1. Polish Dominican priest Father Pawel Guzinski, who is not situated in the hard-right wing of Polish Catholicism, as far as I can determine, told National Catholic Reporter's writer Donald Snyder the following on the eve of Pope Francis's visit to Poland:
Fr. Pawel Guzinski, an outspoken Dominican, said the conservative Polish church gravitates more to popes like John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
"For both these popes, the most important thing was the adherence to Catholic doctrine," he observed in a phone interview. "For Pope Francis, his commitment to the poor and disadvantaged is most important, while doctrine remains in the background."
Catholic doctrinal teaching is distinct, you understand, from commitment to the poor and disadvantaged. Those two things occupy distinctly different — distinctly separate — universes. Catholicism can teach pure doctrine while it pays no attention at all to commitment to the poor and disadvantaged.
The job of Catholicism, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI told us, is to adhere to pure doctrine at this point in history. That commitment to the poor and disadvantaged thing: it can be a distraction from doctrinal purity.
In fact, a lot of Catholic theologians and Catholic activists who stress commitment to the poor and disadvantaged as the absolutely indispensable foundation for all doctrine — you can't have any pure doctrine without this foundation, they maintain — have gone off the rails doctrinally, the purists want us to understand. Never mind that Jesus was all about that commitment-to-the-poor-and-disadvantaged thing as the very ground on which all Christian teaching is to be built . . . .
2. A deduction of the way Fr. Guzinski frames the papacies of JPII, BXVI, and Francis — and this is not unique to Fr. Guzinski or right-wing Catholicism: this viewpoint runs all through the thinking of conservative Catholics in the U.S. — is that litmus tests for doctrinal purity and not commitment to the gospel imperative to put the poor and disadvantaged first can and should be used to separate the Catholic sheep from the Catholic goats.
Those who do not hew to the hard doctrinal line on abortion, contraception, women's roles in church and society, how gay* people are to be treated ("love" them by informing them that they are headed to hell if they cherish and act on their natures) are not adequately Catholic. They should be driven from the pure and holy church.
No matter how much they struggle to put the poor and disadvantaged first and foremost . . . .
3. We live in a conspicuously mean-spirited era of (white) (brown-skinned and black-skinned liberation theologians do not maintain this false dichotomy between orthodoxy and orthopraxis, between pure doctrine and preferential concern for the poor and disadvantaged) Christian history in which many of us who had thought that the gospels with their emphasis on the preferential option for the poor ground all Christian doctrine are being told that we simply have no place in the doctrinally pure Christian community.
The belief of many Catholic Christians that showing preferential love for those on the margins of society is the foundation of all doctrinal purity is countered by those who have most power within the Catholic institution today with demands that one either kowtow to magisterial teaching as represented in papal utterances and catechetical formulae, or leave the church. And with demands that one demonstrate one's adherence to doctrinal purity by voting "right" (i.e., on the basis of rigid ideas about abortion and homosexuality) and all that blather about social justice and war and peace be damned . . . .
What the false dichotomy proposed by Fr. Guzinski and others like him fails to account for is the deep epistemic and existential crisis many of us in the Christian tradition are faced with when we're told that commitment to the poor exists at some secondary level in the definition of Christian identity, while doctrine — as formulated by those imposing the litmus tests, in the most rigid and ahistorical way possible — is what it's all about, if one expects to be a bona fide Christian or Catholic Christian.
4. There is very little mourning among American Catholics either to the right of center or to the left of center about the increasing numbers of American Catholics who have been told they have no place at all in the church of the poor and holy, and who have left — because they have no option except to leave, when what is most foundational of all in their understanding of what it means to be Catholic is ruled to be beside the point to those who claim that they and they alone determine the definition of Catholic identity. There is conspicuously little morning among American Catholics either right of left as people walk away in droves when they are asked to swear loyalty oaths unprecedented in the Catholic tradition recognizing that the zygote has a human status vastly superior to the human status of, say, a large group of gay* people gunned down in a gay nightclub . . . .
People whom Catholic doctrine in its purest and holiest form does not even permit us to name, you understand . . . .
5. As Fred Clark notes yesterday, in some Catholic circles (pseudo-liberal ones, that is to say: "liberal" Catholics are every bit as much responsible for driving people from the church as are right-wing ones) it has become fashionable to ridicule the venerable Wesleyan statement Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, which Hillary Clinton cited in her acceptance speech as the Democratic nominee for the presidency.
John Wesley did not say those words. For anyone who knows much of anything at all about the Wesleyan tradition, however, they quite clearly sum up what is most central to Wesley's Christian theology and Christian piety — hence my formulation "venerable Wesleyan statement."
As Fred suggests, the nit-picking of some "liberal" journalists, Catholic ones included, about who said what when in the case of this venerable Wesleyan formula summing up what is centermost in the Wesleyan Christian tradition is designed to ridicule the formulation itself. It's designed to ridicule the venerable Wesleyan approach to Christian discipleship encapsulated in this formula.
It's designed, in fact, to imply that this Wesleyan formula, with its emphasis on doing good in every way possible and in every context possible (sort of as with the Sermon on the Mount), is "soft," and that this "softness" demonstrates to us how shapeless, silly, and insubstantial Christian traditions become when they get caught up in all that doing good nonsense and forget about doctrinal purity.
When they forget that the most important thing to remember, after all, is that the zygote is more human than all those gay* people gunned down in a gay nightclub whose human identity we cannot force ourselves to recognize, name, even admit — since refusing to name someone who is human in the particular way in which she/he lived her/his human life is refusing to recognize that person as human . . . .
6. Case in point: Michael Sean Winters commenting for National Catholic Reporter on Hillary Clinton's use of the venerable formulation I have cited, as she accepted the Democratic nomination for the presidency,
Not my cup of tea, and a bit lacking in transcendence, but hey, for a roomful of secular lefties, it was nice to hear.
"Lacking in transcendence": all that commitment to the poor stuff simply goes off the rails when it's not grounded in doctrinal purity, which is, when all is said and done, what Christianity is really all about.
7. And so as the current presidential election cycle unfolds, that leading "liberal" Catholic publication, National Catholic Reporter, does not see the slightest inconsistency in claiming in repeated articles that it cares about gay* people and thinks gay* people should be included in the Catholic church, and then publishing a rarin' and rantin' call to doctrinal-purity arms regarding the abortion issue, written by a Southern Baptist who is very well-known to oppose gay marriage.
Because doctrinal purity — and this is what it's all about, is it not? — demands that we give ultimate priority to the human status of a just-fertilized human egg, but certainly not (this remains debatable; NCR and other "liberal" Catholic venues are "fair-minded" and want to represent "both sides") to the full human status of nearly a hundred gay* post-birth human beings gunned down at a gay nightclub . . . .
Whose humanity cannot be recognized even by well-known NCR writers to the extent of acknowledging that it was gay* humanity gunned down in that gay nightclub . . . .
Abortion (God help us, yet again!) as the hammer to be used to separate the doctrinally pure from the louche and indolent, the humanity of the zygote trumping the humanity of the fully born gay* human being, which remains controversial and debatable . . . . Since there are "two sides" to that issue and "both sides" need to be respected if we are to be seen as honoring the doctrinally pure teaching of Catholicism about those who are
That Catholic doctrinal purity thing hides a whole world of Catholic meanness inside it, doesn't it? Meanness perhaps not directed at pre-born human beings in their zygote state, but certainly at post-born human beings who are told repeatedly by the doctrinally pure of both conservative and "liberal" stripe within the Catholic tradition that their humanity, their voices, their insights, their lives, their contributions just don't count and are not wanted in the Catholic community . . . .
* I'm using the word "gay" as a felicitous shorthand to comprise all those represented by the more cumbersome acronym LGBTQI.