I have found that it is hard to predict the Catholic Church’s official stance on any political or social issue. Or perhaps it isn’t that the church’s position is so difficult as it is that many people want to twist the church stance to back up what they want to believe.
That was the thought that popped into my head when I learned of the latest happening revealed to us by WikiLinks – that outfit that wants to make us more informed but doesn’t seem to have a clue as to what constitutes news judgment.
THEIR LATEST DISCLOSURE involves documents related to the Catholic Church’s relations with the government of Venezuela – led by the Fidel Castro-wannabe Hugo Chavez.
The church during the past decade has taken a stance that the bishops based in Venezuela should stay out of the political mess in that country. The pope himself (in the form of John Paul II) made statements that the church was not to support any of the efforts to overthrow Chavez.
Yet the information from the U.S. State Department being released by WikiLinks (which has been picked up by certain newsgathering organizations and turned into actual news stories with proper context and background information to make it comprehendible) shows that many of those bishops were more than willing to support the efforts to dump Chavez from power.
Not that those efforts have been successful. Chavez has been able to take such hostility and use it to convince a majority of the Venezuelan people that HE represents their interests, and the critics do NOT.
IN THIS CASE, we have a situation where the Catholic leadership set a policy that not even the bishops were willing to enforce. Yet those cable messages from 2002 from the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican to the State Department acknowledged that the pope himself realized that his own bishops were likely not to listen to his directives.
For the record, the Vatican was more interested in trying to inspire a dialogue that might persuade Chavez to behave like a more rational leader than he has during his years in power. Officially, the church was interested in avoiding violence. Maybe there is some logic to their thought process.
But this is something we need to keep in mind whenever we take into account what the Catholic church thinks of an issue. On some level, the church’s leaders realize that nothing is absolute.
Which is why I take offense to those people who claim their Catholicism is absolute and that anybody who doesn’t follow everything they desire is worthy of ex-communication (as in removal from the church’s good graces).
ABORTION IS THE ultimate issue where some people try to use the church to justify an absolutist viewpoint, although the death penalty is another (and all too often, many of us aren’t consistent in our view of those two issues with the church – which takes the ultimate “pro-life” viewpoint in opposing both).
Immigration reform is another of those issues, with the Catholic church taking a humanist viewpoint that the current bureaucratic mess splits up families, and therefore is wrong. That view offends too many Catholics who think the church should somehow be more “fire and brimstone” in backing deportations. Then again, those people probably would think it was the Pope who was wrong in trying to urge dialogue in Venezuela – rather than supporting revolutionaries who wanted to dump Chavez.
What it comes down to is that these people are trying to use the church to reinforce their own ideological beliefs, rather than trying to take guidance from the church’s teachings in determining their beliefs on various issues.
If Jesus Christ were resurrected on Thursday, they’d be the first to tell him all the ways in which he was wrong!
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