Tag Archives: Magisterium

Oppose Catholic Employment Discrimination

In North Carolina, a Catholic bishop is arguing in court that the church must have a fundamental right to fire LGBT Catholic employees who exercise their legal right to marry.

Lonnie Billard, left, with husband Richard Donham (pic – New Ways Ministry)

A bishop has claimed that the diocese over which he presides would be “irreparably damaged” if it is unable to fire church workers at will.

Bishop Peter Jugis of Charlotte, North Carolina, made his remarks while being deposed in the federal workplace discrimination court case of Lonnie Billard, who was fired from Charlotte Catholic High School in 2014 when his engagement to a man became public.

Jugis said in the deposition that continuing to employ church workers who advocate against or violate “fundamental moral tenets” of church teaching would be a cause for “scandal.”

-New Ways Ministry

What is truly scandalous, is when church bishops ignore both the Gospels’ clear message of inclusion for all, and the Church’s own teaching on the primacy of conscience and the importance of social justice – including employment justice.


Continue reading Oppose Catholic Employment Discrimination

Schonborn: “Doctrine is Not a Series of Abstract Statements”

The strength of the pushback by some conservative bishops against what they fear the Family Synod will introduce changes in Church teaching on divorce and on sexual orientation is clear evidence of their fear that change is on the way. Their fear is well – founded, at least in the long term.  The synod itself was not called to change doctrine, but only pastoral practice – but pastoral practice will inevitably lead, in the long run, to changes in the teaching itself.

Cardinal Christoph Schonborn

More than that, those insisting on rigid adherence to a set of rigid rules as laid down in the Catechism and Canon Law, completely misunderstand the nature of “doctrine” itself. In a recent interview with the Italian Jesuit publication Civita Cattolica, the eminent theologian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn was asked about this concern, in some quarters, that doctrine should be the main focus of the synod, and their fear that it could be undermined. His response was illuminating, and has great importance for LGBT Catholics (emphasis added):

Civita: According to some, however, the aim should be eminently doctrinal; some even fear for the doctrine.

Schonborn: The challenge Pope Francis puts to us is to believe that, with the courage that comes from simple proximity, from the everyday reality of the people, we will not turn away from doctrine. We not risk diluting its clarity by walking alongside people, because we ourselves are called to walk in faith. Doctrine is not, in the first instance, a series of abstract statements, but the light of the word of God demonstrated by apostolic witness to the heart of the Church and in the hearts of believers who walk in the world today. The clarity of the light of faith and its doctrinal development in each person is not in contradiction with the way that God works with ourselves, that we are often far from living fully the Gospel.

Continue reading Schonborn: “Doctrine is Not a Series of Abstract Statements”

Sexual Ethics, Social Statistics, and the Sensus Fideii

Formal Catholic teaching is clear: in developing moral norms, it is right that we consider  the findings from social science and social statistics. On moral norms around sexuality, however, the Vatican simply ignores its own guidelines.

Whenever I refer to the evidence from social statistics on real – world Catholic belief, and the challenge they present to the sensus fideii on Vatican doctrine,  I know that someone will immediately object, either in a comment to my post, or in an outraged blog post of their own at one of the rule-book Catholic sites. (No, I never have claimed that these polls disprove the SF – just that the present a challenge, a prima facie case that the SF might not exist).

Salzmann and Lawler (“The Sexual Person“) put it like this:

The simple social fact that 89% of Catholics in the communion-Church believe that they can practice methods of contraception prohibited by the Church and still be good Catholics proves nothing theologically. It does, however, raise questions that theologians cannot ignore without fulfilling contemporary prophecies that theologians and their theologies have nothing to do with the real questions of the real world in which men and women live. Another moral question presses the Church we have considered in this book presses the Church in our day, perhaps even more than contraception, namely cohabitation prior to  marriage.  If the first union for some 75 to 80 percent of Western women is cohabitation and not marriage, again  social fact raises questions for theologians about what the communion-Church believes.





The argument for simply dismissing the evidence from social science in considering the SF is two-fold: the Catholic church includes all its members, it is said, and not simply those still living. As Catholics, we must also consider the views of those who have gone before, those now in the communion of saints. The chief difficulty of this argument is, we have no way of knowing what people who lived a thousand years ago would believe today, in the circumstances of the modern world, and equipped with modern knowledge about human biology and sexuality.

The second argument is superficially more persuasive: simple head counts in social surveys are just that – head counts. They make no allowance for varying degrees of commitment to the Catholic church. Some respondents to a survey question on “religion” will identify themselves as Catholics for want of any more accurate descriptor, even though they may never come near a church or open any book on religion.  It is possible (even likely) that their views introduce a measure of distortion to poll findings. This is an objection that I fully accept as valid. It is not appropriate, in assessing the state of the SF, that the views of lapsed or merely nominal Catholics should be taken as equally valid as those of  those who take their faith far more seriously. But this raises another problem. If we are to take some views more seriously than others – which will hey be? Whose views should be considered the most influential: those of the professional moral theologians, perhaps?

Now, here there are even more ominous alarm bells for the sensus fideii, if the lay theologian Charles Curran is to be believed. Writing in his introduction to The Sexual Person, he claims that a majority of moral theologians no longer agree with the full Vatican teaching on sexual ethics, while no more than a minority (although a strong one) defend the Magisterium. Is he right? I don’t know, but his claim is certainly consistent with others that I have heard anecdotally from several priests and theologians I have spoken to. More importantly, the simple fact that such claims can be made calls into serious question any pretence that the officially approved doctrines have the support of the church as a whole – or of its body of theologians as a whole.

Within the Catholic theological community, all recognize that the great majority of Catholic moral theologians writing today support revisionist positions in general, but a strong minority defends the position of the hierarchical Magisterium.

(“Revisionist” theologians are those calling for a change in the hierarchical teaching)

John Paul explicitly wrote Veritatis Splendor in light of the genuine crisis that seriously endangers the moral life of the faithful and the communion of the Church. Today it is no longer a matter of limited and occasional theological dissent but an overall and systematic calling into question of traditional moral teachings, which is occurring even in seminaries and in faculties of theology. This is a genuine crisis.

And so, I ask again:

Where is the evidence that on Vatican teaching on sexual morality, the sensus fideii exists?

 

Recommended Books:

Cahill, Lisa: Family: A Christian Social Perspective

Cahill, Lisa: Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics 

Curran, CharlesThe Moral Theology Of Pope John Paul II 

Farley, MargaretJust Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics

Salzmann, Todd A & Lawler, Michael GThe Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology




Magisterium and Scripture

The problem with attempting to deal with the Magisterium of the Church is that it is so vast, that the only way to do it is as one would eat an elephant: one piece at a time. I propose to do just that. Today’s contribution represents just the first course – more will follow.

As the people who insist we follow the Magisterium often also refer us to the Bible, I thought it would be helpful to begin with a look at what the Magisterium has to say about the interpretation of Scripture. Even this is a vast topic. One good starting point is to look at the useful report of the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1993, “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church” (which may be read in full at the excellent “Catholic Resources” website of Felix Just, SJ).

This important document discusses several different approaches to biblical interpretation with their strengths and weaknesses, and offers an overall evaluation of each. Broadly, the commission finds some difficulties and strengths with each, although some seem to find more favour than others. I have no intention of attempting to provide a comprehensive review in a short introduction, but I do want to pull out some specific quotations which seem to me to be especially relevant to any discussion of sexuality and Scripture.

Possibly the most important single sentence to me comes right at the beginning of the Preface:

“The study of the Bible is, as it were, the soul of theology…. This study is never finished; each age must in its own way newly seek to understand the sacred books.

(Which is why I insist that we need to take seriously the findings of modern scholars on the old clobber texts, which cast an entirely new light on their interpretation.)

The INTRODUCTION then continues with an important warning:

“The Bible itself bears witness that its interpretation can be a difficult matter. Alongside texts that are perfectly clear, it contains passages of some obscurity “

(which is why we must be cautious of glib and superficial references to single verses or passages taken at face value.)

One of the reasons for the difficulty, of course, is that

“Readers today, in order to appropriate the words and deeds of which the Bible speaks, have to project themselves back almost 20 or 30 centuries”.

(Which is exactly what our critics seldom attempt to do.)

The first specific approach considered is that of the “Historical-Critical” method:

“Textual criticism….. begins the series of scholarly operations. Basing itself on the testimony of the oldest and best manuscripts … textual-criticism seeks to establish, according to fixed rules, a biblical text as close as possible to the original.”

(To which I would simply point out that the most explicitly erotic book in he Bible, the ” Song of Songs“, is seldom mentioned by religious conservatives discussing homosexuality. But there are good reasons to believe that it was written as a love poem spoken by two men. At least one scholar believes that the oldest available manuscript has a text with language that is unambiguously and exclusively masculine – and that later texts were effectively censored to hide the homerotic element. See the The Song of Songs: the Bible’s Gay Love Poem at The Wild Reed for a useful discussion and review of this book.)

“The text is then submitted to a linguistic (morphology and syntax) and semantic analysis, using the knowledge derived from historical philology”

(No translation which followed this principle would ever have inserted the modern term “homosexuality” anywhere in the Bibple. Not only the word, but even the concept as we understand it, would have been unknown in Biblical times.)

The report continues with a discussion of three forms of literary analysis: rhetorical, narrative, and semiotic.

“Applied to the Bible, the new rhetoric aims to penetrate to the very core of the language of revelation precisely as persuasive religious discourse and to measure the impact of such discourse in the social context of the communication thus begun

“With respect to the narrative approach, it helps to distinguish methods of analysis, on the one hand, and theological reflection, on the other.”

“Connected with this kind of study primarily literary in character, is a certain mode of theological reflection as one considers the implications the “story” (and also the “witness”) character of Scripture has with respect to the consent of faith and as one derives from this a hermeneutic of a more practical and pastoral nature”

This approach of literary analysis as a basis for pastoral reflection surely supports the kind of Gospel reflections from a gay/ lesbian perspective offered by writers such as Richard Cleaver (“Know my Name“), Michael B. Kelly in “The Road from Emmaus” (reprinted in “Seduced by Grace”) or on -line by Jeremiah at “Gospel for Gays” – and many others.

The next group of approaches discussed are those based on tradition, including the “canonical” approach, which begins

“within an explicit framework of faith: the Bible as a whole.”

to which I can add only, “Hear! hear!”)

We then go on to approaches from the human sciences, particularly the sociological and cultural anthropology approaches, which require

“as exact a knowledge as is possible of the social conditions distinctive of the various milieus in which the traditions recorded in the Bible took shape”.

and seeks

“to define the characteristics of different kinds of human beings in their social context….-with all that this involves by way of studying the rural or urban context and with attention paid to the values recognized by the society……. to the manner in which social control is exercised, to the ideas which people have of family house, kin, to the situation of women, to institutionalized dualities (patron – client, owner – tenant, benefactor – beneficiary, free person – slave)….”

(and, I should not have to add, to prevailing ideas of “normal” sexual relations. I do however, have to stress this point, because this is precisely what the standard view of the Bible and homosexuality ignores. When one does indeed consider the social context of the times, the extraordinary thing about the Bible is not what it says about homosexuality, but how very little it says: no more than six or seven verses, of dubious relevance, in the entire Bible – none of them from the Gospels- this when most societies in the Mediterranean world did not disinguish between the morality of same sex or opposite sex genital acts. )

Of “contextual approaches“, the commission examined only “liberation theology” and “feminist theology”. Since 1993, however, there has been an explosion of writing in areas known variously as gay & lesbian, queer, or indecent theologies, which are of particular relevance to us. As these have largely developed out of other contextual theologies, the remarks of the commission may be easilty extended to them too.

Liberation theology had its roots in Vatican II, and found its most famous expression in Latin America, later also in South Africa and Asia.

“…starting from its own socio-cultural and political point of view, it practices a reading of the Bible which is oriented to the needs of the people, who seek in the Scriptures nourishment for their faith and their life.

It seeks a reading drawn from the situation of people as it is lived here and now. If a people lives in circumstances of oppression, one must go to the Bible to find there nourishment capable of sustaining the people in its struggles and its hopes.”

It is of course true that liberation theology has drawn some strong criticism from the Vatican, particularly in some of its later excesses, and the Commission notes these “risks”. Still, it observes,

“Liberation theology includes elements of undoubted value”.

Both of these observations (of risks simultaneoulsy with value) apply equally to Queer Theology.

Feminist readings, which began in the late 19th Century with the “Women’s Bible” but took on fresh vigour in the 1970’s, especially in the US, emphasises the patriarchal conditions in which Scripture was written, and the resultant biases , requiring that one adopt a position of suspicion about the texts as they stand and instead look for

“look for signs which may reveal something quite different.”

We in the LGBT community would do well to adopt this attitude of suspicion not so much to Scripture, which was not writen with a specifically heterosexual bias, but to much of the traditional commentary, which certainly applied later prejudice retrospectively onto the text.

On the final approach, of fundamentalist interpretaion, the Commission is scathing in its criticism

“The basic problem with fundamentalist interpretation of this kind is that, refusing to take into account the historical character of biblical revelation, it makes itself incapable of accepting the full truth of the incarnation itself. As regards relationships with God, fundamentalism seeks to escape any closeness of the divine and the human. It refuses to admit that the inspired word of God has been expressed in human language”

Of fundamentalism, I say no more.

Where does this leave us?

I freely acknowledge that in going through the Commissions report, I have necessarily been seleective and certainly display my own biases. This was unavoidable given the limitations of time and space. By all means, go through the full report yourelf, or if you want a full discussion on the contents, see “Interpreting the Bible: Three Views“at First Things

I, though, must work with my own conclusions:
  • Biblical interpretation is tricky, and must be undertaken with care. Simplistic use of isolated texts is particularly dangerous.
  • No single approach is complete and sufficient to itself. To one degree or another, all have weaknesses., and so need to be used in combination.
  • Particular sections, let alone single verses, must be evaluated in the context of the entire passage, or even of Scripture as a whole.
  • Careful attention must be paid to the social and cultural conditions of the time, and to the precise linguistic meaning of the words used.
  • The techniques of literary and contextual analysis are useful in providing pastoral reflections appropriatae for our conditions and oppression as LGBT Christians in the Church. There are however risks, and approaches such as queer theology need to be balanced also by other approaches.

Finally, having considered what the Magisterium (as formulated in this one report) has to say about Scripture, I would like to reverse the question: what does Scripture, and specifically the Gospels, have to say about the Magisterium?

Noting the observations about context and the Bible as a whole, I ask you to consider the religious conditions of Jerusalem during Christ’s ministry there. Consider the powerful Sanhedrin, the rabbinical hierarchy, the pharisees, sadducees and scribes who feature so prominently. Now consider Christ’s response to their challenges to His failure to follow the letter of religious law. Time and again, He insisted that adherence to the fundamental law of love, love of God, of one’s neeighbour, and of oneself, took precedence over merely literal adherence to religious regulation.

Now what do you suppose would be His response to those who insist on our blind obedience to the Catechism and to canon law, where it makes religious outlaws of people who are simply following their natural and god -given sexual orientation?

Just a thought.

Conscience Formation, Spiritual Formation, and The Holy Spirit

A dove, symbolizing the Holy Spirit, who is be...
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David Ludescher, a regular OT reader, has put to me some important questions on the formation of conscience. These arose in response to my post on empirical research findings on the current state of British Catholic belief, and some observations I made on the implications for our understanding of the sensus fidelium (on sexual ethics and priestly ministry in particular).

These questions were put in a comment box, which I have reproduced in an independent post for easy reference. Just follow the link to read the questions in full. This is my response:




Continue reading Conscience Formation, Spiritual Formation, and The Holy Spirit

Catholic Magisterium and Me

In one his comments on my Catholic Teaching page, Ignatius / Benedict writes that

“I think you’ll be happy in the Anglican denomination where this sort of reasoning evades the Truth.”

I’m sorry to disappoint you, IB, but you will not get rid of me that easily.  I am a cradle Catholic, “gebore en gerore” (born and bred, as expressed in Afrikaans), and could no more renounce my faith than I could my language – or my orientation.

One year I accompanied my then partner to Christmas Midnight Mass in the cathedral parish of St Mary’s, Johannesburg, a place rich in sympbolism and significance at that time of anti -apartheid struggle – and came away empty.   My present partner here in the UK is also a high church Anglican, and I have frequently accompanied him to services – which again I find shallow and empty.  Only in the Catholic Mass do I find true richness.

What draws me to the Catholic Church, beyond mere habit and familiarity, is precisely that it is not just “Catholic” (i.e. institutional), but also “catholic” (literally, universal).  The Gospels are clearly inclusive, and so, in principle, is the Catholic Church – inclusive across geographic boundaries, across language and ethnicity, and across two millenia of history.

An important part of that is the Magisterium.  2000 years of scholarship and of spirituality must surely include within it much great wisdom, which must be respected and treasured.  I am particularly grateful for those giffts from which I have personally benefited: the wisdom in Ignatian spirituality, the teaching apostolate of the Dominicans and the missionary zeal of so many.   I take the value of the Magisterium very seriously indeed, as teaching authority.  I also take pride in the history of the church in its struggle against oppression, in South Africa and elsewhere.  The Catholic Church took the first steps to defy the apartheid laws and admit people to its schools without regard to ethnic background; spoke out in pastoral letters against the sheer iniquity of apartheid laws;  gave succour and support to political detainees and their families; intervened as peacemakers in vicious ethnic violence in the killing fields of Natal before the 1994 election; and worked as peace monitors and electoral educators in the build up to that historic election. I am proud to say that I myself was a part of the work of the church Peace & Justice activities at the time, which is why I am so disappointed that the Church’s insistence on siding with the oppressed does not extend to sympathy and understanding for those sexual minorities whose  oppression arises from the Church’s own actions. Continue reading Catholic Magisterium and Me

On “Catholic Teaching”: Housekeeping notes.

On my Catholic Teaching page yesterday, Ignatius Benedict posted a comment which drew a response from me, leading to further exchanges from each of us.  Ignatius Benedict has his own blog In the Roman Catacombs, which I respect but often disagree with, and we clearly have very different views on church and authority, so I suggested that on that matter we should now agree to differ and close that particular discussion.

However, reflecting on his comments, and those posted by Conway on the same page earlier, I realised that this page is one that I have neglected for too long.  The reasons I think are understandable. In setting up this site 6 months ago, I built a structure that intially represented ambition and intention rather than achievement, reflected in pages that were set up as templates without content.  As time has passed, I have tried to build up the content on three fronts simultaneously:  a series of regular front page postings reflecting mostly personal opinions and reflections, prompted by events in the news or in my life, or ideas as they occur to me ;  a series of information pages which attempt to build up information on faith and sexuality from a range of perspectives (church, history, scripture, and so on); and an expanding set of books pages.

These inner inforamtion pages are the most difficult for me:   I am very conscious that I ahve no particular expertise or training in these fields, and so I depend on sharing information that I have gleaned from others.   Also, inevitably I find it easier and more useful for me personally to time my time on the topics in which I am personally most interested, and about which I feel most confident.  So these pages ahve been more neglected than others, and Church Teaching most of all.

Excuses though are not good enough.  I personally have limited interest in the detail of Church teaching, but others do.  I will henceforth make a greater effort to research and report on the official teaching.  Be warned, though, that in doing so there will be some surprises.  For as I noted in response to James, the official teaching, once you go beond the simple headlines coming out of the Vatican, are not nearly as clearcut and simple as one would think.

In the meantime, until I have been able to flesh out my thinking in more organised fashion, you may like to check out the interchange in the comments boxes, which has now become quite an extended exchange – and by all means, go ahead and make your own contributions.