Drew Downs
Make a New Normal
Make a New Normal
Roman Catholic Bishops Out of Control
No, I have no evidence of miters run amok, but if anything describes the Roman Catholic Church in the last millenium it is the word “control”. As Tim Padgett of Time argues in his piece on the birth control debate, that is the one thing Roman Catholic Bishops have lost. More precisely, they have lost power and influence in the wider society and no longer speak for most Roman Catholics, particularly on grounds of human sexuality:
Not on abortion or the death penalty (a majority of Catholics believe those should remain legal); on divorce or homosexuality (most say those are acceptable); on women being ordained as priests and priests getting married (ditto); or on masturbation and pre-marital sex (ditto again, Your Excellencies).
Pope Paul VI – Image via Wikipedia And especially not on contraception. Ever since Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the Church’s senseless ban on birth control in 1968, few doctrines have been as vilified, ridiculed and outright ignored by Catholics – evidenced by a recent study showing that 98% of American Catholic women have used some form of contraception. It’s hard to believe, as the bishops would have it, that those women simply succumbed to society’s pressure to do the secular thing. They’ve decided, in keeping with their faith’s precept of exercising personal conscience, that family planning is the moral and societally responsible thing to do — for example, preventing unwanted pregnancies and therefore abortions. And it explains why a recent Public Religion Research Institute poll found most Catholics support the contraception coverage mandate even for Catholic-affiliated organizations. Presumably most endorse Friday’s compromise.
Padgett makes several good arguments, particularly in encouraging the media to stop acting as if any bishop’s opinion is a universally-held belief by all Catholics. For me, just as striking, and under-examined is the link between Catholics and conservative evangelicals. He refrences it, to make his point about the decline in Roman Catholic influence:
Far more Evangelical Protestants, according to the PRRI survey, back the bishops than Catholics do. But that hardly makes the bishops, when it comes to the more independent Catholic vote, the same force to be reckoned with that they were in the 20th century.
And this held true in the political and election results since, at least, 2004, when a conservative evangelical faced off against a Roman Catholic in the presidential election. This is a much more significant development for catholicism than decline of power or control: that so few devoted Catholics support church teaching and so many evangelicals do. What becomes a church that loses the hearts of a majority of its supporters, but gains inroads with a group, decades ago seen as antithetical? Surely the effects of this will be staggering in the coming decade.
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