UNITED STATES
Portland Press Herald
BY BILL SLAVICK
Half a century after John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and John XXIII created a moment of hope, we face environmental doom, nuclear Armageddon, war between the starving masses and corporate greed served by push-button weaponry and mercenary savagery, and conflicts everywhere to control natural resources.
American blacks are again disenfranchised, the rambunctious in jail. And the Catholic Church’s Vatican II re-engagement with the world has been abandoned for doctrinal parsing, celibate hierarchs’ obsession with sex and renewed clerical domination, indifferent to the greatest exodus in 2,000 years – whole generations lost.
Might the charismatic pope lead us out of the wilderness in refocusing the church on living the Gospel? Arguably, Francis’ witness, his challenge to “the idolatry of money” in “Gaudium Evangelii” (“Joy of the Gospel”) and his moves toward collegial governance have been laying a foundation both for essential church reform and a worldwide mobilization to save the race from itself.
But lack of movement raises doubts:
• Francis has not challenged the monarchical structure that encouraged patriarchal domination and clericalism and hid widespread sex abuse. No bishop has been held accountable for complicity in abuse. Dubious censures (targeting U.S. nuns), firings and excommunications continue, still with no vehicle for redressing clerical wrongs.
• Francis speaks of the equality of women but uncritically espouses the theologically flawed, even dishonest, concoctions that argue women are not made to lead: “Jesus did not ordain women” – or men. Women’s patience is waning.
• Church leadership must finally get sex right. They must abandon untenable arguments for clerical celibacy and against contraception and the remarriage of people who have been divorced, and the facile evasion of responsible consideration of lesbian, gay and bisexual sexual orientations, transgender identity and LGBT relationships. Little may come from October’s synod on family, with bishops ignoring mutual love as a goal of marriage to argue against contraception and same-sex unions and the Vatican dismissing the sense of the faithful.
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