Stupidity, Ignorance and Bigotry - all three in one package - how efficient. Over here we have an interview with the erstwhile Bishop by the Vatican's own news agency.
The beginning of the interview is fine, until it turns to the Bishop's favourite hobby horse - gay marriage. Okay, the Bishop is perfectly entitled to disagree with it, nobody is asking him to endorse a legal same-gender marriage. (Or - if they are, the persons doing so are terminally overoptimistic)
Q: In the wake of the same-sex marriage law, do you foresee a danger of more discrimination against the Church and Catholic organizations?
Bishop Henry: Absolutely! The attempt will be made to continue the process of privatizing and/or marginalizing religion.
Er - I don't quite know what he means by "privatizing" or "marginalizing" religion. As far as I can tell, religion enjoys a uniquely privileged place in our society - both socially and in the context of the government recognition of that role. We grant churches a unique tax free status - even when they try to morph themselves into political lobby groups. Since the government asserts no ownership over churches, they are already private organizations - with an amazing amount of freedom that other private organizations do not enjoy.
It will be argued that the Charter of Rights and the new law regarding same-sex marriages compel public schools to teach their students the moral equivalency of heterosexual and homosexual relations and marriages.
Furthermore, to the extent that these concepts are explored in health and physical education classes, the exploration must be equivalent. The argument will be that any other approach would be discriminatory and contrary to the equality rights under s.15(1) of the Charter and the numerous court cases that have led to the passage of Bill C-38.
The impact of the social re-engineering is bound to filter down to school classrooms.
Bishop Henry's paranoid reading of the law misses the point entirely, and will no doubt continue to miss the point. If there is anything to what he is saying, it would turn up in the issue of whether or not the schools are teaching a curriculum that is fostering hostility towards gay couples.
Among other things, the Bishop is once again confusing moral issues with legal and ethical issues. I respect his right to believe that same gender marriages are morally wrong - It's a shame that the Bishop insists upon forcing his moral view upon the rest of Canadian society.
Then, later in the interview, the Bishop goes on to say:
Within the Catholic community we have to do even more to strengthen our marriage preparation and marriage enrichment courses, our accompaniment of the separated and divorced and the bereaved who have lost spouses, and our celebration of marriage and the beauty of human sexuality in God's plan. Many of us are committed to working for a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as the union of a man and woman to the exclusion of all others.
Dear Bishop - if human sexuality is truly beautiful, and it's part of God's Plan(tm), would you please explain to me what your problem is with sexual minorities? Does it not occur to you that your very theological position that God Created All(tm) also implies that God Created Those Minorities? No? - I thought not - that might require you to actually open your eyes and recognize the reality of the world around you. (Not something that Pope Ratz is going let you do anytime soon)
Then the exchange moves to politics:
Bishop Henry: Catholic politicians have a duty to be morally coherent. They cannot live as spiritual schizophrenics.
In undertaking any public initiative, it is morally incoherent to leave out completely one's own fundamental convictions, whether for noble or pragmatic reasons. The truth regarding the human person and obligations to uphold this truth do not change when a politician leaves the security of the home and ventures into the secular or political sphere. In all that he or she does, the Catholic politician must work to proclaim and put into action the truth about man and the world.
All Catholic politicians would do well to imitate the example of St. Thomas More, who by his life and death taught that man cannot be separated from God, nor politics from morality. In him, there was no sign of a split between faith and culture, between timeless principles and daily life, but rather a convergence of political commitment.
While serving all, More knew well how to serve his king, that is the state, but above all wanted to serve God: "The king's good servant, but God's first."
When a politician acts in a manner that is scandalous to the faithful, harmful to society, and gravely immoral, I believe that in keeping with Canon 223, "Ecclesiastical authority is entitled to regulate, in view of the common good, the exercise of rights which are proper to Christ's faithful."
Although not the first course of action, this includes the right to holy Communion. For as Canon 915 states: "Those [...] who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy Communion."
In the world of politics, the Bishop has once again missed the boat. A brief review of Section 2 of the Charter should be mandatory reading for him every night before he goes to bed - along with an essay on how the freedoms of conscience and religion also place our politicians in the position of legislating not merely on the basis of their beliefs, but sometimes on the basis of - oddly - law that may well run at odds to specific dogmas.
While Thomas More may have disagreed with the King, and paid the price for it, this is not the era of King Henry VIII. Our laws today are a compact between all citizens and the government. That means our politicians have to act not merely to protect the expressed interests of the masses of the majority, but also those of minority groups.
Second, freedoms of conscience and religion also mean that if the government is to legislate morality, the courts are then obliged to examine that legislation on the grounds of whether it is causing harm to plaintiff groups. If the Bishop wishes to express that SGM causes some kind of harm (goodness knows what that might be), then go for it. Otherwise, he is doing little more than attempting to impose his own religious dogma upon those who may or may not follow his faith traditions.
Sadly, while the Bishop continues to view marriage as a procreative construct, he fails utterly to understand that it's very recognition in law takes it into a very different context from the scriptural and moral viewpoint that he is pushing. Of course, the Bishop is a member of the clergy, and not a lawyer so perhaps the distinction escapes him.
An aside - if Marriage is primarily procreative in nature, as the R.C. church continually seems to argue, then marriages become invalid when one of the partners becomes infertile. More to the point, why don't I hear them howling blue murder about procedures like vasectomy, tubal ligation and hysterectomy? (Yet the church seems to be incredibly worried about condoms?) Of course, the church couldn't possibly be applying a relativistic spin on things, could they? - especially in light of Pope Ratz's condemnation of "relativism"...
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