A Catholic Sect Crazy Enough For The Teabaggers?

Authoritarian religion & fascism: a match made in Heaven

Although the right-wing/Know Nothing faction of the Republican Party has traditionally been not just Protestant but vehemently anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic, things have changed lately. Right-wing bigots in charge of the GOP and the Tea Party are happy for whatever support they can get-- including Jews and Catholics. In fact, conservative Catholics-- I mean really, really conservative Catholics-- couldn't be better suited for the anti-Science dogma at the heart of modern right-wing movements like today's GOP. Extremists in the Catholic Church are rewarded for the kind of mindless, faith-based devotion that any authoritarian or totalitarian agenda like the Republicans' is dependent on. Yesterday Manya Brachear reported in the Chicago Tribune not on Catholics in politics but on Catholics who are unable to accept any science-based reality whatsoever. The Society of St. Pius X, for example, rejects most of the modernizing reforms made by the Vatican II council from 1962 to 1965.

A few conservative Roman Catholics are pointing to a dozen Bible verses and the church's original teachings as proof that Earth is the center of the universe, the view that was at the heart of the church's clash with Galileo Galilei four centuries ago.



...Those promoting geocentrism argue that heliocentrism, or the centuries-old consensus among scientists that Earth revolves around the sun, is a conspiracy to squelch the church's influence.



"Heliocentrism becomes dangerous if it is being propped up as the true system when, in fact, it is a false system," said Robert Sungenis, leader of a budding movement to get scientists to reconsider. "False information leads to false ideas, and false ideas lead to illicit and immoral actions — thus the state of the world today.… Prior to Galileo, the church was in full command of the world, and governments and academia were subservient to her."



...[S]upporters contend there is scientific evidence to support geocentrism, just as there is evidence to support the six-day story of creation in Genesis.



There is proof in Scripture that Earth is the center of the universe, Sungenis said. Among many verses, he cites Joshua 10:12-14 as definitive proof: "And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, while the nation took vengeance on its foe... The sun halted in the middle of the sky; not for a whole day did it resume its swift course."



But Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., said the Bible is silent on geocentrism.



"There's a big difference between looking at the origin of the planets, the solar system and the universe and looking at presently how they move and how they are interrelated," Ham said. "The Bible is neither geocentric or heliocentric. It does not give any specific information about the structure of the solar system."



Just as Ham challenges the foundation of natural history museums by disputing evolution, Sungenis challenges planetariums, most notably the Vatican Observatory.

Crackpots? Well, sure, but well-financed, well--armed, determined and... you know what Bob Dylan said about people who are certain that they have God on their side. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers the Society of St. Pius X a dangerous right-wing group that grew right out of Nazism. Founded by a psychotic French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre in 1970, the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) is one of the most reactionary, anti-democratic elements in French politics, advocating a restoration of an absolute monarchy while condemning the French Revolution and everything it stood for (Liberté, égalité, fraternité). Lefebvre himself is a dedicated fascist and pro-Nazi supporter of the Vichy government of Philippe Pétain and the neo-Nazi National Front of Jean-Marie le Pen (something like a French version of our own teabaggers). In fact Lefebvre urged his supporters to vote for le Pen based on le Pen's unambiguous opposition to women's Choice. And their disdain for women goes beyond health issues... and, of course, beyond France. (Remember, this is the anti-Semitic cult Mel Gibson finances.)



Kansas recently elected an extreme right Catholic Opus Dei governor with SSPX sympathies, Sam Brownback. He was born into a normal Protestant family, moved to extreme evangelicalism and finally discovered something far more reactionary, the Opus Dei/SSPX branch of Catholicism. But in Kansas? You bet! Here's a 2008 report from Topeka on Good Morning America:

Just minutes before she was scheduled to referee a boy's varsity basketball game at St. Mary's Academy, Michelle Campbell was told she would not be allowed to work the game because she is a woman.



St. Mary's Academy, near Topeka, Kan., is a controversial religious school that follows older Roman Catholic laws, but many argue that religious beliefs does not give the school the right to discriminate.



"The policy of the school was that they indeed do not permit female officials to officiate the boys athletic contests at their school," said Gary Musselman, executive director of the Kansas State High School Athletics Association.

The school's policy-- straight from the SSPX hymnal-- is to not allow women to have authority over men. Perhaps that's the mentality that was behind the total melting away of Michele Bachmann's Republican Party support within days of Rick Perry entering the GOP presidential race.

The National Catholic Reporter takes on "the crisis of leadership" among the Catholic bishops

"Archbishop [of New York] Timothy Dolan, he of the wide smile, ready handshake and outsized laugh, was to be the church’s antidote to the cool and distant manner of his predecessor, Cardinal Edward Egan, who was a public relations nightmare from the start. But a love for beer and a hot dog from the cart outside the cathedral will only get you so far."


"The vote in New York sends a strong message to Catholic leadership. The danger is not in the vote itself. The danger they face is far deeper -- a crisis of leadership and authority for which they have only themselves to blame."

-- an editorial in the July 5 National Catholic Reporter

by Ken

The national discussion is being swamped by so much craziness that I take perhaps excessive pleasure in examples of public non-craziness, which apparently hasn't been outlawed after all. So even though I'm not making any great claims for the significance in the grand scheme of things of this editorial in the National Catholic Reporter, I still may be making too much of it.

Or it may be that the NCR has a better feel for the pulse of at least American Catholics than the whacked-out Church hierarchy.

Okay, the National Catholic Reporter doesn't attempt to present itself as an organ of Vatican-blessed doctrinal purity. In its "Mission and Values" statement, it describes itself as "the only significant alternative Catholic voice that provides avenues for expression of diverse perspectives, promoting tolerance and respect for differing ideas" for the 23 percent of the U.S. population that identifies itself as Catholic. The Catholic crazies speak with such inescapably loud, obstreperous voices that we may easily be fooled by their loudness and obstreperousness that they speak for American Catholics. Maybe so, maybe not.

In the July 5 issue, NCR has an editorial entitled which takes off from the Church's disastrous positioning in the recent New York State marriage-equality battle but really isn't about that. I think the opening establishes its concerns well:

Gay marriage, bishops and the crisis of leadership

July 5, 2011
An NCR editorial

The vote approving same-sex marriage in New York is the latest and most glaring confirmation of some gloomy news for the Catholic church in the United States, and it’s not that gays have achieved the right to marry.

Rather, affirmed in the recent vote is the disturbing reality that the Catholic hierarchy has lost most of its credibility with the wider culture on matters of sexuality and personal morality, just as it has lost its authority within the Catholic community on the same issues. There are reasons -- and they have little to do with secularism, relativism or lingering influences of the wild 1960s -- why people are no longer listening to the bishops.

While we don’t want to minimize the seriousness of the concern of some over a societal redefinition of marriage, there are reasons we think the bishops’ hyperbolic reaction to laws such as that enacted in New York are not only wrong-headed but counterproductive. . . .

Right away there's a thought here that you have to wonder if those bellowing voices of Catholic officialdom are even aware of: that Catholics "are no longer listening to the bishops." I speak as a total outsider, but I can't help wondering whether the Church satraps have their top-down authoritarian structure so ingrained in their heads that it doesn't even occur to them to wonder whether their sheep are listening.

And this is hardly a new problem. I remember in my very first job (and we're talking about some 45 years ago!) working with a young woman, happily married, who considered herself a devout Catholic while saying that she outright rejected the prohibition on birth control. She may once have agonized over it, but by this time there was no question in her mind that it made no sense in either her life or her faith, which again she took seriously, and therefore she considered it to have no validity. This is the very thing Church hierarchists always stress is absolutely forbidden; under no circumstances are Catholics supposed to be entitled to even an opinion about, let alone the option of disregarding, doctrine as dispensed by the Pope.

On the marriage-equality issue, NCR argues that the bishops simply aren't hearing their parishioners, or if they are, are deaf to their actual thinking.

According to Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, “On gay marriage, many of the people in the pews split with their bishops.”

That attitude does not spring so much from a stance of defiance, as some bishops would assert, but more from the experience of gays and lesbians themselves and their parents and siblings, extended family and friends who increasingly understand gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons as far more than the sum of their sexual orientation while also understanding that sexuality is at the core of a person’s identity.
To parents of a gay child, the idea that a group of men can claim to know the mind of God so perfectly that they can proclaim with unyielding certainty that God deems a significant portion of creation “disordered” is absurd. The label is not only demeaning but to contemporary Christians has no resonance with the heart of the Gospel.

A plainer way of putting it might be that in growing numbers Catholics have stopped listening to their bishops and are listening instead to Jesus.

The NCR editorial goes on to note how badly the Church's "lobbying apparatus . . . a fangless relic" was outmaneuvered in Albany -- "by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a divorced Catholic and parent; by the pro-gay-marriage lobby; and by both Democrats and Republicans." But, the editorial argues,

even if the bishops had a persuasive case to make and the legislative tools at their disposal, their public conduct in recent years -- wholesale excommunications, railing at politicians, denial of honorary degrees and speaking platforms at Catholic institutions, using the Eucharist as a political bludgeon, refusing to entertain any questions or dissenting opinions, and engaging in open warfare with the community’s thinkers as well as those, especially women, who have loyally served the church -- has resulted in a kind of episcopal caricature, the common scolds of the religion world, the caustic party of “no.”

"As if on cue," the editorial argues --

As if on cue, after the vote Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio declared by fiat that his diocese is “not to bestow or accept honors, nor to extend a platform of any kind to any state elected official, in all our parishes and churches for the foreseeable future.”

In their reaction to the vote, the Catholic bishops of New York wrote: “While our culture seems to have lost a basic understanding of marriage, we Catholics must not. We must be models of what is good, holy and sacred about authentic sacramental marriage.”

The statement might raise legitimate alarms if, indeed, the state law signaled that the Catholic ideals and sacramental life were actually under attack. They aren’t.

Again, the editorial is more polite than I would be. I would be asking if the bishops are too stupid or too dishonest to grasp that the law deals only with civil marriage, leaving total control of sacramental marriage to religious authorities. The editorial quotes from a piece in the same issue by Nicolas Cafardi, a civil and canon lawyer and professor at Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh:

Jesus in the Gospels . . . besides telling us not to act on our fears, also told us to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. Civil marriage is Caesar’s. If Caesar wants to say that you can only get married on Tuesdays, wearing a blue suit and a red tie, that is Caesar’s call. The sacrament of matrimony is God’s. It is valid only when invoked between a baptized man and a baptized woman, in the presence of two witnesses and the spouses’ proper ordinary or pastor or his delegate. Caesar has no say in this.

To me all of the foregoing is just a warmup to the editorial's real concerns. And what it says seems to me so cogent and so strong that it needs to be quoted in full, with maybe just the tiniest shade of gratuitous boldface highlighting:

The larger problem for the hierarchy, of course, is not persuading the secular culture of its point of view on sacramental marriage, but persuading its own adherents, and particularly young Catholics who now tend to drift off in scores before adulthood, that staying attached to the church is a compelling good, that the church is in fact relevant and will draw them closer to Christ and thus the freedom and fullness of a life of faith.

The bishops have little credibility in the wider culture and diminished authority within the church because in the case of sexual violence against young people by members of their clerical culture, they responded in ways that any reasonable and healthy segment of society would have considered disdainful.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan, he of the wide smile, ready handshake and outsized laugh, was to be the church’s antidote to the cool and distant manner of his predecessor, Cardinal Edward Egan, who was a public relations nightmare from the start. But a love for beer and a hot dog from the cart outside the cathedral will only get you so far.

Dolan’s rising star presumably carries with it a stamp of papal favor. The show “60 Minutes,” in its own hyperbolic burst, dubbed him the “American pope.” And senior NCR correspondent John Allen, who has conducted a book-length interview with Dolan, has written that in other circumstances the archbishop of New York “could easily have been a U.S. senator or a corporate CEO.”

That may or may not be the case, but as senator or CEO, Dolan would be held to standards of accountability that no bishop will ever face. Politicians, we know, can be run out of office and business leaders are held, however imperfectly, to standards of performance and ethics. Some of them land in jail.

In reaction to the marriage vote, Dolan stretched to call up the specter of what remains of the Red menace. On his blog he wrote that in China and North Korea “government presumes daily to ‘redefine’ rights, relationships, values and natural law.” In those countries, he says, government dictates the size of families, who can live and die, and what defines marriage. “Please, not here!” he begs. The comparison, of course, is absurd on its face, a kind of hysteria that demands that someone listen when so few are.

The vote in New York sends a strong message to Catholic leadership. The danger is not in the vote itself. The danger they face is far deeper -- a crisis of leadership and authority for which they have only themselves to blame.

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Two items from the daily hatred and fear blotter

Know your church: Priests at Our Lady of the Rosary Church in San Diego have saved the Catholic Church from the abomination of allowing mass to be said for a dead homo. (The online world being what it is, I guess I better quickly add that the foregoing is written in total mocking derision of the Church's inhumane bigotry and hatred.)

by Ken

I know we've had our fair share of LGBT- or just-plain-gay-themed stories lately, and clearly these are of heightened interest to Howie and me, but I like to think they're of interest to anyone concerned with basic rights. More particularly, it seems to me that the attempt on the Right to hold the line or even push back on these fronts should be of serious concern to all lovers of freedom. I can think of two reasons:

(1) Wouldn't it be fair to say that when repression is in the air, it's targeted first at the most vulnerable groups? It would be wise not to imagine that the Unholy Warriors of the Right will only be going after the LGBT contingent. This is an "orthodoxy issue," and the Upholders of the Right have their sights set on all deviants from the One True Path.

Call this the Canary in the Mine Factor.

(2) Because hatred of all things LGBT is perhaps the most emotional of all the organized-religious hatreds, the current jihad is being waged with a backs-against-the-wall ferocity, with a sense of the Forces of Darkness closing in on the Righteous. What I'm suggesting is that we're seeing with better than usual clarity the special viciousness and dehumanization that lies at the core of the Defense of Orthodoxy when the defenders feel they're under siege.

It may seem paradoxical, but the very same ferocity can be triggered when the Defenders score victories, as they have, for example, in all the public referenda on same-sex marriage laws. It may not seem reasonable that they react almost identically in victory and defeat, but I think the common thread is raw hatred and fear, which when you get down to it seems really what the most fire-breathingly orthodox of orthodox religionists are all about.

Call this the Hatred and Fear Factor.

FROM TODAY'S HATRED AND FEAR BLOTTER --

I. DADT isn't going quietly

We know now that Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) is not going to be consigned to the dustbin of lousy public policy during the Pentagon stewardship of Robert Gates on Thursday. Opinion is divided as to whether the advent of Leon Panetta as defense secretary is going to provide, intentionally or otherwise, an excuse for further delay in the secretary's certification of military readiness for repeal. Most obviously, a new secretary taking the reins of a department as vast and complex as the DoD, especially with approximately two and a half wars in progress, is going to have his hands full and could easily justify setting other priorities. Beyond that, if the new secretary feels that on this particular matter he must do his own due diligence, well . . .

Further delay would be regrettable from a theoretical standpoint, of course. DADT is not only demeaning to the people it targets, it also undermines our national security by depriving the military of the services (and special skills) of a lot of people who want nothing more than to serve honorably. But further delay continues to take a serious toll on servicemen and servicewomen. Remember, the Obama Pentagon has never stopped enforcing DADT.

Consider this report from Advocate.com:

Pentagon Confirms New DADT Discharges

By Andrew Harmon
Posted on Advocate.com June 27, 2011 03:30:00 PM ET

The Pentagon confirmed Monday that more service members have been discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell” pending certification of the policy’s repeal, with one individual’s discharge approved as recently as Thursday.

A total of four airmen have been discharged under the policy in the last several weeks, Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen Lainez confirmed Monday.

One of those individuals is Airman First Class Albert Pisani, who spoke to The Advocate earlier this month of his voluntary separation under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which defense officials approved on April 29.

Air Force spokesman Maj. Joel Harper told The Advocate that the discharges of three additional service members — two female staff sergeants and one male second lieutenant— have been approved since an April 29 discharge. Harper declined to say whether Pisani was the April 29 discharge, citing confidentiality reasons.

When The Advocate story ran, Defense officials had said that the separation approved April 29 was the only such discharge under DADT since late October, when the Defense Department limited authority for discharges to just five senior officials.

But in a statement, Harper confirmed the additional discharges since. “On May 31st, 2011, the Secretary of the Air Force approved discharges of two Airmen under the provisions of 10 USC 654 [the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy],“ Harper said. “On June 23, 2011, the Secretary of the Air Force accepted the resignation of an Airman who asked to be separated under the provisions of [DADT].”

Harper said that all four individuals discharged had made voluntary statements regarding their sexual orientation and had asked to be “separated expeditiously.” . . .

II. The Church hounds a victim beyond the grave

This item seems to me just plain nauseating. Without further preamble:

Catholic Church denies funeral mass to San Diego gay businessman

Posted by San Diego LGBT Weekly, Monday, June 27th, 2011

In a decision reminiscent of the Catholic Church’s refusal to hold a funeral mass in 2005 for openly gay businessman John McCusker, Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Little Italy has canceled a funeral mass scheduled this Thursday morning for openly gay businessman John Sanfilippo, owner of the SRO Lounge, a popular gay cocktail bar.

Sanfilippo died on Friday, June 24.

City Commissioner Nicole Murray Ramirez, a friend of the Sanfilippo family, talked to his partner of 30 years, Brian Galvin. “The Sanfilippo family and Brian are, of course, devastated and are trying to get the mass in another church,” Murray Ramirez said.

When the parish priests found out about the gay relationship of Sanfilippo and Galvin, the priests said they were uncomfortable with Sanfilippo and Galvin’s relationship, according to Murray Ramirez, adding the church notified the family on Sunday that the Thursday funeral mass was canceled. . . .

I hate to be judgmental (chuckle), but this strikes me as beyond the pale even for the Church of Bigotry, Hatred, and Fear. The San Diego LGBT Weekly story notes that City Commissioner Ramirez has contacted the San Diego Diocese "for a clarification of its policy of funeral masses for LGBT Catholics and is planning to press for a policy statement from Bishop [Robert] Brom." It should be interesting to see how the bishop responds (or doesn't).

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