You’re going to
find politics wherever people gather, or so someone once told me when I had objected
to using the secular political terms “liberal” and “conservative” to describe
different factions within the Church.
And he was right, if by “politics” we mean the small-p wrangling that
unavoidably accompanies any human enterprise requiring two or more people. But that is a very different thing from
Politics, of the partisan variety. The Church is not a political
party, and does not work like a political party.
The Synod on the Family, 2014 |
That may seem an obvious point to you, but it’s not at all obvious to very
many people. It’s a distinction lost on
most people outside of the Church for instance, for many of whom politics has
taken the place of religion, and so has become the lens through which they interpret
everything. Many such people have come to dominate the secular media in the
developed world, with the result that the mass media projects the secular political model onto the Church, with “bad guys” called conservatives working to thwart the “good
guys”, the liberals (sometimes referred to as progressives), who are fighting
to bring about a kinder, better future.
This is the only image of the inner-workings of the Church most people
see, including most ordinary Catholics, unless they intentionally seek out
Catholic publications which reject this distorted view (sadly, many
self-identified Catholic outlets do not).
This is not to
say that there isn’t a wide range of legitimate differences of opinion within
the Church; there most certainly is.
Unlike a political party, however, where major policy planks can change
overnight with a vote of the membership (and why not? They’re only opinions),
there are many things in the Church which are grounded in Divine Revelation, and are therefore not up for negotiation. This vital distinction was expressed very
clearly by then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) in 2004. Senator John Kerry, the nominee of the Democratic
Party for President of the United States, was widely criticized for receiving
communion and touting his Catholic bona fides despite his open advocacy
for legal abortion and other positions contrary to Catholic moral
teaching. Accordingly, Cardinal
Ratzinger wrote a letter (later published by the Holy See under the title
“Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion: General Principles”) to Kerry’s
ordinary, then Archbishop of Washington, D.C. Theodore McCarrick, which gives an excellent example of how the
Church is different from a political party, as when it says:
Not all moral issues have the same
moral weight as abortion and euthanasia.
For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on
the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would
not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy
Communion. While the Church exhorts
civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy
in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up
arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of
opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty,
but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI |
This crucial
difference can be obscured by applying secular political terms to church
“politics”. Political parties often
change even basic positions, and this is sometimes a good thing: consider that,
when I was a child, many prominent leaders in the Democratic Party in the United
States were unapologetic White Supremacists; such a position would be
unthinkable today, and yet nobody doubts that the Democratic Party is still the
Democratic Party. Using the political
analogy can create the impression that proposed changes in the Church are
benign or even desirable changes of the same sort.
So-called
liberals in the Church today, however, are not advocating simply the more “liberal”
application of unchanging principles in prudential situations, but are pushing
for changing more foundational things like the teaching on marriage, the meaning
of priesthood, sexual morality, etc. The
Catholic Church, however, can’t change its teachings and still remain the
Catholic Church. One can usually make a case for being either a conservative or
a liberal in political matters, but when it comes to Church Doctrine, we can
only be Catholic, or Not.
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