Good God! (Bad Bishops)
A tangential tirade
On all things wrong (and some things right) with the Catholic Church...
When a Catholic sister hands you a leather condom purse attached to a keychain, the memory tends to stick. In this case, promoting contraception was part of her congregation’s work, in partnership with local health workers and community advocates, to prevent and treat HIV along a migrant worker route from Central to North America. They also ran a clinic and hospice, conducted home care visits (often in disguise due to social stigma), and provided assistance in affording and receiving testing–efforts all championed by their local episcopal conference. The birth control element, however, remained concealed from view: whatever their concern over the crisis, the bishops refused to entertain contraception as a morally viable intervention for HIV. Asked how anyone deals with the virus without such measures, the sister offered a swift, blunt reply: “You don’t.”
As we all know, “not dealing” with complex social issues and instead reverting to disingenuous dogmatic interpretations is clericalism 101. And honestly, here in the US I find it so exhaustingly predictable that I hesitate to comment on the most recent death rattle of our own bishops’ conference: the election of Archbishop Timothy Broglio–the homophobic, COVID vax-skeptical and abuse crisis-adjacent ordinary of the actual friggin’ military–as their next president. For one thing, as I take pains to note, we already know full well what these guys were about. Moreover, at this point the villainy is practically self-parody: they elect Broglio as their anti-Francis (née Bergoglio) president…on the same day bizarro 2020 secular election winner Donald Trump announces his own run against reality and progress…amid fresh fallout from the midterms, which saw lukewarm voter response to revanchist trad-con politics and historic victories for LGBTQ+ candidates.
In other words: why take these clowns seriously? To them, Benedict is still pope, Trump is still president, and homophobia is still cool. But when I think of the case above and the role of bishops in stymying Gospel-inspired efforts to make the world at least a little nicer for all of us, I find myself wading again into the fetid waters of Church commentary. Because as much as the USCCB can be dismissed as irrelevant and obtuse, these bigheaded (and small minded) bozos set the terms for how many local parish communities and dioceses respond to the needs of people in their everyday lives.
You Don’t Even Know What You’re Saying
The (mis)handling of contraception provides an instructive case study, even if on its face it seems like it warrants little more than an eye roll (“whatever you say, grandpa”). But in addition to affecting the lives and health of real people, it also speaks to the simplistic and hypocritical sandblasting of doctrinal intricacies often employed by culture warriors masquerading as dogmatic purists.
As noted by Karen Ross of Catholic Theological Union, “when Humanae Vitae, the Catholic encyclical on birth control was published in 1968, the Church did not foresee condoms as preventative measures for sexually transmitted diseases, certainly none as deadly as HIV/AIDS.” Translation: the Church took a hardline on the issue while literally having no idea what it was talking about. You would think such a glaring miscalculation would be enough for the hierarchy now, 50 plus years later, to entertain at least some nuance regarding a demonstrably ignorant stance. And to be fair, as is his way, Pope Francis actually did exactly that in 2016, addressing a question related to the effects of Zika virus on unborn children. Specifically, he said “avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil” and cited a case in which Pope Paul VI reportedly permitted the use of birth control pills by nuns in the Belgian Congo in the face of rape.
Of course, conservative Catholic media outlets were quick to argue the story was somewhat apocryphal (some Vatican bigwigs said it was okay, Paul never agreed or refuted them either way, etc.). Fine, I guess, but irrelevant to the underlying argument given that Francis, the current pope, verbally agrees with said (dead) bigwigs. And hey, if that’s not enough, in 2010 Pope Benedict XVI also posited that in some cases, such as a male prostitute seeking to lessen the risk of HIV, contraception may be considered.
War Games
Again, these issues are more than matters of inside baseball. In the anecdote from Central America above, the spread of HIV is exacerbated by married men sleeping with other partners and then infecting their wives (I won’t even get into the role of religious and cultural homophobia plays in all this). These women, then, are caught between Church prohibitions on contraception and the Catholic marital “duty” to procreate. It seems like the exact sort of emergency situation in which condom use should not only be condoned, but promoted.
Why, then, are these gilded dunces falling all over themselves to make it easier for people to get infected with HIV? The only answers I can posit are a) they despise the downtrodden and blame them for their sorrows, and/or b) to them this is a war for cultural dominance, and wars have casualties. To the latter point, how fitting to have the Archbishop of the Military Services of the US boot-stompin’ A, leading the charge? In the midst of a virulent anti-LGBTQ+ cultural movement, electing a conference president who has vocally (and errantly) tied the abuse crisis to homosexuality and “effeminate” priests, is not only a value statement by the conference, but a preview. We can likely expect more hateful rhetoric grounded in incoherent teachings (“sex is for babies but the rhythm method is fine, no questions please”) and, in the case of gender identity, often nonexistent doctrine.
Because like it or not, Church leadership wields power and influence over the lives of countless people, both those who identify as Catholic themselves and those who benefit from the extensive network of Catholic charities, hospitals, schools and political advocacy efforts. Clearly not as much as they would like, but enough to cause a whole hell of a lot of damage.