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Do the Catholic Bishops Really Mean What They Say?

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:54:00 -0400

The public opposition of more than eighty Catholic bishops to the University of Notre Dame’s decision to honor pro-abortion President Barack Obama represented an unprecedented public expression of episcopal sentiment on a controversial moral issue. The bishops normally draw back”“prudently,” as they see it”from calling attention to themselves and to the Church. For so many of them to enter into the lists in this particular case surely suggests an enhanced understanding of the seriousness of the central moral issue of our time.

At the end of August, however, Archbishop Michael J. Sheehan of Santa Fe, New Mexico, gave a very different episcopal perspective in an interview with National Catholic Reporter . In discussing the outcry over the Notre Dame commencement, Sheehan worried that the Catholic Church in America risked “isolating itself from the rest of the country.” He judged the refusal to talk to a politician or to give him communion because of a difference on a single issue “counterproductive,” even “hysterical.”

Of course Sheehan did not clearly make the crucial distinction between merely “talking to a politician” and doing public honor to one. He instead “wondered aloud what was so bad about inviting Obama and giving him a degree.” By way of comparison he observe that the pope recently made President Sarkozy, who is “pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, and married invalidly to an actress” an honorary canon of St. John Lateran. The Vatican, he claimed, apparently did not have “quite as big a concern” about Notre Dame’s honoring Obama as the bishops who spoke out against it.

Asked by NCR if there were any other bishops who agreed with him, Archbishop Sheehan replied, “Of course. The majority.” This majority, he said, only remained on the sidelines so as not to start a public internecine fight.

Thus, if Sheehan is correct, a majority of the American Catholic bishops opposes the official policy that they themselves established in their June 2004 statement “Catholics in Political Life.” That document told the world that, “the Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors, or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.” The protesting bishops based their opposition on this plain, unambiguous declaration.

But if, as Sheehan contends, a majority of the Catholic bishops in the United States actually disagrees with this policy, why did they vote for it in the first place? What sort of organization officially adopts a policy that most of its leaders reject? Such patent dishonesty seems rather more detrimental to the Church than “loud tactics.”

The archbishop thinks that opposition, even to a president as aggressively pro-abortion as Barack Obama, is to be deplored because it risks isolating Catholics from the rest of American society. But why should anyone think remaining in accord with a morally decadent society is somehow part of the Church’s mission? According to what principle is the Church supposed to lay aside her fundamental moral principles in order to conform to a society that has in so many respects long abandoned Judeo-Christian moral principles? Of course, the Church as a whole has not decided to “go along to get along” in this fashion. The only question is whether some bishops, as Sheehan’s statements suggest, are no longer in sync with the Church.

It is true that the American Catholic bishops have never been able to agree on a common policy on the question of refusing Holy Communion to pro-abortion public figures. The reason for this remains unclear. Canon 915 of the Code of Canon Law plainly says that those “who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.” Numerous Church documents have established that Catholic politicians who enable, support, or promote abortion are indeed guilty of “manifest grave sin,” and hence should not be admitted to Holy Communion.

More than that, the bishops have received specific orders from higher authority on this matter. When then Cardinal Ratzinger was still the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he sent a communication to Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, then archbishop of Washington, D.C., that explained how wayward Catholic public figures should be handled. Their pastor should first counsel them in person, explaining that they are objectively guilty of “manifest grave sin.” If they do not desist, they should be asked not to present themselves for Holy Communion. If they do present themselves for Holy Communion they must be denied.

As was widely reported at the time, Cardinal McCarrick, did not communicate this message from Rome in its entirety to his brother bishops. Some therefore think that many bishops do not know their duty. But, given the publicity that has surrounded the whole affair, this is impossible to credit; the bishops must know what they should be doing. Nor does resorting to the common argument that they should not “polticize the Eucharist” relieve them of their responsibility to enforce canon law.

Certainly the fact that the pope himself chose to honor Nicholas Sarkozy does not in any way excuse the American bishops. Perhaps the pope’s action was as mistaken as that of the disobedient bishops, but this can in no way negate the force of Canon 915 or even of Ratzinger’s own directive.

“Catholics in Public Life” and Ratzinger’s directive simply manifest the Church’s recognition of the seriousness of the American situation: More than fifty million babies have been killed by abortion since it was legalized by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. This rivals and in some cases exceeds the death tolls inflicted by the Hitlers, Stalins, Maos, and Pol Pots of the twentieth century. Dozens of American Catholic episcopal statements have reiterated that abortion is in a class by itself, currently outweighing by far nearly all other public moral issues combined.

In his NCR interview, however, the archbishop effectively treats abortion as just one more issue. He brags that “we have gotten more done on the pro-life issue in New Mexico by talking to people that don’t agree with us on everything. We got Governor Richardson to sign off on the abolition of the death penalty in New Mexico, which he was in favor of.” Sheehan goes on to admit that the same Richardson is another one of those pro-abortion Catholic politicians, whom he has evidently not “counseled,” however. His reaction when the interviewer mentions Governor Richardson’s pro-abortion stance is to ask defiantly (and here I quote directly), “So?” An archbishop of the Catholic Church thinks the death penalty constitutes an evil on the same scale as the unlimited abortion license.

God forbid that such obtuse and callous moral equivalence should represent the views of the majority of the American Catholic bishops. Sheehan should be pointedly rebuked by the leadership of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for venturing into the public print with views so much at variance with the USCCB’s official position.

In the present climate in which a spade is so rarely called a spade, it is unfortunate that the old practice of fraternal correction has lapsed among the American Catholic bishops. True, only the bishop of Rome has authority over any other bishop, but it is a shame that nobody to whom Sheehan might be disposed to listen spoke to him about the scandal caused by his interview.

Maybe the bishops actually are (mostly) united about the moral gravity of the killing of the innocent, but as long as an assertion to the contrary stands uncorrected and unchallenged, it will be taken as more evidence that the American Catholic bishops are not “completely united and resolute in our teaching and defense of the unborn child””in other words, that they do not necessarily really mean what they say.

Kenneth D. Whitehead is a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education and the translator of over twenty published books.

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Following the Lamb

Mon, 01 May 2000 00:00:00 -0400

In its broad outlines, the story of the sixteen Carmelite nuns martyred at Compiègne during the French Revolution is quite well known. Gertrud von Le Fort based her novel The Song at the Scaffold on the event, and the great French Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos took it up again with great power and spiritual insight in his final work, Dialogues of the Carmelites . The Dialogues were later adapted in the equally powerful modern opera of the same name by Francis Poulenc that has dazzled audiences since it was first produced in 1957.

But in a recent book —To Quell the Terror: The Mystery of the Vocation of the Sixteen Carmelites of Compiègne Guillotined July 17, 1794 (Institute of Carmelite Studies, 244 pp., $11.95 paper)—William Bush takes us even deeper into this compelling story. Not only does he provide the first English-language narrative of the actual events, he shows how the nuns’ dramatic martyrdom, like all true Christian martyrdoms, constituted a conscious, willing offering of their lives in response to a divine call to help “fill up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of his body, the Church” (Colossians 1:24).

Professor Bush originally became engaged with this story through his literary work devoted to the writings of Georges Bernanos. An emeritus professor of French literature at the University of Western Ontario, he is one of the foremost Bernanos scholars writing in English today. In editing the original manuscripts of the Dialogues of the Carmelites in the early 1980s, Bush became caught up with the actual history of the original Carmelite martyrs. He found that their real history differed in important ways from the dramatized versions of it. Nearly two decades of careful research, sometimes conducted with the help of various Carmelite houses, have now resulted in this book, which henceforth has to be considered the definitive account of these famous victims of the French revolutionary Terror.

Bush establishes in fascinating detail that these sixteen religious sisters were no casual, accidental martyrs. Quite the contrary: in the atmosphere of the French Revolution, they found themselves consciously offering themselves “to quell the Terror,” as the book’s title proclaims. It began when an earlier member of their Carmelite religious house had a mystical, prophetic dream “to follow the Lamb.” On the basis of that dream, the prioress and mother superior of these sixteen, Madame Lidoine (“Mother Teresa of St. Augustine”), had led the community in adopting an act of consecration that they renewed daily as a community during the Terror, and by which they specifically offered themselves up in response to it and to the atrocities of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

The unjust arrest of these innocent sisters, their condemnation by the kangaroo court headed by the notorious Fouquier-Tinville, and their execution on the guillotine thus constituted a true martyrdom in the classic Christian sense. These nuns even improvised a hymn which they sang to the tune of the Marseillaise , according to which the day of their execution was to be their own jour de gloire , “day of glory.” Before mounting the scaffold, each sister kissed a small terracotta statuette of the Madonna and Child held by the prioress; then each asked her, their legitimate religious superior:

“Permission to die, mother?”

“Go, my daughter.”

Each sister then mounted the scaffold in turn. The first to go, the young Sister Constance, began to intone Psalm 117, Laudate Dominum omnes gentes , “Praise the Lord, all you peoples!” The others took up the chant, “singing at the scaffold” in truth. The psalm goes on to affirm that, in the translation used by the author, “His mercy is confirmed upon us,” thus placing the martyrdom of these sisters in the context of God’s mercy.

All the historical sources testify to the unusual silence that prevailed in the crowds during the sisters’ journey to the guillotine and their execution. It was usually the case that the crowds mocked and jeered the victims of the Terror, but this execution was very different. One of the remarkable facts Prof. Bush uncovers is that these nuns went to their deaths wearing their religious habits—even though the revolutionary government had long since strictly prohibited them by law. This martyrdom was, the author makes clear, a moment of grace; contemplating it, we cannot fail to understand why “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”

As things turned out, Maximilien Robespierre fell from power just one week after the execution of the Carmelites, and the Terror itself then came to an end. Some have believed, then and since, that it was the willing self-sacrifice of these sixteen nuns that helped to bring about the cessation of the Terror.

In few narratives of the French Revolution will readers find the vivid and sometimes wrenching detail (as in the description of how the guillotine actually functioned) that is in this book. Yet the effect, far from being depressing or morbid, is moving and even exalting. And rarely do the raw facts of history find themselves as well explained and illuminated by religious and theological truth—the “mystery of vocation,” for example—as they do in this telling. It is notable that the author is a member of the Orthodox Church. And it is perhaps not too much to hope that his tribute to the heroic sanctity of these Carmelites, who were beatified in 1906, will help advance the cause of their canonization.

Kenneth D. Whitehead, a writer living in Falls Church, Virginia, has translated more than a dozen books from the French.

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