News

by Hilary White

BOSTON, March 7, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a pair of dueling op-ed pieces, two regular contributors to the Boston Globe have laid out what the Globe thinks is the essence of the struggle between the Catholic bishops of Massachusetts and the state. The bishops are seeking legal means to opt out of the state’s requirement that they include homosexual partners in child adoptions through Catholic Charities.

The columnists, Jeff Jacoby and Joan Vennochi represent what the Boston Globe considers the two sides of a purely political debate: the former giving the “conservative” position and the latter, the “liberal” side.

The difference between them from a Catholic perspective is more significant, however. Jacoby is an observant Jew and says that since the Catholic Church is an independent religious body it can make up its own rules no matter how offensive some may find them. But Vennochi is a dissenting “liberal Catholic,” who is well known for her published diatribes against Catholic teaching. In former times she would have been billed as a “lapsed” not “liberal” Catholic.

Vennochi passes over the question of whether the Catholic Church should be forced to conform to secular values, and asks a question that frustrated faithful Catholics have been asking for decades, “Should Liberal Catholics Leave the Church?”

Characterizing Boston Archbishop Sean O’Malley as a “conservative”, Vennochi says that the Pope having named him as a cardinal, “is clear message to liberal Catholics who still hope the Catholic Church will shift their way: It isn’t shifting.”

Vennochi complains, “Every pronouncement from Pope Benedict XVI draws another line between official church doctrine and liberal ideology. When do liberals choose one side or the other?”

“Liberals raised as Catholics,” she writes. “…think we can be prochoice, pro-gay marriage, pro-gay adoption, and in favor of married and female priests and still call ourselves Catholic. The people who make the rules say we don’t meet the criteria.”

Vennochi reveals her attraction to Catholicism is based not on any love of its teaching, but on romantic attachment to its externals. Liberals stay in, she says, because of fond memories of “the lacy white communion dress and the innocence of childhood confessions.”

Vennochi has discovered that Catholicism is not an ethnicity that focuses on costumes and rituals, but a religion with a unified system of religious tenets that anyone is free to accept or reject and which are largely opposed to the tenets of secular, feminist liberalism.

“But give Vennochi credit,” writes Diogenes, the popular pseudonymous blogger for Catholic World Report. “Her column honestly raises the question of whether liberals should continue to profess membership in a Church whose doctrines they regard as—her word—‘neanderthal.’”

Diogenes goes on to chastise Catholic authorities for failing to explain the reason behind the Catholic objection to homosexuality and gay adoptions.

A small group of US Catholic bishops have taken the opportunity for the “teaching moment” however, including Boston’s O’Malley who said in 2004, that Catholic objection to homosexuality is because of reverence for human dignity. “In reality we must communicate the exact opposite: ‘Because we love you, we cannot accept your behavior,” he said.

Read Vennochi’s column:
  Should Liberals Leave Catholic Church?
https://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/05/should_liberals_leave_catholic_church/