Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

One of the things that is always hard to explain to many of my friends is why I and many other liberals still practice Catholicism. I usually give the glib answer that Roman Catholicism is like baseball. Millions and millions of fans still attend the games and follow every statistic obsessively even though the owners and even the players treat them horribly. A baseball fan will tell you that the game is still beautiful and they try not to get distracted by the men running the sport.

It’s not really that simple. There are plenty of things in the church to tick off both liberals and conservatives. A liberal gets mad about the anti-abortion stance, where a conservative gets mad about the anti-death penalty stance. A liberal smirks a little when the Pope lectures George Bush about the Iraq war, where the conservative admires that same Pope wagging his finger at churchmen who practice liberation theology.

One of the things that I took comfort in during the last Papacy was the way that Pope John Paul II reached out to people of other faiths. This sort of ecumenism make the skin of some conservatives crawl (Pat Buchanan and his ilk still complain about the Pope kissing the Qu’ran), but it gave some of us a lot of hope for peace in the world.

It looks like with one speech, Pope Benedict XVI has turned his back on all of that. Not even one speech, but one paragraph in one speech. I went back and read the speech, hoping to see something like “This ignorant guy Manuel Paleologus, who spent his youth as a prisoner of the Turks and whose Empire was about to be swallowed up by an Islamic army so his opinions about Muslims should be taken with a grain of salt, said…” but nothing. In fact, the paragraph seemed to be out of place in a speech about the relationship of faith and reason. Why he would choose now to say such a thing is beyond me, except as a signal to the less tollerant wings of the Church.

Some of us also wonder about some less noticed signals, such as the recent departure of Fr. George Coyne from the Vatican Observatory. Coyne had been very vocal in his support for evolution, where as Benedict has been pushing for “intelligent design.” It would suprise some that the church had in recent decades not taken a hard and fast position on the issue. Benedict himself had writings on the subject back when he was still Joseph Ratzinger that seemed to accept evolution, but wanted to make it clear that scientific theories should not crowd God out.

(One friend of mine witnessed an argument between a fundamentalist student and Coyne after a class. Apparently, the fundamentalist didn’t realize that Coyne was a priest and knew the Bible as well as he did.)

Coyne is a Jesuit, an order that believes that studying the universe is a way of understanding God. Benedict and some conservatives seem to want to turn their back on this kind of thinking and go back to an earlier time. Given that the last Pope, probably recalling his countryman Nicolaus Copernicus, gave a belated but none-the-less necessary pardon of Galileo Galilei, it makes me wonder how far back he wishes to turn the calendar.