This is a different take on a piece last Friday at my main blog.
If you're politically awake and not under a rock, you probably heard last week about the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, nearly unanimously (five noes, three abstentions) passing a sternly written policy statement about humane treatment of immigrants and explicitly rebuking ICE thuggery.
Per that piece, the statement was pushed by the new pope, Leo XIV, himself. Links at the Substack piece include the National Catholic Register as well as mainstream media.
Let us go to that NCR piece, skipping Hale's intermediary, in part for reasons at the bottom. Here's the nut graf:
"We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care," the bishops said. "We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status. We are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools. We are grieved when we meet parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school and when we try to console family members who have already been separated from their loved ones."
And, read on as you desire.
With that, off to the second half of the header.
What ARE "conservative cafeteria Catholics," you might ask?
Nothing other than the flip side of "liberal cafeteria Catholics."
You'll note there is no such thing in world as "cafeteria Catholic" without the political adjective qualifier. I have written extensively before about mainstream media getting this wrong.
That's because many of the people playing "gotcha" on liberal cafeteria Catholics like Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, etc. on abortion and birth control fail to follow the official Vatican line on the death penalty and are therefore ...
"Conservative cafeteria Catholics," period and end of story.
There are a few who walk the Catholic walk on both.
At the national level, I am only aware of Bob Casey, recently voted out as one of two U.S. Senators from Pennsylvania, and Dan Kildee, Congressman from Flint. So was his uncle, Dale Kildee, whom I know personally.
I've called out hypocrisies of conservative cafeteria Catholics on the abortion issue before, too.
This all said, let us not hold Christopher Hale up as some sort of saint. Beyond things like The Bulwark, bad enough, his "follows" on Substack include Bari Weiss's odious, genocide-supporting Free Press, a bunch of Obamiac / BlueAnon accounts, but not a single pro-Palestinian one.
But, let us instead get to the rest of the header and the rest of that statement.
First, modern US Protestantism arguably divides into six main types.
The first is the conservative, usually fundamentalist, portion of old "mainline Protestant denominations. "Fundamentalist" is still appropriate, even if they're not all Calvinists following J. Gresham Machen's "Five Fundamentals." This includes the conservative wing of Lutheranism. (My sister and other family don't like this, but facts are facts. You have a Lutheran version of "five fundamentals." Indeed, none of the "Five Fundamentals" as first formulated take a position on either side of most of the TULIP acronym, or the standoffish Lutheran third side. In fact, these generally would be accepted by modern conservative evangelicals, while downplaying literal inerrancy, among other things, and having a differing stance on cultural and political involvement.) A lot of American biblical publishing houses have roots in this, even if they've at least partially moved beyond.
The second is the liberal half of these old mainline organization. We're talking United Methodist Church, Protestant Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, etc.
The third would be neo-fundamentalists. I'm not sure that this fits in with Lutheranism, but with some modern Calvinists not only doubling down on some sort of Five Fundamentals but the TULIP? Yes, it's there. Some sort of wingnut searchers like Primitive Root Wiener loving Rod Dreher might fight here too. There is bits of leakage into conservative evangelicalism at times, both on how strictly to hold to certain fundamentals and how much to not engage with the broader world, whether political world or general social world.
The fourth would be evangelicals. The main evangelical denomination is the Southern Baptist Convention, of course. There are some lesser ones; the Disciples of Christ and other "Campbellite" types might fit here. Most megachurches would.
Fifth, if you will? Liberal evangelicals. The American Baptists might fit here, or might fit more in the liberal half of mainline Protestantism. (I would NOT put the SBC in category 1.) I hesitate because, although not called "evangelical," a root of Baptists in the US in general is being evangelical-like. Sojourners folks aren't that liberal.
Sixth would be holiness tradition folks like Church of the Nazarene, and Pentecostalism. These folks are, like the fourth, generally conservative on political and social beliefs, though not necessarily tightly overlapping with conservative evangelicals.
OK, now to the rest of that policy statement. It covers sex, gender, and health care issues. And, on this, like abortion and other reproductive choice issues (where many socially conservative Protestants are drifting toward Rome at least a bit), it's right-wing, if not necessarily far right.
Here's one part:
In their public session, the bishops also approved the revised text of the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services by a vote of 206 in favor, 8 against and 7 abstaining.
The revised directives, which are described as the "authoritative guidance" for U.S. Catholic health care institutions, now mandate that Catholic facilities not provide gender-affirming medical treatment to transgender patients.
And another:
In Part III of the revised directives, Catholic health care institutions are instructed not to perform any medical interventions "that aim to transform sexual characteristics of a human body into those of the opposite sex."
Catholic health care institutions are called upon to "employ all appropriate resources to mitigate the suffering of those who experience gender incongruence or gender dysphoria," while only using means "that respect the fundamental order of the human body."
That should be a good starter. And here's a summary:
The doctrinal note said gender-affirming medical treatments — which may include hormonal therapies and surgical procedures — are "injurious to the true flourishing of the human person," and said that Catholic health care services must not perform them.
The note added that such interventions "do not respect the fundamental order of the human person as an intrinsic unity of body and soul, with a body that is sexually differentiated."
There you go.
First, my background take.
First of all, sex is not gender, though gender roles, understandings, etc., in different cultures evolve out of sex.
Second, on what I'll call sexual identity affirming care, and add in gender-affirming care, while noting the two are different, I uphold Mayo Clinic guidelines for use of puberty blockers, and related issues that it may have spoken on. If "gender affirming care," used properly, means letting a biological male wear makeup or women's clothes? Have at it. But, it's clear the bishops are talking about sexual issues.
Related? Per this LONG piece of mine, which had poxes on four or five houses, since this is DEFINTELY a non-twosider issue? I totally oppose sexual reassignment surgery for minor children. Period and end of story. So do many within the transsexual and transgender world. For adults who are consensual and well-informed, fire away. But be WELL informed. There's literally pretty much no going back. (Yeah, reversal surgery can be done, but you have yet more complications, and they're certainly going to be psychological, not just physical.)
Also, none of this is to say that either transsexual or transgendering people don’t have certain civil rights. They do. They may not always be the same, per at least one seemingly stereotypical but actual set of circumstances about things like women’s shelters, where I am OK with admitting fully transitioned male-to-female transsexuals, but not at all transgendered.
That said, per the non-joke "joke" about theoretically celibate Catholic priests making pronouncements for women? That goes double for talking about birth sex, when "ensoulment" can't deal with teratomas and other cases of reproduction going awry, nor can it deal with spontaneous abortion and ensoulment, or with related issues. That said, how do Baptists et al deal with the age of accountability and ensoulment?
Beyond serious philosophy mixing with snark? Catholic hospitals already ban things like tubal ligations because they prevent an "implantation."
In short, the socially conservative religious (this includes non-"Western" monotheistic traditions) should shut up about anything and everything related to sex, pretty much.
No comments:
Post a Comment