STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES

Jerry Harkins


The Catholic Church in America is dying of self-inflicted wounds. A process that took nearly two hundred years in Europe, is playing out here at breathtaking speed. It would be less embarrassing if we could screen the agony from public scrutiny but it has become too obvious. Decay and corruption are the order of the day. The bishops’ behavior is becoming more deranged every day. They and their Roman masters compete to see who can generate the most lurid headlines, the most pungent scandals, the most fertile fodder for the late night comedians. They blame their troubles on the modern world, on too much sex, materialism, and secularism. But the root of the problem is their own unrelieved stupidity. For example, at the behest of the American bishops, the Roman Curia has recently renewed the church’s historical and hapless crusade against women in the form of a multi-front assault on, of all people, the nuns. The nuns! The selfless women whose works and prayers give substance to the gospel of love and meaning to the word Catholic.

Holy mother the church has never been comfortable with women in general and nuns in particular. The recent pogrom began with canonical sanctions against several hospitals, widely considered a crowning achievement of the nuns. In late 2010, Bishop Robert F. Vasa withdrew the right of Saint Charles Medical Center of Bend, Oregon to call itself Catholic because it had “gradually drifted away” from church teachings. About a year later, Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted issued a similar fatwa against Saint Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center of Phoenix, Arizona and excommunicated Sister Margaret McBride, a member of its medical ethics committee. Sister had approved the termination of the pregnancy of a woman in danger of imminent death. There was no hope at all for the fetus. Their Excellencies seemed not to notice that neither hospital was calling itself Catholic and, needless to say, neither anathema had any effect in the real world. Undeterred, the bishops next went after two important theologians, Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ, Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University, and Sister Margaret Farley, RSM, Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics at Yale and President of the Catholic Theological Society of America. Sister Johnson stands accused by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops of feminism because she apparently takes seriously the claim of Genesis 1:27 that God created both men and women in his likeness. Sister Farley wrote a scholarly book setting out a rational foundation for sexual ethics which Bill Levada of the Curia’s doctrinal office found heretical. Of course the hierarchy has a long history of attacking the church’s best male theologians viciously. Until recently, however, there have been no female theologians. Now they can kill two enemies with one stone.

For men who profess to be infallible and who insist on what they believe to be God’s promise to be with them all days and preserve them from error, the top men in the Roman Catholic Church really are egregiously stupid. As the entire world now knows, the aforementioned Bill Levada has just finished a “doctrinal assessment” of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization that represents about 80% of American nuns. The purpose of this exercise was to encourage “a patient and collaborative renewal of this conference of major superiors in order to provide a stronger doctrinal foundation for its many laudable initiatives and activities.” In other words, as Bill himself wrote, “The overarching aim of the doctrinal Assessment is, therefore, to assist the LCWR in the United States in implementing an ecclesiology of communion, confident that ‘the joyous rediscovery of faith can also contribute to consolidate the unity and communion among the different bodies that make up the wider family of the Church.’” It sounds almost poetic: overarching aim, ecclesiology of communion, joyous rediscovery. What was lost is found, alleluia. You need hip waders to parse the prose. Ecclesiology of communion, for example, is devoid of meaning. But not to worry, the bullshit is only Vaticanspeak for the liturgical formalities that precede every auto-da-fe. Film at eleven.

The man in charge of shaping up the nuns is J. Peter Sartain, Archbishop of Seattle. Pete is Number Two to Timmy Dolan of New York in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. His current priority is to mobilize his parishes to get signatures for a referendum to repeal Washington’s gay marriage law. His success to date has been limited. Six parishes have outright refused to participate including his own cathedral parish. At Our Lady of the Lake church, parishioners responded to the vote not to participate with a sustained standing ovation. The pastor observed, “I only wished the archbishop could have experienced the sustained applause — the sensus fidelium — of the people. He needs to listen to this ‘voice.’ That is my prayer.” That’s one prayer that is certain to go unanswered.

The assessment is only the first shoe to fall on the nuns. There is another in the works called an “apostolic visitation” which was conducted simultaneously by Mother Clare Millea, Superior General of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, on behalf of the Congregation for the Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (CICLSAL), a Vatican dicastery concerned with religious orders. In spite of the name of her own congregation, Mother Millea is not an apostle nor are the real apostles about to make a joyous reappearance in the land of the living. Rather, she is a canon lawyer assigned to “look into the quality of the life of apostolic women religious in the United States.” In other words, a special prosecutor in the mold of Kenneth Starr. The women religious are not apostles either although they’re a lot more apostolic than their imperial masters. Mother Clare is also supposed to “learn more about the varied and unique ways in which women religious contribute to the welfare of the Church and society,” which apparently the princes are ignorant of. Like poor dear Guenevere, Mother is trying to discover what the simple folk do. Her work is meant to “assist the Church to strengthen, enhance and support the growth of the more than 400 congregations to which the approximately 59,000 women religious in the United States belong.” Mother has already submitted her final report on these mysteries but they remain secret at least at present. However, you can rest assured that “strengthen, enhance and support” do not mean the same thing in Vaticanspeak that they do in other languages. Similarly, the assessment’s promise of a “patient and collaborative renewal” should not be taken to mean the Vatican has discovered the virtue of patience or the value of collaboration. As the Pope has often said, in rather a scornful tone, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” He does not want the nuns to collaborate with him. He doesn’t even let the bishops do that. What he’s looking for is groveling submission. And by a “joyous rediscovery of faith” he’s referring to his joy over their submission.

The doctrinal assessment, such as it is, has been released. According to the National Catholic Reporter, it “calls into question the lives, motives, spirituality, fidelity, theology and ways of approaching the church and the world” of the American sisters. Subtle, no? It demands reform, stressing the need for the sisters “to have total allegiance of mind and heart to the magisterium of the bishops.” That’s Vaticanspeak for obedience. Obeisance, actually. Docile, reverential abasement to the majesty of the alpha males.

The inquisitors labored mightily for four years and brought forth an 8-page report with a variety of generalized grievances under three headings. First, the sisters invited their then-President, Sister Laurie Brink, to address their annual meeting. Sister is accused of challenging “core Catholic beliefs” by claiming that congregations of women religious had to change to remain relevant. Second, the sisters objected to the Holy See’s position on women’s ordination and ministry to gay persons and failed to agree with the Church’s teaching on sexuality. Given the intellectual bankruptcy of these asinine positions and teachings, it is not surprising that they are questioned by people who are not brain dead, including huge majorities of lay persons. Finally there came the usual catchall complaint about “radical feminism,” a term which conjures up bomb-throwing, bra-burning harridans or, in Rush Limbaugh’s felicitous phrase, “feminazis.”

The Pope and his mandarins apparently expect the entire Catholic world to breathe a sigh of relief now that the nuns have been brought to heel. Well, of course! What would Jesus do? Demand unquestioning compliance with the dictates of the boys who brought you the worldwide pedophile scandal and its attendant cover-up? Denounce the waste of time involved in ministering to the poor, the hungry, the sick and the persecuted? Elevate stupidity to infallible church dogma?

They never learn. I’ve always wanted to be a fly on the wall of the conference room where the bishops thrash out their decisions. At the meeting on the nun problem, no one seems to have noticed the obvious parallels to the trial of Joan of Arc. Like the case of the American nuns, the charges against Joan were a potpourri of the night terrors of medieval hierarchs, including heresy, witchcraft, disobedience, scandal and, by implication, immorality and blasphemy. The charges against Joan were vague except for the one specific act for which they had her burned. Cross-dressing. They had ordered her to give up wearing the garments of a soldier in favor of a woman’s dress. Then they removed the dress from her cell while she slept and left her with—you guessed it—her forbidden uniform. This was, of course, taken as relapse into heresy, it apparently being a doctrine of the holy Roman faith that girls should either wear dresses or go naked.

Joan had exactly no chance of escaping the stake. You can still read the transcript of the kangaroo court that convicted her. She made logical mincemeat out of their inane questions. She exposed the poverty of their theology and the depravity of their politics. She defended the supremacy of the individual conscience. But she was a pawn in the power struggles of church and state. Once captured by the Burgundian traitors, she was abandoned by her Valois allies and sold to her English enemies. Her life was forfeit and the pious proceedings were a sham designed to bring about her death in the most painful, most humiliating manner possible. She tried to appeal to the Pope as was her right but Eugene IV was busy playing his own power games with the Council of Basel which was about to gather to challenge papal primacy.

It is worth rehearsing Joan’s saga in every generation because from beginning to end it was pure politics. It involved no credible theology, no moral philosophy and not even a hint of the rule of law. From 1428 when she first offered her services to the hapless then-Dauphin Charles VII to 1920 when she was made a Saint by Pope Benedict XV, every twist and turn of her story was motivated exclusively by the unprincipled, sometimes sordid political considerations of the French, the English and the Holy See. The nullification trial twenty-five years after her death was a political sham. It declared she had been improperly martyred but forbade any remembrance of her. It was enough for Charles who cared only that his legitimacy not be questionable because of his association with a convicted heretic. It was enough for the still powerful Burgundians who escaped sanctions for their obscene persecution of Joan. And it was enough for Pope Callixtus III who hoped to placate Charles and convince him to rescind the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges which had limited papal power in France. Her ultimate canonization was a cynical compromise between the French and the Vatican done only after Pope Leo XIII had gained the permission of Queen Victoria.

It is true that many Popes of the era really did believe in witches, demons and the host of Satan abroad in the world and some claimed to have had first hand experience with them. They were victims of superstition, magic, the occult and the esoteric. But they, their predecessors and successors have been principally preoccupied with establishing, extending and preserving their own power. Until recent centuries, the means they employed included the military and police forces of the Papal States. They warped theology and made it a handmaiden to force. Their institution has been the source of a great deal of human misery but, fortunately, it has never been successful in the long run because, throughout the centuries, it has been afflicted with stupidity.

The church can no longer turn heretics over to the secular arm for burning which is a grace the American nuns should be thankful for. But it can still do remarkably stupid things, many but not all of which are aimed at women. As this is being written, the American bishops have declared another war, this one on Barack Obama, and are threatening to excommunicate anyone who supports him in the coming elections. Their strategy is to make all 35 million Catholic voters feel that the President has dissed their religion by failing to agree with their absurdist position on contraception. Leading the troops into battle is their new superstar Cardinal Timmy Dolan of New York whom they have also anointed President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Upon his election, Timmy told the press, “It’s not like we’re in crisis; it’s not like all of a sudden we need some daring new initiatives. Thank God for the leadership of Cardinal Francis George, things are going well.” How could anyone say such a stupid thing? The sex abuse crisis has not been solved. The church is not enjoying a new influx of vocations or money. Those remaining in the church are still rejecting its nonsensical doctrines regarding marriage and sexuality. Dioceses are still declaring bankruptcy. And still the bishops rage against women. Nuns. Altar girls. Girl Scouts. Lesbians. Pants suits. Dresses with hems shorter than eight inches below the knee. Eight and a half inches if you want to attend mass in Padre Pio’s church in Pietrelcina.

Dolan is by no means the worst of them. Among the contenders for that honor is Bishop Daniel R. Jenky of Peoria, Illinois. In April 2012, His Excellency denounced the Obama administration for its “radical, pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda,” most importantly its health insurance plan. The President’s “calculated disdain” for Catholic truth is nothing less than an endorsement of the policies of Hitler and Stalin. This rhetoric is, as the Irish would say, beyond the beyond. It is indecent to equate anyone with two of history’s most despicable icons of evil and, if its intent is to persuade Mr. Obama to reconsider his positions, it is flagrantly stupid.

In its long history, the church has done many stupid things, taught many stupid doctrines and offered many stupid interpretations of the gospel. From the virgin birth to the way the Pope dresses, from original sin to transubstantiation, from the Trinity to the selling of indulgences, stupidity reigns. Stupid, stupid, all is stupid. Why? Because stupidity is an essential strategy for any person or institution that denies change.

A crusade against the American nuns is stupid for many reasons. First, of course, the charges against them are false, the tactics being used against them are immoral, and the whole undertaking is counterproductive. The poverty of the bishops’ case is obvious. They know it which is why they try to conceal their wrath behind a veil of vacuous verbiage. But they fool no one and every time they open their mouths, they lose more adherents. They know that too but the nuns seem to be promoting change by engaging the world as it is today. To the bishops the combination of women and change is nightmarish not only because it threatens their diminishing power but also because it lets loose their formless fears, those night terrors lurking in their souls. But ultimately the new crusade is stupid because there is a fundamental difference between the parties. The nuns want to confront and embrace change. The bishops want to deny it.

In the fifth century before the common era, Heraclitus of Ephesus taught that, “You cannot step into the same river twice, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” Everything is in a state of permanent flux. Reality is merely a succession of transitory states. Many major philosophers beginning with Plato rejected this notion in favor of more comforting beliefs in ultimate permanence, immutability, constancy. They sought absolutes, eternal verities, natural law. The problem they encountered, however, was the stubborn character of knowledge itself. Knowledge evolves. Whether Plato’s perfect ideas are eternal or not, our understanding of the world and our ability to control it constantly change. Worse, the change is directional. Knowledge becomes deeper, more accurate, more useful and more satisfying. Even as we have come to expect that uncertainty lies at the heart of our reality and that our understanding of it can never be complete, our experience of it is progressive.

Thus, as we learned more about the dynamics of the solar system, it became clear that regardless of what it says in the Book of Joshua, the sun did not stop in the middle of the sky and delay going down. The church, of course, could not accept the new knowledge because it might be taken to mean that God erred when he inspired the author of Joshua. Thus, it was compelled to behave stupidly by condemning Galileo as a heretic. It was stupid, among other reasons, because it was unnecessary. The movement of bodies within the solar system had never been a matter of faith and morals in the first place. The church defended the inerrancy of the Book of Joshua only because it feared it would lose power and influence if it did not. But Galileo was no more a heretic than, say, Pythagoras for demonstrating that, in a right triangle, a squared + b squared = c squared. The hierarchs knew this at the time and they still know it. “Truth cannot contradict truth.” So said John Paul II, quoting his predecessor Leo XIII. In 1979, John Paul initiated a reconsideration of the Galileo case. It took thirteen years. When he received the report, the Pope conceded the obvious. “Paradoxically, Galileo, a sincere believer, showed himself to be more perceptive in this regard than the theologians who opposed him.” But he did not lift the verdict of heresy. Nor did he apologize to history. He went to his grave intending to canonize his intellectual hero, Pius IX, the apostle of stasis.

The hierarchs want you to believe that sacred truth does not evolve, that the Rock of Ages is not metamorphic. They pray constantly, “Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum.” As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. They sing plaintively, “Oh, Thou who changest not, abide with me.” But if the Bible has any theme, from Genesis to Revelation, it is of change. Even God changes from the Baal-like sociopath who destroys Sodom and Gomorrah, including its women and children, for the sins of some of its men. He softens a bit when he restores Job’s fortunes after squandering them in a whimsical bet with Satan and even more significantly when he only kills David’s firstborn son to punish the king for murder and adultery. By the time of the New Testament, he is preaching the gospel of love and coming to understand that he himself needs the love of his creatures. Ultimately, he gives his own life for our sins. This is a very different God from that of Genesis or, better perhaps, a very different human understanding of the idea of God. Of course, it is not actually God who is changing; it is our perception of God. And our perception is all we have. Our perception of God is the reality of God, and it changes continually.

Change is almost always for the better even though, at the time, it is always distressful. It gives rise to uncertainty, insecurity and anxiety. Resisting change is natural but rejecting it is childish. It puts the church in the awkward position of Winnie the Pooh. “Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.” Given the constraints of Winnie’s metaphysical space, there is no option of “stop bumping and think.” Just as it is now too late for Winnie, it is too late for a church whose mythology is defined as immutable.