Once a Catholic...

Once a Catholic always a Catholic…it was an old college prof. of mine who first dripped that bromide into my ears…a Jewish gent, by the way, which led me to ask, “Yeah, like how would you know?” and to vow, “Yeah, just watch me.” I was at the tail end of my struggle to free myself from 20 years of Catholic indoctrination and wasn’t too pleased to hear someone…an outsider no less…tell me that my struggle would be all in vain. I do not use the word “struggle” loosely. I was not one of those baptized and go-through-the-motions Catholics. The Catholic Church was the prism through which I viewed the whole world…political, economic, social, intellectual, personal (my dating life!). It so thoroughly infused my being that between the ages of 13 and 19, I walked miles every evening to my local church to pray and seek guidance on how best to live my life. To separate yourself from something that has been so intricately a part of your existence since early childhood is not as easy a thing as it may appear to those raised in less spiritually demanding environments (as they say: if they get you at 5, they’ve got you for life). As I’ve blogged about in the past, I remember the exact moment when my final break with the Church occurred. But the deep hours of contemplation and internal debate that led up to that moment transpired over years.
Although the break was acute, I have not lived my life since then without occasionally experiencing some feeling--like an amputee—in the space where such an important part of me once was. There are times when my old Catholic limb still resonates…like now with Pope Francis in town. This doesn’t happen with every Papal visit to the US. I just learned that Benedict XVI, Francis’s predecessor, also visited the US a few years ago. I have no recollection of that at all, and am sure that any awareness I may have had at the time was quickly dashed by my sense that Benedict was merely the latest, dreary personification of an institution I left long ago. 
Francis arrives with the air of fresh possibility and progress about him. His strong, eloquent statements on behalf of the dispossessed of all creeds and the health of the planet; his scathing rebuke of capitalism gone mad; and his light, but acknowledged hand in advancing peace by helping the US extricate itself from decades of debilitating relations with two countries, Iran and Cuba, provide witness to a Pope, unlike too many before him, determined to leave the world a better place than he found it.
Still, this admirable record has not been enough for many of my post-Catholic soul brothers and sisters on the left who have been busily drawing up their own version of the 95 Theses to nail to the Pope’s hotel room door. Their bill of indictment contains many obvious and (sadly) long-standing church transgressions — failure to advance tolerance for sexual diversity, failure to advocate for more gender equality, failure to divest of its own ostentatious wealth, failure to make a good Act of Contrition over its pedophile scandal. 
Personally, I’d like to see Francis make more of an effort in all those areas, but I confess to not having much leverage in this regard. After all, I’m voluntarily no longer a Church member so I have no more standing for calling on the Vatican to move on any of these issues than I have to demand that Israel’s Knesset change its Palestinian policy. And it’s not as if I’m offering to renew my membership if only the Church would allow women priests or make some other progressive change in its doctrine. The Church, in the person of the Pope, does what it does as Chase or Apple or the Pentagon or any other large and powerful institution does. It does what it does, first, out of self interest and, second, for those most fully vested in it. It’s no small miracle that this Pope perceives that the Church's self interest coincides with the needs of those most vested in it -- the least among us.
It so happens that there exists what the sensualists would call a sweet spot where the Pope’s genuine concerns about global income inequality and planet balance can meet at least some of the left’s complaints about the Church. If he can dare touch that sweet spot, it could lead to the greater benefit of the masses who so arouse his compassion. It also happens that this sweet spot involves a subject that is currently roiling our Congress of Perpetual Uselessness, which the Pope will be addressing on this visit. The sweet spot is birth control, specifically embodied in Planned Parenthood, which has now become the object of a conservative witch-hunt for the second presidential election in a row.  There was a brief, casual moment on a plane ride back from visiting the Philippines when Francis teased the world that he might be willing to embrace a Church study from the 1960s that would have altered its stance on contraception. But after a flurry of optimism, he tacked back to the Church’s traditional hardline as enunciated by Pope Paul VI in his 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, to wit:

Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means. (16)
Neither is it valid to argue (sic), as a justification for sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive, that a lesser evil is to be preferred to a greater one, or that such intercourse would merge with procreative acts of past and future to form a single entity, and so be qualified by exactly the same moral goodness as these. Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good," it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it (18)—in other words, to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general.

That’s a huge mountain to climb, even for a man like Francis with an evolved conscience on global economic dysfunction and a Jesuit-trained intellect for debate. Paul VI not only turned his back on a truly progressive moment initiated by his far more enlightened predecessor, John XXIII, but he forbade any successor Popes from even arguing an opposite view. Had John lived longer, he quite likely would have accepted the study's findings, which means what we're talking about here has more to do with mortal order than moral order. For a Jesuit like Francis, the authoritarian admonition not to argue a point should be a dare he cannot resist.
As a seemingly humble man, he must be able to appreciate how preposterous it is that another mere mortal, Paul VI, not only gets to speak so authoritatively, but irrevocably into eternity about the moral order of things. Francis, for all his avowed compassion, must see that any moral order that calls the distribution of condoms "evil" while seeing God's plan in the devastating impact of overpopulation on economic justice and planet health is not a moral order at all. It is a hoax perpetrated on the poor, and it's every bit as cruel as any fraud to emerge from the world's most corrupt board rooms. Like a lot of people -- Catholic, non-Catholic and ex-Catholic alike -- I think this Pope's heart is in the right place. But unless he's willing to confront the Papal bullshit that is Humane Vitae, he will fail his heart as well as the people he most wants to serve and who need him the most.