Michael KellyThere are clerics who see no inconsistency in living off the Church while preaching opposition to the Church, writes Editor Michael Kelly
The American comedian Groucho Marx famously quipped “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member!”
That idea is somewhat turned on its head when people furiously demand to be considered full members of an organisation whose basic principles they stand opposed to.
Take the Church for example, it’s not uncommon for people who stand almost diametrically opposed to what the Church teaches to consider themselves good Catholics. Anger is often the reaction when this inconsistency is pointed out.
This is not about judgmentalism: I can make no assessment on one’s individual conscience or relationship with their Creator. This is much more fundamentally about consistency.
Take, for example, the situation of a senior member of the Labour party who lost faith in socialism and publicly declared themselves as a buccaneering free market capitalist. Would we find it odd that the Labour party might ask that person to step down as a spokesperson for the party or would we expect that Labour would embrace this philosophy and permit one of their senior members to work for the transformation of the party in to a capitalist vehicle?
Of course, we would all accept that the Labour party has a perfect right to be what it is – a socialist party. And any member of the party who finds himself or herself in conflict with that ideology better find themselves another home.
Opposed
Similarly, if a senior member of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in the North became convinced that a united Ireland was the way forward, we would rightly expect them to leave an organisation that is fundamentally opposed to the North leaving the United Kingdom.
But many people don’t seem to make the connection in the Church. Perhaps it’s because we live in an age which maximises to the absolute extreme personal self-determination. Therefore, I can describe myself as a ‘good Catholic’ even if I don’t accept basic Church teachings. There are even clerics who see no inconsistency in living off the Church while preaching opposition to the Church.
Surely the Catholic Church also has the right to be what it is: the Catholic Church.
There’s been a huge reaction to a story carried in last week’s edition of The Irish Catholic about Ken Curtin a Cobh-based member of the Social Democrats who has been asked to step aside as a reader at Masses because of his public support for removing the right to life of unborn babies from the Constitution.
Mr Curtin has pointed out how important his faith is to him and expressed his obvious disappointment at being asked by the local priest to step aside.
It’s clear that Mr Curtin is sincere in his Catholicism, but it’s also clear that he sees no inconsistency with that Faith’s insistence on the defence of unborn human life and his support for a political campaign that – if successful – would lead to widespread abortion in Ireland.
There are a couple of things at the root of the confusion. I suspect that decades of inadequate – even watery – catechesis has led to a situation where many Catholics experience faith as a sense of belonging and community rather than having any content or context.
The Church must be willing to meet people where they are at, but it must be in the context of what the Synod of Bishops has described as a “penitential path” that is, journeying with people so they can see where the inconsistency is.
Dominance
The historic near-total-dominance of Catholicism is also an issue. The fact that, at least traditionally, one was either Catholic or not religious, has meant that people have no sense of adventure when it comes to religion. In other countries, I suspect that Catholics who find themselves at odds with Church teaching would search for a Protestant denomination that is more suited to their worldview.
It’s not that I want anyone to leave the Church – when one goes it inevitably diminishes all of us, but people need to live a life that is consistent with their views and aspirations. Nor do I think people should keep silent about their deeply-held convictions, but like many before them, people who find their deeply-held convictions at odds with a community, political party, Church or other organisation to which they once belonged probably need to have the courage of those convictions and follow them to their logical conclusion – even if that means a rupture with a once-cherished past.