When Right Is Not Always Good

​I have been carrying around in my mailbox several news accounts involving a June 12 letter addressed to pastors, clergy and administrators of the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois. Bishop Thomas Paprocki outlined his expectations of his clergy in their public and sacramental ministrations to those in same sex marriages. I am linking here to the ​Washington Post story as well as ​to the document itself. The policy has drawn considerable reaction in both the religious and secular media, and I doubt that it would serve much useful pastoral purpose. On the contrary, as thousands of Catholic leaders gather here in Orlando this week to map strategy for evangelization, the bishop’s statement is probably as good an example as any of why Catholics leave the Church. The essential point: while the bishop’s statement is technically compliant with a literal reading of the Catechism, it is pastorally deficient at the least, and in some ways positively harmful to the Church. My first reading led me to conclude that the policies are unjust and worse, discriminatory; an excellent example of how something might be right but not good.
 
Father James Martin, S.J., posted a better analysis than I could write, on his Facebook page from June 23: “If bishops ban members of same-sex marriages from receiving a Catholic funeral, they also have to be consistent. They must also ban divorced and remarried Catholics who have not received annulments; women who have, or men who father, a child out of wedlock; members of straight couples who are living together before marriage; and anyone using birth control.  For those are all against church teaching as well.  Moreover, they must ban anyone who does not care for the poor, or care for the environment, and anyone who supports torture, for those are church teachings too.  More basically, they must ban people who are not loving, not forgiving and not merciful, for these represent the teachings of Jesus Christ, the most fundamental of all church teachings.  To focus only on LGBT people, without a similar focus on the moral and sexual behavior of straight people is, in the words of the Catechism, a "sign of unjust discrimination" (2358).”
 
Father Martin is referring specifically to Bishop Paprocki’s directive that a dying person in a same-sex relationship must repudiate the relationship in order to receive Viaticum—or deathbed Eucharist, “strength for the journey”—and Catholic burial. I started thinking about my own state of Florida, where many heterosexual couples come to retire. Many of these couples live together without marrying, for any number of reasons including taxes, estate planning, family complications. I have personal friends who would fall into this category. Given the data on STD’s among seniors, it is safe to assume that many of these couples are sexually active throughout their seniority. I know of couples who have lived together a quarter century or more; while their relationships are not sacramental in the way that Catholic discipline defines a marriage, the relationships are real and commitments of conscience. And, at the moment of death, the final tribunal of morality is conscience before God who alone sees into the human heart with clarity.
 
Bishop Paprocki has publicly called upon his priests to undertake procedures in deathbed confessions that good priests would shun. If a dying person does not judge his or her relational status as sinful, or has made peace with God over the matter perhaps years earlier, the relationship would not be confessed in the first place.  A confessor would have to pry, to ask questions about living arrangements and sexual practices, to obtain the kind of repudiation that the bishop seeks. One of my gut reactions was toward the bishop’s intrusion into the confessional/penitential forum, overriding the centuries’ old practice of allowing confessors to exercise pastoral prudence in the “internal forum” of conscience.
 
My second reaction was the arbitrary nature of the bishop’s instruction. He is instructing his priests to withhold sacraments of the dying from the LGBT population if there is no repudiation of a same-sex relationship in confession. A confessor would be demanding that a dying gay individual repudiate a loving commitment of many years’ standing (which is one reason Catholics often refuse to engage in the annulment process, which seems to do the same thing.) As Father Martin correctly observes, there is no provision that a dying person in an unmarried heterosexual relationship make the same repudiation. I am surprised that Bishop Paprocki, who is also a civil lawyer, has no sensitivity to the inherent discrimination in his directive. I have never seen any population singled out in such a fashion.
 
I become angry when bishops go rogue and step outside the prevailing pastoral wisdom of the Church, which has—with a few exceptions--tended toward a collective prudence on LGBT pastoral care. Bishop Paprocki’s senior bishop is Cardinal Cupich of Chicago, who responded to the directive with a terse “we don’t work that way here” as I recall it. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued no national guideline of the kind that Bishop Paprocki saw fit to issue. The Post cites Pope Francis himself to the effect that “unconventional unions are not without their ‘constructive elements.’ He called on the church’s clergy to be pastoral and not to use doctrine as a weapon.”  Pope Francis is not cited in the Springfield instruction.
 
Homosexual unions seem to be a pastoral preoccupation with Bishop Paprocki, who reportedly performed an exorcism a few years ago when the Illinois legislature legalized same-sex marriages. (Illinois did go bankrupt on Saturday; who knows?) It is no secret that some bishops in the USCCB, not to mention the College of Cardinals, are unhappy with what they see as the pope’s more cautious pastoral guidance in matters of sexual morality. Nor is it a secret that some bishops are actively engaged in overturning or advocating civil legislation in matters of sexuality. I do understand the need for certainly in life and in faith; as I age, I come to appreciate that life is far more complex than I was led to believe in my youth.
 
My own perception on Church moral teaching is that sometimes we claim more certitude than our knowledge base justifies. There is considerable mystery about our sexuality. I have no idea why I was born straight and another person gay. The Catechism’s assertion that homosexual acts are inherently disordered might be going beyond what we can know about the human species, or the intentions of a creating God, whose own existence goes far beyond gender. If anything, those of us who teach or minister in the Church do well to exercise caution and maybe leave the heavy lifting to the One who knows us than we know ourselves.