c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) When the nation’s Catholic bishops gather next week (Nov. 13-16) in Baltimore, we presume that they will be well prepared and current on what have been called the “hot button” subjects on their ambitious agenda.

Included on their to-do list are guidelines for ministry to homosexuals, a brochure rejecting artificial birth control, and a prescription that Catholics carry clean spiritual slates when they approach the Eucharist.

The word “obedience” comes from the Latin “ob-audire,” meaning “to listen to.” Learners young and old turn automatically toward good teachers and “listen to” them. Those good teachers cannot command obedience, but must earn it through expressing their authority competently and clearly.

Will people “listen to” the bishops if they continue to speak of homosexuals as “objectively disordered” and homosexual acts as “intrinsically disordered”? Detroit theologian Robert Fastiggi tries to explain these abstractions by saying that the homosexual inclination “goes against the natural order of creation” and the acts “go against the purpose of the sexual act … ordered to procreation.”

The bishops describe gays and lesbians as misfits in humanity and then urge us to treat them with “respect, compassion and dignity.” Are we to see them as our brothers and sisters _ for that is what they are _ or with the kind of slightly removed curiosity and sympathy accorded the deformed “Elephant Man” in 19th century England?

Do these distinctions bring comfort and reassurance to persons who have not chosen to be gay but nonetheless find themselves that way through no choice of their own? Are they an instrument for any morally serious conversation with homosexuals or their families? Until the bishops understand our common humanity with gay people, they may speak but they will not get their people to “listen to” them.

Turning to birth control, where do the bishops anchor their assertion that its use introduces what they call “a false note” that “disturbs marital intimacy and contributes to a decline in society’s respect for marriage and life”?

The question is this: Do such assertions about homosexuals and heterosexuals miss the deep humanity that is their common denominator? Likewise, are the good bishops revealing their lack of experience with intimate human experience of any kind?

Then there is the matter of the Eucharist, a subject in which the bishops should be masters. The bishops risk their claims of teaching authority when they insist, in effect, that we must be perfect before we can receive this sacrament. As the bishops see it, Catholics must be in that vague territory called a “state of grace” and cannot disagree with church teachings.

Laying the groundwork to force Catholic politicians and ordinary Catholics to be “reconciled” before receiving the Eucharist _ presumably by the sacrament of penance _ the bishops apparently do not know or remember that the Eucharist is itself the ultimate sacrament of reconciliation.

As theologian Kenan Osborne expresses it, the Eucharist is not meant to be a test of our faith but is in itself the “great moment of reconciliation,” in which the Body and Blood of the Lord “are all indications of forgiveness, of salvation, of reconciliation, of justification.” The Eucharist, he says, “next to Jesus and the Church, is the sacrament of reconciliation, not the sacrament of penance, not even the sacrament of baptism.”

Before the bishops make any pronouncements about our worthiness to receive the Eucharist, they should refresh their understanding that we find in the Eucharist reconciliation and forgiveness. Their attempts to set pre-conditions on its reception make it clear that they are making it more difficult for their theologically well-educated people to “listen to” them at all.

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

KRE/PH END KENNEDY

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