Varia:
You say you dislike Bush, that you're "disgusted" by him. Yet one issue--the possibility of ending foetal life--is so important that you'd be willing to vote for him?
The more I think about it, probably not. But I can't vote for Kerry, either.
The life of an unborn American baby is not more important than the life of an Iraqi civilian. But not less important, either.
Patrick:
My brain overloads and spits sparks at the idea that anyone could support this just because George W. Bush makes encoded and meaningless gestures in the direction of being "pro-life".
Imprisoning people indefinitely without due process is an evil thing, and would be even if the imprisoned people were treated much better than they are.
And my brain boggles that when I think of people - who say they believe unborn babies, at least in the latter stages of pregnancy, are people - who will support aborting babies up until the very moment they are being born, and using public funds to pay for abortions, just because they hope John Kerry will be less tyrranical toward already born humans than Bush.
I was thinking unclearly earlier in terms of choosing "the lesser of two evils". But this is not a situation where one really has to do so. If voting for a presidential candidate means supporting (even if reluctantly, as part of a package deal) every policy that one can be morally sure he will follow, then it is immoral to vote for Bush (because he locks people up without trial, among other things) and immoral to vote for Kerry (because he says the government should take no steps to protect unborn babies from agression, and will probably use federal funding for abortions as other Democratic presidents have done via executive order). I don't like the idea of abstaining in a Presidential election, which I will probably have to do if (as often happens) the Libertarians nominate someone pro-abortion. But you're right. Kerry's support for abortion doesn't make Bush's tyrrany or unjust war OK.
Of course, if you actually think abortion is fine, nothing wrong with it, the choice of Kerry is obvious and easy. But I wonder how you can be so sure that unborn babies are not people and there's nothing wrong with killing them. What argument in favor of free abortion applies to babies in the ninth month of gestation, or even in the process of birth, that doesn't also apply to newborn babies up to several weeks old?
CHip:
...the non sequitur of comparing the short-term pain of the willing convert with the decades of misery demanded of people brought up in the church.
Going back to the context of what I wrote,
But all these things he gives only to some people are trivial compared to the universal (and much less deserved) invitation to love God and be loved by him forever. Answering that call requires some kind of sacrifice for everyone, though more for some than others.
Actually, I was primarily comparing the suffering of the martyrs who were tortured and killed for being Christian with the lesser suffering of people who forgo some enjoyment in obedience to Christ. I find this comparison personally helpful when I am tempted to complain about my own circumstances. Your comparison may be apt as well; maybe people brought up in the Church on average suffer more for Christ than adult converts, because they spend a larger proportion of their lives following Christ. But it seems that you are primarily talking about people like Roz, and suggesting that, by teaching things about human nature that you consider false, the Church is causing them pointless suffering. I won't deny that selective, uncharitable or imprudent application of Church teaching can and often does cause needless suffering. But the Church's teaching is true, and its proper application reduces suffering and makes the unavoidable suffering non-pointless.
What we all have to sacrifice is our self-will. Going back to Teresa's credo from Easter Monday,
I believe that a religion that exists only to tell you how good you are, and which never requires you to do anything you don’t want to do or refrain from anything you do want to do, is a species of moral cotton candy.
Our first turning away from God to do things our own way led us to want various things that are bad for us. All of us have appetites which, if we indulged them as much as we like, would destroy us. It is through the Church that Christ gives us not only the knowledge of less obvious aspects of right and wrong (obvious things we can figure out on our own), but the grace to actually do right.
...the notion that your "loving" god would make humans capable of enjoyment and then tell them that said enjoyment is vile boggles me. (Note "enjoyment", not "destructive indulgence", ...
Almost anything good can be misused, and not all destructive indulgence is immediately and obviously so. Part of the reason for revelation is to point out the less obvious instances so we can avoid them without having to find out the hard way that they are destructive. Part of the reason for a permanent church with teaching authority is so we won't forget or ignore these things when intellectual fashions change.
But I'm not sure there's much point in going into details about the Church's moral teaching, when you don't believe in God or any kind of divine revelation. We may not have enough assumptions in common to debate fruitfully.
Roz:
In general a confessor is not going to ask for more detail unless he thinks you're being too vague for him to tell what kind of sin you've commited and whether you're actually sorry for it. Confession is not the same as psychoanalysis or counseling. Some situations require some of both, though, and not all priests are competent at counseling. Spiritual direction commonly inclues both.
I hope to come back later but that's all I can say right now.
This discussion reminds me of an essay Rod Bennett wrote several years ago on this topic - not specifically about abortion, but about what it means to be Catholic. I just found and re-read the essay and it does seem somewhat relevant to our recent discussion here.
Re: Kerry's "Paul XXIII" - I would not put too much emphasis on mere verbal slips in any case. I don't know of any evidence that eloquence correlates strongly to administrative competence or other good qualities. Nor is it my business to judge how good a Christian Bush is (much less how good a Methodist he is, as I'm not Methodist and never have been), or how good a Christian Kerry is. As a voter all I need to do is figure out which (if either) I can in good conscience vote for - which seems less likely to be disastrous.
A Catholic politician may vote for a law that restricts abortion less than it ideally ought to be restricted, because it's in his judgment the best possible law under present political conditions. He may think it ought to be restricted at the state rather than the federal level. But John Kerry does not hold either of those positions, as far as I can tell; he supports abortion as a fundamental right, and would (correct me if I am mixing him up with someone else) support public funding of abortion as well. I can't see how that can possibly be consistent with Church teaching.
I'm nearly as disgusted with Bush as you are, and I can't possibly campaign for him; but I might end up voting for him, because the Democrats, by nominating someone as strongly pro-abortion as Kerry, have left me with no real choice. I can hope the Libertarians nominate someone at least moderately pro-life (they wouldn't have to try very hard to find someone more pro-life than Bush), but voting for such an as-yet hypothetical candidate would probably have no very good effect.
I talked with my pastor about this over the weekend. He confirmed my suspicion that the "automatic excommunication" was a misunderstanding. Sterilization (except where medically necessary) and mutilation are considered wrong because they involve defacing or desecrating the work of God, the human body. But if it's motivated by a psychological disorder (I hope you are not offended by the term, but it seems to me accurate), then the culpability is lessened (or even in extreme cases eliminated). As with any other serious, deliberate sin, one must repent it, go to confession, and start doing penance before receiving communion again. But this is different from excommunication, where only a bishop can restore you to unity.
This probably won't help you in any practical way in the short term, but I hope it clears up misunderstandings about what the Church teaches and why.
there are broader theological issues here
Once you came to disbelieve what the Church teaches, you did the right thing to obey your conscience by leaving, rather than continue to call yourself Catholic through inertia or fear of change or for social advantage. But I hope you can someday come to understand and believe.
disrespect for my choices is the idea here
I'm not sure what you mean by respect or disrespect for choices, but I'll try to answer based on my best guess - let me know if I'm misunderstanding you.
When someone does something I wouldn't do in their place, but the matter is an aesthetic or otherwise morally indifferent one, I probably have no business second-guessing their choice or telling them they should do otherwise. When someone does something that seems to me objectively wrong, though, I may (depending on my office and my relationship to the person) have a duty to speak up or take other action.
The Church believes that certain actions are in the realm of objective right and wrong, which you (as far as I can tell) believe are either indifferent or ambiguous so that each person should do as seems best to them. It's part of the Church's (specifically, the bishops') job to warn people when they're doing something wrong, that is, spiritually dangerous - not different in principle from, e.g., the U.S. Surgeon General warning people about smoking and other health dangers. You may disagree with the bishops' or the Surgeon General's evaluation of danger, or consider the tone in which the warning is delivered to be annoying, but they would be slacking off if they thought something was dangerous and failed to warn people.
If it helps, I don't have much respect for some of my own choices.
I have spent some more time trying to track down the reported automatic excommunication of transsexuals, and I just can't find it. The closest thing I found was several articles similar to this one from Catholic World News, January 2003, about a ruling from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that transsexuals cannot be ordained or admitted to religious orders. Osservatore Romano keeps only one week of articles online, so searching there was a wash; but I also did site-specific searches for "transsexual" on a number of news sites, besides broader searches with variations on "transsexual, Catholic, excommunicate". Also, I talked to a couple of people I thought might know something about it and they had never heard of it either. Roz, did you read the article in Osservatore Romano, or read a second-hand summary of it in another news source, or hear a second-hand summary of it in conversation with someone...?
Somehow it just doesn't seem terribly plausible, that the Church would excommunicate a whole class of people because of (what the Church considers to be) psychological problems. Excommunication is most commonly used for persistence in teaching heresy after being corrected, and a for a few grave sins such as desecration of the Eucharist or procuring an abortion. If a Catholic theologian were to teach that transsexuals really are instances of God putting the wrong kind of soul in the wrong kind of body, or something to that effect, and that sex-reassignment surgery is a suitable response to such a situation, then I reckon the bishops would tell him he is wrong and should stop teaching that; and if he persisted, he might eventually be excommunicated. But if such a thing had happened recently (surely if it were in the last 8-10 years for which large news archives are on the web) I would probably have found at least some passing reference to it with one of the varying search terms I used in the last few days. I hope you will not be offended if I suppose you misunderstood or misremembered something until I see further evidence. I know I sometimes misunderstand and misremember news articles I've read.
As to the idea that transexuals or homosexuals - and I am both - can somehow
be the thing they are and not do the thing, well, that really does not work.
Which bits of the gay thing is one allowed to do as a Catholic?
I am not the most qualified person to answer this, but I can refer you to Dave Morrison. My tentative answer would be that, in some important respects, the case of a homosexual man like Dave Morrison who, as a faithful son of the Church, lives (with difficulty) celibately is similar to the case of a friend of mine whose wife has left him and who, obedient to Christ speaking through the Church, is still faithful to his wife even though she isn't faithful to him. It is less similar to, but not totallly different from, the case of a single man who is in poor health and too socially inept to have much chance of getting married, but who resists frequent temptations to use pornography or masturbate, and less frequent temptations to fornication. In short - enjoyment of sex is not a universal right. Just as some people die before reaching puberty, or have genital deformities that make it impossible for them to have normal sex even though they have sexual desires, some people are physically capable but it is not right for one reason or another. You may not agree with this, but it is consistent internally and with the rest of what the Church teaches.
God made us; he doesn't owe us anything. To some people he gives excellent health, to some the gift of writing poetry, or being good at math, or being able to marry well, or a call to the priesthood, or what have you. It doesn't make sense for us to second-guess why he gave miscellaneous gifts to some people and not others. But all these things he gives only to some people are trivial compared to the universal (and much less deserved) invitation to love God and be loved by him forever. Answering that call requires some kind of sacrifice for everyone, though more for some than others. Being celibate when one would prefer to enjoy sex is less severe than being crucified, stoned, beheaded, roasted on a griddle, burnt alive, or something of that kind. Realizing that one's feelings are not objectively true is hard, but also less hard than suffering torture and death.
Absent such sympathy, bland words about how we have not been thrown out, but cut ourselves off - sorry - from the Church are more or less meaningless.
I sympathize with your suffering from bishops, pastors and other Church officials who sometimes seem to be (and sometimes are) harsh and unpastoral in the way they apply (or misapply) Church teaching. I have suffered only mildly and rarely this way myself, but I have friends who've suffered a good deal worse, though not in the same way as you. I think it was Flannery O'Connor who said that one sometimes must suffer more from the Church than for the Church. Only a small subset of bishops and priests are saints, and of the rest, most are going to say things from time to time that hurt people unnecessarily and unjustly. Even so, we're far better off than if we had been left on our own, with just a miscellany of books and no way to be sure which, if any, God inspired, or what they mean.
However - don't believe everything you read in the newspapers. Sometimes the words of the Pope and various bishops are taken out of context and sound more harsh than they did in context, or even take on a different meaning. I know this happens in the general media, and I should not be surprised if it sometimes happens in the gay press too, though I don't read such newspapers regularly enough to notice trends of that kind.
If I have said anything offensive, I apologize, and if you point out specifics, I will note them and try to speak more gently in the future.
If I said everything I thought would be relevant, it would be too personal for a public forum. If you want to take this discussion to email, I'm willing.
Catherine:
The two Marian dogmas you mention (as corrected after Avram's question) are the only two dogmas we believe primarily or solely on the authority of the Pope. They are not the only occasions on which the Pope has ever spoken infallibly, much less the only infallible declarations in Church history. The Creed of the Council of Nicea would probably be the first and most famous, but there have been many others from various ecumenical councils, and several from popes, even before the infallibility of the Pope was itself dogmatically declared.
It's true that the conditions of infalliblity are narrow enough that they aren't met by every paragraph of every conciliar or papal document. Most documents which make one or more solemn declarations of dogma also make other more casual statements which though generally true are not infallibly so.
Jeremy:
My apologies for the excessively elliptic phrase "advocating unlimited abortion". What about: "proposing that the state should not protect the rights a particular class of people because anyway they are subhuman and deserve no protection". Is that clearer? Unborn babies are probably the most typical class that some people consider subhuman nowadays, but there have been others in the past. If unborn babies are human, then the state must protect their rights the same as other people's, and if it doesn't, it isn't doing its job.
Re: medically necessary abortions - yes, a necessary evil. But in current court-made law, the "medically necessary" clause seems to be a wide-open loophole. "Medical necessity" is stretched by a legal fiction to cover any circumstance that may cause emotional distress (e.g. pregnancy).
Roz:
This recent post by Secret Agent Man says some sensible things about the rules for receiving communion, and quotes several American bishops on the topic. I don't agree with everything he says, or with his overall sarcastic tone, but especially toward the end of the post I linked he makes a lot of sense.
Niall wrote:
This is not a thought which comes naturally to people born and raised RC.
I am aware that there are a lot of cradle Catholics who disagree with some subset of the Church's teaching, yet don't leave the Church because there is nowhere else that looks more attractive. This sort of makes sense (psychologically, if not logically). But I believe Teresa is the first adult convert I've met who thinks the same way. Thus, I expressed surprise and puzzlement.
Roz Kaveney wrote:
...by a thoroughly corrupt process of bribes and threats to the members of the Council that declared it.
What evidence do you have of this? I would like to see it.
Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would lead us into all truth - but if we belive this process of being led into truth does not occur under specific objectively ascertainable circumstances, we are Protestants (the invididual believer interpreting the Bible more or less on his own, or each congregation interpreting the Bible independently... this is where I grew up). Catholics have long believed that one of these objectively ascertainable circumstances was in a validly convened ecumenical council. Since the first Vatican Council declared that under specific circumstances (ex cathedra definitions of doctrine on faith and morals) the pope is also infallible ("led into all truth"), the latter belief seems to me to be a corollary of the first - unless one thinks that the first Vatican Council was not a valid ecumenical council. Is that what you think, based on the evidence you have heard of bribery, threats, etc?
The Holy Spirit prevents the Church - specifically, bishops in ecumenical councils and popes - from dogmatically declaring anything as true, which is actually false. He doesn't prevent them from declaring truth in a muddled or ambiguous way, on an injudicious occasion, or even from bad motives. (That's not to say he doesn't help them to declare truths clearly, at the right time, and from good motives when they cooperate with his grace - but he respects our free will and doesn't force us to do things or refrain from doing things, except in limited circumstances as mentioned above.)
Specifically, there is the problem of creeping infallibility...
There are people who interpret the words of Vatican I more broadly than they were meant, and assume some papal utterances are infallible which, under the circumstances they were given, are not. For instance, I recently heard someone say that the Pope's recommendation against invading Iraq was an infallible declaration. But it isn't, because he wasn't speaking to the whole church, much less defining a matter faith or morals. That's not to say he was wrong - he was probably right. But he was not infallible on that occasion.
John Henry Newman disagreed with the bishops and pope on some timing issues - if I recall correctly, he thought some of the Marian definitions, and the definition of papal infallibility, were inopportune though of course true. Just because something is true doesn't mean it is wise to declare it.
One of the things I hate most about the bureaucrats of the church is that they use refusal of that communion on a regular basis to police people's actions.
Do you disagree with this on principle, or only when you disagree with the bishops about the particular reason they are refusing someone communion? For instance, would you say the same about the bishops of Louisiana threatening excommunication of certain pro-segregation politicians in the early 1960s? Are there any circumstances in which you would think it justified to refuse communion?
Some years ago, it was announced that all transexuals are automatically excommunicate...
I tried to find the document, but couldn't. Google search for "excommunication transsexual Catholic" turned up nothing relevant in the first several pages. (I found some references to transsexuals being barred from ordination, but nothing about a general excommunication. The exclusion from ordination or from religious orders would be a special case of the general rules that exclude people with psychological problems, or those who have had voluntary sterilization surgery.) Do you know what/when it was?
Anyway, excommunication does not mean that you "can't go back even if [you] wanted to" - it means "we want you to come back, but your actions declare that you've left, de facto, and we have to make that obvious in case you hadn't noticed. We hope you will come back, but you have to repent, and publicly." It is a special case of the general rule that one shouldn't receive communion after committing mortal sin until one has first gone to confession. But when the sin is public (for instance, advocating unlimited abortion) the injury to unity is public, and the restoration of unity needs to be public as well. So returning after excommunication is a little more involved than just going to confession (though that's part of it, and the details of what is said in confession are secret as usual).
Teresa wrote:
Infallibility. Never had the slightest doubt about it; by which I mean, I've always thought it was nonsense.
That puzzles me a lot. I grew up a Baptist, but when I moved away from my parents' house I knew I should figure out where I really belonged; in some kind of Christian church, but not in a fundamentalist Baptist church, I figured.
When I was studing different churches' teachings - toward the end of the period, mainly studying the Catholic church - there were a lot of particular Catholic teachings that made more sense the more I studied them. Near the end of that time, I found I believed too many Catholic ideas to ever be comfortable in a Protestant church again. But I could not actually join the Catholic Church until I got over the problem I had with the idea of infallibity. I realized that even if I agreed with Catholics more than with Protestants on most of the issues that divide us, I still could not actually be a Catholic unless I actually believe all that the Church teaches. So it took awhile longer before I could understand and believe in the infallibility of the Church.
After I got past the usual misunderstandings (confusing infallibility with impeccability, misunderstanding the scope of infallibility, or how it's supposed to actually work) I was thinking, for several weeks if I recall correctly, "That would be cool if it were true, but can I be sure it's true?" Only after I could accept that could I honestly present myself at the nearest Catholic church as a convert and start going through RCIA.
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