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The pope tried to convince couples of the post-pill Western world that birth control is a terrible sin — and by the millions, they ignored his words. Many left the church, but many others stayed to exercise a quiet veto of papal authority, leading to the widespread epithet “cafeteria Catholics,” meaning those who pick and choose the doctrines they will honor.
More recent pontiffs attempted to reassert papal authority in the gentle guise of sainted Pope John Paul II and the sterner aspect of his ally and successor, Benedict XVI. Together, they gradually remade the roster of U.S. bishops in their own conservative image — but to little effect in the pews. The percentage of Americans who identify as Catholic is stagnant at best, and of those, the Pew Research Center has found, only a minority say they look to the pope or the church as the moral authority in their lives.
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Even after the long campaign of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, 3 out of 4 American Catholics in a 2015 Pew survey disagreed with papal teaching on birth control. Roughly 6 in 10 supported married priests and the ordination of women. Add in the ethical and administrative debacle of the church’s worldwide child abuse scandals and you have a hierarchy in serious need of a credibility infusion.
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This is the proper context for understanding the Vatican announcement Monday on behalf of Pope Francis that priests are now free to offer blessings to same-sex couples. The step followed an unusual gathering in Rome to air a wondrous range of modernizing steps to move the church closer to the wisdom of its people and loosen the grip of its all-male bureaucracy.
At 87, the first pontiff from the Americas (Francis is Argentine) seems fired by a sense of urgency to name the problems gnawing away at Catholicism and point a brave finger at the narrow-minded pharisees leading the church into a dead end. He called out the “reactionary” tendencies rampant among U.S. bishops and scolded those conservatives whose moral maps begin at the navel and end at the knees. Obsessive attention to the sex lives of parishioners — their partners, their preferences, their pregnancies — is distorting the true mission of the church, Francis has insisted in recent years.
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“There is a great danger for preachers,” he explained in one interview, “and it is that of condemning only the morality that is — pardon me— ‘below the belt.’ But other sins that are more serious, hatred, envy, pride, vanity, killing another, taking a life … these are rarely mentioned.”
Last month, Francis disciplined two of his harshest American critics, removing Bishop Joseph Strickland from his post as leader of the Tyler, Tex., diocese and stripping Cardinal Raymond Burke of such perks as a Vatican City apartment. So, the hierarchy reacted carefully to the new policy on blessings, choosing to minimize its importance rather than directly attacking its morality.
“The church’s teaching on marriage has not changed,” a spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops declared mildly. A blessing must not be confused with a wedding.
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But the fact that the pope maintained a distinction between priestly blessings and formal marriage rites does not negate how far Francis has moved. This is, after all, the man who in 2016 was still declaring that homosexual partnerships were not “even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.”
Actually, the relationships are highly analogous, Francis has now said. They unite fallible humans who believe that together they can amount to more than as individuals — who have pledged to honor and support one another, to commit to an exercise in patience and forgiveness and joy. They involve whole humans, bodies and souls, and ought not be reduced to mere mechanics of copulation.
Christians — like adherents to many other religions — have continually disagreed over whether religion should properly be a weapon of exclusion or a blanket of inclusion. Francis is inclusive; he would rather discover a person’s virtues than ferret out their vices, appreciating that nearly every one of us is a complex mixture of both.
The path of inclusion has led him to a place where American Catholics stand ready to greet him. Support in the pews for same-sex marriage has grown robustly, like the winds of Pentecost, over the past generation. The spirit of tolerance and the sharing of grace are alive among the people of the church, and regardless of whether they are listening to the pope, at last a pope is listening to them.
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American Catholics, by and large, stopped listening to the pope around 1968. That was the year of “Humanae Vitae,” the encyclical in which Pope Paul VI proved once and for all that popes are as fallible as anyone else.
The pope tried to convince couples of the post-pill Western world that birth control is a terrible sin — and by the millions, they ignored his words. Many left the church, but many others stayed to exercise a quiet veto of papal authority, leading to the widespread epithet “cafeteria Catholics,” meaning those who pick and choose the doctrines they will honor.
More recent pontiffs attempted to reassert papal authority in the gentle guise of sainted Pope John Paul II and the sterner aspect of his ally and successor, Benedict XVI. Together, they gradually remade the roster of U.S. bishops in their own conservative image — but to little effect in the pews. The percentage of Americans who identify as Catholic is stagnant at best, and of those, the Pew Research Center has found, only a minority say they look to the pope or the church as the moral authority in their lives.
Even after the long campaign of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, 3 out of 4 American Catholics in a 2015 Pew survey disagreed with papal teaching on birth control. Roughly 6 in 10 supported married priests and the ordination of women. Add in the ethical and administrative debacle of the church’s worldwide child abuse scandals and you have a hierarchy in serious need of a credibility infusion.
This is the proper context for understanding the Vatican announcement Monday on behalf of Pope Francis that priests are now free to offer blessings to same-sex couples. The step followed an unusual gathering in Rome to air a wondrous range of modernizing steps to move the church closer to the wisdom of its people and loosen the grip of its all-male bureaucracy.
At 87, the first pontiff from the Americas (Francis is Argentine) seems fired by a sense of urgency to name the problems gnawing away at Catholicism and point a brave finger at the narrow-minded pharisees leading the church into a dead end. He called out the “reactionary” tendencies rampant among U.S. bishops and scolded those conservatives whose moral maps begin at the navel and end at the knees. Obsessive attention to the sex lives of parishioners — their partners, their preferences, their pregnancies — is distorting the true mission of the church, Francis has insisted in recent years.
“There is a great danger for preachers,” he explained in one interview, “and it is that of condemning only the morality that is — pardon me— ‘below the belt.’ But other sins that are more serious, hatred, envy, pride, vanity, killing another, taking a life … these are rarely mentioned.”
Last month, Francis disciplined two of his harshest American critics, removing Bishop Joseph Strickland from his post as leader of the Tyler, Tex., diocese and stripping Cardinal Raymond Burke of such perks as a Vatican City apartment. So, the hierarchy reacted carefully to the new policy on blessings, choosing to minimize its importance rather than directly attacking its morality.
“The church’s teaching on marriage has not changed,” a spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops declared mildly. A blessing must not be confused with a wedding.
But the fact that the pope maintained a distinction between priestly blessings and formal marriage rites does not negate how far Francis has moved. This is, after all, the man who in 2016 was still declaring that homosexual partnerships were not “even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.”
Actually, the relationships are highly analogous, Francis has now said. They unite fallible humans who believe that together they can amount to more than as individuals — who have pledged to honor and support one another, to commit to an exercise in patience and forgiveness and joy. They involve whole humans, bodies and souls, and ought not be reduced to mere mechanics of copulation.
Christians — like adherents to many other religions — have continually disagreed over whether religion should properly be a weapon of exclusion or a blanket of inclusion. Francis is inclusive; he would rather discover a person’s virtues than ferret out their vices, appreciating that nearly every one of us is a complex mixture of both.
The path of inclusion has led him to a place where American Catholics stand ready to greet him. Support in the pews for same-sex marriage has grown robustly, like the winds of Pentecost, over the past generation. The spirit of tolerance and the sharing of grace are alive among the people of the church, and regardless of whether they are listening to the pope, at last a pope is listening to them.
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