Authority

I've heard the name Richard John Neuhaus, but had never really run across any of his commentaries until Andrew Sullivan linked to this post at First Things. I obviously need to study more of his thinking, but on the basis of these comments, I'm not sure I can even justifiably call it that. I may start a new award: Horse's Ass of the Week.

I took the plunge and read this article on the recent Vatican Instruction on homosexuality and the priesthood. It's a very interesting article that seems to support the idea that the Catholic hierarchy's doctrinal decisions take precedence over everything -- including the will of God. (Or at least, in keeping with what seems to be one of the conceptual bases of the Church, Neuhaus dismisses the idea that God's call to the priesthood can be valid without being vetted by the hierarchy.)

Quite possibly the most irritating thing about Neuhaus' comments is his supercilious and condescending attitude toward those who do seek substantive answers to moral questions.

There are some unintentional howlers here. Neuhaus quotes Bishop John D'Arcy:

To be happy, a priest must be convinced in his heart that he would be a good father and good husband. Like marriage, the priesthood involves making a gift of oneself to another. Pope John Paul II called it an officium caritatus, that is, an Office of Love. It cannot be an escape for someone who is afraid of marriage, believed he would not be happy in marriage or would not be a good spouse or father. The priest gives up something very beautiful—a lifelong relationship with a good woman, children, and grandchildren. [These are] needs that are deep within our humanity. He gives it up for something beautiful—to be a priest and shepherd after the heart of Christ. He must believe that Christ is calling him. It is a sacrifice. It’s supposed to be a sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice in the same way for a person with deep-seated homosexual tendencies. He is not drawn to marriage in the same way. Thus, immediately, there is a division in the priesthood.

There's a flaw in this statement that just jumped out at me on first reading, which is simply the assumption -- and it is only an assumption, not justified by anything based in the real world -- that by definition, a gay man cannot be a good father and good husband. Sorry -- I realize Catholic doctrine tries to avoid reality whenever possible (something that Neuhaus seems to support), but the rest of us are more or less stuck with it. To paraphrase the feminists of the '70s and '80s, a man needs a woman like a fish needs a bicycle. The statement about those who are "afraid of marriage," considering the context of the times, is hysterically funny and just goes to show how far out of touch the Church is to the realities of the world and how its positions on sexuality simply can't be justified by any sort of logic. If gays fear marriage, why are so many of them fighting for the right to be married?

Neuhaus himself:

Those who are sharply critical of the instruction are slicing and dicing definitions of “transitory” and “deep-seated” same-sex desires, and disingenuously claiming to be puzzled by what on earth the instruction can mean by “gay culture.” By “gay culture” the instruction means the culture of which many of these critics are part.

He doesn't attempt to define "gay culture" because he can't. Anyone who has any acquaintance with the history of gays in this country knows that there never has been a gay culture and that what Neuhaus and his ilk in the Church would like to hold up as gay culture has not been a reality for many men, possibly even a majority.

This is absolutely outrageous:

The truth is that, by the criteria set out in the instruction, many who are priests today would not have been ordained. The further truth is that many of these men have turned out to be good and holy priests, despite the temptations attending the disability of same-sex attraction. The yet-further truth is that many are not good and holy priests. Rome has made a prudential judgment: With respect to giving candidates the benefit of the doubt, too many risks were taken in the past. The benefit of the doubt must now be given to protecting the integrity of the priesthood. With the new “normalization” of homosexuality in the general culture, with the acceptance of that normalization by many priests and not a few bishops, and with consequences such as the sex abuse scandals, the Church simply cannot afford to take the risks that were taken, frequently with the best intentions, in the past. (Emphasis added)

This is an argument that cannot be, by any standard, other than a matter of self-serving politics. Of course, in light of the Church's avoidance of reality, it makes perfect sense to scapegoat as a deflection from one's own moral dereliction, and yet even there, even supposing that the sexual abuse of children was a result of homosexuality among the priesthood (and there is absolutely no evidence to support such a conclusion, and a great deal of evidence otherwise), that still does not address the question of the Church's complete moral failure in this area: why wasn't it stopped, regardless of the cause? (Neuhaus points out that Bishop D'Arcy, quoted above, raised the alarm in Boston in the 1980s. His reward was to be "exiled" [Neuhaus' term] to Fort Wayne, Indiana. This paints an ugly picture of the Church hierarchy and its attitudes.)

Neuhaus' comments on the "mendacity" of the objections to the Instruction are also more than a little self-serving. (The irony here is that he objects to the dissenters "slicing and dicing" the terminology of the teaching while doing the same thing himself.)

Here is the crux of my objections to Neuhaus' argument and Church teachings on the subject in general:

With many of the critics, it is possible to cut through the obfuscation by simply asking whether they accept the Church’s teaching that homosexual desire is disordered and homogenital acts are intrinsically immoral. The emphasis here is not on the disorder but on the act. If it is agreed that the act is immoral, then it follows that the desire to commit the act is disordered. One cannot have a rightly ordered desire to do wrong.

It completely misses the point, in my view, as to what morality is. It is a prime example of what has become endemic in far-right Christianity (as well as the most radical Muslim and Jewish pronouncements): morality is reduced to a set of behaviors that in and of themselves are wrong, including behaviors that may not be any such thing. I'm going to be accused of moral relativism here, which is again is missing the point: in spite of William F. Buckley's howler that "morality is absolute," it's not. Immoral acts are culturally determined, and always have been. They are codified in a number of different ways -- religious teachings, laws, customs, and the like -- and they are subject to revision. To justify the Church's teachings on homosexuality by reference to its consistency over 2000 years (which is not, in what history I've seen, completely accurate itself) is a big "So what?" To typify the expression of one's deepest -- and, by most standards, most admirable -- desires as a "desire to do wrong" is just completely outside the known universe.

More self-serving statements, far outside of reality, from Neuhaus:

The statement by Niederauer that attracted most attention, however, was this: “Also, some who are seriously mistaken have named sexual orientation as the cause of the recent scandal regarding the sexual abuse of minors by priests.” This is nothing short of astonishing. One can agree that it was not the cause, meaning the only cause. There is, for instance, the negligence and complicity of bishops, and of the seminaries in their charge. But to deny, as the bishop seems to be denying, a causal relationship between homosexual priests and the sexual abuse scandal is, well, astonishing. Research commissioned by the bishops themselves shows, as the whole world now knows, that more than 80 percent of the instances of abuse were with teenage boys and young men. It does not require a Ph.D. in psychology to recognize—although a Ph.D. in psychology might be helpful in denying—that men who want to have sex with boys are more likely to have sex with boys than men who do not want to have sex with boys.

Again, this is completely insupportable. Bishop Niederauer is absolutely correct, and Neuhaus is absolutely wrong, betraying a deep misunderstanding of human sexuality (which, coming from an orthodox Catholic apologist, doesn't really surprise me at all). It is well established that the overwhelming majority of child molesters who identify with a sexual orientation aside from children identify as heterosexual (as in slightly more than 98%). And once more, his history is off-base: there are strong indications that the sexual abuse of minors was endemic in the Church long before priests started leaving to get married, which is one of the ultimate causes Neuhaus cites. (Really. He does.) As far as the research he cites that 80% of the victims were boys and young men, well, to put it crudely, what other holes were available? In a rampantly misogynistic institution, you're not going to find a lot of altar girls. Neuhaus' statement then is part wishful thinking, part deflection, and part simple, and perhaps willful, ignorance. (I'm being more than generous here. Essentially, Neuhaus' argument and the Church's position as a whole on the pederasty scandal are a pack of lies.)

Again, I'm not impressed with the quality or caliber of Neuhaus' argument. Even given that Church teaching is almost completely self-referential and that he is an apologist, his concern does not seem to be with the issues under discussion -- they are apparently as much a pretext as anything else. In fact, it's obvious that his concern is solely about the maintenance of the authority of the hierarchy absent any meaningful dialogue.

It's self-evident to me that if one is in authority and is meeting dissent, one must address the dissent by some standard other than "I said so." (Anyone who has had to deal with a five-year-old can attest to that. Of course, this lesson comes from reality, so it may not apply.) Otherwise, authority erodes. What Neuhaus, and the Curia, seem to miss is that using authority to justify authority just doesn't cut it if you are dealing with an audience with any degree of maturity. Of course, the idea of the faithful as a group of adult, thinking, responsible human beings would seem to be somewhat foreign to the hierarchy's thinking.

(A caveat: As a practicing Witch, I suscribe to a religion that emphasizes free inquiry and careful thought, as well as prayer. Moral issues are for me a matter of careful thought in the context of daily life, based on fundamental principles. It's no surprise, then, that I am suspicious of arguments from authority unless that authority can demonstrate some contact with reality. And even then, I prefer to do my own thinking. One of my basic problems with Neuhaus' article is what I can only call its shallowness: he's not asking the right questions, but then, that's not really his purpose, I guess.)

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for alerting me to this.