'Moral Schism' Worries Catholics

By Joanne Viviano
Columbus Dispatch
July 1, 2012

www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2012/07/01/moral-schism-worries-catholics.html

Some Roman Catholic nuns are being compared to Martin Luther and referred to as radical feminists for their views on sexuality and the ordination of women.

President Barack Obama is being likened to Henry VIII over a contraception provision in the federal health-care law. (The British king was excommunicated from the church because of his struggles with Rome.)

And bishops are being criticized as out of touch with their flocks for upholding traditional Catholic views despite society's shifting morality.

Theologians say the disputes have led to what could be an irreparable break between Rome and some U.S. Catholics even as the church recovers from the priest sex-abuse scandal.

"There's a moral schism going on in the Catholic church, and the bishops are the schismatics, broken from the laity and theologians," said Daniel Maguire, a theology professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee.Such breaks often lead to membership upticks for other faiths, he said. "As long as the bishops are behaving this way, there are going to be more Unitarians."

Part of what has led to the current dissension is an April assessment by the Vatican of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a group of nuns that provides guidance to the leaders of about 80 percent of U.S. sisters. The report criticized them for challenging the pope on women's ordination, for their positions on sexuality and for paying short shrift to right-to-life issues.

Some Catholics also question the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Fortnight for Freedom religious-liberty movement that runs through Independence Day and was sparked by a federal health-care mandate that requires employee-provided insurance plans to pay for birth control. Using artificial contraception runs afoul of the church's teachings; although churches are exempt from the mandate, other religious institutions, such as hospitals and schools, are not.

Bishop Frederick Campbell of the Columbus Diocese said he prays that there will not be a rift in the church and cautioned Catholics against discussing faith issues with secular terms such as "liberal" and "conservative."

"On some occasions, the church has to speak very clearly about what it is we believe and how we are to live," he said. "We have to remember we're members of a church and we act and we speak and we live in a very particular way."

Marie Sweeney, a former nun who lives in Clintonville, helped organize a group that gathered weekly this spring to support nuns with prayer vigils outside St. Joseph Cathedral, the diocese's home church Downtown. She said the Second Vatican Council that updated the church in the 1960s allowed more participation by women and encouraged the church to read the signs of the times in light of the Gospel.

"I am Catholic to my core, but I look at Rome and I am heartbroken because they are squandering what could be authority for power," Sweeney said. "It's a medieval mindset, and that just isn't the world we live in anymore."

The Leadership Conference has received wide support from the public, with a lobbying group's Nuns on the Bus tour drawing crowds throughout the Midwest, receiving support from non-Catholic religious leaders and prompting a nonprofit group to sell tour T-shirts. It has a less-vocal group of detractors, including some fellow nuns, who say some sisters have politicized faith issues and misinterpreted Vatican II to embrace themes incompatible with the faith.

The religious-freedom issue has prompted some parishioners to walk out of Masses and question why the church holds fast to its contraception ban when most other faiths have deemed birth control moral. But it also has drawn the backing of several other religious groups, including some that don't oppose birth control, as well as the hundreds of Catholics who've attended rallies and other events.

Supporter Tom Skinner, of the Baltimore-Pickerington area, said the issue is important for all faiths. He planned to participate in the Fortnight for Freedom by praying the rosary and fasting.

Janet Smith, a moral-theology professor who holds the chair of life ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, said she believes that the religious-liberty issue will make the Catholic family stronger, not drive a wedge within the church.

"I honestly think it brings Catholics closer together," she said. "When you're attacked by an external institution, interiorly there's a great coming together."

Contact: jviviano@dispatch.com