A Moral Challenge for Pope Francis
In modern times, the Catholic Church has made excuses for
unjustifiable wars even as it has made abortion a cardinal sin, a
hypocrisy that will be tested as Pope Francis visits the United
States, a country immersed in all the immorality that comes from
warfare.
By Ray McGovern
September 22, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Consortiumnews"-
Pope Francis could use his visit to the U.S.
this week to make unmistakably clear that the Catholic Church’s
teaching on the “sanctity of life” applies to more than just the
first nine months of gestation.
If he does so, he would face formidable
opposition. The bishops appointed by Francis’s two predecessors had
to swear allegiance to anti-abortion principles while showing less
commitment to saving lives from war. The phalanx of right-wing
bishops that Francis inherited were eager to be used,
twice, to help elect President George W. Bush because
he said he opposed abortion.
These bishops then aped the silence of the German
bishops who could not find their voice when Adolf Hitler began what
the post-war Nuremberg Tribunal defined as a “war of aggression.”
Bush’s unprovoked attack on Iraq fit that definition to a T –
complete with what Nuremberg called the “accumulated evil” that
inevitably results from such a war. Think lies, racism, kidnapping,
secret prisons, torture, millions of refugees.
One can only hope that someone has told Francis
that he would not have to start at Square One to rescue “the
sanctity of life” from those who would confine it to abortion. The
Pope needs no jackhammer to break through abortion-hardened
concrete. Readily available are the writings of the justice-oriented
Cardinal Joseph Bernadin, whose most important contribution before
he succumbed to cancer in 1996 was a simple formula he proposed –
the “seamless garment” – to link the Church’s “consistent ethic of
life” to a whole range of moral and social issues.
Bernadin raised consciousness about the sanctity
and reverence due all human life from conception to death. “The more
one embraces this concept, the more sensitive one becomes to the
value of human life itself at all stages,” wrote Bernadin. “This
consistent ethic points out the inconsistency of defending life in
one area while dismissing it in another. … there is a linkage among
all the life issues, which cannot be ignored.”
If Pope Francis has the courage to endorse
Bernadin’s approach to the sanctity of life, many presidential
candidates will have to find a way to dance around it. One, Sen.
Marco Rubio, told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday: “I’m a
Roman Catholic. For me, the Pope … has authority to speak on …
theological matters. And I follow him 100 percent on those issues;
otherwise I wouldn’t be a Roman Catholic. And so I believe that
deeply. …
“On the social teachings, essential issues, like
the sanctity of life and things of this nature, those go deep to the
theology of this — of the faith. And I do believe — those are
binding and I believe strongly in them.”
However, during the same interview, Rubio told
Stephanopoulos that Obama was not forceful enough in making war in
the Middle East. U.S. airstrikes, Rubio said, “are not, quite
frankly, as vibrant as they should be.” Odd word, “vibrant.”
Will Francis find words to make it clear to Rubio
and other U.S. officials that sanctity of life includes those tens
of thousands of non-Americans who may not look like Rubio but who
nonetheless deserve to be protected from the death that rains down
from U.S. bombs, Bernadin’s “consistent ethic of life”? Will the
Pope go beyond applauding the countries that are taking in hundreds
of thousands of refugees and address Washington’s role in the wars
and other violence that create refugees?
Will the Pope remind the Catholic majority of the
U.S. Supreme Court justices that execution is against Church
teaching? And will he remind flamboyant, right-wing Catholic Justice
Antonin Scalia that it has been
500 years since the Church condoned torture?
Techniques Like Waterboarding
It will be interesting to see if Pope Francis has
enough sensitivity to the horrors of the Inquisition, and the role
played by the Jesuits in it, to suggest that presidential candidate
Sen. Lindsey Graham go easy on using that sordid history to brag
about the “effectiveness” of torture. At a May 13, 2009 Senate
Judiciary Committee
hearing
discussing waterboarding, Graham said: “One of the reasons these
techniques have been around for 500 years is apparently they work.”
That torture “works” is a lie, unless your aim is
to produce false confessions. That worked like a charm when
President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney ordered interrogators
to obtain “evidence” of operational ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq
in order to associate Saddam Hussein with the 9/11 terrorists.
(Before the invasion of Iraq, 69 percent of Americans had been led
to believe that Saddam Hussein played a role in the attacks of
9/11.)
However, whether or not torture “works” is not the
point here. When the Jesuits taught me ethics at Fordham College a
half century ago, we learned of a moral category called “intrinsic
evil,” inhabited by rape and slavery as well as torture. I had no
idea that “intrinsic evil” could be somehow rehabilitated. But at
Fordham, at least, it has been – and in a most Jesuitical way.
Those graduating from my alma mater in 2012
encountered this not-so-subtle change when they objected to the
invitation extended by Fordham’s President Rev. Joseph M. McShane,
S.J. to “extraordinary rendition” aficionado John Brennan to give
the commencement address in 2012 – and to receive an honorary
doctorate in humane letters (I am not making this up).
McShane had fallen victim to what more grounded
Jesuits call the “celebrity virus.” At the time, Brennan, a Fordham
College alumnus, worked in the White House (before becoming CIA
director). It did not seem to matter very much what he did for the
U.S. government. Confronted by graduating seniors who had been
taught that torture was always and everywhere evil, McShane gave a
glib gloss on torture – and on Brennan’s role in compiling lists of
those to be killed by drones – with these words: “We don’t live in a
black and white world; we live in a gray world.”
After the Senate Intelligence Committee released
its major study on CIA torture in December 2014, a faculty-initiated
petition asked McShane to revoke the honorary degree given to
Brennan, calling “indefensible” his defense and support of torture.
McShane rebuffed the petitioners. Another sad day for Fordham.
In his autobiography, To Dwell in Peace
published 28 years ago, Vietnam War protester/prophet Daniel
Berrigan, S.J., now 94 and spending his last days in Fordham’s
infirmary for elderly Jesuits, wrote of “the fall of a great
enterprise” — the Jesuit university. He recorded his “hunch” that
the university would end up “among those structures whose moral
decline and political servitude signalize a larger falling away of
the culture itself.”
Berrigan lamented “highly placed” churchmen and
their approval of war, “uttered … with sublime confidence, from on
high, from highly placed friendships, and White House connections.”
“Thus compromised,” warned Berrigan, “the
Christian tradition of nonviolence, as well as the secular boast of
disinterested pursuit of truth — these are reduced to bombast,
hauled out for formal occasions, believed by no one, practiced by no
one.”
It will be interesting to see if, during his visit
to New York, Pope Francis decides to visit a Jesuit prophet named
Berrigan or the celebrity virus-afflicted McShane.
Sexual Abuse
As if Francis needs additional sanctity-of-life
issues to address during his visit to the U.S., a front-page,
above-the-fold
article in Monday’s New York Times provides yet another.
Joseph Goldstein writes about the orders given to U.S. troops to
ignore the sexual abuse of young boys by Afghan “allies.” Until now,
the mainstream media had avoided this story, but it is not new.
Those who took the trouble to read the information
leaked to WikiLeaks by Bradley/Chelsea Manning were aware of this
ugly story several years ago. I alluded to this depravity in
December 2010 toward the end of
a short
interview on CNN. I have not been invited back since, but it
was worth it.
Sexual abuse, of course, is a major problem that
Pope Francis, as well as his predecessors, have had to deal with.
During his U.S. visit seven years ago, Pope Benedict chose to dwell
on steps to address the Church’s pedophilia scandal to the exclusion
of much else, but he got a free pass from the media in disguising
his own role in trying to cover the whole thing up.
While still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he headed
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – the Vatican office
that once ran the Inquisition. In that capacity he sent a letter in
May 2001 to all Catholic bishops throwing a curtain of secrecy over
the widespread sexual abuse by clergy, warning the bishops of severe
penalties, including excommunication for breaching “pontifical
secrets.” Lawyers acting for the sexually abused accused Ratzinger
of “clear obstruction of justice.”
Very few American bishops have been
disciplined. And when Bernard Cardinal Law was run out of Boston for
failing to protect children from predator priests, he was given a
cushy sinecure in Rome. In my view, he should be behind bars.
Barring Female Priests
While Pope Francis’s popularity stems largely from
his penchant for doing unexpected things, sadly, he has shown zero
flexibility with respect to the ban on women priests, and no
miracles can realistically be expected. The prohibition on female
priests is another “truth” that has been set in concrete, even
though it lacks firm foundation in either Scripture or early Church
tradition.
One still hears, “But Jesus did not ordain women.”
Truth is Jesus did not ordain anyone. “Ordination” did not exist
until well over a century after Jesus. At that point, power-hungry
males decided to marginalize women to make the Church more
“acceptable” in sexist societies.
How many people are aware that, in the years right
after Jesus was killed, many of the men and women who knew him
personally worshiped in house churches led by women? THAT tradition
(women in leadership positions) does have firm foundation in
Scripture as well as in Jesus’s behavior toward women, but has been
ignored by the self-ordained theologians and prelates – often to the
point of absurdity.
Thomas Aquinas, for example, followed Aristotle in
attributing the conception of a woman to a defect of a particular
seed, resulting in a failed male. Can it be that this is still part
of our Catholic tradition? With his limited vision of 800 years ago,
Aquinas explained:
“Woman is defective and misbegotten, for the
active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect
likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes
from defect in the active force or from some material indisposition,
or even from some external influence; such as that of a south wind,
which is moist, as the Philosopher observes.” (Prima pars, q. 92,
a.1)
Sadly, there seems to be little hope for equality
for women in the Catholic Church anytime soon. At the same time, it
is not impossible to hope that Francis will reaffirm Cardinal
Bernadin’s inclusive approach on the sanctity of life.
How good it would be to remind American Catholics
that ALL have a right to a decent life – including not only those in
utero, but also babies, young people exposed to predators, and
adults with no economic or educational options but a poverty draft
into the armed forces.
In addition, we Catholics, and most Americans, do
need reminding that Bernadin’s “seamless garment” and “consistent
ethic of life” apply to people of all nations; that intrinsic evil
should not be given a facelift; and that Thou Shalt Not Kill still
applies – even to a country claiming special privileges as the “sole
indispensable country in the world.”
Ironically, it was Russian President Vladimir
Putin who, in
an op-ed in the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2013, took
issue with Obama’s oft-proclaimed claim of American exceptionalism.
Putin wrote:
“It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to
see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are
big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long
democratic traditions and those still finding their way to
democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but
when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God
created us equal.”
For more on the last papal visit, see:
Consortiumnews.com’s “What
About the War, Benedict?” For an op-ed appearing in Sunday’s
Baltimore Sun, see:
“Will Pope Francis Be Polite or Prophetic”
Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst, works with Tell
the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour
in inner-city Washington. He studied theology and Russian at
Fordham, holds a certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown,
and now teaches at the Servant Leadership School in Washington.