Normally, I don't get into discussions about the church hierarchy because, sub specie aeternitatis, the hierarchy doesn't really matter that much. Its role is to keep the lights on and pay the bills, and to provide a minimal sense institutional continuity that humans need to function in groups over time. But whenever the people who compose it try to do more, they almost always overreach, make fools of themselves, and cause unnecessary suffering. This seems to be the case with Rhode Island Bishop Thomas Tobin publicly announcing that he has asked Congressman Patrick Kennedy not to take communion.
We are mistaken if we see these men in the hierarchy as anything more than house management who are not nearly as important as the song and its singers that draw people into the "house" they manage. They have been for a long time deluded into thinking that they have some kind of special spiritual authority. Except for those rare occasions when they meet in council, they just don't. They've been wrong so many times it's borderline ridiculous. And there's nothing wrong with being wrong, so long as you learn from it and don't presume that you actually know more than you do. It's OK to be a hack–most of us are–but you have to recognize that's all you are, and resist the temptation to think you know and understand more than you do. It's in the over-reaching that so much avoidable damage is done.
The managers are company men, not particularly bright or insightful, nor particularly stupid, not particularly holy or good, but not particularly bad, in other words they are mere humans like the the rest of us. The best among these managers recognize a good singer when they find him or her and find ways to step aside and let her song be heard. And every now and then a really talented singer becomes a manager, and people listen, not because of his role in the hierarchy, but because of his song, which touches the heart and changes us, opens us up to new possibility. That's where moral and spiritual authority lie, not in promulgations of infallible truths. But singer/managers are the exception, not the rule.
So people inside and outside the church are mistaken if they think house management has any special spiritual authority. The hierarchy has proved time and again it has no special "charism," to use a churchy word, and that it is almost always on the wrong side of history when it interferes politically. There are exceptions, but for every one there are three or four Richard Tobins, or the hierarchies of France during the Vichy period, who embarrass themselves and bring shame to other Christians who have better sense and a deeper understanding of the gospels.
The bishops as a group are company men–insecure, not very bright, but loyal to a fault. It's as bad now in that regard as it has ever been. I could go on, but it's not really that interesting to me; it's just depressing. Suffice it to say that real spiritual authority comes not from the hierarchy and its institutional prerogatives, but from the witness of the saints through the centuries–the singers (and, yes, some of them were bishops and abbots). That's always been true and always will be.
At some point all this faux medieval nonsense is going to fall away, and my hope is that a mature church will re-emerge, a church with a sacramental sensibility, deeply rooted in the the thinking, wisdom, and judgments of its best men and women through the centuries, and more collegial in its decision making. This absolute monarchy model these hierarchs persist to think gives it some relevance and authority is just plain silly and stupid, but that's the way it is. For now at least–I just don't see how it's sustainable. The scandal of Catholicism is its authoritarian style; the scandal of Protestantism is its tendency toward fission and fragmentation. Real unity is never completely a possibility, because there will always be difference of opinion, but the conditions for its possibility lie in authentic spiritual authority, and there's little of that to be found anywhere these days, and least likely to be found with management.
Now I've made no secret of my loathing of abortion and what I think it says about us as a society. But it's just one of many things that is a symptom of a kind of sickness with which we're all infected–and, alas, it's not the worst symptom. So I have my position on this, which is the principle that the weakest, the most vulnerable, and those without voices must always be given special protections no matter how inconvenient, and that we are barbarians to the extent that we fail to honor this principle.
I believe that some kind of collective obtuseness has infected the collective mind of those that lean to the cultural left, and which has made it impossible for them to hear this kind of critique. And the cultural right makes it easy to dismiss this critique because any argument for abortion restraint is tainted by its association with right-wing fanaticism. So that's where we are, in a place where it's impossible to sanely, thoughtfully converse about what in fact abortion is and what it is doing to us.
But here's my point. The real issue here is not primarily political. Sure, I've argued in the past that there is a legitimate rights dimension to this debate about the human status of the fetus, and insofar as there is, it's is properly a political issue. But at a more fundamental level it's a cultural-values issue because there is no consensus about when human life begins; there are only opinions, some better informed than others. So the real effort here is cultural/philosophical in building a sane values consensus around this deeply vexing issue. And that consensus has to be open to the possibility that people with a moral sensibility shaped by their Christian understanding of the human being, as with the abolition of slavery, are often, (not always) a minority which has it right.
But this is my typically long-winded way of getting around to what I wanted originally to write about: A bishop who denies the sacraments to a politician because he doesn't tow the line on this issue is stupid and offensive to Americans who have a long tradition of fearing the Catholic Church precisely because of their expectation of this kind of meddling. It's another example of people in the hierarchy using a power they might technically possess, but which, because it is rooted in rigid ideology rather than real spiritual authority, undermines further whatever might be left of the American Catholic Church's moral authority. This hierarchy already has little or no credibility except among the most docile and ill-informed; this kind of thing certainly does not help their cause.
Tobin has become a poster boy for all anti-Catholics to point to and say, "I told you so." It affirms everything any anti-Catholic has ever thought about the influence of the Church in American politics. Perhaps some of that vaunted Vatican shrewd political realism still remains, and if it does, it will intervene to tell Tobin to stay out of American politics. It would be reassuring if we could think of him as a loose cannon, but we know that's not true.
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