The Catholic Church issues another statement about gay marriage

[afleitch]

Well there's the expected walk back. Though it took longer than expected.

Substantively the dubium response is the same old "intrinsically disordered" rationale, just worded a little more diplomatically than in the past. What's more interesting is the attached explanatory note, in which same-sex relationships are lumped into a broader category of non-marital sexual relationships as opposed to being set apart as their own Super Duper Ultra Sexual Sin. The recognition that there can be strong human qualities in same-sex relationships is also something of a novelty, and is something that liberal bishops like some of the ones in Germany have been pointing out for years; prior Vatican pronouncements on the subject tended to assume a "fruit of the poisonous tree" principle where every aspect of a gay relationship was inevitably toxic and disgusting. But, no, the finding/ruling itself isn't anything new.

That makes it worse than simply saying nothing at all. To acknowledge you've engaged with the reality of human experience for a moment but then dismiss it.

I know you'll disagree but for me it's another facet of the 'cruelty is the point' school of Vatican grandstanding.

[afleitch]

It's not worth your time.

At the end of it all, and I really don't care if this comes across as flippant or eDgY, the Church is a clutch of unmarried celibate men speaking from a baseless authority on matters they never experience and know nothing about. The only authority they have is what they give themselves and what people hand to them.

[afleitch]

https://mobile.twitter.com/MikeOLoughlin/status/1371459425576304642

[afleitch]

Africa is an Episcopalian, Pentecostal and Catholic battleground  regurgitating the 'culture wars' for a different audience. There's a reason for this, as it's the last ground for potential religious growth.

Ghana, the most recent flashpoint is the most concerning as it's the Catholic Church leading the anti-LGBT charge encouraging police raids, whipping up the press and linking COVID threats to the community.

https://mobile.twitter.com/LGBTRightsGhana/status/1363769318807379977

Announcements like yesterday's don't help.

[afleitch]

It's oddly cathartic in my own ongoing (yes) deconstruction. It's remarkably difficult to accept completely that the Church doesn't like you as you are, has no time for your testimony and is happy to set you apart but the closed wording here is helpfully finite, more so than anything it's put out in two decades.

[afleitch]

Maybe your friends care, but if they teach their kids that the church is wrong, their kids will eventually see remaining Catholic as pointless.

This has to be the dumbest take yet. From abortion to female priests to gay marriage to trans people to the death penalty to climate change to economic programs, over 95% of lay Catholics teach their children that at least one major teaching of the church is wrong. Female priests has something like 80% of lay American Catholics disagreeing. The idea that LGBT issues play an especial place as some thing that parents must teach their children is wrong, in line with church teachings, or the church will die is Christian conservative nonsense. LGBT people are the only group in the whole country becoming more religious - they are four times more Christian today than in 2000, while every other group is 10-30% less Christian.

Source?

[afleitch]

There are lots of cultural Catholics, and this has been going on long before the issue of gay rights was being debated.

Yes - the majority of Catholics worldwide are cultural Catholics. It is becoming a semi ethnic religion, like Judaism, which has more cultural implications than religious ones.

Define "cultural Catholic".

West Central Scotland.

When the same percentage still call themselves Catholic in the census but chapels are closing, and are quarter full on high holidays with an aging congregation pushing over 80, never mind over 65, priests recruited from Poland and almost no youth activity.

That's cultural Catholicism. It's identity without performance or performance without place.

[afleitch]

No offense, Andrew, but if you and Celticempire are both speaking disparagingly of a style of Catholic belief/practice/identity/whatever, then that's a good sign to me that it's doing something right. (joking, mostly) (Apologies also if you're not speaking disparagingly and I'm just misreading your tone, which is a definite possibility.)

I don't really know what you're trying to say.

[afleitch]

No offense, Andrew, but if you and Celticempire are both speaking disparagingly of a style of Catholic belief/practice/identity/whatever, then that's a good sign to me that it's doing something right. (joking, mostly) (Apologies also if you're not speaking disparagingly and I'm just misreading your tone, which is a definite possibility.)

I don't really know what you're trying to say.

I'm making a joke that it seems like you don't get. It's not in very good taste so I'm happy to drop it. Sorry.

Speaking more seriously, it says a lot that "cultural Catholic" is used as a smear against people who chafe against Church teaching on stuff like this, but not against people like Bill Barr (or Antonin Scalia before him!) who openly, admittedly dissent on stuff like the death penalty. (Yes, kids, Scalia publicly admitted that he flat-out disagreed with the death penalty stuff in Evangelium Vitate.) There is a deeply ingrained "don't punch right" sensibility among (white, Anglo) committed Catholics that seems like it's getting more impossible to dislodge rather than less the longer Pope Francis stays in office.

Oh.

Obviously have a different experience of Catholic identity being as it was the walls, floor and ceiling of my life from 5 to 18 with almost no notional secularity as it was the entirity of the identity of half my home town, my family, all my friends and schooling. Fast forward a few decades and it's gone. Not just for me, but for most who have came after.

My point is, Catholicism is cultural and communal or it is nothing and the Church has completely forgotten this. It moved from not actually taking a hard and fast position or issuing Vatican diktats on a lot of social-moral issues to making it pretty much the only time lay Catholics hear from it.

So here's to the cultural Catholics by default. It's all they have saving them from obsolescence in huge swathes of the west.

[afleitch]

I think you are perhaps hanging too much on one poll from 2015. There's plenty of reporting on LGBT affiliation being consistently lower.

2020: https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/lgbt-religiosity-us/

Here you have 47% saying they were religious with 37% being Christian (Gallup) compared to 68% Christian in the rest of the population (Gallup 2020) which is a 23% fall to a 4% fall amongst the general population.

[afleitch]

There are lots of cultural Catholics, and this has been going on long before the issue of gay rights was being debated.

Yes - the majority of Catholics worldwide are cultural Catholics. It is becoming a semi ethnic religion, like Judaism, which has more cultural implications than religious ones.

Define "cultural Catholic".

West Central Scotland.

When the same percentage still call themselves Catholic in the census but chapels are closing, and are quarter full on high holidays with an aging congregation pushing over 80, never mind over 65, priests recruited from Poland and almost no youth activity.

That's cultural Catholicism. It's identity without performance or performance without place.

Catholicism in Scotland? And in the Lowlands? I was under the impression that the Reformation had done its work there and there were practically no Catholics left (except maybe some Highland clans), just Presbyterians and Episcopalians.

The Glasgow area is/was pretty infamous for its sectarian divisions between Protestants and Catholics (largely descended from the huge wave of Irish immigrants).

Yes.

Irish immigration in two waves; Irish Catholic after the famine then Ulster Protestant (but originally plantation Scottish) around WW1.