The World’s Unreasoned Love Affair with Pope Francis — a Little Butter around the Margins Does Not Make a Bigoted Meal Tastier — Katie McDonough’s Critique Gets It Right

© 2013 Peter Free

 

20 September 2013

 

 

Condescending love from the holier than thou is still a spiritual abomination

 

Historically, the Catholic Church’s hierarchy has been one of the world’s biggest oppressors of the human spirit.  And, ironically, its lowest ranking adherents have often been among humankind’s most effective liberators.

 

Consequently, I am frequently taken aback at how easily whoever becomes the newest pope on the block receives admiring attention from people outside the Catholic tradition.

 

It is as if punditry and (sometimes) the general public puts their limited ability to think critically aside in a rush of needlessly optimistic good feeling about yet another male icon of patriarchal intolerance being placed on the tiptop of the Church hierarchy.

 

So it has been with Pope Francis, who seems to have a gift for artfully masking his conservative theological leanings with misleading statements of (frankly) half-assed humility.  The world seems agog over his implicitly highly qualified pronouncements about love, which do little to actually inculcate that trait — or the reasoning based on it — into Church teachings.

 

Katie McDonough cut through our admiring idiocy with her penetrating pen:

 

 

Pope Francis on Thursday said some good things about how the Catholic Church has become “obsessed” with the issues of abortion, contraception and gay marriage, and that it has done so at the expense of other Catholic doctrine, like loving your neighbor and being generous to those in need.

 

‘Tell me: When God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?’ We must always consider the person.”

 

But here’s the thing:

 

Even the “best pope ever” is still a theological conservative who doesn’t support reproductive rights, laws that extend equal benefits and rights to gays and lesbians, or women’s equal standing in church leadership.

 

In April, Francis reaffirmed his predecessor’s censure of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella organization that represents 80 percent of Catholic nuns in the United States.

 

These nuns were penalized by the Vatican, and continue to be penalized, for focusing on poverty instead of stoking moral panic about the existence of gay people or sexually active teenagers — exactly the kind of community-centered work that Francis just declared sorely missing from the church.

 

[T]he Vatican said they were undermining “issues of crucial importance to the life of Church and society, such as the Church’s Biblical view of family life and human sexuality” and promoting “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”

 

Francis’ censure places these women under the full authority of the Vatican . . . which includes the appointment of three male bishops to manage the rewriting of the nuns’ conference statutes, review its community-based programs and otherwise ensure the group “properly” follows Catholic teaching.

 

© 2013 Katie McDonough, “Best pope ever”: Still pretty awful!, Salon (20 September 2013) (paragraphs split and reformatted)

 

 

How we treat women and unnoticed saints ultimately characterizes our civilization and its institutions

 

Any ethos that demotes women from a position of equal and admired primacy is intellectually and spiritual idiotic.

 

A religion that spits on — and attempts to qualify into oblivion — the efficiently humanitarian outreaches of its lowest ranking practitioners is a spiritual evil.

 

 

The moral? — Let’s not be misled by oily protestations of humility, when the basics of the Pope’s reasoning are misogynist, bigoted, and hypocritical

 

Arguably, anyone who accepts the title of Vicar of Christ — and the medieval doctrine that goes with it — proves by that acceptance that he (or she) almost certainly misunderstands the fundamental nature of the spiritual mission, even when solely evaluated in New Testament terms.

 

In reality, the holiest people in the Catholic Church are those priests and nuns who selflessly and realistically serve humanity.  Out of sight, out of mind, and enveloped in heart.

 

The rest are Ego’s fruit.  And unworthy of our spiritual adulation.