As Spector (for various and certainly not all laudable reasons) leaves the Republican party, I read this in the LA Times:

In most cases, former Catholics who are now unaffiliated said they were dissatisfied with the church’s teachings on abortion, homosexuality, birth control or treatment of women.

Change can happen from within people!  You don’t have to leave.  Your leaving just makes the crowd that much more difficult for the rest of us.

I’m grateful for the many comments we’ve gotten on this blog.  I’d like to respond to Stef’s concerns about the Catholic caferteria via a brief discussion of the nature of reason:

I agree that moral relativism is a real problem, and that disagreeing with the Church shouldn’t be done casually.  However, I also believe that we are the Church of faith and reason–and I’m honestly not sure the opposition to my position is best articulated by an argument by authority, that is the Pope says it, so it must be true.  If that were the case, then the Popes could have just written three words in their defense: I am right, instead of long and brilliant encycicals (by the way, I have read Theology of the Body, as well as JP2’s Fides et Ratio).

I’m not talking about the difficulty of taking things on faith–like the Real presence or the Resurrection.  You either believe in those or you don’t.  And I believe, because I’ve chosen to.  But other arguments–like those on condoms and homosexuality especially–are rooted in reason, and reason can go right or wrong.  In this case, I think the church has gone wrong.  And as a part of the Church, I want to stay inside and guide it right.  I’m open, obviously, to correction and to being proven wrong, but being told that the Pope disagrees with me so I’m threfore wrong is not really much of an argument.

Read a take here.  Blair compares the Catholic Church to political parties, which is a bit crass, even if it’s probably sociologically accurate. The difference, of course, is that parties, even if they do care about principles, have a bit more at stake in terms of keeping power, while at least the argument about institutional religion is that it cares about truth first, then power.  Now clearly that’s often not true, but it’s at least the hope in a way that such hope can’t exist in politics.  

Anyways, his point on homosexuals is pretty solid.  Thanks to some great comments on a lot of the previous postings about homosexuality, particularly those that call to question whether the ban on gay acts is “natural”.  I think there’s a ton of compelling evidence to question the existence of a “natural” at all barring some pretty mundane things–I think that humans are naturally selfish, afraid of heights, desirous of community in some form, averse to pain, able to recognize patterns and causation, and a few other things.  But there’s a big jump from those to a natural way to have sex, which anthropology makes pretty clear simply does not exist.  If we want to say this is how the West, or even the Catholic Church, has traditionally done something, that’s one thing, but to argue that it’s natural seems a bit off.

Mark said a few more things worth commenting on:

1. Males and females not fitting together is I suppose true from one point of view, except for the women and  men in gay relationships who think they fit just fine, thank you.  Hands don’t fit together either.  Neither do kissing lips.  So hand-holding and kissing: none of that is natural or achieves a purpose.  Yet it’s still okay, right?  Because it’s unitive.  In terms of what humans were “designed” to do, you either have to take in on authority that certain parochial Western practices are what they were designed to do or ignore the vast amount of other practices that seem obvious and normal to other cultures.

2. The woman accepting the sperm of the man is what sex is about?  What about kissing?  What about long, close hugs?  And this doesn’t even get into the many and sundry forms of sodomy that the vast amount of heterosexuals do.  And then, of course, there are the infertile couples, or those on NFP who know they won’t get pregnant on a certain day and that’s why they have sex that day.  Of course, these are all just exceptions to the rule.  I challenge the rule too: except on an argument by authority, why is sex designed for procreation first?  I don’t believe there’s a good reason.

4. Lastly, there is no good sociological evidence that gay couples raise worse kids or raise kids in an inferior way (unless you count thinking gay relationships are okay is inferior, which is fair enough, but then you’d have to ban liberals from having kids too).  I know the field pretty well, and while I’m open to being corrected, I’d be quite surprised.

That’s not, by the way, neccesarily a bad thing.  The Eucharist, for example, is essentially an argument from authority when you boil it all the way down.  There’s an attractive logic to it thanks to Aquinas, but we have to believe that logic works, and we have only the word of tradition’s authority that it does.  So saying homosexuality is wrong–well, it does seem to lack any real empirical referent, and I’ve yet to find anything indicating that gay marriage would actually destroy, well, anything, that is, except heterosexual definitions of marriage.  Again, I’m not sure it’s bad if we recognize that the Church opposes gay marriage based only on faith, but then it seems like an easier thing to change too.  After all, we are the Church of faith and reason.

A smart debate on this from Damon Linker and Rod Dreher.  Below is Linker’s side, but you should read Dreher too (he’s a great writer).  I think, by the way, that Dreher is totally right that much of the left accuses people who don’t like homosexuality of being sick, ironically in just the same way society used to accuse homosexuals:

In the end, I suppose our disagreement boils down to what Rod says in the last sentence of the paragraph I quoted above: The legitimization of homosexuality, for Rod, “would be a profound distortion of what it means to be fully human,” whereas for me nothing nearly so profound is at stake. All I know is that a few of my fellow citizens love, and feel sexual attraction to, members of the same sex. And as Jefferson might have put it, that neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Rod and those with similar convictions obviously take a very different position. I just don’t see how over the long term they can possibly make their case in our public life if their position boils down to nothing more than a profession of faith: “I believe being fully human requires that my fellow citizens consider it evil to do this and that to each other in bed.” Don’t get me wrong: Such professions might inspire a handful of conversions. But they are unlikely to persuade anyone, because there is no argument involved. If you believe that scripture and tradition are right to condemn homosexuality, then you’ll believe that it’s right to condemn homosexuality. And vice versa.

This is from an e-mail I just sent a friend of the site.  I really appreciate comments and e-mail folks!  If you think I’m too liberal or too conservative or too weird, just let me know!

For me, the truth is the Eucharist (and all the other sacraments too obviously) and the existence of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a community in which I am totally dedicated to engaging myself and having a conversation.  I’m a firm believer in truth and reason, and I believe that the Church can’t disagree with empirical evidence or good arguments (ultimately anyways) though I think it sometimes takes a long time…  My project, as I see it, is to talk to fellow Catholics while still being Catholic, not changing the rules or even calling for the rules to be changed but suggesting why they might be and how that could work.  And, obviously, keeping humble and open to correction.  This is how I would distinguish myself from the more heterodox in the Anglican communion, and we both see what’s going on there.

The problem is that we’re harder on our own.  (For more on this, see this brief reflection from Dan Gilgoff about his conversation with Archbishop Chaput). My girlfriend has been saying this for a long time: if you’re a pro-choice Catholic, good luck ever getting elected, even if Catholics still vote pro-choice.  Pro-choice Democracts for whom Catholics are willing to vote are kind of like the shabbat goy.  They do the stuff that we’re not alllowed to do and we might not really approve of but which we’re not wholly prepared to go without. 

Is this ultimately hypocritical?  Probably, yes.  But it’s the way quite a few Catholics roll.  They recongize that other people of different faiths might have different priorities than they do, but they are less forgiving of fellow Catholics.  All of this is reason number 7 billion it’s hard to be a Catholic in the Democractic party.

I mean, actually, I’m pretty supportive of this movement.  But I’m pretty sure strongarming through the government is not the way to go at all.

Motivated by declining membership, the priest sexual-abuse scandals, parish closings and two cases of financial impropriety at churches in Fairfield County, one of those activists, Tom Gallagher of Greenwich, asked lawmakers to intervene.

The bill would have created lay councils of seven to 13 people to oversee the finances of local parishes, relegating Catholic pastors and bishops to an advisory role. It was pulled Tuesday by the co-chairmen of the legislature’s influential judiciary committee amid questions about its constitutionality.

Church leaders bristled at government interference, which they and many legal scholars view as unconstitutional. They also firmly rejected the notion that parishioners have no say in the affairs of their church.

It’s an article about an intense Catholic judge who might get in trouble for her tough stance on executions.

Judge Keller, 55, has always kept her own counsel; her colleagues at the court have given her the nickname Mother Superior because of her reserved and diligent demeanor and her devout Roman Catholic faith.

This is nothing particularly new: there are a lot more priests in Africa and Asia.  Still, it’s good to know there are a lot more young priests somewhere.

Numbers in Africa had risen by 27.6% and in Asia by 21%, the report said.

The figures were “a continuing trend of moderate growth in the number of priests in the world which began in 2000 after over two decades of disappointing results”, it added

This sounds right to me. I’ve often though that it’d be easier for me not to believe in God than not to be Catholic, and I’m not sure a lot of Protestants can say that about their tradition.  But I know a ton of Jews who can say that about Judaism.

Most who leave Judaism become unaffiliated, rather than converting to another religion; Many continue to identify as Jewish in an ethnic or cultural sense, concluded the study’s author, Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago.

“Jewish losses are disproportionately to no religion,” he said.

With 76 percent retaining their faith, Jews are more “religiously stable” than Catholics (73 percent); and while eight in ten Protestants remain Protestant, specific denominations retain a much lower percentage of members — as low as 16 percent in one case.