Feminist Looking Glass

Will the Catholic Church Derail Another Nominee?

3 Responses

1. 

   R.C., on December 1, 2009 at 6:44 pm said:

   There’s a deep misunderstanding in all of this. (Admittedly it’s hard to understand it correctly if one doesn’t know much about the Catholic faith.)

   If Regina Benjamin supports legal abortion, it doesn’t in any way mean she can’t serve as Surgeon General, or as Attorney General, or as the very model of a modern Major General, or as proprietor of her local Dollar General.

   It merely means she shouldn’t take communion in a Catholic Church, because she is, by her own choice, either (a.) in a state of diminished unity with that Church, or (b.) simply not a member of that Church.

   This is the case according to Catholic dogma, whether she states her support for legal abortion openly or not, and whether she claims to be a Catholic or not. (Catholic teaching includes a notion of spiritual unity based on actual belief and practice, in which protestations of having been raised Catholic, or having been a Catholic at some previous time, or “feeling like a Catholic” are irrelevant.)

   Now, a person who holds (after due consideration of all relevant information) that abortion should be legal, must therefore believe either:

   (a.) the Church is wrong to teach that life begins at conception; or,
   (b.) the Church is wrong to teach that each human being is endowed by his/her creator with inalienable human rights from the moment their life begins to the moment it ends; or,
   (c.) the Church is wrong to teach that secular government’s first, highest responsibility is to defending the human rights, and particularly the right to life, of innocent persons.

   But each of these have been taught as part of the “infallible” Magisterial teachings of the Church, so a person who holds any of them violates Catholic dogma not only in that way, but also implicitly denies that the Church teaches correctly on matters of faith and morals. And the more correct name for a person with that view is “protestant,” not “catholic.” That’s no insult. It’s just truth-in-advertising.

   Now a faithful Catholic bishop is not held responsible if he unknowingly allows such a person to take Communion.

   But he is held responsible if he knowingly allows a person take Communion when in a state of willful, considered, unrepentant, unchanging disunity with the Church. In the Catholic religion, taking communion in such a state risks one’s soul, and may in rare cases risk temporal chastisement from God in the form of illness or physical death (Catholics point to St. Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 11 on this point).

   That may seem odd or even crazy to some, but that is the Catholic faith, crazy or not.

   In that sense, the bishop’s position is not much different from what, say, NRA head honcho Wayne LaPierre’s position would have been if a politician claimed to be a member of the NRA and kept showing up at private NRA functions, but hadn’t in fact been paying any dues. The NRA dude would presumably state that Politician X “is not currently an NRA member, tho’ we’d be happy if he’d renew his membership by paying the dues.” For Catholics, the “dues” include certain obligatory beliefs.

   Now of course a bishop would always want such a person to adopt the Church’s teaching instead of opposing it. But if the person was unwilling to change their views, then of course the bishop would be obligated to discourage them from taking Communion; he’d be guilty of a kind of reckless endangerment of that person’s soul, if he didn’t!

   I bring this up just so it’s understood: Regina Benjamin has every right to be a Surgeon General if she’s up to it, and whether her views on abortion are compatible with being a member of the Catholic church, or not, probably doesn’t enter into it.

   But it’s just unreasonable for Regina Benjamin to hold anti-Catholic views on a matter of faith or morals, and profess them publicly in a manner her bishop is sure to hear…and still expect him to pretend he hadn’t heard it, and offer her communion!

   That puts him in an awful position, and under the circumstances, for her sake more than for his, he’s obligated to ask her to refrain until and unless she returns to the fullness of Catholic faith. He should do it courteously, of course…but not doing it would be far worse than discourtesy, according to his beliefs.

   So the question, “Will the Catholic Church Derail Another Nominee?” is a little off-base.

   The Catholic church has nothing much to say if this protestant or that protestant or the other protestant becomes the Surgeon General. The only problem comes in when it’s someone who claims to be Catholic while in actuality holding anti-Catholic views. Under those circumstances the bishop must correct that person’s misunderstandings about what it takes to be a Catholic.

   But that is a matter of that person’s soul and health and of truth-in-advertising, and has nothing whatever to do with that person’s job. The person could be a nominee for dogcatcher, and the bishop’s responsibility would be no different.

   It’s not a question of whether Regina Benjamin’s job plans are derailed or not.

   Just her plans for Sunday morning, really.

   Reply
   • 

     Mike, on December 2, 2009 at 1:45 pm said:

     R.C., thanks for your thoughtful and informative comment. Let me think about that for a while and I will have a reply.

     Reply
2. 

   Mike, on July 21, 2009 at 8:58 pm said:

   In the post, I wrote that “it remains to be seen what currently-supportive Catholics like Keenan would say if it is learned that Benjamin does support abortion and the Church puts on the pressure.” I wasn’t aware at the time that the Vatican is already putting pressure on American nuns. On July 1, the New York Times had an article titled “U.S. Nuns Facing Vatican Scrutiny.” It reported that the Vatican is conducting two sweeping investigations of American nuns, even though the number of U.S. nuns has decreased from 180,000 in 1965 to 60,000 today.

   In the last four decades since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, many American nuns stopped wearing religious habits, left convents to live independently and went into new lines of work: academia and other professions, social and political advocacy and grass-roots organizations that serve the poor or promote spirituality. A few nuns have also been active in organizations that advocate changes in the church like ordaining women and married men as priests.

   Some sisters surmise that the Vatican and even some American bishops are trying to shift them back into living in convents, wearing habits or at least identifiable religious garb, ordering their schedules around daily prayers and working primarily in Roman Catholic institutions, like schools and hospitals.

   One of the investigations was ordered by a Vatican official who said in a speech in Massachusetts last year that some American nuns “have opted for ways that take them outside” the church. The other investigation was ordered by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is headed by an American, Cardinal William Levada, who

   sent a letter to the Leadership Conference saying an investigation was warranted because it appeared that the organization had done little since it was warned eight years ago that it had failed to “promote” the church’s teachings on three issues: the male-only priesthood, homosexuality and the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church as the means to salvation.

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