Why are the US Catholic Bishops running headlong into the arms of the world’s most radical right wing evangelicals?
According to an NPR report this morning, 98% of Catholic women use some form of officially proscribed birth control. An informal survey outside a Catholic parish confirmed that not one person could be found who supports the Conference of Catholic Bishop’s position on birth control. So to whom is the Conference appealing?
You won’t have to go far to find out. Just walk across the street to the radical right wing conservative evangelical megachurch. That’s where you will find the Catholic Bishops’ true constituents. And, yes, these are the same folks who pass out Chick tracks denouncing His Holiness as anti-Christ and who believe that the Vatican is Satan’s home base on earth. So what gives?
As a practicing Episcopalian, I am the last one to believe that minute-by-minute polling research should ever become the foundation for doctrine and practice within the Church. Nor, however, am I of the opinion that classical pagan Greek or Roman teachings about sexuality should serve as the foundation for Church’s teachings on the same. As every good Episcopalian knows, teaching and practice within the Church should be founded solidly on Scripture, tradition, and reason, so that, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, listening carefully to how the Church believed it was hearing and obeying that Spirit in the past, and attending in particular to the teachings of the Prophets and Apostles, we can, over time, recognize and root out past error and embrace sound doctrine and practice in the present, by God’s grace.
Here the US Conference of Catholic Bishops should stand with the Episcopalians. Instead, seemingly for the sole purpose of defending what all historians recognize as a thoroughly pagan teaching about sexuality, the Catholic Bishops are looting wayward Episcopal priests and running into the open arms of misguided right wing Christians who regularly label His Holiness the living embodiment of the Anti-Christ.
From where I sit, this looks to me as though the tail (or some other less appropriate appendage) is wagging the dog. Time for a little more Reason and Scripture?