Okay. Let's get started here.What is
Anna Quindlen talking about?After reading her Newsweek piece a few times, I've concluded this is what she's going for:
The sexual abuse cover-up has occurred because the Church teaches sexual morality.
And now all hell is going to break loose because all of the victims writhing under the unjust restraints of these teachings are rising up in judgment, thrilled at last to be able to turn tables on their oppressors.
Really.
I guess Anna's too subtle for me, but I have a hard time seeing this connection. I suppose what she's saying is that traditional Catholic sexual teaching "missed the point" by imposing erroneous teachings on Catholics for centuries, while allowing a sexually and emotionally stunted celibate clergy to fester.
Quindlen buys the traditional rap on traditional Catholic morality: that it was nothing but prohibition and a denial of something important about the human person.
For too many years, the church seemed to have a bizarre preoccupation with sins of the flesh so unrelenting that, to this day, people will ask if the nuns taught me that patent-leather shoes reflect up. (No.) The enforced celibacy of the male priesthood, an invention only of the faith’s second millennium, taught a clear lesson: eschewing human sexuality was the greatest glory of the highest calling. (“Our ideal is not to experience desire at all.”—Clement of Alexandria, saint.) The ban on contraception taught that sex could be countenanced only when it could lead to pregnancy. There was no passion or pleasure, only procreation and punishment.
What Quindlen misses, not surprisingly, is context. Sure, the strain of misogyny and idealized asceticism that runs through much of Christian history his disturbing and wrong, but do you know what? It was in the culture. Not only that, for the most part, the culture was worse, and what Christianity managed to squeeze out of it was actually a step up - for human dignity, and yes, Anna, even for women.
And despite the church’s antipathy toward homosexuality, it was inevitable that most of those victimized would be male. After all, the teachings about ordination and celibacy and the evils of desire had as their subtext a misogyny that would lead any reasonable person to conclude that sex with a female is the lowest form of sexual expression.
Huh? This is creative. Really creative. I mean, not everyone could make this move, taking a tradition that uniformly, from the Jewish Law onward, see homosexuality as a perversion and then pronounce that the misogyny of this tradition led the sexually supressed to pederasty because women were supposedly so gross? No, not just anyone could make that leap. Only Anna Quindlen.
.
The bishops gathered wood for this current conflagration every time they turned away from the human condition to emphasize wayward genitalia.
As if the "human condition" has nothing to do with genitalia, wayward or not. Quindlen approvingly quotes Eugene Kennedy, a man who's currently making a good living talking about the (again, supposed) dualism of the Christian tradition in regard to matters of the body (don't believe him, by the way). To separate the "human condition" from sexual matters, as Quindlen does, is nothing but dualism.
They must be amazed at how harshly they are now judged after all those years of deference, when they were allowed to make their own laws. As if, all along, Catholic sexual morality has sprung from a secret, centuries-old "Committee for Making Our Own Sex Rules So The Laity Will Be Miserable." You know, that's sort of what my high school students used to think, too. It was a challenge to help them see the truth - that these "laws" are the fruit of human wisdom and reflection on God's revelations about who we are, as creatures made in His image.
The judgment of divorced Catholics reborn in good marriages ordered not to go to communion.
I'm divorced. I'm remarried. I've never been ordered not to go to communion. Oh. That's right. I have an annulment. And as crazy and legalistic as Catholic marriage law is (and perhaps the Orthodox model is much better - I wouldn't be surprised if most Tribunal employees agreed), you (yes you, AQ) have to admit that its roots are not in the whims of bishops. Its roots are in the teachings of Jesus - pretty strict ones, as a matter of fact. Remember him? Jesus? The guy you're always appealing to? Oh. Not in this case, right?
The judgment of women up all night with sick babies lectured about the sanctity of life
Funny. I never got the impression - not once - that the Church's teaching on abortion took the form of lectures to mothers with sick babies. I always thought the intended audience was doctors who make fortunes from dismembering little human beings, lawmakers who are too gutless to do anything about it, and anyone - pregnant woman, man, parents of a pregnant teen - who have been deceived by opportunists to believe that killing that child is the best way out of a difficult situation.
I really can't be bothered to pick this piece apart any more, because it would just be deeply aggravating. But you know, there is actually a good point to be drawn from this, especially for Catholic leaders: Quindlen starts her piece by scoffing at the sight of Cardinal Egan testifying against mandatory contraceptive coverage for health plans in New York state. Her implication is that considering the moral crisis over which he presides in his own house, talking about such issues is presumptuous on his part.
This is what we call a collapse of moral authority, and it should surprise no one. Americans are going to have a mighty hard time taking the moral pronouncements of the Catholic hierarchy seriously after this farce, and you really can't blame them.
But you know, there's hope. No matter how you feel about it - if you share Quindlen's sense that two thousand years of Catholic moral teaching has been a farce and a classic case of "missing the point", or even if you just can't listen to another bishop talk about truth, justice and the Christian way of love one more second, knowing what some of them have been up to, take heart. There is another voice here, an alternative to this oppression and hypocrisy:
But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on the bus, or in the car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.
From: A Short Guide to a Happy Life by Anna Quindlen.
Now that's some deep thinking there.