The Hall of Shame: Catholic Dioceses Across U.S. Support Maine Diocese's Attack on Gay Brothers and Sisters

In the posting I just uploaded, about shutting down the GayTM, I noted that the Catholic church in the U.S. has mounted a nationwide attack on LGBT human beings.

As I noted this, I offered a link to a 23 October financial statement that the Portland Catholic diocese provided, listing donors to its attack on gay citizens of Maine and their human rights. This link points to a report of the Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices listing contributors to the Portland diocese's attack on gay persons and our human rights.

This report makes clear where that mysterious money came from that the Portland diocese kept finding to carry on its attack on gay people in the recent Yes on 1 initiative. It came, in fact, from all over the United States--from Catholic dioceses across the nation.

While it has been closing Catholic churches and schools, the Catholic diocese of Portland has been passing the hat around among bishops all over the place to collect money to attack a vulnerable minority. And bishops all over the place (many of whom are facing financial constraints similar to those of the Portland diocese, and many of whom are also closing churches) willingly put money into the hat for this cause.

Money given by Catholics in their dioceses to support schools, churches, programs to feed the hungry and heal the sick. Money Catholics around the nation have not given to attack their gay children, brothers and sisters. Tax-free money given as donations to churches, without any political intent other than healing the wounds of the world in the mind of many Catholic layfolks donating that money.

Make no mistake about it: the Catholic bishops in the United States, many of them, are involved in a full-scale, take-no-prisoners attack on gay lives, gay human beings, gay brothers and sisters. This is a cynical, cruel, calculated attack.

And it will not end until Catholics who put money into the collection plates of Catholic churches across the nation stop supporting this attack on their LGBT brothers and sisters by refusing to donate.

You can read the list of dioceses donating to the Portland diocese's attack on gay citizens of Maine at the Maine Ethics Commission website. But just so that the names receive as much attention and distribution as possible, here's the Hall of Shame of dioceses that gave financial support to the Portland diocese's anti-gay initiative:

Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown
Diocese of Arlington
Diocese of Atlanta
Catholic Foundation Archdiocese of Baltimore
Diocese of Baton Rouge
Diocese of Biloxi
Bishop Lori of Bridgeport
Eparchy of St. Maron of Brooklyn
Diocese of Cincinnati
Diocese of Colorado Springs
Diocese of Columbus
Diocese of Crookston
Diocese of Erie
Bishop of Fall River
Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend
Diocese of Fort Worth
Diocese of Gary
Diocese of Grand Island
Diocese of Green Bay
Diocese of Hartford
Diocesan Center for Family Life Jacksonville
Diocese of Jefferson City
Diocese of Joliet
Catholic Foundation of Northeast Kansas, Kansas City
Diocese of LaCrosse
Diocese of Las Cruces
Bishop of Louisville
Diocese of Metuchen
Diocese of Mobile
Diocese of Newark
Diocese of New Orleans
Diocese of Parma
Diocese of Philadelphia
Diocese of Phoenix
Diocese of Pittsburgh
Diocese of Portland, Oregon
Diocesan Assistance Fund of Providence
Diocese of Rockford
Diocese of Rockville Center
Diocese of St. Thomas Virgin Islands
Diocese of San Angelo
Diocese of Savannah
Diocese of Scranton
Bishop of Springfield
Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau
Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston
Diocese of Wilmington
Diocese of Winona
Diocese of Yakima
Diocese of Youngstown

Know any of these places? Know Catholics in any of these places? If you do, do you suspect that many Catholics who put money into their churches' collection baskets in these places in the past year had no idea they were donating to a political cause? That their money would be used to mount a mean-spirited attack on their gay brothers and sisters?

There will come a day when historians will take note of this list for what it really is: a hall of shame of American Catholic dioceses which, in the first decade of the 21st century, chose to use the resources of their faith community to make the lives of a targeted minority harder than they already are.

It's Time: Shutting Down the GayTM

I noted this on my Facebook page yesterday, but should also make a note of it on Bilgrimage.

I'm fully in support of the boycott of the Democratic National Committee announced yesterday by John Aravosis and Joe Sudbay at Americablog. This boycott is being supported by big-name bloggers (unlike me) including Pam Spaulding, Daily Kos, Jane Hamsher at FireDogLake, Dan Savage, Michelangelo Signorile, David Mixner, Andy Towle and Michael Goff at Towle Road, Paul Sousa of Founder of Equal Rep in Boston, Robin Tyler of the Equality Campaign, Inc.), Bil Browning at Bilerico Project, and others.

These bloggers are asking LGBT Americans and those who stand in solidarity with us to consider shutting down donations to the DNC--to shut down the GayTM. Those who support this political action can take a pledge here.

Jane Hamsher is also suggesting that those who have joined Organizing for America (OFA) unsubscribe from that group. The link I just provided to her posting at Firedoglake has a link you can click to unsubscribe from OFA, if you think this is a good means of political protest. The form you'll be given to permit you to unsubscribe allows you to tell OFA why you're taking that step.

It's time. I've had it up to here with the duplicity and moral waffling of key Democratic leaders. It's time for me to make my voice heard about this in any way I can do so. I urge readers of this blog to consider taking these steps as well. I joined the boycott yesterday and have just sent in my unsubscribe message to OFA.

Not that I've ever been able to contribute a great deal financially to the DNC--though I did give as I was able during the last election. I remain unemployed and without health care coverage, and as I've noted on this blog, homophobia enshrined in law is one of the key reasons that I'm in this situation. I don't have abundant resources to give financially, but I supported Mr. Obama in every other way I could support him in the last election, including through postings on this blog.

I'm deeply disappointed in his leadership and in the leadership provided by key Democratic figures nationally. As I've noted on this blog, I'm appalled at the lack of leadership provided by most of the Democrats my state has sent to Congress.

I'm tired of being betrayed by a party I've supported throughout my adult life, from the time I began to vote in 1968 up to the present. I'm tired of having no voice at all in a party my family has supported faithfully through thick and thin for several generations. I was brought up in a household in which being Democratic was synonymous with being politically engaged.

It's time to let our leaders know that we will no longer offer support when they betray us and the core principles of their political party.

I also recommend for readers' consideration the new Facebook site organizing a civil rights march in Maine next May, Meet in the Middle 4 Equality.

It's time. It's time to make our voices heard and push back hard. It's time to stop allowing ourselves and our contributions to be taken for granted by those who have no intent of respecting us as human beings.

(And, as I make that observation, it goes without saying that I encourage any readers of this blog who continue actively to support the Catholic church in any way--financially and/or through other contributions that enable it to carry on business that includes a nationwide attack on gay and lesbian human beings--to reconsider that support. Businesses listen for the most part only to money, and the business of American Catholicism will listen to the faithful only when Catholics far and wide withhold money from collection baskets.)

To the best of my knowledge, Pam Spaulding coined the GayTM phrase. The graphic for this posting is Pam's as well.

Placing God on the Side of Cruelty: America's History of Denying the Right of Marriage in God's Name

So I’ve spent the week thinking about marriage. And what happens when people are married, but their legally sanctioned marriage is not recognized outside the place in which they married. I’ve spent this week thinking about what happens to families when people with a religious animus against marriages they do not understand or accept have free rein to repudiate marriages abhorrent to them. And to punish the families that result from such marriages.

These are, unfortunately, not merely abstract questions. They’re very real American questions. Our nation has a history of permitting people who claim to be inspired by the gospels to upend the marriages of those they do not accept or like, and to make the lives of the families of such couples miserable.

I’ve noted before on this blog that I’ve been spending time in the past year researching and writing about a family story that I’ve teased out of old letters and bible records in the past several years. This is a story of a white Southern planter who “married” (but could not legally marry) a free woman of color, had a family by her, lived most of his adult life with her, and then bequeathed his land to one of his biracial sons.

As I’ve also said here, that son was murdered in 1899 in a week in which black men were lynched across south Arkansas, where he lived after inheriting his father’s land. He was shot in the back while riding horseback through woods on his land. A black man, a former slave, was charged with this crime. I have not been able to discover what happened to that man. I believe he was innocent of the crime and was framed by the white men who, in my view, almost certainly lynched a man of mixed race whom his white father had dared to acknowledge as a son, and to whom he left valuable property.

As I say, I’ve spent the last week thinking about marriage, and about what happens when people—good Christian people, whose lives are framed by the gospels and who care intently about others and about their pain—use tricky, dishonest, shameful, and cruel legal mechanisms to sort real marriages from bogus ones, real families from illicit ones.

I’ve been thinking about this question and how it haunts American history because, in the past week, I’ve discovered new documents that illuminate the life of my murdered relative from the period in which he received property from his father, up to the point of his murder in 1899. His father died in 1883.

At that point, my cousin moved with his wife—a white woman descended from prominent New England abolitionist families who had moved to Ohio, where they founded churches and worked in the Underground Railroad—and their six children from Ohio to Arkansas, to live on the 1200 acres he had received from his father. In Arkansas, the couple had three more children.

And then the wife died tragically young. She was forty-one. I have no information about what caused her death. This death has to have been exceedingly difficult for her young husband to bear. It left him with nine children to raise, their ages ranging from 18 to less than a year old.

And the response of the state when my cousin's wife died? The response of his good churchgoing neighbors to this tragedy affecting a young father and his nine young children?

Here’s what I have discovered took place when the wife of my cousin died in 1890: though this couple had legally married in Ohio in 1870, their marriage was not recognized in Arkansas. It was not recognized in Arkansas because Arkansas did not recognize the marriage of a person of color to a white person.

Arkansas had laws that forbade the marriage of people of different races. Those laws were informed by—they had everything to do with—the peculiar religious views of a majority of Arkansans, who believed that God had created the various races of the world to live separate from each other, to remain apart from each other, not to mingle through sexual union or marriage.

Well, this was the official understanding of such issues in Arkansas at the time, as it was the official understanding of the entire American South—and, truth be told, of much of the nation—at the time. In reality, the races had mingled for years, when white people found no theological problem at all in transgressing the lines separating white folks from folks of color as they brought enslaved Africans to this country to work for them.

And as we know well from many documents during the slave period, not only did white people find it perfectly possible to overcome their theological objections to racial mixing when it came to importing and using African slave labor in the United States, but they also found it eminently possible to overlook those objections when it came to certain matters of fact that ensue when one mixes people of one race with another in systems of forced labor that subject people of one race to people of another race: as anyone could have predicted, the forced enslavement of Africans and their importation to the American colonies immediately resulted in racial mixing that continued throughout the slave period. Mixing in which white masters, for the most part, forced black women enslaved to them to submit to their sexual advances and to bear their children.

As I say, the official understanding of racial relations enshrined in the law of states like Arkansas in the 1890s conveniently overlooked the actual history of racial relations for several centuries in the United States, as it forbade the legal marriage of people of different races. This official understanding conveniently clutched at a handful of carefully chosen biblical passages that supported its cynical and cruel denial of the right of marriage to mixed-race couples, while conveniently ignoring the plethora of texts (about love, justice, and mercy) that exposed the white majority’s refusal to permit interracial marriage as hypocritical and, well, cynical and cruel.

And so here’s what happened when my cousin’s wife died in 1890 in Arkansas. Because my cousin was a man of color, and because his wife had been white, the state refused to acknowledge that the two had been husband and wife. Though the state of Ohio had recognized them as a legally married couple twenty years previously . . . .

This meant, of course, that the children of this legally married couple were illegitimized by Arkansas law. Since their parents were not recognized as legally married in Arkansas—since they could not be legally married in Arkansas (or anywhere in the American South, or in most states of the Union) at the time—their father had to appeal for guardianship when his wife died. He had to appeal for guardianship of his own children. Of his own legal children. Of his own heirs.

He had to go to court, pretending to be a disinterested party who, for whatever reason, had an interest in the well-being of these nine children, and swear with witnesses who gave bond along with him that he would see to the care and education of these orphaned minors. The court documents giving him guardianship of his own children never once mention that he was their father. They could not mention this, without making a mockery of the entire proceedings—of the bizarre requirement that a father petition for the guardianship of his own children.

As if he had been nothing at all to their mother—certainly not her husband. As if he were nothing at all to these children—certainly not their father.

As if he and his wife had not been married but “married.”

As they in fact were in Arkansas at this period—and as they were in the eyes of a majority of Americans at this point in time. “Married.” Certainly not married.

And then nine years later he was murdered.

And I wonder how much has changed in the century or so following these tragic events, which made the life of this family (and of similar families) exceptionally painful. Unnecessarily painful. Painful in the name of God.

I wonder what has changed with the churches, in particular. Whether they’ve learned, many of them, that inflicting such pain on human beings who want merely to love one another and provide for one another is atrocious.

And even more atrocious when we claim to be inflicting that pain in the name of God.

The picture is a picture of my cousin as a young man, around the time of his marriage in 1870.

News Round-Up: Times Editorial Supporting Same-Sex Marriage, D.C. Catholic Legal Arguments vs. Same-Sex Marriage, Resurgence of Religious Left

I’d like to draw readers’ attention to several noteworthy articles today dealing with issues frequently discussed on Bilgrimage.

First, I take heart that today’s New York Times editorial “Six Tests for Equality and Fairness” identifies initiatives to ban same-sex marriage or to remove that right from gay citizens in states where it now exists as “mean-spirited” and antithetical to “tolerance and justice.”

Yes. And if we want to build a better society, one in which everyone has opportunity, gay or straight, black or white, we all need to concern ourselves with mean-spirited attacks on any targeted minority. Even when we don’t happen to belong to that particular minority. We’re not going to build the society of which our founders dreamed as long as we permit these attacks to go unchallenged whenever and wherever they occur.

I’m struck, too, by a report on the Clerical Whispers blog about a 26 October hearing at which representatives of the Catholic archdiocese of Washington, D.C., addressed the D.C. city council’s Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary. They did so to argue against recognition of same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia.

According to the report at Clerical Whispers, central to the case that the archdiocese of D.C. presented at this hearing was a letter from Williams and Connolly law firm, which argues that acceptance of same-sex marriage by civil society will result in litigation that will threaten Catholic coffers. Clerical Whispers states that the D.C. archdiocese augmented this argument by the law firm with opinions from “six prominent legal scholars” who concur with the viewpoint pushed by Williams and Connolly.

So that’s what it comes down to in the end, with the bitter attack of many Catholic leaders today on gay human beings and gay human rights? Money? Fear of lawsuits?

When the best argument a religious group can offer regarding an issue of pastoral and ethical importance—an issue affecting real human beings, real human lives, and real human families—is a legal argument crafted by high-powered lawyers, then that religious group seems to be on shaky pastoral and ethical ground, indeed. When and why have lawyers and their opinions become so centrally important to the Catholic response to the pastoral needs of a group of marginalized human beings?

Finally, I want to take note of Candace Chellew-Hodge’s analysis at Religion Dispatches today of the resurgence of a progressive coalition within American Christianity. In my view, that resurgence is still radically threatened by the powerful coalition of the religious right with a well-heeled political right. Still, it’s heartening to read that this coalition may be challenged in days to come by progressive groups within the churches who are finding their voices again after several decades of neocon and religious right dominance of the media and political life.

White Male Voters and Phallocentric Preoccupations: Reflections on Catholic Sexual Ethics and the Battle Against Same-Sex Marriage

I wrote yesterday that it strikes me as tragically wrong-headed (not to mention a betrayal of core Christian values) that powerful Christian leaders today are hinging the future of Christianity on the belief that those with a penis and light skin coloring have an ontological status different from and higher than that of everyone else in the world.

Today, I’m interested to read Andrew Sullivan’s comments on a U.S. map showing the percentage of white male voters for Obama in the U.S. The map appeared yesterday in a posting at Open Left. Compare the two maps at Open Left—state-by-state percentages of all but white men who voted for President Obama, and percentages of white men who voted for Obama—and a fascinating picture emerges.

As Andrew Sullivan notes,

When the disparities of experience and understanding are this acute, Washington has a problem with its pundit class. Increasingly, we're talking about ourselves, not America.

And I agree. One of the conspicuous shortcomings of much political (and religious, and academic, and so on) commentary is that it projects the straight white male viewpoint onto everyone else as the human viewpoint.

And so I continue to maintain that it is tragically shortsighted for so many Christian leaders to apotheosize the experience of one small sociological group and to seek to make that experience normative for all believers everywhere. The big struggle within the Christian churches today—the struggle on whose outcome the future will depend—is about whether the gospels give inordinate privilege to those who have a penis and light complexion.

If the answer to that question is no, then the churches need to find immediate ways to revise their polities radically, and to shift how they do business at the most fundamental level possible. If the answer to that question is yes, then many of us will continue to distance ourselves from the churches and will continue to stand by in sad dismay as things fall apart.

Vis-à-vis the Catholic church in particular, a reader left a valuable comment at my posting last week about the Italian Catholic priest who married a couple in which the female partner was transsexual. Readers will recall that Cardinal Renato Martino, president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, condemned the pastor’s decision to marry this couple, on the ground that marrying a couple in which a spouse or spouses are transsexual “does not bring anything to the church.”

Ht. Tom, the perceptive reader who commented on this posting, noted that the marriage law of the Catholic church is a mess, and offered the opinion that the church ought to get out of marriage altogether. To illustrate his point that the marriage law of the Catholic church is mess, he offered two canons governing Catholic pastoral decisions about whether a priest ought or ought not to witness the sacramental marriage of a couple in which one or both partners is unable to conceive.

I’m not a canonist, and I haven’t researched the two canons in question. I have only the text posted by Ht. Tom to go by, as I think about this issue.

But as I read these canons, I have to say that I completely agree with Ht. Tom. The Catholic church’s understanding of marriage and human sexuality is a total mess. It’s a mess because it depends on phallocentric biological and anthropological assumptions that are so obsessively focused on penises and what penises do, that Catholic sexual ethics twists itself into bizarre conclusions which no informed and right-thinking person today can possibly accept.

Here are the canons that Ht. Tom cites to illustrate the mess the Catholic church has made of the theology of marriage, with its obsessive focus on penises:

Canon 1084.1 Antecedent and perpetual impotence to have sexual intercourse, whether on the part of the man or on that of the woman, whether absolute or relative, by its very nature invalidates marriage.

Canon 1084.3 Without prejudice to the provisions of canon 1098, sterility neither forbids nor invalidates a marriage.

Here’s what strikes me as I read these canons (and, again, I want to stress that I haven’t researched these texts in context, and I haven’t read theological commentary on them: my impressions are top-of-the-head ones, but they’re considered top-of-the-head responses based on wide reading in Catholic sexual ethics). What strikes me is the absurd, blind focus of 1084.1 on “impotence” as the sole impediment to a marriage in which one or both partners may be incapable of consummating a marriage.

This is an exclusively penis-centered approach to the complex question of why some couples are unable to have satisfactory intercourse. The word “impotence” is phallocentric. It is customary to speak of women who may find it impossible to engage in sexual relations either persistently or intermittently as “sterile,” not impotent.

The canon takes a male term and a male experience and applies it to women, as if women experience difficulty achieving an erection, and consequently can’t hold up their end of the bargain when it comes to consummating a marriage. In doing so, it makes nonsense of all that we know about human biology, about the act of conception, about women’s sexuality and the role that this plays in marriage.

And how can canon 1084.1 and 1084.3 both be true? If sterility doesn’t forbid or invalidate a marriage, then what is this female “impotence” that does forbid or invalidate a marriage?

It seems clear to me that the primary focus of the church’s sexual ethics—the obsessive, monomaniacal, laughable focus—is the penis and what it does. Or does not do, as the case may be.

The Catholic magisterial understanding of sexual ethics reflects a worldview and a pre-modern biological system that sees the penis as the only important thing to think about in the act of reproduction. This worldview sees women as passive receptacles for sperm, ovens in which a man is to place his bun and let it bake. This worldview imagines men doing everything that is really important in the act of conception. They supply the stuff of which life is made. Women merely receive and incubate that stuff.

Women’s sexual pleasure and sexual responses simply have no place in this worldview. Women’s sexuality makes no sense at all in the worldview on which Catholic sexual ethics continues to be based.

It’s all about the penis—where it goes, what it does, what happens to sperm, where sperm is placed and ends up. I really do wonder if those evangelical Protestants like Bernice King, the new president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, have any idea who and what they’re getting into bed with, when they parrot the Catholic line that marriage is all about procreation?

King, who is Martin Luther King’s daughter, opposes same-sex marriage. Several years ago, she told reporters that she does so because the purpose of sexuality and marriage is procreation.

So I take it that, with her legacy of a strong commitment to fairness, equity, and justice for all citizens, Bernice King opposes the marriage of two people of the opposite sex who are beyond childbearing years, or of an opposite-sex couple in which one or both partners cannot conceive for other reasons, or of an opposite-sex couple that does not intend to have children. I take it that Bernice King (who is a minister of the gospel) holds these positions because, otherwise, it would be radically unfair to oppose the marriage of people of the same sex on the ground that marriage is all about procreation. If we maintain that gays must not marry because marriage is all about procreation, then logic and consistency (not to mention elemental fairness) demand that we apply that norm to all couples, gay or straight, who intend to marry.

Otherwise, it’s not all about procreation. It’s all about bashing the gays and keeping them in their places.

And about the magical power of the penis, about where it goes and what it does, as the most significant datum to consider in sexual ethics. That’s what Catholicism thinks, with its “all about procreation” claim.

Does Bernice King agree, I wonder?

For All the Saints: Reflections on the Communion of Saints

One of the things I’ve always liked about the doctrine of the communion of the saints is that it assumes that the vast company of saints is made up of people from every walk of life, every culture. The doctrine of the communion of the saints encapsulates the most fundamental affirmation that the church makes about itself: that it is catholic, universal, open to the vast experiences of people from every sector of the globe.

Hidden inside this doctrine to which Christians everywhere profess adherence when they recite the Apostles’ Creed each Sunday is the assumption that the church extends itself through history by engaging every culture and every human experience in a positive, redemptive, love-oriented way—as God does. The church is the church, and is the church catholic, only to the extent that it opens itself to every culture, to people from every walk of life, to human experience in its manifold complexity everywhere in the world.

In practice, of course, the canon of saints—the list of those officially recognized by the church as saints—has been and continues to be largely male and largely clerical. Ordained men have a better chance of being canonized in the Catholic church than do non-ordained men. Men have a better chance of being elevated to the status of sainthood than do women. Men or women called to celibacy are routinely recognized as saints, where married people receive less notice when saints are chosen.

And the saint-making business has been largely European (and, by extension, American, since the Americas are a cultural extension of Europe) in the past. The business is centered in Europe, after all, in Rome. And this assures that the canonization process has been dominated not merely by European culture and cultures born out of the European experience, but also by men who are white rather than by people of color.

Even so, the idea of the communion of the saints rests on the assumption that all of us are potentially saints—that all of us are, in fact, called to be saints. And that notion has exerted a powerful tug, a democratic one, one is tempted to say, in the life of the church over the centuries.

The belief that the Spirit of God can choose to dwell in anyone at all (and, in fact, that the Spirit delights to dwell in the outcast and downtrodden) has emboldened women like Catherine of Siena to speak out and warn the pope when she disagreed with his actions, Teresa of Avila to persist in founding reformed religious houses across Spain when the Inquisition sought at every turn to trap and destroy her, and Joan of Arc to claim that God had chosen to speak through an untutored cross-dressing girl who wasn’t even in religious life.

The doctrine of the communion of the saints led Martin de Porres, the son of a slave, to imagine that he could enter a “white” religious community when such a notion was unheard of, just as it led Henriette DeLille to found her own community of women of color when she was denied access to “white” communities on the ground that women of color cannot keep the vow of chastity. This doctrine caused Julian of Norwich to imagine that Mother God might choose to lavish spiritual gifts even on a laywoman with no theological training, just as it urged Franz Jäggerstätter, an ordinary young Austrian married man who had fathered a child out of wedlock, to persist in following his conscience to the point of martyrdom in Nazi-occupied Austria. Even when his pastor and bishops informed him that he did not understand and was not being faithful to Catholic teaching . . . .

There is, built into the notion of the communion of the saints, a certain revolutionary potential, which troubles and constantly challenges the church, insofar as the church and its leaders want to settle down in history, to cozy up to a particular culture and the powerful of that culture, in any given time and place. We’re living now through a period in which the revolutionary potential of the doctrine of the communion of the saints needs to be rediscovered, I would propose, by the church at large. Because we’re living through a period of history in which the church has been hard at work in recent years making compromises with the status quo that endanger its future and impair its ability to speak salvifically to people everywhere, to people in every walk of life across the globe.

I’ve written previously here about Nicholas Cafardi’s suggestion that a number of powerful U.S. Catholic bishops have, in recent years, given their hearts and souls so decisively to a single political party that they have become captive to that political party. Nicholas Cafardi sees a spectacular lack of wisdom in the choice of some influential U.S. Catholic bishops to make being Republican synonymous with being Catholic.

I thought of Cafardi’s thesis today as I read Frank Rich’s op-ed piece in the New York Times about the Republican party’s devolution into a “wacky, paranoid cult” that increasingly represents the views of a tiny, extreme political faction in the United States. I thought of Cafardi’s thesis in light of the doctrine of the saints as I read Rich, because he notes that the Republican party is faltering badly not merely because it has allied itself with the fringe right, but because it has wagered its future on a sociological drift that is waning rather than waxing in American culture.

Rich observes that the Republican party has made itself the party of white men at a moment of American history in which the nation is increasingly diverse, in ethnic terms, and in which such diversity (and the ever wider extension of power it implies in a democratic society) is only going to grow. He notes that Republican spokespersons like Pat Buchanan are lamenting the loss of “their” America, of an America that belonged primarily to them, as white, working-class men.

In Rich’s view,

They are right. That America was lost years ago, and no national political party can thrive if it lives in denial of that truth. The right still may want to believe, as Palin said during the campaign, that Alaska, with its small black and Hispanic populations, is a “microcosm of America.” . . . But most Americans like their country’s 21st-century profile.

If Frank Rich is correct in this analysis (and I think he is), then those U.S. Catholic bishops who want to hang the future of American Catholicism on the Republican party are doing a tremendous disservice to the church in linking its future to a sociological trend that is declining—the dominance of white men. And in doing so, they’re eviscerating the doctrine of the saints (and the catholicity of the church) of all real significance, because they’re implicitly limiting the scope of the church’s concern and ministry—as well as its power structures—to one gender and one race.

Powerful currents within global Christianity today, most of them emanating from Europe and North America, have made a preferential option for males at a moment in which women are emerging onto the stage of global history as persons and agents of their own destinies, rather than as objects and possessions of men. Just as women are, in a way unprecedented in global history, achieving full personal status in many societies, decisive reactionary movements within the Christian churches are trying to rewrite the scriptures to make them all about gender and gender roles, about women’s subordination to men—as though gender and gender roles are the heart of the Christian message.

The price that churches pay for making this preferential option for the male is tragically high. When the most significant accoutrement one can have for ministry or office in the church (and for leadership positions in the countless institutions churches sponsor) is a penis, people without a penis who have abundant qualifications and gifts to minister and lead will be overlooked, while people with a penis who often have mediocre talents and gifts (and attenuated sympathy for anyone unlike themselves, and constricted vision) thrive. Which is to say, some of those most qualified to carry the church forward in history will be excluded from positions of influence, while many of those least qualified to lead will rise to the top.

Institutions that hinge their future on something so incidental as possession of a penis as the primary qualification for leadership are not likely to thrive—not in the long run. Institutions that make being a leader all about having skin of one color rather than another are not likely to have a bright future, because they have made leadership dependent on a characteristic that has nothing to do with the content of character.

When institutions that calculate the future on the basis of ownership of a penis and a skin of a certain shade are Christian institutions, they not only jeopardize their future: they also radically undercut an important affirmation of the Apostle’s Creed—the recognition that being church is about opening the doors to everyone, since it is precisely in everyone that the Spirit chooses to reside. Not just in those who possess a penis and happen to be white. In everyone, including human beings with wombs, human beings who marry and are sexually active, human beings whose skin is gloriously hued, human beings who live in barrios and housing projects. And in men who love other men and women who love other women.

Though the canon of the saints may not include all those categories of human beings—though it may not give primary places of honor to those categories of human beings—I have an inkling that the real list of saints, the list of those whom God knows as saints even when they are not and never will be canonized, includes people from all of those categories, in abundance. I suspect this because I also have an inkling that when God looks at the world, what God looks for first and foremost is not penises and skin color, but the heart.

What a pity that so many Christian leaders today, and so many of those whom they indoctrinate, look for penises and skin color instead. This betrayal of the doctrine of the communion of the saints does not bode well for the future of the Christian churches.

News from the Week: Maine Anti-Gay Initiative's Shenanigans, More on Rome's Invitation to Anglicans

It’s apparently not just this site that has gotten plastered with ads from the Yes on 1 folks—the group trying to remove the right of marriage from gay citizens of Maine. John Aravosis reported yesterday at Americablog Gay that the ads had shown up on his blog, too. John says, “Folks, just an FYI, the anti-gay bigots in the Catholic Church and the religious right in Maine are buying Google Ads on all the gay sites.” The ad that showed up on his site appears to be the same one that I found on this blog—one that tries to stir up fears that gays are out to recruit children.

I’m trying to understand the rationale of this move. Since people visiting Americablog Gay or Bilgrimage will likely not be inclined to donate money to Yes on 1 or support its goals, why plaster sites like this with No on 1 ads?

Well, at least we must have attracted these folks’ attention, and that’s probably not bad. They know they’re being watched as they wheel and deal—and watched in some cases by people of faith, as they claim that they wheel and deal in the name of the Lord.

Thankfully, around 100 religious leaders representing a wide range of communities of faith gathered in Washington, D.C., yesterday to provide another perspective about the role of faith in debates about gay rights today. They represent a coalition of some 200 ministers in D.C. who have formed D.C. Clergy United for Marriage Equality. The group spoke in support of a bill before the D.C. city council, which would permit same-sex marriage.

As Benedict continues to re-brand the Catholic church as the international shelter par excellence for Christian homophobes and misogynists, many faith communities will continue to move in the opposite direction: they will continue the march to justice alongside their gay brothers and sisters, regardless of Rome’ s warnings and the shrill cries of other right-wing religious groups that are trying to build 21st-century Christianity around misogyny and homophobia today.

They’ll continue their march because it’s the right thing to do, the gospel-oriented thing to do. It is very difficult to preach a gospel centered on God’s salvific love for all, and, in particular, for the dispossessed and wounded, while targeting a vulnerable minority and seeking to make the lives of members of that minority group even more miserable. It’s difficult to do so and retain credibility as you proclaim the gospel, that is.

Particularly not when the men fulminating against intrinsically disordered gays are wearing pink dresses and fabulous designer shoes. As Andrew Sullivan notes, one of the open secrets of contemporary right-wing Catholicism, with its fixation on smells and bells and parsing theological rules to keep everyone in line, is that many of those in the driver’s seat of this movement are repressed gay men: “But there is as much an overlap of closeted gay priests and bishops with liturgical and theological orthodoxy as there is of closeted gay politicians finding ways to oppress other gays who are out and open.”

For a humorous take on the recent Roman invitation to dissident Anglicans which touches on that open secret about which we’re not supposed to talk, have a look at Stephen Colbert’s recent send-up of the Roman invitation. Colbert, who’s Catholic, is in his zone with this bit of comedy, and I’m glad that Cathleen Kaveny has chosen to blog about it at Commonweal.

As she notes, the clip is on YouTube, which means that it becomes a message—a theological one, one worth theological attention—for a whole generation of young folks. To ignore the theological conversations that are taking place at this popular level, in the name of a theological elitism that disdains all popularizing of theological discourse, is to miss a significant opportunity to comment on theological reflection at the level at which it reaches the widest audience possible.

I like Randall Balmer’s persistent statement, in the Colbert clip, of what’s really at the heart of this discussion: the Jesus about whom we read in the gospels never turns his back on those who are in need. He reaches out. He includes. He brings in and does not shove away.

As Balmer notes, organizations built around a message that appears to be about only the negative, around a message of exclusion, are likely to falter. And a church built around such a message is failing to be a sacramental sign of Christ in the world.