955
(1 vote, average 4.00 out of 5)
Written by Jamakaya
Jun 3, 2010
As the controversy over Marquette University’s rejection of Jodi O’Brien as new dean of Arts and Sciences wore on in the past month, I found myself channeling Captain Renault in “Casablanca.”
I’m shocked, shocked to find discrimination going on in the Catholic Church!
Don’t get me wrong. I hope O’Brien gets a big settlement for enduring such shabby treatment. Ultimately, her reputation will be enhanced by the classy way she’s handled herself and by the national publicity given to her work. I feel bad for the students who are so disheartened by the actions of Marquette’s administration, and I certainly admire their protests.
But what world are they living in? Have they studied history? Do they know what the Catholic Church stands for?
Do they know about the millions of women worldwide condemned to compulsive childbearing, poverty and ill health by the Vatican’s campaign against artificial birth control?
Or about the millions who have died and who will continue to die of AIDS complications, especially in the Third World, due to the Vatican’s irrational opposition to condoms?
What about the millions of Catholic women who are restricted from full participation in the Church, permanently relegated to a secondary role? It is an apartheid regime based on fear of, and contempt for, women.
What about the thousands of victims of pedophile priests, a sad but predictable result of the Vatican’s repressive, hypocritical view of human sexuality?
Imposing the Inquisition? Accommodating fascists? Excommunicating people desperate to leave rotten marriages?
Successive popes have called homosexuality “intrinsically disordered” and “evil” (John Paul II) and labeled long-term same sex relationships “insidious and dangerous” (Benedict).
This is scurrilous, eliminationist language. It is intended to demonize and isolate a minority and mobilize armies of the “faithful” to rid society of that minority’s existence. Protecting the physical and moral purity of the nation or community is the rationale. Depriving people of their civil rights and pathologizing their differences are key elements in the operational plan.
The Catholic Church in America has spent millions to lobby against women’s rights, sex education, no-fault divorce, same-sex marriage.
And we’re surprised by Milwaukee’s archbishop cracking the whip and Marquette dumping a lesbian scholar?
I know there are good Catholics doing a wide range of valuable work in our communities. But one does not need an archaic, misogynist, morally compromised hierarchy to love God or to honor the teachings of Jesus Christ.
I write as only a lapsed Catholic can write. My own estrangement came early.
While attending Catholic grade school as a child, I once naively asked the forbidden question in catechism class: “Why?” When the answer, which I’m sure had something to do with blind faith, did not seem adequate, I asked again, “Why?” And again, “But why?” The priest finally bellowed back, “BELIEVE AND OBEY!”
“Well, that’s dumb,” I remember my stubborn little 10-year-old self thinking.
The reigning ethos of the 1960s was to question authority, and the history books I was reading talked about this really cool time called “The Enlightenment,” when science overcame superstition and average folks challenged the divine right of kings. We kicked the Brits out of America so we could run our own lives, didn’t we? Why in the world would anyone just “believe and obey”?
It didn’t make any sense then, and it makes even less sense now.
With the world in the shape it’s in – environmental catastrophes, unending wars, corporate corruption, government incompetence, religious zealotry – we all need to engage at whatever level we can to question authority and work for change.
The only upside of Marquette’s boorish rejection of Jodi O’Brien is that it’s spurring a new generation to question authority. I hope their inquiries run deep, and I hope they last a lifetime.
