The Washington Post loves pushing those stuffy conservative church folk around in the Sunday paper. The entire top half of the Sunday Outlook section carried a condom package with wings and the headline “Why the church needs condoms: A more honest position on contraception would help reestablish the Vatican’s moral authority.”
That’s according to former New York Times religion reporter (and liberal Catholic writer) Peter Steinfels. Like every secular liberal, Steinfels thinks the contraception ban is not only “dishonest,” but even “offensive,” starting with Obamacare.
Polls of Catholics easily show a majority of Catholics -- many of whom don't attend church -- oppose the church teaching on contraception. Liberals love doing this -- it's like counting the votes of people who never show up at the polls.
Meanwhile, an outspoken conservative minority insists on making opposition to contraception a litmus test for separating “faithful Catholics” from “dissenters,” and the past two popes seemed to count it far more than many other qualifications in naming new bishops. In short, the contraception issue has injected paralyzing doses of tension, suspicion, dissemblance and dysfunction throughout Catholic life.
So an American hierarchy that had long campaigned for the “right to health care” gets bogged down in political opposition to the Affordable Care Act, for fear that Catholic institutions would be forced to provide their employees with contraception coverage. Outstanding Catholic efforts to serve AIDS victims in Africa are discredited by a doctrinaire anti-condom stance in Rome. Advocacy for impoverished families in the Philippines and elsewhere is contradicted by political lobbying against workable birth-control programs...
The church’s unwillingness to grapple with a deep and highly visible gap between official teaching and actual practice undermines Catholic vigor and unity at every level. It encourages Catholics to disregard all manner of other teachings, including those on marriage and abortion. If the church wants to restore its moral authority, it must address this gnawing question.
Can you smell what the liberals are cooking? The Catholic Church has lost its “moral authority”...until its morals line up with the secular liberal media. It’s funny that Steinfels would accuse the church and the “outspoken conservative minority” with dishonesty, when he’s suggesting that perhaps the Church would more effectively oppose abortion and “gay marriage” if it surrendered on contraception – as if the liberals would stop pushing on those issues – including the liberal Catholics.
Steinfels plays this “Catholics in crisis” line perpetually, as in his 2004 book A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America. Steinfels is also dishonest in suggesting he could see where Pope Francis might just bend the contraception rule a bit, but that would be “offensive” to his “liberal Catholic majority” and its ideals:
One can also imagine that he might prefer to see the condemnation of contraception maintained in principle while bent to the needs of the poor or the burdened in practice. He has not shown himself to be overly worried about consistency.
It is hard to see, however, how preaching an absolute rule while excusing lots of exceptions could resolve the church’s credibility gap or heal its internal division. Too many Catholics would likely find that solution not only inconsistent but offensive.
Liberals claim they don't enforce an inflexible orthodoxy, but on this issue they are demanding the Catholic Church submit to their orthodoxy, with Steinfels reminding the reader that every other Christian church knuckled under to "honesty" on this issue. "Vigor and unity" inside the Catholic Church is only possible when liberals win.
