thus departs from the Catholic tradition’s close linkage of conscience, practical reason, and freedom.

Moreover,

... these bishops needlessly lapse into using a sectarian model of the Catholic conscience ill-suited to the Church’s mission in a democratic pluralist society like the United States.

DeCosse adds:

Where a theologian like Thomas Aquinas speaks of conscience combining obedience to moral law and the exercise of practical reason, the bishops heavily favor the former over the latter. On the one hand, this means that conscience is best understood as the way by which we adhere to the moral laws requiring respect always and everywhere — in the bishops’ eyes especially meaning turning from what they call the “intrinsic evils” at stake in the use of the artificial means of birth control; in gay marriage; and in taking innocent human life from conception onward.

Put another way, I'd say that the bishops are, in the spirit they have infused into Fortnight for Freedom, leaving no wiggle room for Catholic institution heads and business owners who are in the line of fire vis-à-vis the contraception mandate to, in their own private moral deliberations, treat the Church teaching about contraception as something that is not "obligatory in a universal, objective way."

I think that's a bad choice on the bishops' part. Emphasizing "obedience, law, and hierarchical authority," it implies that lay Catholics ought to consider themselves moral "children" who should simply listen to the haughty prelates of the Church and do their bidding.

Fortnight for Freedom, Day 10

Fortnight for Freedom is all about whether the government can require, under Obamacare, the Catholic Church, its institutional affiliates such as charities and universities, and its individual members who own businesses to provide their employees with health-care coverage that pays for contraception.

Underlying that controversy is the question of whether the Church is right to oppose the use of contraception — other than the "rhythm method" — as immoral.

I believe the Church is wrong to do so.

The Church opposes contraception largely because, in the 13th century, it was found by Thomas Aquinas in his seminal theological discourses that anything that marriage partners might employ to "impede" the ability of sex to lead to procreation is "unnatural."

Aquinas felt that the "natural" function of the generative organs irrefutably tells us that we ought not to artificially block the possibility of pregnancy. His approach to theology has long been called that of "natural law." The Church has, ever since the 13th century, made Aquinas's "natural law" a centerpiece of its theological outlook.

Today, I think we need to revisit the question of what is natural, and thus lawful.

Michel Foucault

One excellent rationale for revisiting natural law, I have recently learned from Margaret Farley's book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, comes from French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault has written several books on the history of sexuaity in the West. As Farley describes Foucault's insights, they revolve around two ideas.

One is that human "sexuality" is something humans have "constructed." Although there is obviously a natural stimulus toward sex, what sex we engage in and how we regulate our sexuality are matters that vary by historical epoch. Human sexuality in all its rich complexity is not a natural given.

The other of Foucault's main ideas is that human sexuality is constructed by power relationships. There are, historically, human institutions of power that give us permissions — or else withhold them. The Catholic Church was once the most important permission giver/witholder in the Western world. No longer.

Today, I would say, we face a complex picture when it comes to permission giving. Many of our cultural power centers tell us a different story than does the Church. It feels "natural" for many women today to try to artificially "impede" pregnancy under certain circumstances — and if that doesn't work, to have an abortion.

Each of us, female or male, Catholic or otherwise, tries to find our way through today's veritable thicket of conflicting permission givers. As we do this, we necessarily have to employ our free will. And our free will is necessarily guided by what feels "natural" to us — which in turn is conditioned by the cultural "waters" we together find ourselves swimming in.

Obamacare will make oral contraceptives (nearly) universally free of charge — just show your insurance card to the pharmacist along with your prescription, and take the pills home with you. The next generation of women won't know there was a time when oral contraceptives were deemed impermissible.

Under such circumstances, it will quite naturally feel "natural" to have sex while on the pill. In fact, for 98 percent of Catholic women, it already does.

I would accordingly say that the Catholic Church needs to step boldly into the 21st century, and that Fortnight for Freedom is counterproductive in that regard.

Fortnight for Freedom, Day 9

There is something in the progressive spirit of the famed artworks of Sister Mary Corita from an earlier era that implicitly upbraids the conservative counter-spirit of today's Fortnight for Freedom. Take, for instance, her "The Juiciest Tomato of All" serigraph from 1964:

(Click to enlarge.)

She's referring cheekily to the Blessed Virgin Mary, of course. How appropriate that cheekiness was, in a day in which Vatican II was metaphorically throwing open the windows and letting fresh air into the stuffy old Catholic Church.

Sister Mary Corita

The woman now known as Corita Kent, pictured at left as Sister Mary Corita, is enjoying a retrospective, "Sister Mary Corita: R(ad)ical Love," now at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Ave. NW, Washington, DC. It runs until July 15.








The website for the exhibition says of Corita Kent:

As a member of the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles and an influential teacher at Immaculate Heart College in the 1960s, Corita developed a bold graphic language that revealed her impassioned spiritual beliefs and vision of peace and love in the turbulent 1960s.

From the exhibition, here's another of Corita's images:

(Click to enlarge.)

I grew up in the 1960s, when there were truly "impassioned spiritual beliefs," and there was likewise a palpable "vision of peace and love" in the post-Vatican II Catholic Church of the time. Sister Mary Corita's posters were ubiquitous at Georgetown University during the late 1960s, as I well recall.

Here's another:

The upside down yellow text says, "Wine that rejoyces man's heart."

Another:

You can read it as "Open Wide: That the King of Glory May Enter In," or as "Open Wide: The Exits of Poverty to the Children of the Poor." Get it? It's the exact same, essentially basic Christian message stated in two different ways.

Where, I wonder, is the second version of the message in today's Fortnight for Freedom? If the bishops get their way, lower-income women working for Catholic institutions would not be given contraception coverage, and the "exits for their children" would have to accomodate a whole lot more children.

Fortnight for Freedom, Day 8

Let's recap. Today is the midway point in the Fortnight for Freedom, a 14-day campaign led by Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, who is acting on behalf of the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). F4F is billed as a protest against government-mandated contraception coverage in health insurance plans offered by Catholic-run institutions and Catholic-owned businesses to their employees.

The Catholic Church teaches that the use of artificial means of birth control (pills, condoms, IUDs, sterilization, etc.) is immoral. Archbishop Lori thinks that the government is trespassing on constitutional guarantees of religious freedom when it insists employees of Catholic-run or -owned entities get the same contraception coverage in their health plans that (most) other U.S. workers get.

I strongly disagree with you, Archbishop Lori — which is why I'm saying so repeatedly in this 14-day series of posts.

HHS Secretary
Kathleen Sebelius

Kathleen Sebelius, President Obama's Secretary of Health and Human Services — who happens to be a fellow Catholic — set off a firestorm when she announced, on Jan. 20, a mandate requiring that all health plans under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, known more briefly as "Obamacare," provide coverage at no cost for all contraceptives approved by the Food and Drug Administration, as part of a standard package of preventive health services for women.

As the mandate was originally set up, so-called "religious organizations," such as our Catholic churches themselves, were exempted, but a broad range of Catholic-run institutions such as charities, social-services providers, hospitals, and universities were not.

The bishops rightly howled.

President announcing
contraception mandate tweak, with
HHS Secretary by his side.

On Feb. 10, the President himself stepped to the White House podium, with Secretary Sebelius by his side, to announce a change to the terms of the mandate. "Under the rule, women will still have access to free preventive care that includes contraceptive service no matter where they work," Obama said. "That core principle remains."

"But," the President continued, "if a woman's employer is a charity or a hospital that has a religious objection to providing contraceptive services as part of their health plan, the insurance company — not the hospital, not the charity — will be required to reach out and offer the woman contraceptive care free of charge without co-pays, without hassle."

According the the revised mandate, it would be insurance companies, not conscience-bound Catholic institutions, who would have to pay for the contraception coverage.

That didn't satisfy the bishops, though. Despite an initial, if somewhat tepid, signal to the contrary, the USCCB soon went into a full-court press against the revised mandate. On May 21, according to Fox News, "Some of the most influential Catholic institutions in the country filed suit against the Obama administration ... over the so-called contraception mandate, in one of the biggest coordinated legal challenges to the rule to date."

Washington Post opinion
writer E.J. Dionne Jr.

I agreed with many liberal Catholic pundits, among them op-ed writer E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post, that the original mandate did in fact encroach on religious liberty. But — as does Dionne — I think the tweak made on Feb. 10 makes the mandate acceptable. I think the bishops are wrong to take legal action against it. And I think they are wrong to have organized the Fortnight for Freedom.

But I also think that certain liberal Catholics who have called for those of us who disagree with the bishops to come right out and exit the Church entirely, once and for all, are dead wrong.

E.J. Dionne agreed with me about this on May 13, when his column titled "I’m not quitting the church" appeared. He chastised an ad placed in The Post by the Freedom From Religion Foundation ...

(Click the ad to see a larger version.)

... that said, "It's time to quit the Roman Catholic Church. Will it be reproductive freedom, or back to the Dark Ages? Do you choose women and their rights, or Bishops and their wrongs? Whose side are you on? In light of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops’ war against women's right to contraception," all those who "choose women and their rights" ought to quit the Church.

I'm right with E.J. Dionne, contrariwise, in saying that the FFRF ...

"... may not see the Gospel as a liberating document, but I do, and I can’t ignore the good done in the name of Christ by the sisters, priests, brothers and lay people who have devoted their lives to the poor and the marginalized. ...

Do the bishops notice how often those of us who regularly defend the church turn to the work of nuns on behalf of charity and justice to prove Catholicism’s detractors wrong? Why in the world would the Vatican, apparently pushed by right-wing American bishops, think it was a good idea to condemn the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the main organization of nuns in the United States? ...

Oh yes, and the nuns are also scolded for talking a great deal about social justice and not enough about abortion (as if the church doesn’t talk enough about abortion already). But has it occurred to the bishops that less stridency might change more hearts and minds on this very difficult question? ...

Too many bishops seem in the grip of dark suspicions that our culture is moving at breakneck speed toward a demonic end. Pope John XXIII, by contrast, was more optimistic about the signs of the times.

“Distrustful souls see only darkness burdening the face of the earth,” he once said. “We prefer instead to reaffirm all our confidence in our Savior who has not abandoned the world which he redeemed.” The church best answers its critics when it remembers that its mission is to preach hope, not fear.

That's precisely why I have to say, in the most unambiguous terms possible, "Sorry, FFRF. Like E.J. Dionne and a lot of other liberal Catholics, I'm not quitting the Church. No way."

Fortnight for Freedom, Day 7

Ready for a history lesson? Here's the big question: What is the intellectual history of the Catholic Church's opposition to artificial means of contraception?

That teaching, which says using birth control pills, condoms, and so on is downright immoral, is currently the basis of the U.S. bishops' Fortnight for Freedom campaign. F4F, now in its 7th of 14 days, assails the Obama administration for mandating that contraception-covering health insurance be provided by Catholic institutions to all their employees. F4F's point man, Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, says the mandate violates our country's constitutional guarantees of "religious freedom."

Birth-control pills

But why did the Church reject "the pill" and other modern methods of preventing pregnancy in the first place? Margaret A. Farley, in her book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, takes the reader back to the time of Saint Augustine in the fifth century. His seminal writings held that marriage and procreation were good, but that "sexual desire [was] in itself an evil passion (that is, distorted by original sin)."

St. Augustine of Hippo

Augustine firmly opposed the philosophy of the heretical Manicheans of his day, who thought of the human body as intrinsically corrupt and evil. But, Augustine said, the Fall of Adam and Eve — the biblical event that brought humankind into a state of "original sin" — had introduced disorder into human sexuality. To offset that disorder, Augustine insisted on a strictly procreative purpose for sexual intercourse, which, of course, he limited to married heterosexual couples. He felt that only such an unwavering "procreative ethic" could tame unruly passion, a bad thing, with orderly reason, which Augustine deemed intrinsically good.

Augustine's procreative ethic echoed that of the earliest Christian writers, Farley shows, who in turn had been influenced by certain of their pagan contemporaries: specifically, the Stoic philosophers of the late Greco-Roman period. With the Stoics, the early fathers of the Church held that the Gnostics (who were the intellectual precursors of the Manicheans) were wrong to the extent that they asserted "two extreme positions ... one in opposition to all sexual intercourse and the other permitting any form of sexual intercourse so long as it was not procreative." The Stoics and the early Church fathers both wanted — again, strictly within the confines of heterosexual marriage — reverence for procreation as the only way hot sexual passion could be subdued by cooler intentional reason.

All the while, there were numerous competing strands of Christian thought about sexuality, says Farley. One of these held that virginity and celibacy were superior to marriage and procreation — a major reason why Catholic priests are celibate today. Another denigrated marital sex as preeminently a "remedy for lust." Yet another, which had roots in the thought of the late-Greco-Roman philosopher Plutarch, affirmed a different, if secondary, imperative for marital sex.

Plutarch

Plutarch, Farley says, held that "sexual desire represented a fundamental natural drive not only to procreation but to the companionship of spouses." This second legitimate purpose of marital sex would complement the first, that of procreation, in some of the earliest and also in some of the most modern statements issued by the Church regarding sexual morality.

To me, the most telling aspect of early Christian thought about sex and gender relations, as described by Farley, is that women were typically judged to be inferior to men. Their bodies were commonly linked to corruption and defilement; their putative passivity was deemed of lower merit than the supposedly more active male character; they were thought to be of lesser intelligence. If there is one single thing today that serves to call into doubt the whole history of Catholic thought about sex and gender, I believe it's our present-day recognition that women are not inferior, their bodies are not corrupt, their wits are not dim, their attitudes are not passive ... and their sexuality is not threatening to the good order of society.

St. Thomas Aquinas

Writing in the 13th century, though, Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologiae and his Summa Contra Gentiles, did nothing to elevate the status of women. He did suggest, says Farley, "that marriage might be the basis for a maximum form of friendship," echoing Plutarch and other thinkers from antiquity. But wives were still required to be subordinate to what might be called their "friendship" partners, i.e., their husbands.

Moreover, Aquinas's thinking about "the anatomy and biological functions of the sexual organs," writes Farley, led him to postulate that "the norm of reason in sexual behavior requires not only the conscious intention to procreate but the accurate and unimpeded (that is, noncontraceptive) physical process whereby procreation is possible."

In other words, the use of anything which might do what modern condoms do — impede the "physical process whereby procreation is possible" — was forbidden by Aquinas's theory of "natural law." By extension, the birth control pills of today, insofar as they likewise "impede" the procreative physical process, are considered just as unacceptable by the Church.

Today, 98 percent of sexually active, fertile Catholic women desiring not to become pregnant either are using, or have at some point used, artificial means of contraception, statistics show. A great many women, Catholic or otherwise, feel they would not be able to assert their equality, their intelligence, their bodily sanctity, their inclination to be active in life rather than passive, and the sheer validity of their strong female sex drive were it not for the ready availability of modern contraceptives.

A note, then, to Archbishop Lori: That's why the U.S government is telling the Catholic Church, "No more employee health plans without contraceptive coverage." Life in these modern United States today, I'd urge you to accept, demands exactly that.

Fortnight for Freedom, Day 6

In my previous installment in this series of posts — a series whose main point is to question the currently-under-way Fortnight for Freedom campaign instituted by Archbishop William Lori and the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops — I talked about the Vatican censure recently aimed at Margaret A. Farley and her book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics.

Farley, a professor emeritus of Christian ethics the Yale Divinity School and a "woman religious" (in Catholic-speak) in the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, had in her book proposed modern attitudes toward masturbation, homosexual acts, homosexual unions and remarriage after divorce (among other topics). These are attitudes that the Church hierarchy finds offensive, but which I decidedly do not.

As the upbraiding of Farley was publicly revealed, American nuns as a group were simultaneously pushing back against their own recent censure by the Vatican. In April (see this Washington Post story) the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an umbrella group representing 80 percent of Catholic sisters and nuns in the United States, drew the fire of the Vatican over ...

... serious theological errors in statements by members, widespread dissent on the church’s teaching on sexuality and “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith” ...

That's what was stated in "a church report released Wednesday [April 18]," the Post story said. A member of the all-male apostolate in the U.S., Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle, was appointed by the Vatican "to oversee 'reform' of the women’s organization," according to the story.

The epicenter of the dispute between the Vatican and the LCWR seems to have been that:

NETWORK, a Washington, DC lobbying group founded by Catholic sisters in 1971 was singled out as “silent on the right to life” ... “I think we scare them,” Sr. Simone Campbell, a lawyer who serves as the executive director of the lobby said of the church’s male hierarchy ...

The article then said:

Campbell sees the current tension between male and female Catholic clergy as a part of a post-Vatican II democratic evolution within the church, but worries that the male leaders fail to recognize the “witness of women religious.”

“I made my vows over 40 years ago to serve the people of God and that service is unseen in this document,” she said in an interview.

“It’s painfully obvious that the leadership of the church is not used to having educated women form thoughtful opinions and engage in dialogue,” Campbell said.

Also mentioned in the article:

In October, the U.S. Bishops’ doctrinal conference offered a formal critique of theologian Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson, who they said inappropriately over-emphasized feminine descriptions of God in a new book.

And:

After the head of the Catholic Health Association, Sr. Carol Keehan, voiced approval for the Obama administration’s attempt at a compromise on the HHS birth control regulations, Cardinal Timothy Dolan said he was “disappointed that she had acted unilaterally, not in concert with the bishops.”

A follow-up article soon appeared. It was headlined, "American nuns stunned by Vatican accusation of ‘radical feminism,’ crackdown." This photo accompanied it:

Sister Mary Alice Chineworth, 94, and other
nuns at the Oblate Sisters of Providence motherhouse
all have their favorite spots to sit during evening prayers
in the chapel Aug. 24, 2011, in Catonsville, MD.

(I take the liberty of including the photo because I, too, live in Catonsville, MD, and my last birthday was August 24, 2011!)

The points made in the article included:

• The directive from the Vatican taking the American sisters to task came without warning and took the women religious by surprise.
• The directive amounted to "a Vatican crackdown on what it calls 'radical feminism' among the women and their purported failure to sufficiently condemn such issues as abortion and same-sex marriage."
• "The Vatican report took the nuns to task for making 'occasional public statements' that disagree with the bishops, 'who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals'.”
• There was a question of fairness: "The Vatican report didn’t focus on public positions the women took but rather on the private conversations they had at their own meetings and comments they made in private letters to Vatican officials about such issues as how to minister to gays and lesbians."
• A large number of lay Catholics stood up on the nuns' side: "Thousands of people joined a Twitter drive to support the Leadership Conference, which represents more than 80 percent of American nuns. Using the hashtag #whatsistersmeantome, one person wrote of the nun who 'was the rock of our Catholic campus'. Another man tweeted about how his father lost his own mother at 13. 'It was the Mercy sisters who consoled and loved him onward'.”
• The connection between priests and nuns has been weakening since the late 1960s and early 1970s, according to Sister Pat McDermott, president of the 3,500-member Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, which is based in Silver Spring, MD.
• The number of women religious in the U.S. Catholic Church is seriously on the decline.

Anyone see the pattern here? As the male hierarchy has become increasingly conservative, a trend that started with the pontificate of Pope John Paul II beginning in 1978, the vocations of women religious in this country have dwindled. Meanwhile, those sisters and nuns who have remained have grown increasingly out of step with the apostolate.

How long can this go on? How can anyone think it's good for the Church?

Fortnight for Freedom, Day 5

Fortnight for Freedom, a campaign spearheaded by Archbishop William Lori, the head of the Baltimore Archdiocese of the Catholic Church, is in its fifth of fourteen days, a span that will end square on the Fourth of July. F4F is supposedly about the "freedom" of the Catholic Church not to be encumbered by a recent Department of Health and Human Services mandate that women employees of Church-run institutions and Catholic-owned businesses must have cost-free contraception included in their health plans.

I say that's a diversion of focus, a ruse. F4F is actually about the power of an all-male apostolate — the Church's bishops, including the pope — to speak for the American Catholic laity, among whose women fully 98 percent (setting aside those women who have never had sex or have never been put at unwanted risk of pregnancy) have used artificial means of contraception.

I'm posting a new installment of this series every day of the F4F campaign, in hopes of showing that even an almost-65-year-old male Catholic who has never been married and is not sexually active thinks the bishops are all washed up.

Margaret A. Farley

I am reading Margaret A. Farley's recent book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics as I do this series. Farley is a professor emeritus of Christian ethics the Yale Divinity School and also a nun in the (Catholic) Sisters of Mercy of the Americas. In a story that appeared in The Washington Post on Monday, June 4, I learned of her book's existence at the same time that I learned, from the story:

The Vatican criticized a popular American nun [Farley] on Monday, saying her book on sexual ethics, including topics such as masturbation and homosexuality, contradicts Catholic teaching and must not be used by Catholic educators.

The story went on to say:

The Vatican rejected Farley’s views on masturbation, homosexual acts, homosexual unions and remarriage after divorce.

Farley writes that masturbation, particularly by women, “usually does not raise any moral questions at all” and that it “actually serves relationships rather than hindering them.”

The Vatican said the church teaches that masturbation is “an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.”

Farley writes that “same-sex oriented persons as well as their activities can and should be respected.” The Vatican said that while homosexual tendencies are not considered sinful, homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and “contrary to the natural law.”

The story said it was the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that issued the censure, which was duly "signed by department head Cardinal William Levada, an American, and approved by Pope Benedict XVI."

The next day, a follow-up story by Post reporter Michelle Boorstein appeared on The Post's blog site. Boorstein stated:

Twenty-four hours ago news broke that the Vatican had condemned the book “Just Love:A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,” a publication by a prominent nun-theologian that disagrees with church teaching on same-sex marriage, masturbation and remarrying after divorce. Monday morning, the book’s reported ranking on Amazon: 142,982


Tuesday afternoon, after a day of furious news coverage of the Vatican censure: It’s at #16.

The book had gone viral. That was when I bought it.

Fortnight for Freedom, Day 4

Sisterhood is powerful.

That's what feminists in the women's liberation movement in the days of my young adulthood used to say. Sisterhood: women pulling together to break the shackles of a culture in which, for millennia, women had wielded little power. Powerful: capable of breaking those shackles.

They got broken.

Sort of.

Today, women have individually and collectively claimed power to an historically unprecedented degree. Their new power has created a force, a pressure, that has radically changed our world. Including our Catholic world.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

But full equality with men has remained elusive. Hillary Clinton found when she ran for president that there is still a glass ceiling. Women's compensation as workers in the marketplace lags behind men's. Women rightly worry that a slight rightward shift in the Supreme Court might bring an end to abortion rights.

Nowhere is the tension between full rights for women and the prerogatives of men who are still trying to hold onto power more evident than in the Catholic Church.

Fortnight for Freedom is an expression of that tension, that struggle for power. Archbishop William Lori and the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops claim that F4F is all about religious freedom, but that's a ruse. It's about the ability of the Church to dodge a contraception-provision mandate issued by the federal government, true, but it's much more about whether the Church can continue to claim in its stodgy old way that an all-male apostolate — the bishops, the pope — can define the "belief" of the Church over the heads of the 98 percent of Catholic women who are sexually active and at risk of pregancy, or have been at some time in the past, and have used artificial methods of contraception.

Pope Paul VI

The bishops oppose such methods as the birth control pill and the employment of condoms, a position set in stone in the late 1960s by an encyclical of Pope Paul VI, written at a time when the modern women's movement was just revving up.

We are probably just days away from the decision of the Supreme Court on Obamacare. The court may strike the law down in its entirety, or it may nullify the individual mandate at its heart. If it takes either of those two approaches, the contraception mandate may automatically become void. Why campaign against it thus prematurely?

Because, I think, the real issue is not Obamacare, but the power of the (male) bishops. Their power in our society as a whole, and their power among Catholics. This is a salvo in an ongoing campaign to bring back the mojo bishops commanded once, in a day not so long ago when women had yet to claim their power.

Fortnight for Freedom, Day 3

Today is the third day of the Fortnight for Freedom, a 14-day campaign that Archbishop William Lori, the head of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, is spearheading on behalf of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops:

It's billed as a protest against Obamacare-mandated contraception coverage in health insurance plans offered to employees by Catholic-run institutions and Catholic-owned businesses. The Catholic Church teaches that the use of artificial means of birth control — pills, condoms, IUDs, sterilization, and the like — is against God's will and is therefore a sin.

I happen to think otherwise. So, apparently, do huge numbers of Catholic women. According to tables published by the Guttmacher Institute, using (among other sources) unpublished data from the 2006-2008 National Survey of Family Growth ...

(Click image above to enlarge.)

... 98 percent of Catholic women who have had sex have at some point in their lives used a contraceptive method other than natural family planning, aka the "rhythm method." (See also the Guttmacher Institute report "Countering Conventional Wisdom: New Evidence on Religion and Contraceptive Use," by Rachel K. Jones and Joerg Dreweke.) Among non-pregnant, non-post partum Catholic women who are sexually active and who do not wish to get pregnant:

• 32 percent rely on sterilization to avoid pregnancy
• 31 percent use a pill or other hormonal treatment
• 5 percent use an IUD
• 15 percent use condoms
• 4 percent use some other artificial method 
• 2 percent rely on natural family planning to avoid getting pregnant
• 11 percent rely on no method whatever

Only the last two categories, comprising just 13 percent of the Catholic-and-sexually-active group, meet with Church approval — assuming, that is, that the women in those two categories are having sex only with their husbands.

Sterilization, pills, hormonal treatments to avoid pregnancy, IUDs, condoms, and all other approaches besides the rhythm method are forbidden to Catholic women by the Church. So 87 percent of the sexually active Catholic women who are in the "I don't want to get pregnant" group are voluntarily placing themselves in a state of sexual sin.

The statistics show that there's not a big difference between Catholic women and women of other faiths in this regard. True, women whose religion is "Other" (Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, etc.) are more likely to use condoms than women whose religion is Catholic, Mainline Protestant, Evangelical Protestant, or "None." Evangelical Protestant women are more likely to depend on sterilization. Other than that, there's not a dime's worth of difference in the numbers.

The Guttmacher Institute report I cited above says:

Sexual experience among never-married women of all religious affiliations is common: It is reported by four in 10 adolescents aged 15–19 and eight in 10 young adults aged 20–24. Among those aged 20–24, Evangelicals are slightly less likely to have had sex than are Catholics or Mainline Protestants.

And also:

Never-married women of reproductive age who attend religious services every week are less likely to have ever had sex than are those who attend less frequently (48% vs. 74–80%), and this association applies to both adolescents and young adult women. Similarly, never-married women with a religious affiliation who indicate that religion is very important in their daily lives are less likely to be sexually experienced than are those who indicate religion is less important (59% vs. 74–80%), and this association applies to both adolescents and young adult women.

To me, this last result indicates that the Church needs to work harder to get more fannies into pews, if it wants less illicit sex ... which means not railing against the sexual practices of potential Mass attendees. But instead, Archbishop Lori and the USCCB are conducting the Fortnight for Freedom, railing against government mandates that don't force anyone, Catholic or otherwise, to have illicit sex or to use artificial birth control when she has licit sex.

Huh? Go figure ...

Fortnight for Freedom, Day 2

An article in the Friday, June 22, Baltimore Sun, "Catholic leaders launch campaign against Obama policies," reports on the Mass celebrated the previous day at Baltimore's Baslica of the Assumption, the oldest cathedral in the United States, by Archbishop William Lori to kick off Fortnight for Freedom. In his homily, Archbishop Lori said President Obama's policies are "morally objectionable":

"On Aug. 1, less than six weeks from now, the Health and Human Services mandate will go into effect. This will force conscientious private employers to violate their consciences by funding and facilitating through their employee health insurance plans reproductive 'services' that are morally objectionable. Religious freedom includes the freedom of individuals to act in accord with their faith but also the freedom of church institutions to act in accord with their teachings and to serve as a buffer between the power of the state and the freedom of the individual conscience."

Fortnight for Freedom is an argument about power.

I have it on good authority that human sexuality, and thus all human sex qua sex, is also an argument about power.

Margaret A. Farley

In her book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, retired professor Margaret A. Farley of the Yale Divinity School, who is also a Catholic nun (Sisters of Mercy), summarizes the scholarship of Michel Foucault in his own series of books on "The History of Sexuality." Foucault holds that you cannot understand human "sex" until you understand how "sexuality" has been construed down through history. Foucault's research shows that the most consistent aspect of "sexuality" in different Western epochs is that, as Farley puts it, "Sexuality is [perennially] a 'transfer point' for relations of power — between women and men, parents and children, teachers and students, clergy and laity, the young and the old, rulers and people ruled."

For humans, that is, there is no "sex" or "sexuality" without power relationships, and sex can never be reduced to a mere instinct or urge, as it can for animals. Instead, it is actually not reproductive urges but power relationships that channel — nay, define — what sex is to us in any given age.

Foucault shows that the nexus of thought among power elites in ancient pagan cultures constructed a sexuality focused on satisfying human desires for "health, beauty, and freedom." Then, Farley writes, in the pre-modern Christian era the seeking of "purity of heart before God" demanded new sexual ethics that amounted in large part to "procedures ... to make us detest the body."

Yet, according to Farley — per Foucault — "religious, political, medical, [and] psychological forces have been at work at various times in the past both in [that form and in the form of] 'ruses ... to make us love sex'."

So in every epoch, including the modern one, power has been exerted by competing elites to sway humanity in the direction of one or the other of these two opposed forces.

In our modern Western world of the last three centuries or so, our incessant "self-examining and self-reporting" have served up for us, courtesy of our power elites, a sexual ethic in which (we now say) we are "repressed" — Foucault urges upon us the question of exactly why we say this — and one in which we "burden ourselves ... with so much guilt for having made sex a sin" — another crucial "why" question for Foucault.

We need not hope to ever get away from our tendency toward fostering bodily detestation or our competing tendency toward a ruse-inspired, hyped up sexual ardor, I would suppose. But my point here is that Fortnight for Freedom is oriented toward reinstating a constricted attitude toward sexuality, á la the first force, while claiming to be upholding religious liberty instead. It is a plea for making "purity of heart before God" once again the watchword: the (supposedly) traditional mantra which (or so says the Church hierarchy) is inconsistent with the (supposedly) purely carnal sex that the widespread use of contraception supposedly must unleash.

It's a double-edged power play by the bishops: First they insist on their own definition of which sexual attitudes and practices foster the requisite "purity of heart before God," and then they insist that any government action that "forces" Catholic institutions and business owners to underwrite contrary attitudes and practices constitutes an assault on religious freedom.

Plenty of Catholics aren't buying it, per the Baltimore Sun article: "According to recent polling by the Public Religion Research Institute ... about 57 percent of American Catholics do not feel their religious freedom is being threatened, and 65 percent believe publicly held corporations should be held to the mandates of the Obama administration's health reform law."

Still, as many as a third of Catholics would seem to be, at least to an extent, in sync with the bishops. The bishops would call these the "conscientious" ones. But I'd say that such language itself, as carefully couched rhetoric, constitutes its own attempted use of force.

Fortnight for Freedom, Day 1

Archbishop Lori

Fortnight for Freedom is the name being given to a 14-day campaign that the U.S. Catholic Bishops have organized, starting June 21, 2012, and running through the Fourth of July. Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, my own archdiocese, is the force behind it. It is billed as a campaign for religious freedom or religious liberty. Archbishop Lori and his supporters believe the freedom of the Catholic Church in the U.S. is under assault. Principally, it seems they object to the recent mandate of the Obama administration that agencies of the Church provide access to health coverage for their employees that includes cost-free contraception.

I, in turn, object to the Fortnight for Freedom and the reasoning that has brought it about. I believe the compromise worked out by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, according to which the insurance companies will pay for contraception coverage and the Church-as-coverage-provider will not, decidedly is enough of a nod toward religious freedom to make Fortnight for Freedom a case of overkill.

More is going on here, though, than just a dispute over health care coverage. I think this is a battle in a renewed, even stepped up, culture war, and I find myself on the opposite side of this conflict from Archbishop Lori and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

For me, it's not just whether women who work for the Church or its institutional subsidiaries should have artificial means of birth control covered in their health plans. It's more about whether the Church is right to oppose using birth control in the first place. I think it's wrong for the Church to oppose it outright.

I also support legalized abortion, same-sex marriage, and a wider ambit of sexual expression than the Church would condone. To me, unmarried sex, homosexual relations, masturbation, and other taboo forms of sexual expression are not necessarily sins.

If I'm right, then the reason is, I think, that the world has changed fundamentally since the Church worked out its teachings. Those teachings were once correct, but for a different world than the one we live in now.

I call the change a fundamental one for this reason: We have in my lifetime experienced a huge revolution in sexual attitudes and behaviors, one which would once have surely put us on the road to social chaos. Indeed, the old teachings were designed for a world in which sexual strictures were absolutely necessary. They were a vital strategy meant to uphold the traditional family as the nucleus of social order. Had Christians not been taught to toe the line sexually, who knows what an abyss of social chaos would have ensued?

But the old taboos have, in effect, been retired by our society today. For example, a great many Catholic women have obtained abortions, and an even greater number have enjoyed sex without the benefit of marriage, have used artificial means of birth control, have secretly masturbated, etc. Catholic men have likewise violated the sexual strictures traditionally placed upon them, and have often done so with great abandon. The same is true of non-Catholic women and men. And the social order has not degenerated into chaos. Repeat, not.

I'm not saying there should be no moral or ethical limits to sexual behavior. I'm just saying that we need, whether Catholics or not, a new framework for Christian sexual ethics. The old framework no longer applies.

That's what I personally believe, but clearly Archbishop Lori and a great many other Catholics inside and outside the Church hierarchy believe quite differently. However, unless we take the stance that the position promulgated by the hierarchy simply is, by definition, what the Church believes, the situation is actually a more complex one than that. If the attitudes and practices of Catholics in general constitute the "belief" of the Church, then (for example) the mandate for contraceptive coverage is not inconsistent with religious freedom in this country as it impinges on the Catholic Church.

Blog Rededication

This blog has been rededicated yet again!

I have lately found my attention drawn to the current controversies surrounding the Catholic Church in America, to the unfortunate exclusion of my environmental concerns. I'm still worried about Mother Nature, but I'm even more worried about the Church. To find out why, see Fortnight for Freedom, Day 1.