Why Catholicism Must Return to the Big Questions

Why Catholicism Must Return to the Big Questions

10/17/14

Lеwis McCrary

Religion, Europe

"Despite an occasional tone deafness to the contemporary commentariat, the Church has succeeded in navigating the rough currents of history many times before." 

The Vatican Press Office is one of the newer departments of the Holy See, set up only a half century ago as the Catholic Church began to adapt to the age of instant, worldwide communication. Somehow it still found itself unprepared for the intense media reaction that came earlier this week, when a synod of bishops convened by Pope Francis released an initial report of its discussion on the Church’s pastoral approach to gay and divorced Christians. The subsequent spin from the blogosphere, in which both progressive and conservative outlets sought to portray a merely advisory document as a revolutionary upheaval—which depending on your prejudices is either a welcome development or a grievous blow to orthodoxy—might have been predicted by any competent PR agency.

Yet after the smoke clears and Church affairs recede back behind the front pages, a larger question remains: How does an institution once at the center of civilization effectively respond to a disenchanted public that, at least in the West, largely rejects the Church’s former role as the cornerstone of a universal, transcendent moral order?

Back to the Culture Wars

In first asking how to welcome gay and divorced members of the flock—when longstanding Church teaching calls for chastity and fidelity within traditional marriage—the bishops brought up issues that in recent years have marginalized conservative Christians, particularly in the United States, where same-sex marriage was universally prohibited as recently as a decade ago. Yet today in America, home to the world’s fourth-largest Catholic population, gay weddings are now legal in 30 states. So it should have not been a surprise that at least U.S. outlets would seize upon the Vatican report as yet another setback for conservatives still fighting a culture war.

In this myopic narrative, the battlefield had temporarily shifted from the typical domestic sites—the U.S. Supreme Court and sidewalks outside abortion clinics—to the papal palaces and colonnades of Rome. Perhaps, as the American Catholic writer George Weigel mockingly described a New York Times account of the synod, “the great Catholic cave in” to secular elites had finally come. The New Yorker called the report a “bombshell” and veteran Vatican reporter John Jarvis felt a “pastoral earthquake.”

Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-catholicism-must-return-the-big-questions-11491