For a few years on my spiritual journey, in the early 1980’s, I fancied myself a Roman Catholic. Like many others coming out of the sometimes sterile Mainline Protestant traditions, I fell in love with the beauty, the art, and the music of the mass, of the great cathedrals, the appeal to the senses, smell and sound and color. The powerful and Spirit-full winds of Vatican II were blowing. A priest named Matthew Fox was writing about original blessing instead of original sin, developing what would come to be known as Creation Spirituality. A few brave bishops seemed to be opening the door to tolerance, if not an actual welcome, to members of the LGBTQ community. Who knew? Women priests? Married clergy?
We all know how that story ends, with reactionaries and Opus Dei and a return to the way things were, with drawing lines and deciding that those who embraced change were the enemy, though of course the world had changed anyway, whether they liked it or not. The result was that each generation since has been less and less engaged with the church, has drifted further from the faith, the rites and sacraments emptied of meaning, just an excuse for a family party. Were it not for Latinx immigrants, the Roman church would be as empty as so many Protestant churches, and with that tap seemingly squeezed shut, they can expect national declines to match those of the Baptists.
I still love the beauty of the mass, even if I no longer have room for the hocus pocus, the misogyny, the authoritarian structure. I continue to appreciate one theological development from that period, what the Vatican called its consistent ethic for human life. As articulated by the Roman church, the faithful Christian, obedient to the commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill,†would oppose war, capital punishment, and abortion, all for the same reason. I am completely pro-choice, but I’d prefer to live in a world where access to sex education and birth control rendered abortion a rarity, for I am unsure of the mystery of life. You can’t undo an execution when you later discover that you got it wrong, and we have so many proven cases of wrongful conviction that the entire prosecutorial system looks suspect. I concede that there are circumstance where war is a necessary evil in the world as we know it, yet I dream of a world unknown where justice and love render AR-15s and weaponized drones obsolete. Like St. Martin of Atlanta, I believe that “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.†Continue reading “(Ten) Some (Commandments) Suggestions: July 29, 2018”