By George Neumayr on 6.11.02 @ 12:46AM
Is the solution to the liberal scandal in the Catholic Church even more liberalism?
Is the solution to the liberal scandal in the Catholic Church
even more liberalism? This is the view of the dominant media, which
they typically advance by either quoting or publishing "Catholics"
who hate official Catholicism.
Commentary pages in the mainstream media are always open to
self-described Catholics, provided that they heap scorn on the
tenets of their religion. The Los Angeles Times adheres to
this criteria faithfully. The Times will gladly publish a
Catholic if his or her essential message is that the Church should
adopt the liberalism of the Los Angeles Times. Its policy
for Catholics is the same as its policy for Republicans: Want to
get published? Okay, then attack your own principles.
Monday's
offering in the Los Angeles Times came from Marcos
McPeek Villatoro, a "writer in residence at Mount St. Mary's
College"(read: a Catholic college in Los Angeles that hires
heretics).
Villatoro is a de facto liberal Protestant who calls himself a
Catholic. He wants his "church to grow up." What does this mean?
"Anything that will bust down the doors of the good-old-boy Roman
Catholic hierarchy. Married priests. Women priests. Women bishops.
And, of course, the abolition of mandated celibacy," he writes. He
also wants a "new theology of sexuality," which is an
important-sounding phrase for sanctioning sexual sin. He attributes
the Church's current problems not to laxity, but to strictness.
Homosexuality is not a concern for the Church, he writes, even
as he recounts the flagrant homosexuality from his seminary days.
He writes that a priest who "liked his sex partners young" made
advances upon him: "I should have seen the warning signs: the teen
pornography stacked in the closet of his rectory apartment, the
strange videos, the alcohol that he kept offering me.…After
telling me about his affair with a 15-year-old at a local high
school, and telling me how he sent the teenager off to juvenile
detention for threatening to tell the authorities, the priest asked
if I wanted to take a shower with him. Finally, an alarm went off.
I declined."
Villatoro somehow concludes from all of this that the Church
needs to travel further down the road of liberalism. This is pundit
Andrew Sullivan's advice as well. Time magazine gave him
2,000 words or so
this week to call for more liberalism in the Church. "Reform,"
in Sullivan's mind, means not restoring high standards, but
abolishing them. Never afraid to be counterintuitive, Sullivan
chalks up the sex-abuse scandal to the Church's traditional
intolerance toward sexual sin.
"I think it's fair to say that very few people in my generation
of 40-year-olds and younger can take the church's sexual teachings
very seriously again. When so many church leaders could not treat
even the raping of children as a serious offense, how can we trust
them to tell us what to believe about the more esoteric questions
of contraception, or homosexuality, or divorce?" he writes.
Had Sullivan taken these teachings seriously before? The
sex-abuse scandal spread in the Church because priests and bishops
didn't take those teachings seriously either. They had become
nonjudgmental about sexual sin, and this skepticism about the
Church's teachings produced paralysis when the time came to boot
sex abusers.
Sullivan's own words contradict his attempt to pin the scandal
on the conservative traditions of the Church.
"In almost 40 years of regular churchgoing, I have yet to hear a
homily defending the church's positions on birth control, women
priests or homosexuality," he writes. "My suspicion is that the
priests don't believe the teachings themselves. In the
confessional, I have found that priests, while not condoning
homosexual relationships, find it hard to condemn them."
This inability to condemn -- a consequence of the liberal
revolution in the Church, which the media helped foster -- explains
the crisis. Accelerating that revolution as secular journalists
propose will not solve the Church's problems, but create new
ones.
George Neumayr was recently a media fellow at the
Hoover Institution.
topics:
Mainstream Media, Religion, Catholicism
