The National Catholic Reporter takes on "the crisis of leadership" among the Catholic bishops

"Archbishop [of New York] Timothy Dolan, he of the wide smile, ready handshake and outsized laugh, was to be the church’s antidote to the cool and distant manner of his predecessor, Cardinal Edward Egan, who was a public relations nightmare from the start. But a love for beer and a hot dog from the cart outside the cathedral will only get you so far."


"The vote in New York sends a strong message to Catholic leadership. The danger is not in the vote itself. The danger they face is far deeper -- a crisis of leadership and authority for which they have only themselves to blame."

-- an editorial in the July 5 National Catholic Reporter

by Ken

The national discussion is being swamped by so much craziness that I take perhaps excessive pleasure in examples of public non-craziness, which apparently hasn't been outlawed after all. So even though I'm not making any great claims for the significance in the grand scheme of things of this editorial in the National Catholic Reporter, I still may be making too much of it.

Or it may be that the NCR has a better feel for the pulse of at least American Catholics than the whacked-out Church hierarchy.

Okay, the National Catholic Reporter doesn't attempt to present itself as an organ of Vatican-blessed doctrinal purity. In its "Mission and Values" statement, it describes itself as "the only significant alternative Catholic voice that provides avenues for expression of diverse perspectives, promoting tolerance and respect for differing ideas" for the 23 percent of the U.S. population that identifies itself as Catholic. The Catholic crazies speak with such inescapably loud, obstreperous voices that we may easily be fooled by their loudness and obstreperousness that they speak for American Catholics. Maybe so, maybe not.

In the July 5 issue, NCR has an editorial entitled which takes off from the Church's disastrous positioning in the recent New York State marriage-equality battle but really isn't about that. I think the opening establishes its concerns well:

Gay marriage, bishops and the crisis of leadership

July 5, 2011
An NCR editorial

The vote approving same-sex marriage in New York is the latest and most glaring confirmation of some gloomy news for the Catholic church in the United States, and it’s not that gays have achieved the right to marry.

Rather, affirmed in the recent vote is the disturbing reality that the Catholic hierarchy has lost most of its credibility with the wider culture on matters of sexuality and personal morality, just as it has lost its authority within the Catholic community on the same issues. There are reasons -- and they have little to do with secularism, relativism or lingering influences of the wild 1960s -- why people are no longer listening to the bishops.

While we don’t want to minimize the seriousness of the concern of some over a societal redefinition of marriage, there are reasons we think the bishops’ hyperbolic reaction to laws such as that enacted in New York are not only wrong-headed but counterproductive. . . .

Right away there's a thought here that you have to wonder if those bellowing voices of Catholic officialdom are even aware of: that Catholics "are no longer listening to the bishops." I speak as a total outsider, but I can't help wondering whether the Church satraps have their top-down authoritarian structure so ingrained in their heads that it doesn't even occur to them to wonder whether their sheep are listening.

And this is hardly a new problem. I remember in my very first job (and we're talking about some 45 years ago!) working with a young woman, happily married, who considered herself a devout Catholic while saying that she outright rejected the prohibition on birth control. She may once have agonized over it, but by this time there was no question in her mind that it made no sense in either her life or her faith, which again she took seriously, and therefore she considered it to have no validity. This is the very thing Church hierarchists always stress is absolutely forbidden; under no circumstances are Catholics supposed to be entitled to even an opinion about, let alone the option of disregarding, doctrine as dispensed by the Pope.

On the marriage-equality issue, NCR argues that the bishops simply aren't hearing their parishioners, or if they are, are deaf to their actual thinking.

According to Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, “On gay marriage, many of the people in the pews split with their bishops.”

That attitude does not spring so much from a stance of defiance, as some bishops would assert, but more from the experience of gays and lesbians themselves and their parents and siblings, extended family and friends who increasingly understand gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons as far more than the sum of their sexual orientation while also understanding that sexuality is at the core of a person’s identity.
To parents of a gay child, the idea that a group of men can claim to know the mind of God so perfectly that they can proclaim with unyielding certainty that God deems a significant portion of creation “disordered” is absurd. The label is not only demeaning but to contemporary Christians has no resonance with the heart of the Gospel.

A plainer way of putting it might be that in growing numbers Catholics have stopped listening to their bishops and are listening instead to Jesus.

The NCR editorial goes on to note how badly the Church's "lobbying apparatus . . . a fangless relic" was outmaneuvered in Albany -- "by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a divorced Catholic and parent; by the pro-gay-marriage lobby; and by both Democrats and Republicans." But, the editorial argues,

even if the bishops had a persuasive case to make and the legislative tools at their disposal, their public conduct in recent years -- wholesale excommunications, railing at politicians, denial of honorary degrees and speaking platforms at Catholic institutions, using the Eucharist as a political bludgeon, refusing to entertain any questions or dissenting opinions, and engaging in open warfare with the community’s thinkers as well as those, especially women, who have loyally served the church -- has resulted in a kind of episcopal caricature, the common scolds of the religion world, the caustic party of “no.”

"As if on cue," the editorial argues --

As if on cue, after the vote Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio declared by fiat that his diocese is “not to bestow or accept honors, nor to extend a platform of any kind to any state elected official, in all our parishes and churches for the foreseeable future.”

In their reaction to the vote, the Catholic bishops of New York wrote: “While our culture seems to have lost a basic understanding of marriage, we Catholics must not. We must be models of what is good, holy and sacred about authentic sacramental marriage.”

The statement might raise legitimate alarms if, indeed, the state law signaled that the Catholic ideals and sacramental life were actually under attack. They aren’t.

Again, the editorial is more polite than I would be. I would be asking if the bishops are too stupid or too dishonest to grasp that the law deals only with civil marriage, leaving total control of sacramental marriage to religious authorities. The editorial quotes from a piece in the same issue by Nicolas Cafardi, a civil and canon lawyer and professor at Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh:

Jesus in the Gospels . . . besides telling us not to act on our fears, also told us to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. Civil marriage is Caesar’s. If Caesar wants to say that you can only get married on Tuesdays, wearing a blue suit and a red tie, that is Caesar’s call. The sacrament of matrimony is God’s. It is valid only when invoked between a baptized man and a baptized woman, in the presence of two witnesses and the spouses’ proper ordinary or pastor or his delegate. Caesar has no say in this.

To me all of the foregoing is just a warmup to the editorial's real concerns. And what it says seems to me so cogent and so strong that it needs to be quoted in full, with maybe just the tiniest shade of gratuitous boldface highlighting:

The larger problem for the hierarchy, of course, is not persuading the secular culture of its point of view on sacramental marriage, but persuading its own adherents, and particularly young Catholics who now tend to drift off in scores before adulthood, that staying attached to the church is a compelling good, that the church is in fact relevant and will draw them closer to Christ and thus the freedom and fullness of a life of faith.

The bishops have little credibility in the wider culture and diminished authority within the church because in the case of sexual violence against young people by members of their clerical culture, they responded in ways that any reasonable and healthy segment of society would have considered disdainful.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan, he of the wide smile, ready handshake and outsized laugh, was to be the church’s antidote to the cool and distant manner of his predecessor, Cardinal Edward Egan, who was a public relations nightmare from the start. But a love for beer and a hot dog from the cart outside the cathedral will only get you so far.

Dolan’s rising star presumably carries with it a stamp of papal favor. The show “60 Minutes,” in its own hyperbolic burst, dubbed him the “American pope.” And senior NCR correspondent John Allen, who has conducted a book-length interview with Dolan, has written that in other circumstances the archbishop of New York “could easily have been a U.S. senator or a corporate CEO.”

That may or may not be the case, but as senator or CEO, Dolan would be held to standards of accountability that no bishop will ever face. Politicians, we know, can be run out of office and business leaders are held, however imperfectly, to standards of performance and ethics. Some of them land in jail.

In reaction to the marriage vote, Dolan stretched to call up the specter of what remains of the Red menace. On his blog he wrote that in China and North Korea “government presumes daily to ‘redefine’ rights, relationships, values and natural law.” In those countries, he says, government dictates the size of families, who can live and die, and what defines marriage. “Please, not here!” he begs. The comparison, of course, is absurd on its face, a kind of hysteria that demands that someone listen when so few are.

The vote in New York sends a strong message to Catholic leadership. The danger is not in the vote itself. The danger they face is far deeper -- a crisis of leadership and authority for which they have only themselves to blame.

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