Catholics fatigued? Here's why

Maureen Connors Badding is a local freelance writer serving a stint as a "community columnist" for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which published this column yesterday.

Shortly before his triumphant return to Germany for World Youth Day, Pope Benedict XVI bemoaned the "spiritual fatigue" plaguing some progressive Catholics.

No citation, so we'll assume it arguendo.

He's right, of course. Many of us are tired. But it has less to do with our spirituality and everything to do with the church hierarchy.

Just like in Dilbert.

We're tired of a church that is clearly in desperate need of clergy, but refuses to allow married men or women to become priests.

Is it really a feminist argument to say we'll should let women do it because we're desperate?

We're tired of a church that protected sexual abusers, yet is currently inspecting seminaries for homosexuals, once again perpetuating the myth that homosexuality is akin to pedophilia.

Let's leave aside that most of the clerical sexual abuse was of adolescent males. Is homosexuality a problem otherwise? It seems to me we are not likely to get many vocations while seminaries are perceived as homosexual dating services. Even Archbishop Weakland appeared to take Paul Marcoux's saying he was interested in becoming a priest as an indication he was datable.

We're tired of a church that tells people it's wrong to use a condom while an AIDS epidemic of biblical proportions is raging throughout Third-World countries. This is no longer a questions of morals. It's a question of compassion and common sense.

Common sense indicates people not deterred by Church teaching on sex generally are probably not deterred by Church teaching on contraception.

We're tired and perplexed that the church continues to prohibit birth control in a world where so many women use abortion as a form of family planning.

I'm skeptical that a woman who avoids contraception because of Church teaching would have an abortion despite Church teaching.

We're tired and mystified when our church starts issuing new opinions on issues that we thought were settled long ago.

That leaves open the possibility that they're mystified by their own ignorance. But didn't she just finish demanding new opinions on settled issues?

For instance:
- Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna, a friend of the new pope, indicated in a recent essay in The New York Times that belief in Darwin's theories of evolution may be incompatible with the Catholic faith. When evolution was taught in my classes in the '70s, were the nuns and their diocesan-approved textbooks misinterpreting their own faith? I don't think so. It's another case of the church migrating away from Vatican II.

What the Cardinal apparently meant was to warn of a philosophical materialism cloaked in the language of evolutionary biology.

- The Vatican has recently strengthened its stance against the practice of yoga. In a document written before he became pope, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger warned that yoga "can degenerate into a cult of the body."

Whichs sounds like a warning not to confuse means and ends.

- The Church prohibits most forms of fertility treatment. Frankly, I have no idea if this is a new policy, because I've never heard it discussed at Sunday Mass.

Oh, heck, leave it in the denunciations of new policies, anyway. Since it appears that either nothing is being said in homilies, or if something is, no one remembers it, perhaps we should just pipe in a message from some nearby bible church, instead.

I had always thought of the Catholic Church as being uncompromisingly pro-fertility, but I learned otherwise in newspaper articles about Italy's anti-fertility legislation.

Perhaps this goes along with missing the connecting of sex and procreation in Church teaching on contraception.

Pope Benedict XVI promises that our spiritual fatigue can be overcome by a renewed "zest and joy to know Christ." Yet zest and joy are alive and well in Milwaukee's Catholic churches.

So alive that we keep closing parishes to concentrate all that zest and joy in the ever fewer that remain.

We have many wise, compassionate and hardworking priests who don't happen to support every new doctrine from Rome.

Sounds like a formula for working yourself to death while doing more harm than good.

Our churches are filled with many dedicated, enthusiastic parishioners who hope that someday we will return to the progressive spirit fostered by Vatican II.

Obviously, she doesn't mean "filled" literally. Among those who are there, opinions vary.

These are good people, living decent lives and making moral judgments based on their hearts as much as their faith.

If faith were in the heart, wouldn't this conflict disappear?

They remain loyal to the Catholic Church because they're not advocates of the "love it or leave it" mentality. They're willing to fight for the changes they believe in.

Sort of like marrying someone because you think you can change him.

How long can they hold out before fatigue and disillusionment take over?

Forty years and counting.