David Michael Miller
A fallen-away Catholic, I sometimes find myself in the awkward position of defender of the faith.
My experience is that liberals don’t extend their tolerance and acceptance of all faiths to Catholicism. It’s the one religion that can be attacked on all fronts. I attack it myself some of the time, but I’ve earned the privilege. I spent 12 formative years of my life in Catholic education. I was an altar boy. I spent some steamy Sunday mornings in a church with no air conditioning choking on incense.
So I get my back up when non-Catholics go after my old church. The church treats women like second-class citizens? That’s awful but not unique to Catholicism, unfortunately. All of the Dalai Lamas have been men, after all. The church opposes abortion and most forms of birth control? Most practicing Catholics in this part of the world just ignore that stuff, but it’s rooted in doctrine about the value of a life and when that life begins. The church teaches that acting on one’s homosexuality is a sin? Many black churches are equally opposed to that, but they don’t come in for the same criticism.
And Pope Francis has spoken out against the death penalty, criticized the treatment of immigrant families, and called for stronger action on climate change and on income inequality. In many respects, he’s been the last remaining progressive voice in a world gone mad with nationalistic populism.
So, I sometimes spend some personal political capital pushing back on friends who ignore the failings of other faiths (sometimes their own) while they gleefully go after the church. But then Madison Bishop Robert Morlino says something and I just drop the microphone and go home.
Morlino has been mostly blessedly silent in the years since Francis took control. Morlino’s brand of hard-edged, judgmental conservatism was out of step with Francis’ kinder, gentler approach. But with the most recent horrific revelations about systematic and organized abuse of children in Pennsylvania parishes, Morlino apparently felt that he had to say something.
Just saying that it was unconscionable, that those responsible for those acts or for a cover-up should be held to account, and promising that anyone under his own jurisdiction who commits the same crimes and sins will be turned over to civil authorities would have been enough.
But the bishop went on to offer his own explanation for how all this could have happened. He blamed gay culture within the church.
Linking being gay to being a pedophile has no basis in fact and it reveals a warped, paranoid view that most of the modern world has moved away from.
As the Rev. Bryan Massingale, a Milwaukee priest and theologian, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "The crisis of the church is not one of sexual orientation. The crisis of the church is one of sexual violations, systematic dishonesty and episcopal malpractice. And blaming gay priests is grossly unfair and a slander, frankly. There are many gay priests who serve this church with integrity, dedication and commitment, and every bishop knows that."
The first job of the church is to stop covering all this up, to aid the prosecution of the abusers and to do all they can to help the victims recover.
Then it needs to deal with the culture that allowed all this to happen. And it’s not gay culture that’s the problem. It’s pretty clear to many Catholics, both practicing and not, that a couple of the solutions are to allow women to be priests and to allow priests to marry. A power structure made up exclusively of men who are required to be celibate is not likely to foster a healthy, open institution.
But real progress within the church has been way too slow, even by the glacier-slow pace of the Vatican. Critics have pointed out an improvement in tone and rhetoric under Francis but little in the way of action.
Church leaders aside, I know my share of devout Catholics who do a lot of good in the world and their faith is at the very center of their lives. And they are torn apart by these revelations of abuse and cover-up. It would be an awful mistake to tar an entire religion or its faithful. But Bishop Morlino is not helping those good devout Catholics — or even fallen-away ones who still occasionally try to stick up for the church — when he says things that are consistent only with his extreme conservative political views.
