The First Step in a Long Withdrawal

On February 17, I posted the following in response to a comment by Deacon John M. Bresnahan to an item on Bettnet.com about the unwillingness of Massachusetts authorities to grant Catholic Charities an exemption to the Commonwealth's anti-discrimination policies:

Let me put in a word of support for the view of Deacon Bresnahan. The Church should continue both to try to do good and to refuse to do evil, then let the chips fall where they may. This is no less than Catholic moral teaching requires every human being to do and the Church itself must provide a model of such behavior. Demonstratively withdrawing from the “social service” field (i.e., the practice of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy) would be a spiteful step contrary to charity. If, on the other hand, the State forces the Church out of these fields, the Church should accept this development with regret, but also ultimately with equanimity—even while urging good Catholic families to extend themselves in charity to provide adoptive and foster families for children in need. Catholic families, in their private capacity, may well be able to do more good than the Church as an institution can any longer do. The main thing is to regard charity as the ultimate norm in meeting whatever challenges the State throws at us.

As this posting attests, I would have preferred that Catholic Charities just calmly go about its business, quietly neglecting to place children with same-sex couples, until someone else made an issue of this and tried to put them out of business. In that case more of the public odium would have fallen where it belongs -- on those to whom it is more important that the Church not be allowed to act according to its beliefs than that further hundreds of needy children be placed in fine and loving normal families. A week after the posting, it is clear that the Church in Boston has chosen the option of making Catholic Charities withdraw from its long- established work as an adoption agency. In this way it does indeed avoid doing evil, and may still, in some way which is not yet clear, continue doing the good which mediating adoptions has allowed it to do for the last 103 years to children needing homes. As has been pointed out, the reason the Church got into this work in the first place was to see to it that Catholic orphans would be placed with Catholic families and be brought up in the faith. In other words, it was aimed primarily at insuring the spiritual welfare of the children it placed and only secondarily at their material security, which could have been provided for equally well by other agencies. This historical background should certainly be kept in mind in any consideration of the appropriateness of the Archdiocese's decision in the face of a choice imposed upon it by an unyeilding civil regime. This decision is indeed "sad," as people have been saying, but it was also inevitable, as people have not been saying.

An unsentimental analysis of the current official positions of the Catholic Church and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts makes clear that they are irreconcilably opposed to one another on any number of important issues and that the number and intensity of these differences is likely to grow in the coming years. The fact that a large number of elected and appointed office-holders in the governmental structure of the state are thoroughly secularized Catholics, often carrying a considerable baggage of guilt and resentment, is an aggravating rather than a mitigating factor in this clash because it has meant that these people have at times attempted to use public power to coerce the Church into adopting their notions of ecclesiastical reform, almost all of which involve "democratization" of the local church and defiance of Papal teaching and discipline -- in other words, the de-naturing of the Church. So the question has for some time been not whether the Church and the Commonwealth would come into open conflict, but rather only when and how that conflict would be precipitated.

The Massachusetts dioceses' announcement of their unwillingness to continue in their traditional role as adoption agencies enjoying subsidies from the state under the conditions imposed by the state has allowed them to sidestep the blow that was directed at them by the Church's internal and external enemies. This maneuver may buy them a little time. It may also be merely the first of a long series of such strategic withdrawals from direct involvement in quasi-public functions. But even such strategems cannot forever stave off the inevitable conflict over fundamental beliefs and values, one which could cost the Catholic Church in Massachusetts (and also possibly, because no state is a legal island, throughout the United States) its tax-exemption, its material assets, its social respectability, and a good deal of its membership. (On that last point, to gain some idea of the public mood around Boston, take a look at the opinions expressed on this Boston Globe-administered Website.)

The Church is already vulnerable on a number of fronts (as an employer, as the proprietor of healthcare facilities, as an educator, and as a provider of religious "services" -- especially of the sacraments of Baptism, Eucharist, Penance, and Matrimony) to demands by the state that it comply with legally enshrined norms of secularist morality, and it will probably be made more so by laws likely to be enacted in the next few years. We have already seen such laws introduced in various state legislatures across the country, and we should not let their defeat lead us to suppose that we have seen the last of them or that those who sponsored them are going to accept defeat. What we have seen is the beginning, not the end, of a campaign by the enemies of the Church (and of religion in general) to make the Church's open practice of the faith which it preaches ever more difficult. And in every instance, you can be sure, the steps in this campaign will be carried out under the sanctimonious slogans of "equality before the law," "protection of the vulnerable," and "freedom of choice."

Faithful Catholics should therefore brace themselves against these developments and consider now, not when the full-blown crisis has already engulfed them, what their stance will be, what kinds of tactics they will chose, and by what means they will try to maintain the practice of their faith under the conditions of mild persecution they may well be called upon to endure.