Is this a good thing for Catholics? For democracy? For politics?
I personally feel that the Catholic church is free to demand whatever it wants to of its adherents. And those who don’t agree are free to leave the church.
But I can’t help but feel that such proclamations will have a rather chilling effect on politics (in some areas of the world, anyway), and how various sections of the voting public will now perceive politicians who happen to be catholic. I fear it will help reinforce prejudices and stereotypes, both positive and negative. And it will once again raise that same old question of to whom a catholic politician owes his/her ultimate allegience.
I’m also a bit concerned that it will make many voters more likely to vote for or against a candidate based on their religion, regardless of the candidate’s actual track record.
Is the pope’s statement cause for valid concern in a democracy? Or is it a tempest in a teapot?
Is he talking excommunication-level stuff here? That was an issue back in '04 – some bishops in the U.S. were threatening to excommunicate pro-choice Catholic pols, IIRC. Don’t recall if they actually did it.
Why are do people act so surprised when the Roman Catholic Church get’s involved in politics? It’s been getting involved in politics for almost 2,000 years. This isn’t a new thing.
I’d like to see how this plays out on the micro level.
Let’s take a Catholic politician, a hypothetical congressman, and he knows that abortion is wrong, but he also knows that introducing a bill to ban it would get nowhere. But being a good Catholic, he’s troubled by this conflict, and takes the issue to his bishop.
A good bishop would probably realize the limits of what the congressman could do, but he might encourage him to do what he could given those limits. Instead of banning abortion, maybe more aid could be given to unwed mothers so they feel no financial pressure to abort. Perhaps he could back some support groups and centers so that unwed mothers get some moral support for their choice. And through these things, children would be saved, which would be a moral act.
I would have no problem with this. I don’t think the Church would either. I think what troubles the Pope are politicians who claim to oppose abortion morally but then don’t even do these minimal things to reduce their number. I can’t see how that can be squared at all with your moral obligations.
Then they have no business crying “anti-catholic” when someone criticizes or satirizes the Pope or the church. Tolerance is for minorities who quietly practice their faith, not politicians.
Hell with that. The Church is the Church, not the embodiment of the philosophy of the current Chief Cheese. I understand what it wants to do and what it tries to do, and IMHO, the ways and means are wrong-headed in the sense of being naively mistaken. They’ll catch up one day.
No they’re not; they believe that will condemn them to hell. The purpose of the church making these demands is to enforce obedience, not to ensure the only believers that have left are 100% pure in thought.
I spent years desperately trying to rationalize a loyalty to the Church. I got married and had a child in an attempt to be straight for God. Even after that fell to pieces and so much pain resulted for so many people, I still wanted to believe that there was a place for me in the Church. Indeed, I felt that that I had to hold on, to try to make it better for others like me. Yet even after all that, it’s Ratzinger who has me finally giving up. He gives me the Fear as bad as anyone ever has. My rational brain knows better, but the Catholic in me will never, ever stop believing in such nonsense, and when I contemplate Ratzinger I’m reminded of the movie Bob Roberts, Gore Vidal as the good Senator after the debate: ‘I thought I detected a hint of sulphur in the air’.
The Church is not free to “demand whatever it wants” of its people. For one, the people are the Church. For another, “gayness is a dangerous sickness” for example is not a tenant of the faith and the Pope has zero authority to make it one. As Peter he has that authority, but he’s not speaking ex cathedra: “Catholics must vote against gay marriage” is NOT a matter of dogma, but merely inferred from it (because of the particular brand of pagan-like sex magic at the heart of Catholic mysticism). So while his opinion is the weightiest there is in the Church, it’s not God talking. To say “these values are non-negotiable” is to imply that you can’t be a Catholic if you don’t believe in them, which ACCORDING TO THE FAITH ITSELF is untrue. The list of things you have to do and believe to be a Catholic is short.
I can’t say “I’m not a Catholic” without having a little anxiety attack. It’ll probably take a long time. But the more Ratzinger pulls crap like this, the easier it gets.
What? That’s why queers and abortions are bad. They violate the gender-based sex magic inherent to Catholic faith. Women and men have distinct spiritual essences and sex is supposed to be a holy ritual between the two.
Catholics have a long and rich history of ignoring the pope. Like any religious population, some are fervent, yet most are using the religion as a guidepost.
I don’t think it will amount to much. Even in the Philippines (catholic majority), he is routinely ignored, I doubt if it would have much impact in the US. Is it a good thing for politics? Sure - for so long as everyone will agree that religion will no longer be shielded unnecessarily in the marketplace of ideas. Otherwise, they’ll have a distinct advantage of pushing their agenda without being open to challenge.
I’m curious how you feel about the rest – not the sex magic part, that’s (I hope) obviously just me flaunting my newfound spiritual freedom and is correctly ignored by persons of decent character*. Do you feel Catholic politicians are morally obligated to vote against gay rights? How do you feel knowing that you are for legal gay marriage but your Pope is not?
*Although perhaps not entirely. I think the Church could change on gays precisely because it’s not “magic”, shouldn’t be, and in her own slow time she’ll come around to codifying that. If two people intend to raise children together, whether they can produce them biologically shouldn’t matter to a Catholic perspective, and being gay is no different from being infertile. (The bisexual may be in hotter water, but I digress from the digression.) On abortion the Church will never change, because that really is impossible to disentangle from dogma,whereas the homosexuality thing is more superstitious. (Obviously from an atheistic perspective it’s all superstitious, but speaking in the Catholic paradigm).
The pope’s words are pretty much meaningless. Think about it: Do you want to be the archbishop of Boston when the pope decides to excommunicate Ted Kennedy or John Kerry?
It’s not a part of Catholic doctrine that one must be a Catholic in order to be saved.
In the long run, I think this will do more damage to the Church than to the political processes of any Western country. The Pope is already pretty much irrelevant to most US Catholics. They pay lip service to him, but they’re overwhelmingly more liberal than Rome. If you’re going to start issuing threats, you need to make damn sure that you have the power to back them up, or you badly undercut your authority.
Then why did they desert John Kerry in droves at election time when US Catholic church leaders were were holding him up as a bad example for US Catholics?
I think that had a whole lot more to do with abortion (which IS a subject that the majority of moderate-to-conservative Catholics in the US happen to hold a congruent opinion to the Church teaching on) than with the bishops saying “Nay!”
Again, though, that’s only because abortion is one of those subjects on which the Church and the American laity tend to overlap. There are other official Church teachings where there is less to very little overlap, like artificial contraception, the Iraq war, and the death penalty.
American Catholicism has long been a major headache for the Vatican.
