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Church Hierarchy's Lack of Willingness to Discipline Said "Biggest Reason" for Loss of Marriage Battle

Lawler Outlines the Devastating Results, the Problem and the Solution

By John-Henry Westen

BOSTON, June 15, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Phil Lawler, the editor and founder of Catholic World News, the first online Catholic news service, has placed the chief blame for the loss of the battle to protect traditional marriage in Massachusetts, and beyond, on the Catholic hierarchy's failure to discipline Catholic politicians.

Lawler, a Boston area native, has had a more than twenty year career in politics and journalism and was the first lay editor of The Pilot, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston.  His upcoming book called "The Faithful Departed" covers the collapse of Catholic influence in the Boston area.

THE DEVASTATING RESULT

Lawler first commented to LifeSiteNews.com on Thursday, the day the legislature failed to garner even the 50 votes needed to send the issue of homosexual 'marriage' to the citizens for a vote. 

The vote was 151-45, despite the fact that a majority of the legislators identify themselves as Catholics. 

Lawler said at the time, "It's clear that the archdiocese is not serious about this issue."  He added, "There is no real penalty being exacted on people who are in support of same sex marriage."

Lawler explained, "People who are supporting traditional marriage, who supported the marriage amendment, were going to have to pay a pretty heavy price in terms of the wrath of the gay rights lobby, of Governor Patrick, of the editorial writers all around the state.  But people who abandoned the cause, people who supported same sex marriage, and opposed this amendment were not going to face any real problems with the leadership of the Catholic Church."

He concluded, "And that's really in my mind the biggest reason for today's outcome."

LifeSiteNews.com asked Lawler, former editor of Crisis and Catholic World Report magazines, to expand on those comments. He did so, saying, "The main message of my book is that the influence of the Catholic Church in Boston was declining rapidly long before the sex-abuse scandal. In fact, the scandal itself could be seen as evidence of a corruption that was already far advanced."

THE PROBLEM

The corruption among the hierarchy, he said, "has taken the form of compromising on principles of Catholic doctrine and discipline, in an attempt to gain public respectability."  He noted, "In the long run that approach is bound to fail, because whatever public respectability the Church has is based on the integrity of doctrine and discipline."

Lawler, a member of two presidential inaugural committees, added, "For a long time the Church had enormous political clout in Boston, because there was great solidarity among Catholics. That solidarity was based on shared beliefs, shared practices, shared principles. But as Catholics grew more comfortable, and Church leaders made fewer demands on the faithful, the basis for that solidarity began to erode."

These problems, says Lawler, go beyond Boston and even beyond the Catholic Church. "The particular circumstances in Boston make it a particularly vivid example," he said, "but the same problems can be seen within the Catholic Church in other places; for that matter, not just the Catholic Church, but all religious groups seeking to maintain traditional morality."

"There's a great temptation for religious leaders to dabble in politics, and since practical politics often entails compromise, there's the tendency to compromise on matters of faith. But again, it's bound to fail."

THE SOLULTION

Lawler suggests that the solution to the problem is a back-to-basics approach.  "Put it this way: If Church leaders are guided solely by the desire to spread and strengthen the faith, they'll find that a strong spiritual life creates solidarity among the faithful as a side-effect, and that solidarity brings some nice benefits, such as political clout," he said.  "But if they get distracted from the spiritual priorities, and seek to enhance their clout instead, they will find, paradoxically, that they lose solidarity and therefore lose clout."

"In other words, if you put first things first, the secondary things will take care of themselves. If you make the secondary things your priority, however, you lose both the primary and the secondary things."

Lawler's book, The Faithful Departed, is due to be released early next year.

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