Denver Catholic

18 AUGUST 13-26, 2016 | DENVER CATHOLIC Perspectives The Washington Post and the Church of Me M y local paper, the Wash- ington Post, is best read for its sports and op-ed pages and its often-sensible editorials on foreign policy. Alas, the Post editorial board's IQ drops well below the Mendoza Line when the subject is the Cath- olic Church. After decades of grumbling about this seemingly permanent fea- ture of life along the Potomac littoral, it occurred to me recently that the problem here isn't gross ignorance about matters Catholic; the problem is that the Post is all-in for another, competing religion. The prophet of that religion – call it the Church of the Imperial Autono- mous Self or, if you prefer something punchier, the Church of Me – is U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. For almost a quarter-cen- tury, Justice Kennedy has preached a notion of freedom that the Post regu- larly applauds and promotes, dismiss- ing other views as bigoted. The idea of freedom in the Church of Me was neatly captured by that great moral philosopher, Frank Sinatra, when he sang, "I did it my way." Underwriting that self-centered (indeed, selfi sh) concept of freedom is the idea that the human person is just a twitching bundle of desires, the satisfaction of which is what we mean by "human rights." This Church of Me has, if you'll pardon the phrase, a sacramental system: theª sexual revolution in all its forms. Thus the Post has been front and center in the agitation for giving legal protection to every imaginable icon of this extraordinary cultural upheaval, from state-funded contra- ception to abortion-on-demand to the latest faux-"civil rights" cause: public restrooms in which people who call themselves "transgendered" can live out their self-defi nition, irre- spective of biology. In a July 2 editorial ("The Pope's welcome surprises"), the Post tried to recruit Pope Francis as a kind of deputy to Justice Kennedy as prophet of the Church of Me, claiming that the Holy Father had "charted a new course in compassion for the Roman Catholic Church." The evidence for this was the most over-reported and mis-represented papal statement in history: the Pope's response ("Who am I to judge?") to a question about the appropriate pastoral approach to a priest experiencing same-sex attraction who was striving to live an upright and chaste life (the Pope repeated a modifi ed version of the phrase to reporters in late June). "Empathy for the oppressed," the Post's editors opined, "has always been a hallmark of Francis's papacy." Memo to editors: "Empathy for the oppressed" has been a hallmark of the papacy for a long time. To suggest otherwise – to imply that the Catholic Church has been a theologically-so- phisticated Ku Klux Klan, reveling in oppression until the Pope from the peripheries began to drag it into the bright uplands of compassion – is slander. Period. And anti-Catholic slander, as the Post editorial board should know, has a long, ugly history in the United States. Then there was the editorial's claim that the "Catholic Church has been dodging " certain "contested issues" for a long time. Which issues, you ask? Welcome to the catechism of the Church of Me: the issues being "dodged" include "homosexuality, divorce, and contraception." Memo #2 to editors: The Cath- olic Church has emphatically not been "dodging " these issues, which are not in fact "issues" but settled matters of Catholic moral teaching, informed by both reason and revela- tion. Beneath the façade of a Church playing dodgeball, the real complaint here is quite di" erent: what cobs the Post's editors is that, unlike liberal Protestantism and Reform Judaism, the Catholic Church has not taken the Post's advice and caved in to the cultural tsunami of the sexual revolu- tion – a surrender the Post applauds as "compassion." If Pope Francis, however mis- reported and misrepresented, has gotten the Washington Post editorial board's attention, good for him. Let me now suggest some follow-up for the editors. Read St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body – or, if that's too much to ask, read the summary of it in my Witness to Hope. Then see if that portrait of human love, noble self-giving, and mature, humble self-mastery isn't a more attractive vision of human possibility than Jus- tice Kennedy's twitching bundle of desires. The editors challenged "Church traditionalists" to "open themselves to a 'God of surprises.'" Let's see if the Post's editorial board has the nerve to take its own advice. The Catholic Diµ erence George Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. GEORGE WEIGEL Vote, yes, but please study fi rst A few weeks ago I was with friends in a mountain town, soaking up the local color, when a woman in full stars and stripes regalia approached us. Her: "Are you registered voters in the state of Colorado? Would you like to sign a petition to give local commu- nities more autonomy?" (She shows us a stack of petition sheets full of signatures.) Me: "More autonomy in what?" Her: "Oh, it's all written right here," (points to her clipboard). Me: "Do people actually sign this petition just because you say that it will 'give communities more autonomy?'" Her (cheerfully): "Why yes, they certainly do." [Meanwhile, my friend begins reading the petition. Stars and Stripes Woman immediately yanks it away.] Her: "I'm going to talk to those people over there. I don't like your attitude. Good-bye." So apparently there are people— lots of them, given the stack of signa- tures I saw—who sign petitions on the street, simply because they are told that they will "give communities more autonomy," without knowing how or what kind of autonomy or anything about what they are advocating. For all they know, their communities may be petitioning to withdraw from the state, or to secede from the Union entirely. I have to admit that, if I were the Boss of Everybody, my fi rst instinct would be to say that those people, whoever they are, should not be allowed to vote. In fact, maybe I would even make this a test. I would stand on street corners asking people if they will sign a petition to "give communi- ties more autonomy." If anyone signed it without question, I would immedi- ately revoke their voter registration, and not readmit them to the polls until they had taken a course on American History, and written a fi ve-page essay on "why I have no business voting if I have no idea what I'm doing." Guest Column Bonacci is a syndicated columnist based in Denver and the author of We're On a Mission from God and Real Love. MARY BETH BONACCI PHOTO BY GETTY IMAGES Your vote is a pre- cious gift. Use it wisely." "

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