Quote of the Day

. . . [T]here’s something in Benedict’s resignation statement that bears noting: “After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.”

Conscience, Benedict reminds us today, is still primary for Catholics. Examination of conscience: that is just the formula millions of us use to explain why we use birth control, enjoy our sexuality in a variety of ways, and see enormous good in other religious traditions. Conscience is the ultimate arbiter, and the Pope relied on his. Good on him, and good on the rest of us.

There has been a lot of fudging on the matter of conscience in recent decades. The post-Vatican II hierarchy has claimed that conscience is primary if, and only if, it is informed as they see fit. But Pope Benedict XVI is giving conscience a new lease on life. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander — the appeal to conscience cannot be denied now that the Pope himself has had recourse to it.

. . . [R]ank and file Catholics want a new Church, not just a new pope.

We know that change is in the air because we put it there. Progressive Catholics all over the world are creating new forms of church since the old is so thoroughly discredited. No institution can withstand the onslaught of negative publicity that the Vatican earned over clergy sexual abuse and episcopal cover-ups without major changes. No hierarchy however fortified can hold out forever against spirit-filled steps toward equality and justice. This time, just electing a new pope will not do. Nor will closeting away a group of elite electors responsible to no one but themselves cut it for an election process.

Catholic people have consciences too. We expect to have a say in how we organize and govern ourselves. We cannot in conscience abdicate our authority to 118 mostly elderly men. Those days are over. If a pope can abdicate before he goes out feet first without the sky falling in then new egalitarian models of church can and will emerge too.

– Mary E. Hunt
"Papal Retirement: A Matter of Conscience"
Religion Dispatches
February 11, 2013

Related Off-site Links:
Pope's Sudden Resignation Sends Shockwaves Through Church – Philip Pullella (Reuters via Yahoo! News, February 11, 2013).
Pope's Resignation: Reactions Around the World – Kate Connolly, Giles Tremlett, Jonathan Watts, David Smith and Kate Hodal (The Guardian, February 11, 2013).
A Truly Historic Announcement – Colleen Kochivar-Baker (Enlightened Catholicism, February 11, 2013).
Pope Benedict to Resign at the End of the Month – John L. Allen Jr. (National Catholic Reporter, February 11, 2013).
Speculation Swirls Around Pope's Sudden Resignation – Meredith Bennett-Smith (The Huffington Post, February 11, 2013).
Benedict's Painful Legacy – Elizabeth Drescher (Religion Dispatches, February 11, 2013).
Pope's Mission to Revive Faith Clouded by Scandal – Nicole Winfield (Associated Press via Yahoo! News, February 11, 2013).
The Resignation of Pope Benedict XVI: Is It Health? Or Politics? Or Both? – Howard Chua-Eoan (Time, February 11, 2013).
Benedict's Resignation: Thanks Owed to Survivors of Childhood Clerical Abuse for Call to Build a Better Church – William D. Lindsey (Bilgrimage, February 11, 2013).
New Ways Ministry on the Resignation of Benedict XVI – Francis DeBernardo (Bondings 2.0, February 11, 2013).
Gay Catholics Respond to Pope's Impending Resignation – DignityUSA (February 11, 2013).
Let an Inclusive Church Rise! – WATER's Statement on the Resignation of Pope Benedict XVI – Women's Alliance of Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (February 11, 2013).
Voice of the Faithful Prays for Pope and a Renewed Church as Benedict XVI Steps Down – Voice of the Faithful (February 11, 2013).
Call to Action Responds to Pope's Resignation – Call to Action (February 11, 2013).
Catholics United Statement on Pope Benedict XVI’s Announcement of Resignation – Catholics United (February 11, 2013).
Benedict's Resignation: A Selection of Commentary as Day Continues – William D. Lindsey (Bilgrimage, February 11, 2013).
How Will the Church Handle a Living Ex-Pope? – Nick Squires (The Christian Science Monitor via Yahoo! News, February 11, 2013).
The Next Pope – Jayden Cameron (Gay Mystic, February 11, 2013).


UPDATES:
Why Resignation May Mean a Conclave Open to Change – John Allen, Jr. (The National Catholic Reporter, February 13, 2013).
American Nuns Hope For Sister-Friendly New Pope – Barbie Latza Nadeau (The Daily Beast, February 13, 2013).
A Pro-Gay Catholic Church Leader? Don't Get Your Popes Up – Corinne Pinfold (Pink News, February 11, 2013).
Benedict’s Embattled Legacy on LGBT Issues – Bob Shine (Bondings 2.0, February 13, 2013).
The Disastrous Influence of Pope Benedict XVI – John Cassidy (The New Yorker, February 12, 2013).
New Pope? I've Given Up Hope – Garry Wills (New York Times, February 12, 2013).
Cardinal Peter Turkson, Possible Pope Successor, Has Defended Legislation Like Uganda's 'Kill The Gays' Bill – Cavan Sieczkowski (The Huffington Post, February 13, 2013).
La Sorpresa: The Papal Resignation, in the Latin American Eye – Mary Jo McConahay (On Being, February 14, 2013).
Pope Benedict's Most Powerful Gift to the Church – Joan Chittister, OSB (The Huffington Post, February 15, 2013).
Vatican Feuds, Fiefdoms, Betrayals Await Next Pope – Nicole Winfield (Associated Press via Tahoo! News, February 21, 2013).

Former Priest: When It Comes to Understanding Conscience, Our Catholic Leaders Have It Wrong

Ed Kohler is a founding member of a group of over 100 former priests speaking out against the proposed Minnesota "marriage amendment." He's a thoughtful and articulate man with solid knowledge of Catholic teaching and history. Recently, Ed had a letter-to-the-editor published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press in which he calls on all people of good will to "exercise their fundamental right to follow their conscience" and vote against the marriage amendment. Following is more of Ed's letter.

. . . That conscience must rule is consistent with what all of us former priests learned in seminary. It is also consistent with what I taught college students in social justice classes during the '60s at the archdiocesan minor seminary. When discussing human rights, I included Pope John XXIII's teaching that every person possesses the right to honor God "according to the sincere dictates of his own conscience." The rule is also consistent with the teachings of Pope John Paul II. He wrote that "People are obliged to follow their conscience in all circumstances and cannot be forced to act against it."

That conscience must rule is also consistent with the current Pope Benedict XVI – who taught, while still Father Joseph Ratzinger, that "Over the pope as the expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority, there still stands one's own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, even if necessary against the requirements of ecclesiastical authority."

Some Minnesota Catholics are conflicted on how to vote on the marriage amendment. This results from many Catholic leaders instructing Catholics that the church's religious values bind the conscience to support the amendment, in effect making support a non-negotiable moral imperative.

These Catholic leaders are wrong. They have converted a political tenet into church dogma. Catholic readers should know that. They are being led astray.

There is no official Catholic teaching that dictates how one must vote on the marriage amendment. Catholics are free to vote their conscience on Nov. 6, regardless of what they may hear from the pulpit or read in their diocesan paper.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
"Conscience Is the Highest Norm"
Ascertaining the Common Good
The Question of an "Informed" Catholic Conscience
Reflections on the Primacy of Conscience
John Cornwell on the "Pontifical Hijacking" of Cardinal Newman
Beyond the Hierarchy: The Blossoming of Liberating Catholic Insights on Sexuality (Part 3)

Recommended Off-site Links:
Catholic Q&A on the Minnesota 'Marriage Amendment' – Michael Bayly and Florence Steichen (Sensus Fidelium, August 7, 2012).
Gay Marriage, Bishops and the Crisis of Leadership – National Catholic Reporter (July 5, 2011).
Can 'True' Catholics Support Marriage Equality? – Chris Welch (CNN, June 20, 2012).
Conflicted Consciences Wrestle with Church Actions on Marriage Amendment – Beth Hawkins (MinnPost, April 18, 2012).
A Catholic Case for Same-Sex Marriage – Jeannine Gramick and Francis DeBernardo (Washington Post, February 14, 2012).
Amendment Campaign Contrary to Church Moral Teaching – Paula Ruddy (The Progressive Catholic Voice, March 3, 2011).

Beyond the Hierarchy: The Blossoming of Liberating Catholic Insights on Sexuality (Part 3)

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The Wild Reed’s series “Beyond the Hierarchy,” which highlights the liberating insights on sexuality that are emerging and “blossoming” beyond the Vatican, continues with an excerpt from Catholic theologian Joan Timmerman’s 1992 book Sexuality and Spiritual Growth.

I had the honor of experiencing Joan (pronounced Joanne) as one of my professors at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, where I studied in the Masters of Theology program from 1994-1996. In my final year, Joan served as my adviser in the writing of my thesis – one that explored the coming out process of gay men as a spiritual journey.

When people ask me what type of theology most interests me, I reply, “sacramental.” I have Joan to thank for this, as she was the first to provide me with the words, the theological terminology and framework, I’d long desired to put to certain experiences of my journey as a gay Catholic man.

In the following excerpt from her book Sexuality and Spirituality, Joan offers a “morality of responsibility regarding sexual issues,” a morality that, sadly, remains undeveloped within and by the hierarchy of the church’s clerical caste. Joan also presents a number of “steps for practical sexual decision-making,” and offers one of the best definitions of an informed conscience I’ve come across to date. “The importance of a well-formed conscience is obvious,” she writes. “It is the result of education and a habit of right choices. It is more like a developed skill, such as aesthetic taste, than an infused gift.”

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A major turning point in the history of sexual morality occurred when Augustine’s theory, that original sin was transmitted by the act of copulation, was accepted as doctrine. This extreme version of one (but not the only) theology of original sin, when taken as the basis for moral teaching, has tended to appeal to those who, for whatever reason, are pessimistic about human motives and the human capacity for responsible action. . . . The hope for moral transformation has no place in their sexual arena. By contrast, recent Roman Catholic teachings regarding politics and economics counts precisely on the human capacity for self-regulation. They envision the possibility of a just and peaceful society and call for voluntary action to make that hope a reality. The political agenda follows from optimism regarding virtue over concupiscence. Again by contrast, the agenda currently reflecting sexual assumptions – especially that on abortion – invokes public condemnation, fear, and legal sanctions, thus revealing its basic pessimism.

So the tragedy is one of omission: for want of a theology of sexuality based on baptismal identity and responsibility, a morality of responsibility regarding sexual issues was left undeveloped. . . .

Adult moral decision-making is integral to adult spirituality, not just as individuation but in the service of community renewal. This is also why morality needs spirituality. As life needs rules, so rules need to be stretched regularly to respond to life. Some regular method needs to be adopted and trusted, so that human forethought and planning are valued within the sexual arena as in other adult decisions.

The current moral theology about sexual expression is showing that some change has come out of listening to the stories of those who express their love sexually. Attempts to distinguish signs of sin from signs of grace show evidence of inductive reasoning and reflection on practice. No longer is it considered appropriate to impose on this experience a model which was created without reference to it and is managed from outside it. For the first time, in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, marriage is recognized as in its sexuality the singular expression and completion of the spouses’ love, their primary way of performing their intention for total self-gift. Earlier documents would have found in the sexual impulse an inescapably selfish concupiscence asserting itself. But the tension between the magisterium’s ameliorating judgment on sex and the simultaneous tenacity of the ancient bias against sexual expression continues to appear within official and unofficial theological materials.

Within those foundational comments, what I propose is the following set of steps for practical sexual decision-making.

1. Be clear on who you are and what you choose to become. This is the basis of morality. The indicative precedes the imperative. A person starts where she is, with her self-knowledge, her commitments and sense of vocation. Integrity is to choose action continuous with one’s dynamic center.

2. Consult all the sources of wisdom which are available to you. Sources of moral reasoning include Scripture, tradition, communal and personal experience, law, imagination and works of the imagination, moral rules, family of origin with customs and cultural values. Imagine all these as consultants around a table. They do not all have the same deliberative vote, but are assigned priority according to your unique situation and history. All should, however, be attended to.

3. Ask: What are the alternatives to the action presenting itself? If a person thinks she has no alternatives, she is too isolated, too dependent, or has stopped thinking too soon. Then assistance should be sought before proceeding. Action without alternatives is not free, and therefore not a moral choice. It is of course also possible to sabotage one’s own moral agency by deliberately putting oneself in a situation of reduced freedom, for example, by intoxication. This is culpable to the extent that one is aware of it and consents to it. It is always to settle for less than the personal and spiritual adulthood one is destined for. It may be helpful to think in terms of two steps in the deliberate choice of a wrong action, that is, (a) deliberate self-deception and (b) action on the self-deception.

4. What are the consequences for the primary participants? For their wider network of relationships? For society as a whole? Usually the consequences are not between good and evil but between variations or degrees of the good. Moreover, one is aware that the long-term consequences of an action are not always immediately visible and the short-term consequences may be overturned. Here one’s “hierarchy of values” becomes pertinent.

5. What choice, given the self-understanding, data, and the evaluation of consequences, will I make? A choice is not a further step beyond reasoning; it is choosing to stop the reasoning process by the intervention of the will in order to get on with what life requires, that is, action. The alternative to making an imperfect choice is worse: it is not to act at all, which is in effect never to become a moral agent, a fully functioning spiritual person.

6. Am I at peace with this decision? To act out of an unresolved doubt or a troubled conscience is destructive to the person. One can identify a right choice in advance of the action by the peace of mind and soul the decision brings, and a wrong choice by the guilt in initiates. One should of course be sure by consulting of sources (step 2 above) that one is not acting out of false conscience, scrupulosity, or unhealthy guilt. Anxiety (What would my mother say?) or bravado (I wish X could see me now!) might indicate such unreadiness to take this action because it shows a morbid excitement rather than a sense of legitimate pleasure in expressing one’s deepest self. The importance of a well-formed conscience is obvious. It is the result of education and a habit of right choices. It is more like a developed skill, such as aesthetic taste, than an infused gift. Though one should never act in bad faith, there comes a time when the moral calculus must end, and one can act, in good faith, though not always with complete certainty. Then faith provides the certainty that even when wrong choices are made in good faith, the person’s spirituality is not diminished but can grow. God’s forgiveness never fails. As Julian of Norwich wrote, “There is no wrath in God.” When people have difficulty believing in the forgiveness of God and others, it may well be because they have not yet been able to forgive themselves. This takes us back to step 1; What do I wish to become?

– Joan Timmerman
Sexuality and Spiritual Growth
pp. 123-125

NEXT: Part 4

Above: Joan Timmerman (seated at front left) and my classmates
at the College of St. Catherine – St. Paul. I took this photo on the
last evening of class in the fall semester of 1995.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Beyond the Hierarchy (Part 1)
• Beyond the Hierarchy (Part 2)
• The Question of an "Informed" Catholic Conscience
• Joan Timmerman on the Sexuality of Jesus
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Joan Timmerman (March 2007)
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Joan Timmerman (September 2008)
• Joan Timmerman on the "Wisdom of the Body"

Opening Image: Michael J. Bayly.

Roy Bourgeois: "I Will Not Recant"

Following is an excerpt from Fr. Roy Bourgeois' open letter to the Rev. Edward Dougherty, M.M., the Superior General of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers.

Maryknoll has been Bourgeois' community for 44 years. On March 8, 2011, he received a letter from Dougherty stating that he must recant his belief and public statements that support the ordination of women. If he failed to do this, he would be dismissed from Maryknoll.

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. . . After much reflection and many conversations with fellow priests and women, I believe sexism is at the root of excluding women from the priesthood. Sexism, like racism, is a sin. And no matter how hard we may try to justify discrimination against women, in the end, it is not the way of God. Sexism is about power. In the culture of clericalism many Catholic priests see the ordination of women as a threat to their power.

Our Church is in a crisis today because of the sexual abuse scandal and the closing of hundreds of churches because of a shortage of priests. When I entered Maryknoll we had over 300 seminarians. Today we have ten. For years we have been praying for more vocations to the priesthood. Our prayers have been answered. God is sending us women priests. Half the population are women. If we are to have a vibrant and healthy Church, we need the wisdom, experience and voices of women in the priesthood.

As Catholics, we believe in the primacy and sacredness of conscience. Our conscience is sacred because it gives us a sense of right and wrong and urges us to do the right thing. Conscience is what compelled Franz Jagerstatter, a humble Austrian farmer, husband and father of four young children, to refuse to join Hitler's army, which led to his execution. Conscience is what compelled Rosa Parks to say she could no longer sit in the back of the bus. Conscience is what compels women in our Church to say they cannot be silent and deny their call from God to the priesthood. And it is my conscience that compels me to say publicly that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is a grave injustice against women, against our Church and against our God who calls both men and women to the priesthood.

In his 1968 commentary on the Second Vatican Council's document, Gaudium et Spes, Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, said: "Over the pope . . . there still stands one's own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, if necessary, even against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority."

What you are requiring of me is not possible without betraying my conscience. In essence, you are telling me to lie and say I do not believe that God calls both men and women to the priesthood. This I cannot do, therefore I will not recant. . . .

– Roy Bourgeois

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If you want to express your support for Roy, here are some telephone numbers and addresses.

Call or email Rev. Edward M. Dougherty, Maryknoll Superior General at (914) 941-7590 and edougherty@maryknoll.org, or write to him at PO Box 305 Maryknoll, NY 10545-0305.

Send a letter of support to Fr. Roy at PO Box 3330 Columbus, GA 31903.

You may also want to sign this petition on the Women’s Ordination website.



Recommended Off-site Links:
Christian Sacrifice and the Unholy Crusade to Defrock Roy Bourgeois – Michele Somerville (Religion Dispatches via The Progressive Catholic Voice, April 7, 2011).
Catholic Church Targets Proponent of Women’s Ordination; Feminist Theologian – Mary E. Hunt (Religion Dispatches, April 8, 2011).
Fr. Roy Bourgeois: Ordination of Women Inevitable – Gary Stern (Journal News via The Progressive Catholic Voice, August 11, 2009).
Ordination of Women in Minneapolis Reflects Emerging Renewal of Priesthood and Church – Michael Bayly (The Progressive Catholic Voice, August 19, 2011).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
When Expulsion is the Cost of Discipleship
Fr. Roy Bourgeois: "We Need Women Priests in Our Church For It to Be Healthy and Complete"
Angela Bonavoglia on the Church's "Continued Demonization of Women"
Thoughts on Ordination, Intellectual Dishonesty, and the Holy Spirit of which the Prophet Joel Speaks
In Prophetic Obedience to the Spirit
Roman Catholic Womenpriests Ordained in Minneapolis
“We Are All the Rock”: An Interview with Roman Catholic Womanpriest, Judith McKloskey
Revealing a Hidden History
Out and About – July 2009

Image: Michael Bayly (August 2009).

“Conscience is the Highest Norm”

My friend Paula Ruddy’s most recent article at The Progressive Catholic Voice is generating some great discussion. I particularly appreciate the following comment by “Lisa.”

As a life-long Catholic, I have always known my Church is not perfect. [Members of the clerical leadership] are mistaken about women’s issues (ordination) and are mistaken about their view on homosexuality. They were mistaken about Joan of Arc when they put her to death, and mistaken about Galileo when they put him under house arrest. It took my Church nearly 400 years to apologize to Galileo. Although the leaders may not apologize to my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters in my lifetime they should not continue to “burn them at the stake” by denying them their civil rights.

Although I disagree with my Church on some issues, I can remain a Catholic in good conscience because of important church teachings such as primacy of conscience. As Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, before he became Pope Benedict: “Morality of conscience and morality of authority as two opposing models, appear to be locked in struggle with each other. Accordingly, the freedom of the Christian would be rescued by appeal to the classical principle of moral tradition that conscience is the highest norm which man is to follow even in opposition to authority.”

Thank you, Paula, and The Progressive Catholic Voice, for helping Catholics such as myself inform our conscience.

To join the discussion, click here.


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Reflections on the Primacy of Conscience
• The Question of an Informed Conscience
• A Catholic Understanding of Faithful Dissent (Part 1)
• A Catholic Understanding of Faithful Dissent (Part 2)
• Ascertaining the Common Good
• John Cornwell on the “Political Hijacking” of Cardinal Newman
• A Catholic’s Prayer for His Fellow Pilgrim, Benedict XVI

Image: “Conscience”: Artist unknown.

John Cornwell on the "Pontifical Hijacking" of Cardinal Newman

In his September 10 London Financial Times article, “The Papal Hijacking of Cardinal Newman,” John Cornwell outlines the story of John Henry Newman – the “most electrifying religious thinker and writer in English of the past 200 years” and a figure of inspiration to progressive Catholics.

Newman, who died in 1890, is set to be beatified by Benedict XVI during the pope’s upcoming visit to Britain. Beatification, as Cornwell notes, is the “penultimate stage of full sainthood.” Yet amidst this process it appears Newman’s legacy is being “revised.”

“Pope Benedict and Catholic officialdom,” writes Cornwell, “are presenting Newman as an exemplar of unquestioning papal allegiance. The Cardinal has been pontifically hijacked.”

John Cornwell is the author of Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint. Following are excerpts from his September 10 article.

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John Henry Newman has always been a source of inspiration to Catholic liberals for his tendency to see both sides of every question and to follow conscience wherever it may lead. Such views are to be found in English language Catholic journals with international reach. In Britain there is The Tablet; in the US, the National Catholic Reporter, America, and Commonweal. One of Benedict’s first acts on becoming Pope was to have the Jesuit editor of America fired for his progressive editorials. Ironically, Newman himself was sacked from the editorship of the liberal mid-19th century Catholic magazine, the Rambler for running articles critical of the papacy.

Newman’s path to beatification has taken half a century – the process began in 1958, on the insistence of the community of priests at Birmingham Oratory, founded by Newman – and it is an arcane, macabre process at the best of times. The candidate’s physical remains are procured and enshrined. Across Catholic Europe, bits of bone and hair of blesseds and saints are treasured in satin-lined gilt receptacles. Cadavers are venerated in glass-sided coffins, their faces reconstructed with wax and enlivened with rouge. Relics signify power, and miracles are sought in their presence, acknowledging the holy ones’ intercessory credit with the Almighty. Then there are the hagiographies: embellished stories of the holy ones’ lives for the edification of the faithful. So what is Newman’s story?

John Henry Newman is simply the most electrifying religious thinker and writer in English of the past 200 years – subtle, imaginative, deeply learned, at times maddeningly paradoxical and dialectical. James Joyce and Gerard Manley Hopkins claimed that he was the finest English prose stylist of the 19th century. His range is prodigious: poetry (“The Dream of Gerontius”), fiction, history, hymns (famously, “Lead, Kindly Light”), many hundreds of published sermons, as well as profound works of theology and philosophy. His Apologia Pro Vita Sua is by common consent the greatest spiritual autobiography since Augustine’s Confessions. A literary workaholic, he prayed with a pen in his hand. Believing in Christianity, he thought, was like falling in love. His motto was “Heart speaks unto Heart”; bullying and clever arguments, he said, do not bring us to God.

Newman spent the first half of his adult life as a scholar and preacher in Oxford, where he led a movement to renew the Anglican Church. He spent the second half working as a Catholic priest in industrial Birmingham, head of his community of Oratorians. As a Catholic, he continued to write prolifically; but the Vatican was suspicious of his writings: they were too independent, too English. A Vatican monsignor said he was “the most dangerous man in England” and should be “crushed”. Newman complained: “If I put anything into print, Propaganda [the Vatican] answers me at once. How can I fight with a chain on my arm? It is like the Persians driven to fight under the lash.”

Despite the suspicions and the oppression, Newman was made a Cardinal as he approached 80. A remarkable new Pope, Leo XIII, recognised his value for defending Christianity in a secular age. But there was opposition. Pope Leo spoke of prelates accusing Newman of being “liberal”, the dirtiest word in the Vatican’s vocabulary. John Everett Millais painted him in his Cardinal’s scarlet silks; like the drowning Ophelia in Millais’ famous depiction, Newman’s robes appear to be dragging him under. But Newman’s surreal cardinal status gave him immunity from censure in old age, and grudging toleration from the Vatican after his death.

As for Newman’s relationships, his friendship with a priest, Ambrose St John, was not widely known until recently. He was interred in St John’s grave, in Rednal, on the outskirts of Birmingham. “I wish with all my heart,” Newman had written, “to be buried in Father Ambrose St John’s grave – and I give this as my last, my imperative will.” There is no evidence of an active homosexual relationship, but Newman and St John ignored the clerical ban on “particular friendships.” They were like a married couple in all but the marital bed. They would lie together in death, but they would not be left in peace.


. . . [W]hy had Benedict, a rigid conservative, seen fit to hasten the beatification of a man who has an iconic stature for liberal Catholic intellectuals throughout the English-speaking world? All becomes clear with Benedict’s revision of John Henry Newman’s legacy. Pope Benedict and Catholic officialdom are presenting Newman as an exemplar of unquestioning papal allegiance. The Cardinal has been pontifically hijacked. . . . Even Newman’s image of the “kindly light”, penned when he was still a young Protestant, is cited to mean not the light of Christ, but the light of papal magisterium. It tells us much about the anxieties of Benedict as he heads for Britain.

. .. Newman had a jaundiced view of the papacy, especially an aging one. “It is anomaly,” he wrote, “and bears no good fruit. He [the Pope] becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it.”

Newman described the papacy of his day, Pius IX’s, as a “climax of tyranny”. He even accused him of heresy, for “narrowing the lines of communion, trembling at freedom of thought, and using the language of dismay and despair at the prospect before us”. Benedict believes the Church should rid itself of the naysayers and critics. He also denies that the Church should change, whereas Newman wrote: “Here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” Their differences abound. Benedict downgrades the laity, while Newman believed the laity should participate fully in the running of the Church: “The Church would look foolish without them,” he once quipped to a skeptical bishop. Benedict jealously protects the pyramidal structure of the Church, with the Pope and the Vatican at the apex. “The Holy See,” Newman lamented, “was once the court of ultimate appeal” and not the “extreme centralisation which now is in use.”

The most dramatic difference between Newman and Benedict involves the role of conscience in the life of a Catholic. What should a Catholic do when individual conscience and papal teaching are at variance? Newman wrote that conscience must always be the final arbiter. If he were to make an after-dinner toast, he wrote, “I shall drink … to conscience first and to the Pope afterwards.” A person who fails to follow conscience, he wrote, “loses his soul”. For Benedict, however, allowing conscience to be the final arbiter of moral behaviour is to invite moral relativism.

Benedict has decided that Newman meant the opposite to what he wrote. Papal authority, says Benedict, is not in opposition to conscience “but based on it and guaranteeing it”. In other words, the voice of conscience for a Catholic is the voice of God; and, in truth, the voice of the Pope is the voice of God, since he is God’s representative on earth.

For Ratzinger, and for conservative Catholics, the teachings of Newman are as problematic as the reforms of the Council which he helped inspire; neither can be ignored or undone. Both require reinterpretation. The conservative view claims that nothing of any consequence was changed at the Council: it is back to business as usual. In the case of Newman, the conservative view claims him for its own by selective out-of-quotation context: unfortunately, the dialectical nature of his writings – his “saying and unsaying”, as he called it – make him vulnerable to such reactionary revisions.

The nub of the Catholic crisis, according to Ratzinger, is that Catholics have been following their private judgment rather than allowing themselves to be guided by papal teaching. Newman was opposed to such an all-embracing view of papal infallibility. He agreed that conscience needed guidance, but that papal teaching itself required the authorisation of the entire faithful before it could be said to be authentic Christian doctrine. Progressive Catholics argue that papal teaching against contraception, published in 1968, has still not been endorsed 40 years later.

. . . In 1864, irritated by distorted versions of his life, Newman published his famous autobiography. He wanted to explain himself, so that “the phantom may be extinguished which gibbers instead of me”. The real Newman, of course, is to be found throughout his published work and letters. But will his beatification reveal his dynamic and inspiring approach to the Christian faith? Or will it portray a conservative travesty? Newman, by his own frequent admission, warned that he was no saint. Perhaps his reluctance stemmed from commendable modesty. More likely, he had foreseen that beatification would mean the conjuring up, yet again, of a gibbering phantom instead of the reality of his life, his beliefs and his teachings.


To read Cornwell’s article in its entirety, click here.


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
“Something Very Newmanesque”
Poor John
Answer to a Troubled Liberal Catholic

Recommended Off-site Links:
Heart Speaks to Heart: Cardinal Newman in the 21st Century – Juan R. Vélez (Mercatornet.com, September 9, 2010).
There's Nothing Weird About Being Catholic and Liberal – Matthew Bell (The Independent, September 12, 2010).
Newmania 17: Conscience and Its Counterfeit – Joseph A. Komonchak (Commonweal, September 13, 2010).
Standing Newman on His Head – William D. Lindsey (Bilgrimage, September 25, 2009).
And More Synchronicity: Newman Again – Misappropriating and Misrepresenting the Facts – William D. Lindsey (Bilgrimage, September 26, 2009).
Another English Saint for All Seasons – Colleen Kochivar-Baker (Enlightened Catholicism, May 8, 2009).
Keep It Secret – Karen Doherty (Nihil Obstat, September 15, 2009).

Ascertaining the Common Good

My friend and fellow Progressive Catholic Voice editorial team member Paula Ruddy has a great article over at the PCV site that examines the recent efforts of Archbishop Nienstedt of Minnesota and Bishop McCormack of New Hampshire to push for legal protection for people whose jobs require them to provide services to people whose ethics they disagree with.

It’s a very timely and important article - one that’s reprinted in its entirety below. However, if you would like to comment on it, I ask that you do so here, at the Progressive Catholic Voice.

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Two Catholic Bishops, Conscience,
and the Common Good

By Paula Ruddy
Progressive Catholic Voice
June 14, 2009

Two U.S. Catholic bishops have recently expressed urgent concern for freedom of conscience in the public sphere. They are arguing for legal protection for people whose jobs require them to provide service to people whose ethics they disagree with. The services in question are medical services for those who choose to have abortions or sterilizations and the services connected with civil marriage to same-gender couples. Are the bishops right? Should people employed to serve the public be protected by law in refusing to provide services to those they disagree with?

Examples from outside the emotionally charged areas of abortion and same-sex civil marriage may make the question clearer. Recently in local news, Muslim cab drivers were refusing to transport airport fares carrying duty-free alcohol or any passenger accompanied by a dog. The cab drivers’ refusal was based on religious beliefs and ethics. As it turned out, they were not given legal protection; they were threatened with suspension of their licenses. When another religious tradition’s ethics were the subject of conflict, did the Catholic bishops argue that the law should protect the cab drivers’ right to refuse service?


Archbishop Nienstedt on Abortion Services

Archbishop, John C. Nienstedt, in his April 2 column in the Catholic Spirit says he intended to reflect on the Easter triduum, but because of “a grave threat to our country’s well-being through the infringement of our right to exercise a freedom of conscience,” he was compelled to talk about a Health and Human Services (HHS) rule instead. In doing so, he uses phrases such as: government coming “between an individual citizen and God;” “first step in moving our nation from democracy to despotism,” “slippery slope to moral chaos.”

The intemperate language is aimed at the Obama administration and a move it made to hold hearings on a Health and Human Services agency rule dealing with the right to refuse abortion and sterilization procedures. What the Archbishop did not explain is that the HHS rule he is defending as crucial to our freedoms has been in effect only since January 20, 2009, and has nothing to do with forcing Catholics to assist in abortion or sterilization procedures.

The HHS rule in question was promulgated in the last days of the Bush administration and took effect in January 2009. It was intended to implement a law that has been in effect since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. That law, 42 USC Section 300 a-7, provides that health care entities receiving federal funds may not discriminate against either providers of abortion services or those who refuse to provide abortion services on the basis of “religious belief or moral conviction.” Catholic health care facilities are not forced to provide abortions or sterilizations. Catholic physicians are not forced to provide those services. Revising or rescinding the 2009 HHS rule would not repeal the 1973 law, so it is hard to see this as “a grave threat to our country’s well-being” or a move from “democracy to despotism.”

I do not know the results of the hearings or how his administration intends to re-write the rule, but President Obama, in his address at Notre Dame on May 17, 2009, made this conciliatory appeal:

Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equality of women.

This does not look like a step down “the slippery slope to moral chaos.” Is the Archbishop’s vehement language an effort to protect individual conscience or is it an effort to frighten people in order to criminalize abortion?

There may be political reasons to do so, but what is the logic of providing ”conscience clauses” for health care providers? Aren’t health care workers employed in a public facility providing abortion and sterilization procedures in the same position as the Muslim cab drivers? There are eleven abortion providers in the state of Minnesota, according to the Guttmacher Institute’s website. Why work for one if you are conscientiously opposed to providing abortion services? We would like to hear from anyone who has experienced problems of conscience in providing health care.


Bishop McCormack on Same-Sex Marriage

Another U.S. bishop’s concern is service providers’ freedom of conscience in same-sex civil marriages. Bishop John B. McCormack of Manchester urged the New Hampshire Governor to veto a same-sex marriage bill then making its way through the legislative process. He is quoted in the Manchester Union Leader of June 6, giving these reasons for his position:

When a change of this momentous scope is proposed and there is not adequate time to not only look at all the implications of it, but also not to hear in depth from the people whom it will affect, then there are going to be serious problems. Short of preserving marriage as the union of one man and one woman, there must be adequate protections for churches, but also for individuals who have a genuine conscientious objection to participating in or assisting ceremonies of same sex couples.

We urge Governor Lynch to veto this legislation, if for no other reason than it leaves too many unanswered questions regarding protections for religious organizations and persons of conscience.

The bill has since been signed by Governor Lynch making same-sex marriage legal in New Hampshire.

Imagining a situation Bishop McCormack may be talking about, let’s say a county clerk has a religious conviction that same-gender sex is sinful. In handling the marriage application of two men or working for the marrying judge, he is “assisting ceremonies of same sex couples.” If he can’t rationalize his duty as a public employee in serving people who are legally requesting a service of him, then he will have a problem of conscience. I’d say he is in the same position as the Muslim cab driver. He must either reason his way to providing the service or find a job in which he can avoid contact with people he considers sinners. He is in the same position as a person who in the past was conscientiously opposed to serving blacks, Irish, Jews, foreigners, women, or any other marginalized group. There is no reason to legally protect him in refusing to fulfill the duties of his employment.


A Mix-Up of Moral Questions

These two Catholic leaders appealing for “the right to freedom of conscience” in relation to public law set me to thinking about what that right is and how it affects the common good. I think the bishops have mixed up two very different moral situations.

One situation is about being coerced by law against one’s conscience. But neither the federal law restricting the states from criminalizing abortion nor the state laws allowing same-sex marriage force anyone to have an abortion or to marry a same-gender person. Both laws allow a freedom; neither coerces a person to some act in violation of conscience. Each woman is free, with restrictions in the second and third trimesters, to terminate a pregnancy according to her own conscience; and each man or woman is free, with some restrictions, to marry whomever he or she chooses in conscience to marry. If a law required a woman to have amniocentesis and abort a fetus with health problems, for example, civil disobedience would be in order and the bishops would be right to campaign against it.

In the other situation a person must choose what employment conditions are consistent with his or her ethical code. No one is forced by law to work in a job that violates his or her conscience. Though some people have the luxury of avoiding repugnant conditions, the necessity of making a living can make a person quite tolerant of sinners around him. If a person believes his own moral rectitude is threatened by the choices of the people it is his duty to serve, he has the freedom to quit the job. This is the moral situation both bishops describe. In a pluralistic society with multiple ethical codes, is it reasonable to expect the law to protect each person’s right to refuse to serve people whose ethics they disagree with? I don’t think so.

The bishops erroneously speak as if the moral obligation in the second situation were the same as in the first. This might be a good question to test the bishops’ position: if the state criminalized abortion or homosexual sex, would prosecutors who did not believe in the justice of criminal penalties for either of those acts have the right to refuse to prosecute under a “conscience clause” provided for them? Would the bishops advocate for that conscience clause? Probably not. What they advocate is not about freedom of conscience at all. It is about coercing others to live by a Catholic ethical code

I do not doubt that both bishops sincerely think that their ethical view is the objectively “right” one and that the nation’s adopting their view would be for the common good.


The Common Good

This is the crucial question: who is to say what is for the common good? There are myriads of goods (values) and individuals have different priorities of goods. Since the conception of a good life and how people should relate to one another is deeply ingrained in a culture, each cultural group knows what is good for them. In pooling our views, we the people, all voices heard, decide what is for the common good in creating laws for ourselves. It’s a very messy process, one that often fails to include all voices. Nonetheless it is the ideal. No one group can decide what is good for the whole nation. Cooperation within the system of laws that we ourselves have made is the closest we can come to delivering the common good.

Whether the laws are just is always open to question. Time, public debate among citizens, and evolution in ethical thinking will tell how durable they are.

And what of the ethics of citizenship in a pluralistic nation? I think good citizenship calls for recognizing ourselves and our own ethical community as one of many individuals and communities, all with a stake in determining the common good. It calls for respect for the others’ freedom of conscience, a reluctance to force laws on people. It calls for recognition of ethical ambiguity and compassion for the way others view their choices. It calls for reasonableness and the careful use of language in public discourse All in all, a serious task for all of us.

Paula Ruddy


NOTE: To comment on this article (or to read comments on it), please click here to where it is posted on the website of the Progressive Catholic Voice. Thanks.


See also the related Wild Reed posts:
Reflections on the Primacy of Conscience
The Question of an “Informed” Catholic Conscience
A Catholic’s Prayer for His Fellow Pilgrim, Benedict XVI
A Catholic Understanding of Faithful Dissent (Part 1)
A Catholic Understanding of Faithful Dissent (Part 2)
A Church That Can and Cannot Change

Charles Curran: Loyal Dissenter

I recently came across a review by historian Christine Roussel of Fr. Charles Curran’s latest book, Loyal Dissent: Memoir of a Catholic Theologian.



Here’s a brief excerpt from Roussel’s review:

For Curran, dissent is an honourable service to the Church. Loyal dissent is intended to be helpful and constructive to a Church always in need of correction and reform. . . . Curran recognizes that the search for truth will be lifelong, just as the Church’s pilgrimage toward complete understanding of the truth is eternal. He is a pilgrim, serving a pilgrim Church.

I look forward to reading Curran’s book. To read Roussel’s review in its entirety, click here.


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Authentic Catholicism: The Antidote to Clericalism
Who Gets to Be Called “Catholic” - and Why?
Comprehending the “Fullness of Truth”
Casanova-inspired Reflections on Papal Power at 30,000 Ft.
Beyond a PC Pope
Reflections on the Primacy of Conscience
The Question of an “Informed” Catholic Conscience
When “Guidelines” Lack Guidance

The Question of an “Informed” Catholic Conscience

The National Coalition of American Nuns (NCAN) recently issued an “open letter to Catholic voters”, which provides an alternative to the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s voter education efforts throughout the U.S.

Writing in the Denver Post, Eric Gorski notes that the letter urges Catholic voters “to challenge church teachings against abortion and gay marriage while weighing a broad range of social issues on Election Day.”

“Opposing war and treating immigrants with compassion are included in a list of seven issues outlined by the group”, writes Gorski. “The letter also states, ‘We encourage respect for the moral adulthood of women and will choose legislators who will recognize the right of women to make reproductive decisions and receive medical treatment according to the rights of privacy and conscience.’ [Sister Mary Ann Cunningham of Denver, an NCAN board member] said many Catholics disagree with the church’s opposition to legalized abortion for ‘compassionate, faithful reason’. [. . .] The nuns’ letter also says citizens ‘in committed relationships – whether marriages or civil unions’ – should have adoption, inheritance and other rights.”

According to Gorski, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver has urged Catholics to “act Catholic” when they vote or run for office and called opposition to abortion and gay marriage “foundational.”

The archbishop’s comments remind me of the Voter’s Guide for Serious Catholics published by Catholic Answers, an “evangelical Catholic” publishing house, in the lead-up to the 2004 U.S. elections. This “guide” lists a number of “non-negotiable issues” – including abortion, fetal stem cell research, and same-sex marriage – that Catholics must “never support through their votes.” The “guide” also attempts to discuss the role of conscience and erroneously concludes that “a well-formed conscience will never contradict Catholic moral teaching.”

In response to such a contention, the Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities (CPCSM), as part of the Twin Cities-based Inclusive Catholics network, organized and hosted in 2004 a three-part series, “In Good Conscience,” which explored the Catholic understanding of conscience, its formation, and its connection to both personal morality and social justice.


Informing the Catholic conscience

“It is the responsibility of a Catholic to vote their conscience, but [it must be] their rightly formed conscience, their educated conscience,” declares Jeanette DeMelo, spokeswoman for Archbishop Chaput of Denver, in response to the NCAN's open letter.

I actually agree with this statement. Our moral choices should be the result of an informed or “educated” conscience.

Yet some within the church insist that it is only the “official” church which can properly “educate” and “inform” the Catholic conscience.

Such Catholics are adamant that one knows if one’s conscience is rightly formed if it conforms with what the Magisterium, the official teaching office of the church, says about various moral matters.

Yet if this was really the case, why have a conscience? What’s the point of it when we have the Magisterium?

Also, if we relinquish our personal conscience in favor of the Magisterium , what do we do with statements like the following:

Above the pope as an expression of the binding claim of church authority, stands one’s own conscience, which has to be obeyed first of all, if need be against the demands of church authority.

Such a statement explicitly differentiates between one’s “own conscience” and “church authority.” Yet is this statement simply the ramblings of a dissident theologian, a “militant secularist” in Catholic disguise?

Actually, no, it’s not.

They are, in fact, the words of Fr. Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), and he is talking about the Catholic teaching on the primacy of conscience. The pope’s explanation is excepted from a commentary on “Gaudium et Spes” (“The Church in the Modern World”) published in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II (Vorgrimler, Herbert (Ed.), Burns and Oats, 1969, p. 134.)

So, one can, in good conscience, dissent from the church’s official moral teaching. But, of course, one can only do so as a result of an “informed” conscience. Which brings us back to the crucial question: How does one go about properly informing one’s conscience?

Believe it or not, I think we should allow the church to inform our consciences, but I don’t limit “the church” to the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. In it’s broadest and, I believe, most catholic sense, the church is the entire people of God; the whole Body of Christ, in other words.

For instance, in forming my conscience on how I am to live I am compelled to be open to the experiences and insights of the entire people of God, not just the teachings of the Magisterium. These experiences and insights are just as important as the doctrines of the church when it comes to informing my conscience. The tragedy is that the Magisterium itself, as the teaching office of the church, should be similarly engaged in such a universal, i.e. catholic, process of discernment.


A growing gap

Unfortunately, the official church is not engaged in such a catholic endeavor. The church as people of God, however, most certainly is. Hence the growing gap between Catholic teaching and Catholic practice; the hierarchy and the laity.

Why has the hierarchical church retreated from such compassionate engagement and discernment with the wider church, the Body of Christ, when it comes to matters of human sexuality?

There are a number of reasons for this. One is to do with the fact that the majority of Western church leadeship bodies (including the Vatican and its various departments and offices) maintain a view of God that emphasizes the transcendent at the expense of the immanent reality of the sacred. Their ecclesiastical structures, methods of defining and maintaining authority, and their emphasis on a “high” Christology, all reflect this overt emphasis on transcendence. If a more balanced, and thus more authentic approach is to be embraced, all such structures and methods must be transformed by taking into consideration the theological and pastoral concerns, experiences, and insights of contemporay Christians.

Another reason for the hierarchical church’s failure to develop a sexual theology aligned with the Spirit of God present in the lives and relationships of the people of God, was articulated by Dr. Simon Rosser in 2004 when I interviewed him for CPCSM’s Rainbow Spirit journal.

Rosser is an internationally renowned researcher on sexuality and sexual health, and a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist. On the issue of the church’s current sexual theology, Rosser, himself a Catholic gay man, observed that, “The theology of human sexuality that the church is teaching is seriously disturbed. [. . .] Part of the problem is that as the scientific world advanced, the church first didn’t keep pace with change, and then became a refuge for those frightened of change, including the psychosexually underdeveloped. I don’t think it’s fair to expect the church to be ahead of science, but when it lags so far behind, it loses credibility and starts becoming extremist.”

Rosser also made the interesting point that from his observations and experience, “fundamentalists of various varieties – Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, and Christian – appear to percieve science and medicine as a threat, and seem to confuse their particular brand of God’s Revelation with ultra-conservatism. They all interpret their special brand of ‘truth’ to condemn homosexuality. Curiously, all of them are simultaneously displaying the scandals you get when ultra-orthodoxy runs amok – scandals of power, pedophilia, and abuse.”

It seems rather hopeless, but folks like Simon Rosser and others do provide roadmaps to a more healthy and hopeful theology on human sexuality.

“I think the first step,” says Rosser, “is for the scientists and the bishops to sit down at the same table and talk. [. . .] Signs of real reform, as opposed to cosmetic cover-up, include reform of the Vatican level – holding the [Vatican’s] Congregation of the Faith responsible for overseeing both the sexual abuse by clergy and the promotion of pedophilic theology, ‘mainstreaming’of Catholicism from ultra-conservative positions to more moderate ones, and the establishment of genuine dialogue between scientists and bishops on this issue.

“I have a lot of hope because I think the situation is so bad that American Catholics will be forced to think for themselves. And that’s a good thing. Whether it’s homosexuality, contraception, premarital sex, divorce, masturbation, or HIV prevention, the official church position is now so extreme, so negative, so ultra-conservative, and so ill-informed, that I’m confident that less than five percent of Catholics actually believe or follow Catholic sexual teaching”.

“In this situation, either the church reforms, or it dies”, insists Rosser. “Given the ability of the Catholic Church to survive, I’m confident it will reform.”


A hopeful and prophetic movement

And I too am confident – especially when we have such prophetic and courageous Catholic groups such as the National Coalition of American Nuns, CPCSM, Catholic Rainbow Parents, DignityUSA, New Ways Ministries, and Fortunate Families, all of which are open to having their views and their consciences informed by prayer, dialogue, and an openness to the presence of God throughout the entire church – an entirety which includes the church’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender members.

It’s appropriate that the laity (which in Catholicism includes nuns and brothers) is at the forefront of this hopeful and prophetic movement. As Catholic theologian Joan Timmerman notes in her book, The Mardi Gras Syndrome: Rethinking Christian Sexuality: “Fortunately [within our male-dominated church, there are] women and sympathetic men [. . .] searching the Scriptures and the tradition to ask questions about sexuality that go far beyond the issues of marital intercourse and unborn life to the issues of human development. The mandate for this basic research and recasting comes directly from the church through the words of Pope Paul VI: ‘It belongs to the laity, without waiting passively for orders and directives, to take the initiative freely and to infuse a Christian spirit into the mentality, customs, laws, and structures of the community in which they live.’”

Members of the laity, says Timmerman, “call for communal structures that provide for development of their active side as well as their receptive side [. . .] as persons whole in themselves. Recognizing the Gospel promise of redemption as wholeness, men and women can do something effective about the contradictory and irrelevant proposals that the church still offers as ethical solutions” to problems of life, sexuality, and marriage.

The National Catholic Coalition of American Nuns’ open letter to Catholic voters is but one example of “persons whole within themselves” embarking on a faith-filled and informed endeavor to counter the official church’s “contradictory and irrelevant proposals” on issues of human sexuality.

That such endeavors continually surface from the informed consciences of Catholics and, as a result, bring hope and empowerment to individuals, couples, families, and groups within the church (despite the efforts of ultra-conservatives to dismiss and malign them) gives me hope that the church is indeed a living body of faithful seekers. And one which continues to be guided by the Spirit in its pilgrim journey of renewal and reform.


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Reflections on the Primacy of Conscience
“Catholic Teaching on Homosexuality is Complex and Nuanced” Says Theologian

Recommended Off-Site Links:
Understanding Conscience: Making the Right Choice by Richard Benson, C.M.
Bishop Misses Mark in Assault on Understanding Conscience by Max Charlesworth.

Reflections on the Primacy of Conscience

Last Sunday’s Pentecost Mass in St. Paul, Minnesota, was not the first time that Catholics have been denied communion because they were wearing, in good conscience, a Rainbow Sash – a symbol that says that the wearer is (or knows and/or supports someone who is) accepting of their homosexuality. In fact, the first instance of this denial occurred in Australia in 1998.


Who Is Worthy?

In the late Fr. Ted Kennedy’s 2000 book, Who Is Worthy? The Role of Conscience in Restoring Hope to the Church, David McKenna, president of the Australian Rainbow Sash Movement, contributed a brief “perspective” in which he wrote:

“On Pentecost Sunday in 1998 and 1999, gay and lesbian Catholics and their friends, families and supporters, wearing rainbow sashes, presented themselves for Communion to Archbishop George Pell at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne. The proclamation of their purpose was set out in their ‘Letter to the Church’: In wearing the ‘rainbow sash’ we proclaim that we are gay and lesbian people who embrace and celebrate our sexuality as a sacred gift. In wearing it we call on the Church to honour the experience and wisdom of lesbian and gay people; to enter into open dialogue with us; and to work with us for justice and understanding. Let us seek a new appreciation of human sexuality in all of its diversity and beauty.” (1)

At both Pentecost Masses, “Dr. Pell refused the Eucharist to all those wearing the sash,” writes McKenna. “On the first occasion, he delivered a statement from the altar, notable for its harsh tone and lack of pastoral dimension. On the second occasion, Dr. Pell announced to an astonished media group that homosexuality was a greater health hazard than smoking. He also suggested that discouraging homosexuality amongst the young might reduce the number of youth suicides.” (2)

McKenna also offers his views on the current state of the wider Church in relation to the issue of homosexuality, noting that there is “an extraordinary level of fear amongst Catholics, especially those employed by or closely associated with the Church, about offering any public support for the Rainbow Sash Movement or, indeed, the cause of gay and lesbian people generally. It also shows just how constricted and apprehensive these people are. Given the claims made by the Catholic Church about itself, this is a scandal.” (3)

David McKenna concludes his contribution to Ted Kennedy’s book by observing that “the Catholic Church is in a highly authoritarian and repressive phase. Its restoration to what it should be – a genuinely open, growing and tolerant community – depends on honest discourse and critical but constructive comment.” (4)

Such qualities are reflected in Fr. Ted’s prophetic book, Who Is Worthy? The Role of Conscience in Restoring Hope to the Church. Fueled by the author’s outrage at the Australian Catholic hierarchy’s treatment of both the aboriginal and the gay communities, much of Who Is Worthy? is devoted to taking to task Archbishop (now Cardinal) George Pell’s controversial stance on the Catholic teaching of the primacy of conscience.


The Meaning of Conscience

The Latin word for conscience is conscientia, “knowing with, knowing within oneself” (Gk, syneidēsis). Theologian Christine Firer Hinze notes that within Christian tradition, conscience “denotes a multi-dimensional, uniquely human capacity for perceiving, judging, and deciding in relation to moral value. (5) Hinze also observes that “in Jewish scriptures the equivalent term (translated into Greek) is kardia, “heart.” In the New Testament, syneidēsis is used frequently by Paul, the Greek philosophical term synthesized with the Jewish idea of kardia to forge a distinctive Christian moral concept.” (6)

“Christian ethicists,” writes Hinze, “understand conscience in three senses: 1) most fundamentally, as an aspect of personhood experienced as an interior “law . . . written on [the] heart” (Rom. 2:15), a personal dynamism and response toward moral value; 2) as the process of analysis and deliberation concerning the right, or good, in particular cases, requiring honest, receptive dialogue with sources of moral wisdom (scripture, religious traditions, other funds of descriptive and normative insight); 3) as the event of moral judgment and decision in the concrete.”

In this third sense, notes Hinze, “conscience has been considered an absolute subjective guide: one must always follow it, and external authorities may not force a person to violate it.” (7)


The Primacy of Conscience: A Dangerous and Misleading Myth?

According to George Pell, however, “the doctrine of the primacy of conscience should be quietly ditched . . . because too many Catholic youngsters have concluded that values are personal inventions.” (8) Furthermore, the primacy of conscience is “a dangerous and misleading myth.” In fact, according to Pell, “in the Catholic scheme of things, there’s no such thing as primacy of conscience.” (9)

One can only wonder if Dr. Pell is familiar with how Fr. Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) expressed the Church’s understanding of the primacy of conscience – an understanding which he eloquently expressed while serving as Chair of Dogmatic Theology at the University of Tübingen in 1968.

“Above the pope as an expression of the binding claim of church authority,” writes Ratzinger, “stands one’s own conscience, which has to be obeyed first of all, if need be against the demands of church authority.” (10)

I’ve never met George Pell, but have seen him interviewed on various Australian television news and current affairs programs. The little I have seen and heard has nevertheless ensured that I concur with Ted Kennedy’s observation that “the thinking of [Cardinal] Pell is undoubtedly marked by the intransigence of Ultramontanism, which historian Eamon Duffy describes as a ‘form of absolutism revelling in what Cardinal Manning called “the beauty of inflexibility”.’ Denial of the primacy of conscience, which has become a permanent fixture in the ecclesiastical wardrobe of [Pell’s] mind, is . . . it seems, a cloak that hides insecurity and fear of loss.” (11)


“Up, Let Us Go Forward!”

In my work with the Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities (CPCSM), I’ve often been challenged by people uncomfortable and threatened by CPCSM’s mission of creating environments of respect, acceptance, and safety for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersexual (GLBTI) persons and their families. Some critics are quick to share their view that an informed conscience can never contradict church teaching. What they’re advocating, of course, is what is known theologically as the “seated conscience” of “seated persons”.

Yet as one of Catholicism’s most respected moral theologians, Bernard Häring, CSsR, has noted: “Christ bids us rest but does not require us to become seated persons, i.e. those men and women who are forever tired, devoid of ideals and inspiration, who are unable to enlist the power of the Spirit to encourage others.” (12)

Häring goes on to observe that: “The seated person is the one who is incapable of internalizing Jesus’ invitation, ‘Up, let us go forward’. Most especially if going forward implies the risk of potential suffering, change and temporary insecurity. The seated person is static and self-satisfied, ever confident to celebrate past triumphs and achievements while ever avoiding the courageous responsibility that risk-taking involves. In a word, the seated person is cowardly.” (13)

“Ordinarily,” says Häring, “the self-satisfied are fundamentalist in their thinking, eschewing new and creative formulations of doctrine while ever clinging to the norms and imperatives of the past. They are hard-and-fast traditionalists, and, if gifted with energies, they use them strenuously to promote the restorations of a past order. Seated persons are those perched on self-made thrones, unwilling to move forward with the times because such a move would mean renouncing the glamour and privilege of clericalism in all its forms at every level.” (14)


Creative Conscience

In Who Is Worthy? The Role of Conscience in Restoring Hope to the Church, Ted Kennedy recalls how in 1989 the 77-year-old Häring wrote an article appealing for a “recognition of ‘consensus seeking’ which rests on the mystery of love and life, which is written in the heart and echoes in the core of conscience.” (15) In the same article, Häring, notes Kennedy, “appealed for a recognition of the concept of ‘creative conscience’ . . . that exists for all who have understood what Paul said in the Baptismal lesson: ‘You are not subjects of a rule of law, but rather are of grace’(Romans 6:14).” (16)

Kennedy goes on to describe an understanding of human conscience in light of this grace: “Creative conscience,” he writes, involves the discovery of an authentic, open ecumenical base which gathers in the consciences of many who have grown through struggle to embrace the non-violence of the Beatitudes, including the best representatives of Protestantism, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam. Such people are Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Nugget Coombs, Simon Weil (none of them Catholic) and so many Aborigines who hold depths of Aboriginal spirituality. Each of these has been able to provide a releasing of spiritual insight, which the Church so sorely needs. And of course, such a reservoir can hold the voice of women unconstricted by the multi-shaped forms of gender bias with which the Church is loaded.” (17)

“Father Häring,” continues Kennedy, “tried patiently to explain to his bureaucratic, clerical detractors that his notion of creative conscience . . . is not the entering into an academic dispute over fine points of methodology in ethics, but rather has to do with basic attitudes towards the world and the very meaning of human life. Such a comprehensive notion of creative conscience has the enormous advantage of relying on the initiative and insights of both men and women, regardless of gender, denomination or non-denomination.” (18)

Creative conscience also has the “advantage of relying on the initiative and insights of both men and women” regardless of their sexual orientation. Such initiative and insights can be discerned through the words and actions of a range of Catholic organizations and individuals working to reveal the presence of God in the lives and relationships of GLBTI people.


The Hallmark of Our Living Faith

In light of this discussion on the primacy of conscience, what can we say is the hallmark of our living faith as Catholic Christians?

Is it unquestioning obedience to the Pope and the Magisterium? Is it openness to God present solely in the Church as Institution?

Or is it a trusting openness and response to the presence and action of God within the Church as People of God and thus the vast and diverse arena of human life and relationships?

Which of these “hallmarks” is most catholic, most universal?

One of the goals of CPCSM is to build and celebrate an understanding of Church that is open and responsive to the presence and action of God in the lives and relationships of all.

We see this as a profoundly catholic endeavor. We work toward recognizing and celebrating a catholicity of life, by which is meant the discovery and celebration of God as creator and lover of all humanity, a God who desires all people to experience both personal and communal flourishing.

Other Catholic organizations share similar aims in relation to ministering with and for GLBTI persons and their families, and educating the wider Church and society about their unique gifts and challenges. Such organizations include the National Association of Catholic Diocesan Lesbian and Gay Ministries, Dignity, Catholic Rainbow Parents, Fortunate Families, numerous parish-based ministries, and, of course, both the Rainbow Sash Movement and the Rainbow Sash Alliance USA.


1-4. McKenna, D., in Kennedy, T. Who Is Worthy? The Role of Conscience in Restoring Hope to the Church (Pluto Press, Annandale, 2000), pp.23-26.
5-7. Hinze, Christine Firer, in Russell, L.M. & Clarkson, J.S. Dictionary of Feminist Theologies (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, 1994), p. 54.
8. Pell, George. Seminar on the Sociology of Culture, La Trobe University, May 12, 1988.
9. Pell, George. The Bulletin, April 27, 1999, p.29.
10. From a commentary on Gaudium et Spes (“The Church in the Modern World”) in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, Vorgrimler, Herbert (Ed.), Burns and Oats, 1969, p. 134.
11. Haring, Bernard. Priesthood Imperilled (Triumph Books, Missouri, 1995), p.56.
12-15. Haring, Bernard. “Building a Creative Conscience: Resisting Moral Rigor Mortis”, Commonweal, August 11, 1989.
16-18. Kennedy, T. Who Is Worthy? The Role of Conscience in Restoring Hope to the Church (Pluto Press, Annandale, 2000), pp. 84-85.


See also the related Wild Reed posts:
The Question of an “Informed” Catholic Conscience
Celebrating Our Sanctifying Truth
“Receive What You Are, the Body of Christ”
My Rainbow Sash Experience
“Take, All of You, And Eat” – Communion and the Rainbow Sash (Part I)
“Take, All of You, And Eat” – Communion and the Rainbow Sash (Part II)
“Take, All of You, And Eat” – Communion and the Rainbow Sash (Part III)
A Catholic’s Prayer for His Fellow Pilgrim, Benedict XVI

Recommended Off-Site Links:
Understanding Conscience: Making the Right Choice by Richard Benson, C.M.
Bishop Misses Mark in Assault on Understanding Conscience by Max Charlesworth.
The Primacy of Conscience by Brian Lewis.