Catholics and Pastorgate [View All]

[Plaid Adder]

I was listening this morning to a story on the Indiana primary on the local NPR affiliate. They sent one of their reporters down to Hammond to ask Democratic voters about Wright and Obama. It cheered me up to see how hard they had to work to get at least some of these voters to say that they could see how it might be a problem for him, but that it wasn't going to affect their decision. One of the last people they talked to expressed frustration with the whole issue. He said he didn't care about the fact that Obama's pastor was a "jerk." Why? Because, he said, he's Catholic; and given the number of Catholic priests who have been exposed for doing things a lot worse than shooting their mouths off in public, he thinks it's a bad idea to get into the habit of judging people based on what their pastors do.

This connected with a strain of the ongoing conversation about Wright that we've had in our Dancing With The Stars and Spiritual Enquiry Group, which meets every Monday night at our place after PJ goes to bed. DWTS, of course, is an engagingly dorky reality show and has nothing to do with spirituality; it just so happens that all the people who come over to watch it with us are connected to a Christian religious organization in some way. It also so happens that all of us have at some point in our lives been Catholic; the only guy in the group was raised Protestant but converted, whereas the four of us women were raised Catholic but have left the church in one way or another. Anyway, even since round 1, all of us have been tremendously frustrated by what seems to us to be the idiotic assumption that because you sit in the congregation, that automatically means that you agree with everything in the sermon.

To a lot of American Catholics, that assumption seems not only groundless, but offensive. First of all, we've all been stereotyped by Protestants for long enough as credulous priestridden idiots who will believe anything the Vatican tells us, and we're tired of hearing it. For the same reasons, it seems unfair to us that all of Wright's parishioners should be assumed to be the unreasoning tools of a demagogue. Though now that I think about it, in a lot of ways "pastorgate" reprises some of the attacks launched against Kennedy when he was running for president; the "Black church" is as alien and scary to the presumed mainstream white voters as the Catholic church was back in the day, and racism predisposes its adherents to believe that Wright's parishioners are too stupid, ignorant, or lazy to form their own opinions, just as anti-Catholicism predisposed its adherents to believe that a Catholic president would serve Rome first and the U.S.A. second.

Second, certain aspects of Catholic doctrine which get propounded by the Vatican and preached at the pulpit are nevertheless tacitly rejected by many American Catholics--and, though most of them won't admit it, a fair number of American priests. Even fairly hard-core pro-life Catholics, for instance, routinely use birth control; the Church's ban on most fertility treatments is likewise widely disregarded. Most of the American Catholics I know also vehemently reject the official position on homosexuality (which is that our sexuality is inherently disordered, our relationships inherently evil, and our families instruments of child abuse) because their own experiences and their own consciences tell them that this is a crock. Technically, Catholics who have divorced and remarried are not supposed to receive communion; but a lot of them do it anyway, and usually nobody tries to stop them.

Third, the refrain you hear from the Clinton campaign and elsewhere that Obama would/should have left the church if he didn't agree with Wright's views doesn't make much sense to Catholics, especially those who are for one reason or another disappointed in or alienated from the Church hierarchy. The reason is pretty simple: lay Catholics don't hire their own priests. Parish priests are appointed from above, and though in some cases there is a process of negotiation which tries to ensure that a thriving congregation continues to thrive, it's also not unheard of for the diocese to punish a 'disobedient' congregation--one where, say, the outgoing priest allowed girl altar servers--by sending them an arch-conservative who has been chosen precisely because he's completely out of step with the congregation. When that happens, some people are inevitably driven away; but just as many will stay in the congregation because the community is important to them, and deal with the priest as best they can. Because Catholics have so little control over a) who their priests are and b) what Catholic doctrine is, those who for whatever reason can't swallow the Vatican line are used to putting up with priests (and bishops, and Popes) that they don't agree with for the sake of maintaining their membership in a church they love.

I'd like to hope that this would work in Obama's favor, at least at the primary level. We shall see. But at least now I know why my blood has been boiling so much over this stupid manufactured controversy. I finally made the decision to stop going to a church where I was going to hear me and mine vilified on a regular basis; but many friends and relatives whose integrity I respect and whose spirituality I admire have stayed with the object of fighting for what they see as the _real_ church and changing it from within. It's unbelievably condescending, not to say inaccurate, to simply assume that by sitting in a pew you are endorsing whatever comes from the pulpit.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder