Father Greeley, who alternates between writing sex novels and offering sociological insights, likes gay marriage. In fact, he calls those who are opposed to it—which would be most Americans—bigots. Consider what happened in 1996 when President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, a bill that protects states from being forced to recognize gay marriages performed elsewhere (only 14 senators voted against it).
Greeley called the legislation the “Gay-Bashing Bill,” wondering aloud why “the gay-bashers just don’t leave gays alone.” He added, “Nor do I understand the profoundly un-Christian hatred for them,” 20 making clear that anyone who supports the traditional understanding of marriage as being between a man and a woman (this would include the Catholic Church) was a gay-bashing SOB. Greeley is so committed to the radical gay agenda that he thinks men who abuse boys are not “necessarily gay.” So what would they be? “They might just be the kind of people who enjoy variety in their sexual partners.” 21 Either that or child rapists.
Gay marriage is not only something Catholic dissidents rally to defend, they seek to sabotage Catholic theology. Father James F. Keenan is a Jesuit theologian who is convinced that homosexuality is not an unnatural orientation, it is a manifestation of human love. 22 His interest in reworking the Bible makes it easier to understand why he testified before a committee of the Massachusetts State Legislature in opposition to a bill that would prevent for gay unions legal benefits that are identical to those afforded married couples. “I cannot see how anyone could use the Roman Catholic tradition to support [the bill],” he testified in 2003. “On the contrary,” he explained, “the Catholic theological tradition stands against the active and unjust discrimination against the basic social rights of gay and lesbian persons.” 23 True enough, but what he failed to say was that the Catholic Church does not consider it “unjust discrimination” to deny identical rights to gay men that are afforded married men and women.
Father Keenan was not alone in misrepresenting Catholic teaching on the subject. Two other priests, Thomas J. Carroll and Richard P. Lewandowski, also testified before the Joint Committee on the Judiciary; they, too, left the impression that gay marriage was okay. What they said deviated so badly from what the Catholic Church pronounces that the Massachusetts Catholic Conference was required to issue a public memorandum titled “Erroneous Testimony on Catholic Teaching.” The memo said that “all three [priests] mischaracterized the teaching of the Catholic Church, while two mischaracterized the position of the Catholic Bishops specifically.” In conclusion, the priests were indicted for communicating “their personal opinions to the committee under the false guise of authority to the detriment of the integrity of the public hearing process.” 24 This is a serious charge, and it is entirely warranted.
Deconstructing Catholic teaching is not only a favorite tactic of pro-gay Catholics, it is a popular strategy with pro-abortion Catholics as well. Beginning in 1984, pro-abortion Catholics such as Catholics Speak Out started taking out full-page ads in the New York Times declaring there was a plurality of legitimate Catholic positions on abortion. The person who was most responsible for advancing this dishonest idea was Mario Cuomo, the three-term governor of New York. In 1984, he gave his infamous Notre Dame speech where he floated the “I’m personally opposed but” position on abortion. It was not Biology 101 that informed us that human life begins at conception, he argued, but religion. Picking up on this view was vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, the result of which was an ensuing public battle between her and New York’s Cardinal O’Connor. She maintained, without any evidence, that there was more than one Catholic view on abortion that was legitimate. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Obama’s VP pick, Joe Biden, spouted the same nonsense in 2008.
Worse than Ferraro was Father Robert F. Drinan. He actually defended President Clinton’s veto of a bill that would have banned the killing of innocent human children who are 80 percent born. Astonishingly, he said that he agreed with Vatican II when it said that “abortion is virtually infanticide,” but he then went on to conclude that a bill banning “so-called” partial-birth abortions “would not reduce the number of abortions.” He never explained why. But he was very sure that such a bill “would allow Federal power to intrude into the practice of medicine in an unprecedented way.” 25 It was left to Cardinal O’Connor (again) to put Drinan in his place: the New York Archbishop blasted the former lawmaker in Catholic New York, the weekly newspaper of the archdiocese. Drinan was smart enough to drop the issue once and for all. 26
Catholics for Choice
Most people are aware that the Catholic Church does not have multiple positions on abortion any more than it has several teachings on genocide, but this hasn’t stopped anti-Catholic members of the establishment from trying to sell this invidious notion to the public. To be specific, the Ford Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Buffett Foundation (named after the money tycoon), the MacArthur Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Packard Foundation, and an array of others fund a phony Catholic group, Catholics For Choice (CFC—formerly Catholics for a Free Choice). 27 Unlike the Catholic League, which is a true membership organization, the CFC is a foundation-supported entity. Indeed, it is nothing more than a well-greased letterhead led for decades by Frances Kissling, and now by Jon O’Brien. If the fat cats who fund CFC were to fund Jews for Jesus, they would be branded anti-Semitic. However, the charge of anti-Catholicism doesn’t have the same sting, thus allowing them to stick their secular noses into the affairs of the Catholic Church.
The truth is that to many—and count me among them—the CFC is really just an anti-Catholic front group that promotes abortion on demand all over the world. Consider what Kissling once admitted: “I spent twenty years looking for a government that I could overthrow without being in jail. I finally found one in the Catholic Church.” 28
CFC was founded in 1973, setting up shop in the headquarters of New York’s Planned Parenthood. Once abortion was legalized, CFC joined with the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, moving decisively to counter efforts for a Human Rights Amendment. Its first president, Father Joseph O’Rourke, was expelled from the Jesuits in 1974, but that didn’t stop him from serving as president until 1979. Kissling took over in 1982.
The following statement is typical of the way CFC distorts Catholic teaching: “The bishops won’t tell you, but CFC will: There is an authentic prochoice Catholic position.” It was due to disinformation like this—there is no pro-abortion position that is authentically Catholic—that on November 4, 1993, the United States Catholic bishops released a statement reading, “many people, including Catholics, may be led to believe that it [CFC] is an authentic Catholic organization. It is not. It has no affiliation, formal or otherwise, with the Catholic Church.” They added that CFC “is associated with the pro-abortion lobby in Washington, D.C.” and “attracts public attention by its denunciations of basic principles of Catholic morality and teaching.” In May 2000, Bishop Joseph Fiorenza, the head of the bishops’ conference, denounced CFC again for rejecting and distorting Catholic teachings on life issues. 29
Perhaps the most severe blow to the reputation of CFC came on April 21, 1995. That was the day the National Catholic Reporter printed a letter by Marjorie Reiley Maguire blasting CFC. Maguire, an attorney who was once married to the ex-Jesuit and Marquette University professor Dan Maguire, was once a prominent member of CFC. Indeed, she and her radical husband were once the CFC’s poster couple. But like many others who came of age in the 1960s, Marjorie began to have second thoughts. Included in her intellectual migration were second thoughts about CFC and Catholicism.
In her letter, Maguire branded CFC as “an anti-woman organization” whose agenda was “the promotion of abortion, the defense of every abortion decision as a good, moral choice and the related agenda of persuading society to cast off any moral constraints about sexual behavior.” She further explained that it was not the Catholic Church that is “hung up on sex.” Que
stioning the right of CFC to call itself Catholic, Maguire said, “When I was involved with [CFC], I was never aware that any of its leaders attended Mass. Furthermore, various conversations and experiences convinced me they did not.” 30
The only reason why this shell of an organization exists is because it serves the interests of secular saboteurs out to gut the Catholic Church. In 2008, it published a lengthy “investigative report” on me (for which it received funding from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation). Alas, there was no new dirt, just some recycled stuff. I graciously corrected some typos and returned it to them requesting a correction.
Homegrown Dissidents
The secular left that funds CFC may be responsible for Kissling’s agenda, but it has nothing to do with homegrown dissidents within the ranks of priests and religious. Take nuns. In 1978, Sister Mary Theresa Glynn testified before the Florida State Senate Rules and Calendar Committee in opposition to a proposed constitutional convention on a human life amendment to the state constitution. “I am here to say that the Catholic position on abortion is not so cohesive,” said the Sister of Mary nun, “not so monolithic as is often presented.” 31
How is it possible to be a pro-abortion nun? Realistically, it makes no sense, but in the minds of some of those associated with the social justice wing of the Catholic Church, it is not hard to fathom. To be sure, it’s not as though left-wing Catholics are actually in favor of abortion, it’s just that they don’t agree with the Church that it is “intrinsically evil.” Take, for example, the Catholic organization NETWORK.
NETWORK was founded in the early 1970s by radical nuns professing a strong belief in social justice but no interest whatsoever in abortion. It is so radical and unrepresentative of American Catholics that it has butted heads several times with the Church hierarchy in the United States, as well as in Rome. In 1983, it took the side of a dissident nun who refused to denounce publicly funded abortions. When the Sisters of Mercy nun refused, the Vatican stepped in to force her to leave her order. NETWORK responded with boilerplate, saying it “deeply regrets the authoritarian exercise of administrative power on the part of Vatican officials.” 32 The very next year, Sister Marjorie Tuite, a founder of NETWORK, was herself threatened with expulsion from her order for signing an ad calling for the Catholic Church to reconsider its opposition to abortion. When she died two years later, she was remembered for accusing the Church of treating women unjustly. 33
In 1988, the National Coalition of American Nuns joined with CFC and others filing an amicus brief in support of abortion rights. In 1996, the same group of nuns joined the usual suspects in warning Catholic bishops “to refrain from the single-issue partisan campaign against abortion that has characterized your activity in this election season.” The following year, the abortion-happy nuns wrote President Clinton protesting the lack of federal funds for poor women seeking an abortion. 34
It is because so many of the women religious have thrown Catholic doctrine overboard that few young women are drawn to them. After all, why give up the joy of starting a family if the lifestyle of a nun is almost indistinguishable from that of a social worker? Not only have the more “progressive” orders of nuns exchanged their habits for polyester suits, they no longer live and pray together in a community. So it is hardly surprising to learn that, with the important exception of orthodox nuns like the Sisters of Life, the convents have long been emptying. At the end of Vatican II in the mid-1960s, there were 180,000 sisters in the United States. Today there are 65,000, with an average age of 70. 35
Dominican Sister Laurie Brink, who teaches at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, addressed 750 leaders of women’s religious communities in Kansas City, Missouri, in 2007. Admitting that dissident nuns have failed to accomplish their mission, she advised that some congregations could “rightly and valiantly” choose death; thus did she suggest that it was defensible to shut down altogether rather than continue and thereby give tacit assent to the status quo. Another method for dealing with reality was “reconciliation.” As she put it, “Reconciliation first with our hierarchical church from which we have experienced abuse, oppression, neglect and domination.” 36 Why she simply didn’t want to blow it up she did not say. But she did admit that “we may not avail ourselves of the sacraments,” adding that some sisters have “moved beyond Jesus.” 37
It would be unfair to say that Sister Brink speaks for all nuns. Legions of nuns have led a life of dedication to the Catholic Church, asking little in return. Indeed, many are happy with the Church the way it is and resent the fact that Sister Brink appears to be speaking for them. Nonetheless, as Our Sunday Visitor’s Ann Carey observes, “Women Religious are among the most public Catholics ignoring or challenging Church teaching and authority.” As examples, she cites Catholic hospitals sponsored by women religious that permit sterilizations, pro–gay marriage nuns, sisters who have worked with Catholics for Choice trying to get the Holy See kicked out of the United Nations, pro–abortion nuns, and women religious who attend pagan events such as Earth Spirit Rising. 38 In other words, they are out to sabotage the Catholic Church. Most Catholics, never mind others, would be shocked to learn just how out of control some of these nun activists have become.
Just as mind-boggling is the fact that the ranks of lay dissidents are full of ex-priests and ex-nuns, as well as those who studied to become priests or religious and dropped out. The average Catholic has no idea that these disaffected Catholics have taught religion or have worked in some capacity for the Church for several decades. They are disproportionately represented in the bureaucracy of the bishops’ conference as well as in chancery offices and have found their way into teaching CCD to Catholic students who attend public schools. Overwhelmingly left of center in their politics, they assert the primacy of conscience over the directives of the magisterium (the official teaching body of the Catholic Church, i.e., the pope in communion with the bishops).
Take Catholic Charities, for example. Tied to the welfare establishment (it would collapse absent federal funding), it turned so far to the left in the 1960s that it literally lost its bearings. Brian C. Anderson captured what was happening at the time. “Catholic Charities first announced its politicization in a wild-eyed manifesto that invokes such radical sixties icons as Malcolm X, Gloria Steinem, Herbert Marcuse, and—above all—the Marxist-inspired liberation theology movement that (to put it crudely) equates Jesus with Che Guevara.” 39 Anderson is not given to hyperbole. Unfortunately, much of the good work that Catholic Charities does has been tarnished by those who harbor a political agenda.
Accepting the teachings of the Catholic Church on important moral issues is not a condition of employment at Catholic Charities. This is especially true of abortion and gay rights. Here are two unassailable examples. In 2008, four employees of Catholic Charities in Richmond, Virginia, were arrested for helping a 16-year-old Guatemalan girl get an abortion; it is against the law in Virginia for a social worker to sign a parental consent form for an abortion. 40 As a result of this fiasco, all Catholic Charities employees in the diocese were required to learn what the Catholic Church teaches on various moral issues. Why it wasn’t done earlier is a disgrace.
In the same year, San Francisco’s Catholic Charities held a fund-raiser for HIV/AIDS programs. That was fine, but what was sickening was the sight of professed enemies of the Catholic Church attending the party in their capacity as event organizers. For instance, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom has a long history of publicly condemning the Catholic Church over its teachings on sexuality, yet he was chosen to be an honorary committee member of the event. So, too, was Bevan Dufty, a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. The board is so imbued with hatred of all things Catholic that it was sued in 2006 by the Thomas More Law Center, representing the Catholic League, for unconstitutionally promoting hostility to the Catholic Church; the board had passed a unanimous resolution that year condemning the Vatican for “meddling” in the city’s customs and traditions. The
Vatican’s crime? Its opposition to gay adoptions. 41
Sociologist Joseph Varacalli rightly credits Monsignor Michael Wrenn and Kenneth Whitehead for substantiating “the reality that large parts of a liberal ‘catechetical establishment’ have refused to teach the official Church line on homosexuality and on a host of other hot-button issues.” 42 Catholic higher education is worse still.
Theologian Michael Novak sees two kinds of dissent at Catholic colleges and universities. The first is represented by faculty who entertain a secular mind-set, one that is preparing them “for the Church of the future.” The other kind of dissent, he says, “is that of faculty who are openly anti-Catholic, and who abhor a great deal of what the Church teaches.” 43 Another astute student of the Church, Father Joseph Fessio, estimates that about 90 percent of theologians on Catholic campuses do not accept Catholic teaching on sexuality and the priesthood. 44 Whatever the correct figure might be, as sociologist Anne Hendershott has detailed, it is beyond dispute that the secularization of Catholic higher education did not happen by accident: it happened because Catholic dissidents worked hard to make it happen. 45
Catholic colleges have declined so much that a lay organization has been established to call them back to their moorings: the Cardinal Newman Society blows the whistle on Catholic institutions that have lost their way. It has its work cut out for itself. I worked at a Catholic college where the president was a feminist nun who favored Protestant women candidates to succeed her over a competing monsignor; he was deemed unworthy simply because he was a priest. The same college used to hire nothing but Protestant chaplains. None of this, of course, has anything to do with being ecumenical—it has to do with a calculated attempt to sabotage Catholicism from within.
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