Tough times for Catholics, this week.
When will Pope Francis do something of substance, some of us have wondered. Gestures are fine, but one good cop against a background of a bureaucracy full of bad cops seems disingenuous.
Then we had this past week’s rumors that a Vatican synod of bishops, meeting to discuss family issues, was on the verge of issuing a statement welcoming homosexuals as people with gifts to bring to the Church (like everyone else, I add), as people who benefited from their romantic relationships.
It wasn’t hard to predict how that would be received. Instead of all that, the bishops suggest that we treat homosexuals with respect and sensitivity.
When Christians have to be told to start treating other people with respect and sensitivity, as opposed to how we have treated certain people up to this point, we must have sunk really low.
The bishops did, however, include language that is shocking– that civil heterosexual unions outside the Church contain positive elements.
One hesitates to take this to the logical conclusion, which is, have we been supposed to have been thinking that a Catholic marriage is the only type of marriage that contains anything good at all? Such unbridled arrogance and condescension is absolutely insane.
Read your catechism, someone might say. That’s not what the Church teaches. Well, I really hope not! But there it is in the newspaper, and that’s what people will think, so, mortifying though it is, we have to deal with it on this level.
It’s hard to imagine that someone could be found who would say those things, but when people are running scared and looking over their shoulders at narrow-minded watchdogs who will leap for the jugular at the slightest sign of weakness, people will say crazy things just to get the hounds off their backs.
It’s easy to capitulate to the experts. “They’re the experts, those bishops and cardinals and priests,” we shrug. “We can’t argue with them, and it’s nice that we always know what they’re going to say about situations that, if one really thought about them, could get confusing.”
We used to sing the song, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”
That’s a promising idea, but it’s vague. Love of God, do they mean? If it’s love of God, then maybe we should show that by being super faithful to the Church and following all the directions from the clergy. Or not.
Love of each other, do they mean? Sometimes we have to practice tough love. We can’t just smile and go along with everybody all the time. We have to be able to say, “You are wrong in your ideas and beliefs, and you need to straighten up or face the consequences.” That’s something everyone has to do some times.
Maybe a different type of love is meant, a type of love that expresses itself in solidarity and support with all types of people, because we all need solidarity and support, and if we were disqualified from that by our moral failings, why did we ever bother to sing that song?
Sexual immorality is not a comfortable subject. The Church simplifies it by differentiating between heterosexuality and “intrinsically disordered” homosexuality, which implies an unequal playing field slanted in favor of heterosexuals, but like any type of sexuality, heterosexuality is the orientation of people who are otherwise compromised by any number and variety of moral failures.
We have our religious leaders who take upon themselves the burden of adjudicating the relative seriousness of various types of sin, but as a layperson, I’m glad it’s not for me to decide who– the advocate of the death penalty, the soldier, the banker, the high-salaried CEO, the heterosexual who occasionally looks at porn, the stealer of office supplies, the homosexual– is in the more or less serious state of sin.