Catholic Sensibility

Church teaching issues boil down to two qualities. Only the extremists of the right (LeFebvre and Pope Pius XIII) or the left (Danubian ordination cruisers) deny the obvious teaching authority of the bishops. Sensible Catholics acknowledge authority, but many also atrribute low or no credibility to church leaders. The fallout from the sex abuse and cover-up scandal is one obvious example. Nobody is saying the bishops don't have the power to govern their dioceses well. We wish they'd done the job when sexual predators were on the loose. The problem of the bishops, and Rome somewhat, is that the bishops lack credibility to tackle the problem. On sexual matters, the bishops started losing credibility decades ago. Our friend Leo can easily produce a quote like this from Aquinas: As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence; such as that of a south wind, which is moist, as the Philosopher observes. And while some would call that hitting below the belt, so to speak, the Magisterium's problem is that it has not repudiated such thinking forcefully enough. Inherent issues of fairness are glossed over, and instead we get a fawning comparison to the Blessed Mother (at best) and a continuing hammering away at sex issues which come to the same conclusions as Aquinas did. The end seems the same, and they say the means has changed. But sincere people wonder. The widespread rejection of Humanae Vitae should be a wake-up call. But it's not. There was an expectation in 1968 that the voice of authority would be sufficient to maintain the ranks. Hindsight and 90% non-compliance would tell us that was a fool's hope. Was the document flawed because it ignored the findings of the theological commission? Did Paul VI lose his nerve? Was the document authentic and people just didn't listen? Did the document contain much that was good and did that get lost in the furor over the handling of contraception? All good questions, some better than others. Paul VI and others clearly felt that their word of authority would be sufficient. But it wasn't. They lacked a sense of compassion for couples struggling in heroic circumstances. They failed to address the situation of women's rights. They failed to repudiate long-held positions that could no longer be sustained by our understanding of biology or sociology. Upholding tradition was fairly safe: no guilt at directly leading people astray, and the few who were put in a position to make terrible choices were invisible. I wonder how much this contributed to the phenomenon of "cafeteria" Catholicism that we see on both the Left and Right today. Instead of unifying belief, thought, and practice, Humanae Vitae may well have been the beginning of discord within the Catholic Church. Long before Rush and Ann and Al, the seed was planted for today's strife. Sociologists say that the American hemorrhaging of church attendance can be traced to HV. Vatican II reforms ameliorated it somewhat. What should the bishops do? Credibility is a precious quality. When a person tells a lie, or especially a series of lies, doubt is brought into the relationship equation. You lied about where you were last week ... you don't get the car keys tonight. You're in a conflict with another person who has a reputation for truthfulness ... you forfeit. It takes a long time to recover. The reason why this is a bad time to make liturgical changes or to deny communion is not because the liberals don't like it. It's a bad time because the bishops have another job to do: restore the confidence of the laity. Until that's done, the risk of alienation remains. And that must be factored into every public decision until the right relationship between people and bishop is restored.