Mrągowo In my first piece on abortion I discussed how a person who opposed abortion could also vote for pro-choice politicians. In this piece I would like to draw attention specifically to the tactical choices of the Catholic hierarchy.
The thing that always strikes me when I hear priests in the pulpit talking about abortion is the simple fact that it is a sin that I can never commit. I am a man. I can’t abort a child. I suppose I could become a doctor in order to perform the actual operations, but that would really involve going out of my way to sin. This is strange, isn’t it? Abortion is not a sin like pride or sloth or lust – sins that you fall into minute by minute. I am completely safe from this sin. And that is true for the person speaking the sermon as well. And for most of the congregation. Only young women and doctors could possibly be involved in a future abortion, and those who might probably wouldn’t be in the congregation. They were driven out of the pews a long time ago.
I know of no other moral cause preached from the pulpits in Church history with quite the same profile. Slavery might have been somewhat analogous, but it was never preached from the pews as a concern of Christian spirituality. Witchhunting may be mentioned, as the positing of an external evil that needed to be extirpated; but it was believed that witches were daily doing real harm to the community, i.e. it was a situation that required a reaction of some sort.
This is the first thing to notice about the hierarchy’s anointing of abortion as the great moral evil of our time: it is external to too many people. Sin loses its meaning if it is external: like all spiritual truths, you have to know it as an interior phenomenon. You will deceive people if you talk about sin as something that is “out there.” It leads to demonization of what is outside, not interior conversion.
And it leads us to what is certainly the primary and characteristic temptation of the Christian character: to sit smugly in one’s own goodness and try to “save” everybody else. It recurs again and again in churches: the “holier than thou” type. An untransformed Christian will say, “Yes, precisely – that’s what a Christian is supposed to do. That’s preaching the Gospel.” Nonsense. The Church needs to get back in touch with its monastic side: every person needs to turn his focus inward. When other people see the fruits of your work on yourself, they will be attracted to it. I began my own spiritual path when I encountered a man who had spent decades in a monastery before working in a local parish. I knew there was something different about him because he was the one person I allowed to correct me. I could feel the inner authority he had. He did not have to reach out to me: I went to him.
And even overzealous Christians recognize how useless zealotry is in others. It is almost never transformative. It usually results in defensive hostility, probably because its real source is aggressive hostility. You can hear this aggressive hostility in the way many Church people will talk about their abortion opponents – either nakedly or masked as condescending compassion. Almost the entirety of the Catholic “abortion ministry” has been fruitless.
There is another dimension to the problem of externalizing evil and projecting it elsewhere. Since it is fruitless, you sense your own powerlessness. You begin to look for help from elsewhere. This comes in two forms. First of all, you look for internal, psychological assistance. You need some kind of brake or control or counterbalance to oppose the immense external weight of evil. You feel you can’t do it yourself. And so you externalize what is good as well. This is the Law.
I have already noted that Paul labored long and hard to make it clear that this was not the Christian path, and I recommend to all who disagree with me to return to Paul, even if they don’t like him, and try to figure out how to square the notion that his letters were considered divinely inspired with modern Christianity. For Christians have worked with real zeal to construct a Christian Law. The idea is that if you are good, keep the commandments, go to church once a week or once a day or however much, you can convince God that you’re good. This is the hierarchy’s predominant idea of what the Gospel is, if we are to figure out their conception from what they preach. You can understand why: that’s the reason they became priests in the first place! They were looking for more laws to obey to make it clear to God that they were worthy. They are all like the rich young man in the Gospel. “I’ve already mastered all these laws. Do you have any others for me to work on?” The hierarchy’s response would be: “You’re a great kid. I wish all the rest of the kids were good like you.” And Jesus’ response is: get rid of everything that makes you feel you’re important and in control and trust God by following Him.
The Law is the wall that separates fortress-Catholicism from the demonized outside. The hierarchy is always patrolling the wall, “the infallible teaching authority of the Church in faith and morals,” to see if there are any points that need shoring up. And Jesus’ advice is: get outside the wall and follow me. Unfortunately, you can’t take the fort with you.
Maintaining a fortress like this within a “hostile culture” – everything is put in terms of warfare, by the way – requires immense expenditure of effort. A war like this requires allies. Not only internal ones – outside, real-world allies as well. And this is the final thing I will point out about the Catholic hierarchy: they are always looking for powerful allies to help them guard the walls.
You may see this as comic or tragic, depending on your personality. The American Republican party is a fairly reasonable, moderate choice compared with Franco, or Mussolini, or Charles II, Napoleon, Charles X, Henry VIII (lauded as Defensor Fidei by the pope before it all went awry), Cesare Borgia, Eva Peron, Daniel Ortega, Bloody Mary, and many, many others. Even Constantine and Justinian, supposedly the paragons of them all, turn out to be much more complicated and bizarre in historians’ eyes than the King Arthurs the Church tradition made them out to be.
The Church has survived all this, and indeed the Machiavellian would say the Church has survived because of it. Perhaps so. But it has nothing to do with the salvation of souls or even moral progress. You may list almost every single change over the last two hundred years which people – including Catholics – would today regard as moral progress, and find the Church either indifferent or opposed: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, human rights in general, representative government, ending slavery, public education, women’s rights, racial equality, and many others. If our moral system is at all correct – and now even the popes embrace it, calling on countries like China to offer freedom of conscience as an inherent right – then it is clear enough that the Catholic hierarchy has no record of moral insight. Indeed, looking from the record, the only thing we can be sure it has is a strong instinct for survival. And even that is in some doubt.
For these political alliances have so thoroughly disgusted people in Europe and South America (i.e., wherever the Church has been truly powerful) that it is often regarded as little more than an extension of the ancien regime. Sometimes even the Catholics believe this. I know a devout French Catholic who believes France will become a great imperial and cultural power if they all embrace old-time Catholicism as she does.
That is, in the end, what this type of Catholicism produces: a belief that religion is just another form of power, and religious hierarchy another method in life of gaining success. This is what an atheist believes religion is. And because it so accurately describes the Catholic Church, atheists are being minted at a tremendous rate in all formerly Catholic countries.
All of this is one organism, one interrelated phenomenon, and all to be found in the hierarchy’s fixation on abortion: the externalization of sin, the embrace of law, embarrassing political alliances, and the pursuit of power in the guise of sanctity. It is the same old story over and over again. It’s Bad News – the stuff of newspapers. And it would be a relief if we didn’t have to have it coming from the pulpits too.
Post a Comment