Steve Duin: Reconciling the Pope and the Archbishop

By Steve Duin
Oregonian
August 29, 2015

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/steve_duin/index.ssf/2015/08/steve_duin_reconciling_the_pop.html

Lauren Brown was offered a job at St. Mary's Academy, but the downtown Portland school withdrew the offer after learning about Brown's sexual orientation.

Decorations on the statue outside St. Mary's Academy had changed by noon Thursday from a hoodie and rainbow glasses to flowers.

Students from St. Mary's Academy protest the administration's decision to rescind a job offer to a gay counselor job candidate.

The major independent Catholic institutions in the area – including Marylhurst University, the University of Portland, and high schools like St. Mary's Academy – have a simple code of conduct:

Live out your faith. And stay off the Archbishop's radar screen.

Alexander King Sample – who was installed 29 months ago, replacing John G. Vlazny – is more conservative than most Catholics in town.  He's also more alert to challenges to his authority.

That preeminence provides essential context to the Lauren Brown debacle at St. Mary's. The administration's attempt to bury the story after her dismissal is a reminder of the tactics that prolonged the priest sexual-abuse crisis, a scandal that should have ended the unforgiving Catholic lectures on sexual morality.

But the greater tension here is between an inventive Pope who tells us the Church is no longer singularly obsessed with "issues related to abortion, gay marriage, and the use of contraceptive methods," and the conservative prelates – including Archbishop Sample – who aren't listening.

Without changing a word of the catechism, Pope Francis has labored to transform the face and embrace of Catholicism. He believes the Church has a higher calling – extending mercy and the love of God – than simply adding condemnation to the burdens we carry, especially on the issue of sexual orientation.

As James Carroll wrote in a 2013 New Yorker profile – "Who am I to Judge?" – the Pope "unilaterally declared a kind of truce in the culture wars that have divided the Vatican and much of the world."

You just might not know it, given the recent hostilities at Battleground Portland.

When the Supreme Court ruled on June 26 that states cannot ban same-sex marriage, Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago, for one, played peacemaker. The Church, Cupich said, "must extend support to all families, no matter their circumstances, recognizing that we are all relatives, journeying through life under the careful watch of a loving God."

Sample chose a different tack. Not content with the letter from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops denouncing the court decision, Sample released a lengthy statement of his own.

"A tragic ruling," Sample opined, "that will negatively affect the common good of our society, especially the future generations of children."

The Archdiocese of Portland maintains Sample played no role in St. Mary's decision to jettison Brown because she is a lesbian and pondering marriage. Sample did, however, laud St. Mary's for "upholding the teachings of the Catholic Church."

And at 7:02 a.m. Wednesday – even as news of Brown's departure roiled the city's Catholics – Sample's Twitter account fired off the following:

"Pope Francis: 'Who am I to judge?' Please read the fuller context of his statement."

That Tweet linked not to the Vatican, but to a Sample column in the Catholic Sentinel, in which Sample argues Francis was "really not breaking new ground, and was certainly not advocating support for same sex 'marriage.'"

Just what the Pontiff needs: an old-school Portland translator.

Sample is hardly the only archbishop on the Left Coast to keep the culture fires burning: In San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone proposed adding morality clauses to the teacher contract at four Catholic high schools, labeling as "gravely evil" sex outside marriage, homosexual relations and masturbation.

Although I am decidedly pro-choice, I understand such uncompromising language and vehemence on abortion.

But not on marriage, regardless of the genders involved. Not when bishops have decided they can accommodate remarriage after divorce, which also violates Church doctrine.

We have a Pope, at last, who is sensitive to such nuance. A Pope who would rather dress our wounds than order us to take the people we love into hiding.

On his watch, it sounds like a new church. You hear that each time Francis opens his mouth, and a great many Catholics in Portland are hanging on his every word.

Even if the archbishop is not.