June 2, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) — A leading British commentator who is both a homosexual and an atheist has come down hard on the leadership of the Catholic Church in Ireland for what he calls its complacent “willingness to bend to prevailing mood” on Ireland’s same-sex “marriage” referendum.
The Irish voted two-to-one for allowing homosexual “marriage.” This result met with the full approval of Matthew Parris, a former Conservative MP and current columnist for the Spectator and Times newspapers who has been in a civil partnership with his longtime homosexual partner Julian Glover since 2006. He nonetheless devoted a scathing column in the Spectator to condemning the Catholic episcopate for undercutting its own beliefs with its tepid response to the referendum result.
He cited Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, who told Irish broadcaster RTE, “The Church needs a reality check right across the board, to look at the things we are doing well and look at the areas where we need to say, have we drifted away completely from young people?” Martin went on to question the effectiveness of the Church’s involvement in the school system, since polling indicated young people proved especially keen on legalizing same-sex “marriage.”
But Martin’s humble, apologetic self-examination was not what Parris wanted from the Church he disbelieves in, though his Wikipedia entry indicates he was never a member. What he wanted to see was something like “Moses’ (and God’s) furious reaction to the nude dancing and heretical worship of Moloch in the form of a golden calf: the Sin of the Calf in the Hebrew literature.”
Archbishop Martin went on the describe Ireland’s vote as a “social revolution” which must serve as a “reality check” for Church leaders about how bad a job they are doing as teachers and pastors.
What should Martin have said? According to Parris, “The conservative Catholic’s only proper response to [the referendum result] is that 62 per cent in a referendum does not cause a sin in the eyes of God to cease to be a sin.”
“Can’t these Christians see that the moral basis of their faith cannot be sought in the pollsters’ arithmetic? What has the Irish referendum shown us? It is that a majority of people in the Republic of Ireland in 2015 do not agree with their church’s centuries-old doctrine that sexual relationships between two people of the same gender are a sin.”
Parris went on to argue that Christians more than other religious believers ought to expect their teachings to be unpopular, given “the fate of their Messiah, and the persecution of adherents to the Early Church. ‘Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you,’ says Paul.”
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Parris concludes with a question. He wonders if Martin’s response — and Pope Francis’ too — to the Irish loss, reveal that they never really believed their moral positions were from God after all –“that on some half-conscious level neither ever really believed that morality was absolute or objective anyway — or supposed we really thought they were serious? Have some of us, in short, made the mistake of taking the church at its word?”
Parris’s argument at this point rests on an atheist’s typically truncated understanding of Christian teaching—that it consists solely of repeating God’s word as distilled from the Bible. Clearly it has never occurred to him that the Church has developed a moral theology based on reason and the concept of natural law which it has passed down in the form of millennia-old Tradition (not “centuries-old” as Parris puts it). That homosexuality is a sin not because God says so, but that God says so because He is the designer of humanity and ought to know best how we function.
But this does not necessarily make Parris wrong in his assessment of the Catholic hierarchy’s milquetoast response to the referendum. Raised in a time when the Church’s power was peaking, entering seminary with the expectation of preferment and perquisites, most current bishops never signed on to be reviled like Jesus Christ was, or, perhaps worse, ignored as an irrelevant anachronism.
So the answer to his question could be that the current Church leadership is indeed suffering from a crisis of doubt, but this need not be true of earlier generations, and is not even an accurate characterization of the Catholic faithful or bishops in the developing countries in Africa and Asia. There persecution is growing, and the Faith is strong.
