Exit, Voice, Loyalty and the Catholic Church

People close to the Vatican have been speaking in ominous tones of a conspiracy by masonic lodges and big business to undermine the church.

Sounds like the masonic lodges and big business would be behaving perfectly reasonably.

One question for me about the American Church is whether the exodus, if it occurs, will lead to the creation of new, socially and politically progressive religious communities — partly in response to the current hierarchy’s tacit approval of neocon policies (death penalty, war, torture and the like).

Henry,
If the Catholic Church is, and has always been, so hostile to grassroots change, where do groups like Voice of the Faithful (which organized in Massachusetts in response to the abuse) get the idea that they will have an impact? Or, for that matter, the people who have been sleeping in closed parishes for three years to prevent the diocese from selling or tearing down the buildings? The Catholics I know and grew up around (and those I overhear Sunday evenings in restaurants) criticize the hierarchy constantly, and talk as if they are given a lot of freedom. It’s difficult to imagine how they could think so, if it’s not the case.

Are these organizations simply stirring people up to eventually leave? (About 15% of MA residents who polled as Catholics 15 years ago no longer do.)

Not “15% who polled . . .”: % polling as Catholics was 51%, is now 37%.

Salazar: I think that’s just factually false. The Iraq war was condemned in no uncertain terms, as are torture and death penalty vigils are held constantly. The Church may not issue press releases as frequently as governments, but the positions are both absolute and vocal.

Bianca: first, I think you’re right that many are simply being stirred up to leave. It’s that sort of perception which explains why VoF was met with such a harsh response. Second, as I noted earlier, the Church is bad at top-down change, too, so there’s a difference between feeling freedom and thinking you’re going to change something. Third, VoF meetings were nearly exclusively populated by baby boomers who grew up in the aftermath of Vatican II. I think living through a moment of great change in the church, without much insider knowledge of how that change came to pass, skewed their sensibilities of its future likelihood.

Just that not all such criminal situations stir up such spectacular media coverage.

Can you think of another such criminal situation worthy of comparison?

Maybe Catholics and Episcopalians can just swap members. Episcopalians upset about gays and women being given a place in the church can become Catholics and Catholics upset about child molestation going unpunished and an unresponsive medieval hierarchy can become Episcopalians. I doubt the two groups have much overlap.

People think the Episcopal church is making a bad move with allowing gay bishops and a woman head. I think they just don’t understand the larger trends afoot here.

Let us not also forget the UN and its foray into child raping and prostitution. Obviously, not quite as endemic as what the Catholic church has been up to, but then its only had 50 years to establish itself some level of unaccountability, while the church has been entrenching itself for 1500 years!

Substance: public school systems, for instance, seem to harbor abuse at similar levels, but aren’t seen as globally coordinated. Not that equivalence is any defense whatsoever.

Salazar: I think there are two differences. First, torture and capital punishment, no matter how despicable, do not kill innocent persons in the hundreds of thousands. Second, neocons were adept at saying the right thing on torture while doing the wrong thing. The Church has historically been very bad at dealing well with that, again see the whole sordid history in South America. I’m not excusing it, but merely attempting to reframe what I think the gap really is.

Kathryn: that is exactly what is happening.

jhe: the story has broken on Africa, so go for global. Certainly the record shows that there have been cases where perpetrators were genuinely reassigned to positions where they would not have contact with children rather than abominably juggled about. Defrocking and denouncement are both rather different, and while they may be appropriate in some cases may not be in others, and I don’t think the failure to do either indicates complicity or evil on its own.

I can’t begin to defend bishops who reassigned abusers to other parishes multiple times, or to clerics who are spending their energies on defense rather than cleaning up the problem. I do think, however, that the broader impedance mismatches between the Church and the modern world confuse the issue, and that the main issue has been the understanding of and response to all sorts of de facto evils rather than some particular intention to protect or perpetuate child abuse.

the discussion reminds me of: Gill’s book:
http://books.google.com/books?id=zPzRkTrgB7YC&dq=anthony+gill+cesear&lr=&source=gbs_navlinks_s

There may or may not be any way to produce significant internal pressure on the church, but I’d love to see a more serious effort at applying external pressure. Revoking their tax-exempt and audit-proof status would seem to be an excellent and obvious first step.

A headline that seems tailor-made for a regular five-minute spot on the nightly news and perhaps its own theme: Catholic Church sex abuse scandals around the world

“Now it’s certainly appropriate to wonder about both the prioritization and the tactics there, but that’s a far cry from suggesting that these evils were being actively perpetuated.”

I was in Boston when the abuse scandal blew up there, and the evidence really did suggest that “these evils” were being actively perpetuated. And the response by the Catholic hierarchy was more centralized than you suggest–otherwise Cardinal Law would not have been whisked away to a position in Rome.

Ryan Miller:

Either you concretely know of repeated instances of public school officials covering up and reassigning pedophile teachers while insisting on “internal investigations”, in which case your evidence will be forthcoming since it has now thrice been requested

or you have just demonstrated that you are here to provide cover for an institution at its most criminal and self-regarding.

I’ll come down off my high horse if you can explain how your blind quest for exculpating equivalency is anything but feeble-minded claptrap.

And from the post above:

As Duncan Black notes, the issues are quite straightforward, and have nothing to do with questions of theology. At the least he’s presided over an organization that has systematically covered up for child abusers, and it seems quite plausible that he’s been actively involved in said cover-up.

So what an equivalent rate of abuse might be isn’t the point.

On a related note, a question: How far is sovereign immunity likely to carry the pope and whatever bishops he chooses to shield in the Vatican? And can anyone think of any other religions whose primates get to avail themselves of this happy status?

If you look through http://www.teachercrime.com/ you’ll see quite a number of them had previous allegations etc. And I believe that I did not suggest that equivalency was a good principle, let alone exculpating, but rather attempted merely to explain why some primates feel that the media has them in its sights. Certainly the links to the name “Ratzinger” have a bit of a feel of attempting to bring him into it.

Uncle Kvetch: I agree and I think it’s problematic, but again I think that’s more of a question of policy vs action than about right-wing vs left-wing topics.

jdkbrown: I, too, am a Bostonian, and I’m not sure why you read this the way you do. Bernard Cardinal Law has the most humiliating, menial job that it is possible for a Cardinal to hold. You may think that punishment is insufficient, but it’s definitely punishment, not protection.

akatsuki: you really think there’s no pressure to change? Seminary rectors are now under spectacular pressure to ferret out whether applicants may have tendencies to pederasty. In fact, I’m not really sure what further the Church would do on the subject in the developed world. Many African dioceses haven’t come to terms with that reality yet, however.

tom bach: an excellent point. I do think bureaucrats, even Church ones, often lose sight of that.

Bernard Cardinal Law has the most humiliating, menial job that it is possible for a Cardinal to hold.

Restroom cleaner at the penitentiary for 3 cents / hour?

…or is it impossible to jail a Cardinal now?

[akatsuki is right.]

substance: as have a number of priests whose accusers went to the civil authorities before the statute of limitations expired. The bishops and superintendents both seem to be walking free.

salient: in context, I meant possible for him to be assigned to by the Pope.

It’s important to remember that the canonical relationship between bishop and priest is as between father and son. A father certainly cannot morally let his son abuse his grandchild, but nor is he morally required to report his son to the police, or disown (defrock) him. The evil committed by both the abusers and their reassigners was great, but I don’t think defrockings and resignations are going to change anything. If they were, why did the rate of abuse drop so dramatically in the last twenty years? Canon law doesn’t have any revenge principle and I don’t think it should. Abortionists, too, are welcome to the confessional at any time.

salient: assuming he has some other way of preventing the abuse (if he doesn’t, then that’s probably morally required). What would create such a moral duty?

Well, maybe mixing moral duty with the particular laws of whatever jurisdiction might be theoretically inappropriate.

It’s not just about preventing further abuse of that particular kid, e.g. by removing the grandson from that situation. It’s about preventing the abuser from attacking someone else, I’d presume, even if there’s no ‘appropriate punishment’ motive.

And for a more appropriate comparison, suppose X was the mayor, X had ten sons, and three of them were sexually abusing their grandkids. X leans on the sheriff and the local newspaper guy to look the other way whenever evidence of this emerges, and X pays for his kids’ moving expenses when scandal’s potentially about to break, maybe putting that particular grandkid in another home. X doesn’t know all the details, but relatives know, and they collude to make sure no one else finds out. When one of X’s sons was divorced by a wife angry over the abuse she learned about, you helped find him another wife, found ways to intimidate the ex-wife into shutting up, and encouraged the son to have more kids with his new wife (he did, and proceeded to abuse those kids).

Don’t people have a moral duty to… not act like X? At all?

Sorry, once in there I typed “you” where I meant X. It was an editing fail, not in any way meant as an accusation.

Ryan, whether or not it’s a moral duty, it’s a legal obligation. (Not to say anything about the moral obligation of the cleric to his parishoners.) And coming around again to your comment, since when has there been (in the US at least) any moral, common-law, or statuatory principle that parents are not be required to report the crimes of their children, or to provide evidence or testify against them in court?

It is understatement to say that the Church gets the same treatment as other organizations with similar scandals. In fact, the Church has consistently been let off easy in this regard, as it still is today. Anybody who doubts it should ask the McMartin family what happens to people who are accused of abetting child abuse – even when the charges are nonsense.

Bernard Law skipped the country to escape charges, got a sweet sinecure at the Vatican, and was one of nine prelates who presided over John Paul’s funeral masses. So not only was he not disgraced, he was explicitly honored by the Vatican after he failed to cooperate with the law’s attempts to uncover his child sex ring.

Lord, I wish folks would try a little harder to FOCUS.

For one thing, the Pope is not “infallible”. The doctrine doesn’t say that if a Pope decided to get into the Vatican office pool on the NCAA, he’s gonna beat out the autistic kid with all perfect picks. The doctrine is that when the Pope SAYS something is a matter of faith and morals on which what he is saying right now, on this matter, is absolutely true: THEN — and only then — is that doctrine infallible.

It’s only ever been used for I think three statements about Mary.

For another, there are two reasons why this scandal is so serious for the Church, and neither of ’em are directly related to sex, as such.

The primary reason it’s so serious is because the Church so clearly aided and abetted crimes and criminals. If these guys had been sneaking out of the confessional to knock off banks and 7-11s, it would be pretty easy to see that the responsibility of their employer would have been to turn ’em in. Somehow, that wasn’t clear to the Church itself.

The second reason it’s so serious is because it speaks to the relationship that doctrine has to the institution. In most institutions, if a minor official commits a crime and a mid-level official covers it up, the institution itself is structured so that they can cut it off and heal — hell, making prompt hard calls like that is precisely what gets mid-level officials promoted to the top levels, in healthy organizations. But the Church’s institutional structure is so saturated with its doctrine that they’re just not nimble (much less responsible, never mind moral) about the obvious civic responsibilities they shirked.

That’s why this is so serious, and why they’ve had such difficulties dealing with matters that, in a healthy institution, would have been dealt with long ago.

So, naturally, they’re dealing with the problem at the top, because there’s no place else to pass it along: I’m not sure a Pope has EVER resigned, so don’t hold your breath it will happen now.

An arrest seems more likely – and man! that would be crushing.

It would be interesting if somebody familiar with Catholic doctrine were to actually write out what the Pope should say, and do, that even COULD be consistent with the institutional responsibilities of the office.

I like Matt Taibbi’s take on this: The Catholic Church is a criminal enterprise

Law is the only non-retired Cardinal who does not have a curial or diocesan position of authority. This is not an accident.

My heart bleeds for him.

The man should be in jail, and this is the best you can do?

First, that it’s appropriate for bishops to look to canon law first, as a moral matter.

Yes, in a case where your employee is sodomizing kids, you look at the employee handbook. It is, after all, a workplace incident.

I can’t forget that all this is on top of the abuse of telling children a bunch of lies, that goodness comes from “god” and not from your own nature; that women are beneath men in holiness, and therefore cannot be the spiritual leaders that men can; that priests have grace that others don’t; that a wife should suffer abuse from her husband because “god” wants her to – tripe like this. I went to Catholic school for eight years, and I never experienced anything like the goodness I’ve seen in my atheist friends and teachers. It’s such a pathetic pretense, that there is any enlightenment in such a sick organisation. It’s a dirty old mens’ club, that’s all.

I had a teacher in high school, in his mid 40’s, who married a recent college graduate.
They met when she was one of his students in 10th grade.
The heart of the problem isn’t sex between 16 year olds and 40 year olds, it’s the gulf between absolute moral authority and absolute corruption.
No one should ever have such authority over anyone, and the Catholic church is founded on it that lie.

From Ryan’s NCR link:

In 1995, some of Murphy’s victims and their lawyers contacted the now-archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland (ironic, yes, but that’s a different issue), reporting Murphy’s actions from the 1970s.

What’s ironic? This:

Milwaukee, Wis (CNA) – Former Archbishop of Milwaukee Rembert Weakland, who resigned after revelations that his archdiocese paid $450,000 to a man who alleged the archbishop had sexually assaulted him, will soon publish a memoir describing his work in the Church and his sexual orientation.

Now that’s a stirring essay in defense of reasonable behaviour by church officials!

So, naturally, they’re dealing with the problem at the top, because there’s no place else to pass it along: I’m not sure a Pope has EVER resigned, so don’t hold your breath it will happen now.

It has happened once: Celestine V.

ajay @64,

[Papal abdication] has happened once: Celestine V

And Celestine went to hell doing so, sent there by no less an authority than Dante himself.

Though in terms of how best to deal with the current incumbent, part of me can’t help but admire Philip IV’s way of addressing the issues presented by Celestine’s immediate successor.

other alex: I’m still surprised by all the surprise. I don’t recall a time in my adult life when I wasn’t conscious that black humour about the sexual proclivities of priests put in charge of children was a commonplace

No. I remember when the Irish scandals blew up, and I don’t remember anyone I knew being in the least bit surprised. This may just be anti-Catholic prejudice, of course.

I remember reading that besides Judas, the Catholic church has only once officially declared that a person is in Hell.

The subject was some minor Italian nobleman at war with the church, in the days that the Pope still had divisions and lots of them. The Church had sent a 15 year old cardinal as messenger, and the guy publicly raped the kid in front of his troops to make a statement. Since the raping of children obviously isn’t the big objection, I guess it was raping cardinals in public that damns your soul.

The trouble, is I can’t find any confirmation of this story, which leads to scary implication that I might have accidentally made it up myself.

Not to get self-referential, but it seems like it might be useful to explain my monicker in this context: in the 18th century, it became necessary to create an American bishop — John Carroll. Like all consecrated bishops, he was required to condemn all heresies and heretics. Unlike others, he refused — because that would have meant that he would have been damning George Washington himself (a Mason). The Vatican let that slide for about a century.

But Carroll’s refusal began what was eventually known as “the Americanist heresy”. The American divergence from Vatican doctrine really got going in the 1850s, when Pius IX issued the Syllabus of Errors which said, among other things, that freedom of speech and religion, and the separation of Church and State, were not compatible with being a faithful Catholic. (Catholic apologists note that Pius did not claim the Syllabus was infallible doctrine; most folks figure this is a distinction without much difference.)

In mid to late 19th century America, there was a wave of Catholic immigration as well as a resurgence of the faith among foreign stock (US citizens with immigrant parents), particularly among German-Americans in the midwest. The leaders of that resurgence, notably Hecker and Orestes Brownson, didn’t emphasize certain aspects of Catholicism (e.g., Mary), but were passionate that being a good Catholic AND a patriotic American was not only possible, it was a Very Good Thing. (The Vatican wasn’t quite sure.)

One of these guys served in the Civil War, and eventually became Cardinal Gibbons, who gave us the Baltimore Catechism. (Taught Babe Ruth, too.) He was in charge of the American Church when a bunch of French knuckleheads provoked Leo XIII to investigate, and eventually condemn “Americanism”.

It’s sometimes called the phantom heresy, because neither the US Church nor the Vatican wants to recall what it meant — particularly now. In a nutshell, the Americanist heresy was the idea that civics has a moral value in itself. When I read about that, I thought: well, that’s me. Thus, my online id and alter ego.

Leo XIII condemned the Americanist heresey in 1899 by citing Church authority: civics, he said, has no moral value UNLESS it reinforces the authority of the Pope.

The thing about the Americanist heresy is that, in the end, it WON: much of the core ideas of the heresy (for example, the redefinition of “outside the Church there is no salvation” ) became Church doctrine at Vatican II, notably because of JC Murray.

So it’s central to the reactionary approach the Church has taken since Vatican II, personified by Benedict but beginning with JPII before he became Pope, when he served as the Vatican’s designated dissenter from the birth control commission (which included not only laymen, but also married women!); JPII’s dissent became the Vatican’s position on the relationship between celibate authority and sex.

The Americanist heresy doesn’t recognize the tainted Biblical idea of rendering unto Caesar (which was, after all, a defense of slavery), it acknowledges instead that secular authority in a democracy has an inherently moral power which the Church must accept. (As a Union veteran of the Civil War, Gibbons knew this keenly — the Catholic Church was the largest American denomination that did not split over slavery: nobody needed to tell Gibbons that Southern Catholics were wrong, no matter what they were told from the pulpit.)

LOL — anyway, TMI. It just seems relevant to any discussion of how and why the Vatican just didn’t order all bishops to turn all criminal priests over to the cops. (But if anybody wants to produce the play I’ve written about all this, let me know.)

Kewlness — I appreciate the encouragement.

LOL — and I didn’t even mention the lesbian lead character.*

*F’r real, btw: her name was Ella Edes, and she was the Vatican reporter for the American Catholic press. She knew everybody, and was a genuine player in the Vatican’s wheeling and dealing surrounding the Spanish-American War, which the Pope opposed. The evidence for her orientation is that she never married but had a lifelong female companion, which I have some fun with onstage: gotta love a tall, striking redhead who used her beauty to get her brains where they could do some good.

I also couldn’t resist telling part of the story — which has to have a big historic sweep to work — with Teddy Roosevelt, for two reasons: first, TR was the first to apply the word “Americanization” to immigrants. Orestes Brownson had coined the word — and probably the concept — for the American Catholic Church. When he was NYC police commissioner, TR had dinner with Cardinal Gibbons in Baltimore (at the home of his friend, who was Napoleon’s nephew, no less), which is where TR heard the word from Gibbons himself.

Secondly, the Vatican’s attempt to keep secular America from kicking Catholic Spain out of Cuba was the most important global event leading up to Leo XIII condemning the Americanist heresy. But not too long before, there was this intriguing little staged event at Cape May, between President Harrison and Cardinal Gibbons, who just ‘happened’ to be walking along the same stretch of beach. The incident has intriguing echoes with what happened much later with Hitler, and even what goes on now with Muslims and al-Qaeda: there was a fight between the German and Irish stock Catholics in the US at the time. The German stock folks resented all the Irish stock guys hogging the American appointments for bishops — which, as it happens, is Ross Douthat’s theme on the scandal, that Cullen in Ireland (the worst anti-erotic bishop of modern times) caused the repressive character of the Church which in turn caused the scandal.

So Gibbons, as the first cardinal in the American church, made a point of bumping into the President of the United States at the beach, and got his informal personal opinion that it would better for American Catholics to be taught in English than in German. (Sounds something like the current debate over Spanish-speaking immigrants, no?) That’s what Gibbons wanted, so he promptly communicated it to Leo XIII, who immediately squelched the Prussian movement called Cahenslyism.

I think it’s a helluva story, at any rate, and oughta be more widely known.

I accept the claim that change in the church tends to be top down and it is resistant, though not totally impervious, to down up change. I think the church has allowed evil behaviour and effectively condoned it.
However, one of the main issues that is being ignored is the implicit acceptance by civil authorities of the churches misbehaviour and its unwillingness to seriously tackle it.
Maybe the route to get the church to change is pressure on the civil authorities to change the relationship between civil authorities and the church so the civil authorities are much more intrusive.

“it acknowledges instead that secular authority in a democracy has an inherently moral power which the Church must accept. ”

Why? First, there’s no reason to just assert that democracies (as a category) are INHERENTLY more moral than other forms of government. The Confederate States of America were a democracy. The Confederate States were as secular as the United States as the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights were incorporated directly into the Confederate constitution.

But that leads us directly to the question: obviously, some democracies are even massively evil regimes (like the Confederacy). If the Confederacy had won the Civil War, should the American Church be supporting that regime? After all, the Confederacy was an actual democracy that performed numerous absolutely essential civic functions – in fact, in terms of civic functions, the Confederacy (at least, for non-slaves) essentially had the exact same things as the United States did. (Of course, the Confederacy was composed of former US states, so many aspects of the Confederacy’s governance were precisely the same as they were before the war.)

It’s quite possible to assert that a particular monarchy is superior to a particular democracy – in fact, that was indeed the case with the Confederacy. Some monarchies were, in fact, superior to the democratic Confederacy.

“I realize you think you were making a relative argument—that a slaveholder “democracy” can be morally inferior to a “free” monarchy—but it’s bullshit.”

You’re avoiding the question: does the mere fact of democracy (and, yes, the Confederacy was a democracy) mean LITERALLY every democracy is inherently better than ANY other possible state? There’s nothing the worst democracy could do that it would not, by definition, be better than any other possible regime?

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” (Winston Churchill in the House of Commons on Nov. 11, 1947)

Besides, what I actually said (describing a heresy that I did not invent, after all, although I’ve been encouraged to revive it) was that 1) civics has a moral value in itself, and 2) that secular authority in a democracy has a moral power that the Church must accept. Neither of those are remotely like your odd, ahistorical misunderstanding of the point. That you keep distorting the idea that the Vatican has to recognize the moral power of secular authority into something grotesque does not indicate you’d handle an argument on even your weird terms well.

It’s important to realize that at the center of the Church’s alienation from its moral responsibilities in hiding criminal priests, is that it not only considers itself morally superior to the civil law in these matters, it considers the civil law to be essentially IMmoral — literally and precisely to the extent that it would be prosecuting priests and bishops.

That’s why the Americanist heresy cuts so close to the bone on this one. As Leo XIII said of everything modern in 1899: “Yet all this, to be of any solid benefit, nay, to have a real existence and growth, can only be on the condition of recognizing the wisdom and authority of the Church.”

Understand THAT attitude, and it’s easy to see why something like two-thirds of all American bishops have been documented to have covered up crimes by the priests for whom they were responsible.

As for your distorted idea it’s worth arguing whether any democracy must be better than any other form of government: it’s a monumentally stoooopid formulation of a practical (not an abstract) set of questions.

“2) that secular authority in a democracy has a moral power that the Church must accept”

1. Does this secular authority in a democracy have moral powers that secular authorities in other types of regimes don’t (and indeed, can’t) have? Do religious authorities in democracies (many democracies had established religions, and some still have them) have moral powers that the Church must accept? Do religious authorities in non-democracies have moral powers that the Church must accept?
2. There have been numerous democracies within the time the Roman Catholic Church has existed. Some of these had conflicts with other democracies (including wars). Thus, the secular authorities of one democracy could be ordering their citizens to kill the citizens of another democracy. Wouldn’t this doctrine mean that Roman Catholics on both sides MUST engage, to the best of their abilities, in this war? Which means these Roman Catholic citizens must kill each other. And this killing is morally correct (by definition) because their respective states order them to kill. They do not have a choice in this matter.

“but it’s a position that has little resonance in contemporary democratic theory or popular discourses of democracy”

You’re inherently assuming here that contemporary democratic theory is by definition correct. Again, most religions have had to deal with many different kinds of political regimes and often, have needed to deal with numerous kinds of political regimes at the same time (Lutherans had to deal with being under democracies, absolute monarchies and aristocratic republics all at the same time, for instance). The Americanist is asserting that all religions should treat all democracies in a quite different way than they treat all non-democracies.

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Besides being a piece of rhetoric and leaving multiple terms undefined, Churchill seems to be making a prudential argument: democracy, in general, is a better regime than non-democracies. He certainly does not think that all democracies, by definition, are better than all non-democracies. He clearly believes there can be, in practice, democracies which are worse than the non-democracies of their times. For example, Churchill clearly favors the not very democratic Great Britain of 1860-1865 to the democratic Confederacy of 1860-1865.

Churchill believes that usually democracy is the best regime. The flip side of this is that he does not think democracy is universally the best regime in all times and places.

“Governments don’t GRANT rights. We are born with them.”

Assertion. Beyond the fact that many religions deal with regimes that explicitly reject this statement. It cannot be taken simply as a given in Islam, Judaism or numerous other faiths.

“That simple and damned revolutionary concept is what made America—because we are that rarest of things, a CONSERVATIVE revolution. The colonists originally sought only those rights as colonists, e.g., the right to tax themselves with their own representatives, that they would have had as Englishmen. But the Crown replied that they didn’t have those rights—because the Crown had not granted them.”

I’m not certain why this is even being mentioned. All religions which cross the boundaries of multiple states inherently need to think about morals independently of particular political regimes. Not all Catholics live in the United States. In fact, only a small percentage of Catholics live in the United States. Historically, only a trivial number of Catholics interacted with the United States (most, of course, died before the United States existed). The same goes for any other particular regime type, particular geographic location, particular ethnic groups and so on. Historically, regimes change over time (the regime of the United States now is different than the one in 1773, obviously). So, every religion retains the ability to judge regimes independently from the state authorities. If they don’t, they’re meaningless – it means that the political authorities simply run the religions for all practical purposes.

BB: you realize, of course, that literally no one (including you) has a clue what you’re talking about, much less its extremely hypothetical (and only cuz I’m cutting you a break) relevance to the thread.

But just cuz it’s Holy Week, I’ll unpack the odd baggage you keep dragging into this: it’s perfectly legit for someone to express the view that the Declaration’s founding concept that governments don’t grant rights, that we’re born with them, is just an opinion like any other — an “assertion” — but it is NOT legit to insist that the Declaration (based on this principle) isn’t the foundation of “Americanism”.

Likewise, it is perfectly legit for non-Catholics to dis the Vatican for stuff like infallibility, but it is NOT legit for anybody (Catholic or not) to mis-state what the actual doctrine IS, for Catholics.

The conflict between the Church as an institution (which is so saturated with its doctrine), and the actually, American-ishly revolutionary responsibilities of, well, everybody’s civic values that would have turned all these criminal priests in to the cops in a heartbeat, is pretty obvious.

So it’s just odd that BB keeps trying to make up definitions (like the Confederacy was a “democracy”) and then apply ’em as if they substitute for the stark reality that is staring one of the world’s great religions in the face.

Just to get technical: No, slavery is not mentioned in the original US Constitution. There are two references to it — the infamous (and widely misunderstood) 3/5s clause, and the following: “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.”

This is an example of why I dunno that arguing with you about terms you define is likely to be productive: you get basic civics wrong.

The only time the Constitution mentions slavery is to abolish it, in the 13th amendment.

Djw,

I’m genuinely curious: what is the standard by which the contemporary US is a democracy, but the Confederacy was not?

In both, sovereignty is located in the people, exercised through elections; in both, the people consists of adult citizens, with large numbers of others (children, immigrants, prisoners and so on, and slaves in the Confederacy) subject to the authority of the state but without political rights, and with some groups of citizens (residents of DC, Puerto Rico and other territories today, and free blacks in the Confederacy, and of course blacks in much of the post-Civil War South) with sharply circumscribed political rights. How is the one case different from the other?

In both, sovereignty is located in the people, exercised through elections; in both, the people consists of adult citizens, with large numbers of others (children, immigrants, prisoners and so on, and slaves in the Confederacy) subject to the authority of the state but without political rights, and with some groups of citizens (residents of DC, Puerto Rico and other territories today, and free blacks in the Confederacy, and of course blacks in much of the post-Civil War South) with sharply circumscribed political rights.

Small prize for the first man to name the (very, very large) group of disenfranchised Confederate citizens that lemuel has forgotten to mention.

“Small prize for the first man to name the (very, very large) group of disenfranchised Confederate citizens that lemuel has forgotten to mention.”

Problem: under this definition, the United States wasn’t a democracy either until 1865 (and quite arguably until 1964). The United Kingdom wasn’t a democracy until probably the Third Reform Act of 1884. Of course, all nations of that time didn’t allow women to vote (and the female population was even larger than the slave population). If we use female suffrage as a goalpost, the United States wasn’t a democracy until 1920, the UK wasn’t a democracy until 1918, Switzerland until 1971, the Netherlands until 1919 and France until 1944.

I don’t see the point of the Confederacy thread. Clearly the whole point of the existence of the Confederacy was to perpetuate slavery at the point of a gun. As such it was an illegitimate state irregardless of the extent of the franchise.

Come to that, I don’t see the point of using the intention of ‘the founders’ as a normative argument for how the country should be run. The intention of at least a third of the founders was to perpetuate slavery and a caste based society that put them at the top of the heap. Several were serial rapists of slave-women.

I suspect that the fondness of certain parties for making such arguments comes not in spite of the serial rape problem and the institution that enabled it, but rather because that is deep-down the way they think we should live.

BB, you fit the cliche definition of a fanatic: redoubling your efforts when you’ve lost sight of your goal.

The theme of the thread is the moral and legal failings of the Catholic Church worldwide, including the United States, specifically regarding sexual crimes committed by priests against (mostly) kids, which were covered up by the heirarchy, all the way up to the current Pope.

Derailing that because you want to argue whether the Confederacy was a democracy indicates a certain fascination with shiny objects on which perhaps you should consult a professional.

F’r instance, when you’re not making flat-out errors (e.g., the Constitution does not mention slavery, as you claimed in 91), you keep asking, viz. 95: “how was the Confederacy not a democracy?” I’ve pointed out that you bounce back and forth from abstractions (which you get wrong) to history (in which your errors are worse): it’s Calvinball — and now you’re losing by the lopsided score of Oreos to eleventy-one.

Nevertheless, out of charity, I spoke to your abstract point, such as it is: to the extent a “democracy” like the Confederacy is immoral, it’s not a democracy; just as to the extent a “monarchy” is moral (name some), it’s not a monarchy.

You promptly confused this simple observation — again! — by insisting on several impossible and irrelevant things at once. So let’s just take the irrelevancies:

I had noted the specific connection between the Roman Catholic Church’s institutional structure, and its doctrine. I also pointed out that this is directly related to the Americanist heresy, which I explained denotes, among other things, that the Vatican must acknowledge the moral power of secular authority in a democracy.

You promptly distorted that, and have continued to bend it to your twisted mind ever since. You’d do better to take real thinking straight, like good whiskey.

The classic formula for the separation of Church and State — which was formally rejected by the Vatican as late as 1854 — is Christ’s “render unto Caesar”. In the Gospel, this is generally (and properly) understood to be about idolatry and commerce, since the Pharisee who was trying to trap Christ asked him about whether it was legit for a Jew to use Roman money, as a religious matter.

But I noted it was ultimately a rationalization for slavery — Rome was a slave state, of course, and you will search in vain throughout the Bible for a moral condemnation of slavery, either as a legal institution or morally. (Slavery is advocated on several occasions in the Old Testament, particularly in Leviticus, and expected as a matter of course until the end of time in the New Testament.)

Much like the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, you seem to have missed the significance of that.

The honor of the first unequivocal, moral attack on slavery belongs to Patrick — who also happens to have been the first missionary to go outside of the Roman empire. The eventual abolition of slavery was religiously inspired (Wilberforce, the Quakers), but it was NOT carried out by an authoritarian religious structure, such as the Roman Church, or others require — again, for doctrinal reasons.

Again, you’d do better to take real thinking straight, on its own terms, rather than to constantly try to bend abstractions that are beyond your intellectual strength. It’s not just you, of course: Ajay also misses the plain language of the Declaration, that “to defend these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their JUST powers from the consent of the governed…” (emphasis added)

Because governments do not grant rights, We, the People — though sovereign — have no legitimate power to take away the rights that individuals are born with. Slavery is not, and can never be a legitimate exercise of popular sovereignty, any more than a legislature can repeal gravity or Canute could command the tide.

Despite your transparent sophistry, BB, this is essentially a MORAL point, stated bluntly in the Declaration as self-evident. It’s because you keep skipping over the practical civics of the history that you have such trouble understanding where it led us. But it’s not like these are facts hidden from view.

Legions of historians (notably Richard Ellis in Founding Brothers) have explored how the United States was founded first on the proposition that we are all equal (the Declaration), and then on its contradiction, the compromise with slavery that made us a nation in the Revolution and the Constitution.

What I’ve been pointing out in this thread — kindly don’t skip over it this time — is that the resolution of that contradiction in the Civil War is directly related to the scandal confronting the Catholic Church, because of the Americanist heresy. See how focus works?

Cardinal Gibbon served as a Union chaplain (from a slave state, no less), so he knew from personal experience the moral power of preserving the Union BY abolishing slavery. With acolytes like Monsignor O’Connell (whose experience of the war including the burning and looting of his parish church in South Carolina), Gibbon was vividly aware that the American Catholic Church was the only American denomination that didn’t break up over slavery. That he championed Americanization — a term coined for the Catholic Church, and later applied to immigrants — took a moral and political courage that you’d do well to perceive, never mind appreciate. It is a very big deal for a Cardinal to be that close to a heresy.

Like I said, the essence of the Americanist heresy is the notion that civics itself has a moral value: as demonstrated by the appalling price the Civil War exacted, in order to preserve the Union by abolition. The Americanist heresy includes the idea — specifically condemned by Leo XIII, whose view of the Vatican’s moral authority remains Benedict’s today — that the Papacy must acknowledge the moral power of secular authority in a democracy. That is what the Vatican has refused to do regarding criminal priests and the bishops who protected them.

You have deluded yourself that “the moral power of secular authority in a democracy” denotes the Confederacy. The history I have cited repeatedly demonstrates that it refers to the UNION, which abolished slavery.

Strive to take real thinking straight. You can’t handle the fizzy stuff.

Alex @ 103: yeah, you’re right. I was wrong to leave that out.

Before people get exercised about C19 ‘democracy’ in the USA [or the CSA], they should read something like “American Mobbing, 1828-1861: Toward Civil War”, by David Grimsted, in which is discussed the extent to which actual physical violence was an everyday part of political life, up to and including the need to literally fight one’s way to the ballot-box on election day, and how this was upheld by observers as an example of the manliness, independence, forthrightness, etc etc of the American democratic spirit.

“to the extent a “democracy” like the Confederacy is immoral, it’s not a democracy; just as to the extent a “monarchy” is moral (name some), it’s not a monarchy.”

1. This seems to be a no true scotsman argument.
2. The statement renders the words democracy and monarchy meaningless. The word moral (entirely undefined) actually does all the work.
3. All states do some moral things and some immoral things. Where do we draw the line so that some states are democracies? If we say the word democracy means a state that has done absolutely no immoral things ever, the set of democracies is an empty set. There are no actually existing democracies that haven’t done bad things. Similarly, many monarchies have done at least some good things. Is the set of monarchies also empty (or almost empty)?

@108: Thomas Frazier also devoted a chapter to this topic in “The Underside of American History, Vol. 1.”

““to the extent a “democracy” like the Confederacy is immoral, it’s not a democracy; just as to the extent a “monarchy” is moral (name some), it’s not a monarchy.””

Please explain this above statement of yours. I confess I do not understand what it means. Perhaps I’m simply dumb, but if it is as easily understandable as you say, it should be easy to explicate it further to me.

“You seem to think this meant that ALL democracies, or ANY democracy, must be morally superior to any other conceivable form of government in any possible circumstance”

Ah, we’re getting somewhere. Religions should recognize the moral power of the secular authority of a good or moral democracy. Thus, armed with this rule, we can determine that, if the Union was a good democracy, religions should prefer the Union (a good democracy) as opposed to a bad democracy (the Confederacy, if the Confederacy is a bad democracy).

How does a religion determine whether a particular regime is good or a democracy? Both the Union and the Confederacy claim to be good and both claim to be democracies. Indeed, the PRC and the USSR also claimed to be both good and to be democracies. All regimes everywhere at least claim to be good (not all claim to be democracies). The religion needs some rules or guides to determine the claims of the Union (good democracy) versus the Confederacy (bad democracy) versus the PRC and USSR (neither good nor democracies). What do you suggest to be these rules?

Re Steve LaBonne @1:

Last week, the center-left daily La Repubblica wrote, without attribution, that “certain Catholic circles” believed the criticism of the church stemmed from “a New York ‘Jewish lobby.’”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/world/europe/03church.html

Um, hix: you HAVE heard about this scandal? It’s not like it’s new: consider how the Church directed Catholics to SECRETLY handle such cases back in 1962 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimen_sollicitationis

Ratzinger was personally involved in a number of cases, both in Germany while he was an Archbishop, and in at least one US case after he went to the Vatican. Hell, even the Curia doesn’t try to deny those facts.

How can you be unaware of ’em?

Your bizarre notion that it is anti-Catholic to report the facts, even as you insist that the Church is somehow capable of preventing a coverup from ever reaching Vatican City, is just ignorant.

What’s happened is clearly the opposite: in hundreds, if not thousands of cases, local Catholic authorities chose to resist all efforts to turn criminal priests over to civil prosecutors. In most cases, this was done by direct intimidation of witnesses. As noted upthread (and, in a somewhat uninformed way, it was the central point of Henry’s post itself), most organizations are structured and organized to prevent a scandal like this from ever getting too far up the food chain. In fact, in a healthy heirarchy one of the best ways to get promoted is to be the mid-level guy who realizes that something can’t be covered up, so you fix it. The organization’s reputation takes the hit, and then you move on.

But not the Roman Catholic Church. Its structure is too closely identified with its doctrines — the Mystical Body of Christ, after all — to be sufficiently nimble. That’s why I noted the relationship all this has to the Americanist heresy: the Church has historically held that it can NOT acknowledge the moral power of secular authority. That’s precisely why there are documents proving beyond any reasonable doubt that the cover up in every local case was not only authorized, it was REQUIRED by the heirarchy, e.g., Crimen sollicitationis.

There is documented evidence that Ratzinger personally ordered bishops and parish priests alike to carry out this policy, with his own, personal, infamous directive at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that their primary responsibility in criminal cases involving sexual abuse by priests was to defend the Church’s reputation.

How come you don’t know that? It’s been in all the papers.