Mixed Blessings
John Paul II comes to America, where he'll be welcomed by a pro-choice president and celebrate with a church divided over sexual issues
Pope John Paul II arrives in Denver this week "to celebrate life--the value of life, the beauty and joy of life." The occasion is World Youth Day, an international Roman Catholic jamboree that this pope has previously celebrated in Poland, Spain and Brazil--but never in the United States. Upwards of 500,000 Catholic pilgrims, the equal of Denver's population, are expected to descend on the city for the chance to pray with the pope and savor his moral exhortations. Every hotel room in Denver is taken and thousands of students from around the world will sleep in parking garages and abandoned stores. Moneyed pilgrims are renting private homes at up to $20,000, depending on the papal view. Already, the World Youth Day committee has been accused of hoarding Porta Pottis needed in the flooded areas of the middle West. Some 3,000 journalists will be on hand, chiefly to cover the pope's first meeting-billed as a private, 45-minute chat on Thursday--with President Clinton. In a city that has already seen a summer upsurge in drive-by shootings and random violence, police and federal officials are bracing for a security nightmare.
This will be the pope's third and shortest trip to the continental United States, and it may well turn out to be his most contested. On many of the emotion-laden issues now roiling the body politic, the Catholic Church stands firmly in opposition. The church says no to abortion, to premarital sex, to homosexuality and to contraception. Its bishops have fought against condom-distribution in public schools and the pope himself has rejected any change in the church's tradition of limiting the priesthood to celibate males. Though no longer prudish in its view of human sexuality, the church refuses to muffle what it regards as Christ's own moral standards. But its witness is hobbled by the scandalous disclosures that hundreds of its priests have sexually abused the children in their care (page 42).
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In Clinton, John Paul II meets for the first time a president of the United States who champions abortion rights and gay liberation. Clinton won office with strong support from feminist and homosexual groups-as well as 44 percent of the Catholic vote. But many Catholics are outraged by Clinton's nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, who told a cheering pro-choice crowd last year that abortion's religious opponents were conducting "a love affair with the fetus" led by "a celibate, male-dominated church."
In their private conversation, the pope and the president are expected to focus on world issues of common concern like the war in Bosnia. A White House aide also anticipates that the pope will feel "a moral obligation" to state in private the church's case against abortion, especially as it relates to the president's domestic healthcare reform. But in his public appeal to the Youth Day crowd, John Paul II will not pull punches. "Young people," he observed last month in a speech previewing his trip, are confronted with "a culture of death, often presented as the civilized achievement of new rights, but which, in fact, lays a trap for human life by preventing it through abortion from being born, or by extinguishing it through euthanasia."
The pope knows well that his own American flock is itself divided over specific issues of sex and gender. According to the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, U.S. Catholics have serious differences with official church teachings on such matters of conscience as birth control and the ordination of women and married men to the priesthood. On each topic, a majority differs with the Vatican's line. But despite that dissent, on other sexual issues American Catholics still exhibit certain common instincts. The majority of Catholics in the NEWSWEEK Poll think the church's position on abortion "is about right." On AIDS, American Catholics support perhaps the largest network of private services to victims of that disease. But they resent groups like ACT UP, which has invaded Catholic churches on both coasts and desecrated the eucharist-and they wonder why the nation's press has been so slow to condemn such anti-Catholic assaults. If Catholics have doubts about the effect of abstinence as the answer to teenage pregnancy, many also think the free distribution of condoms is equally impractical, an enticement to promiscuity and an interference with parental rights. "We need to tell kids that they're not just victims of whatever urges come their way," says Dolores Leckey, an official of the U.S. Catholic Conference.
Curiously, this should be a season in which the Catholic leadership finds itself harmonizing nicely with the political tone of the times. At bottom, the church is preaching family values and concern for children--now standard parts of the contemporary political litany. What's different, of course, is that the church makes into moral teachings that which American pols would prefer to leave to choice and encouragement: united families, committed parents, even the dignity of labor.
The church's sexual ethic was never easy for Catholics to observe. But for most of American history, it was virtually indistinguishable from that of Protestants' and Jews'. Today marital fidelity is still the norm for millions of religious Americans, however they may fall short in practice. But within the last 30 years, the institutions of marriage and the family have suffered near collapse--and with them the old norms of acceptable sexual behavior. "Living in sin" is now a quaint concept and, for the young especially, "just do it" has the power of a cultural imperative.
For American Catholics, this recent and radical shift in sexual mores was accompanied by equally important changes within the church. As Catholics joined other Americans in the trek to the suburbs, observes Jesuit historian Gerald Fogarty of the University of Virginia, "the community bonds which reinforced church values about sex and marriage broke down." Sex, like religion, became a private matter and the authority of distant Rome to establish rules for sexual conduct grew suspect. Catholics learned through their own experience of marriage that sex is riot dirty or the snare many of the clergy imagined it to be. But the main point on which Catholic teaching differed from that of other Christian churches was birth control. By 1968, most Catholics expected church authorities to change their traditional opposition to contraception. Then came the word from Rome: No.
This year is the 25th anniversary of "Humanae Vitae" ("Of Human Life"), the encyclical of Pope Paul VI which reaffirmed the papal principle that every act of sexual intercourse must be "open to the transmission of life." Since then, most married Catholics and theologians alike have taken a different view: that contraception is a moral and practical necessity if spouses are to express their love and regulate the size of families. Out of this lived experience, most theologians now believe, Catholics have in fact reaffirmed the church's core teachings about human sexuality--that sexual intercourse represents the total giving of self to another, and that this gift finds meaning only within a faithful, fruitful marriage. Even so, the main impact of "Humanae Vitae" has been a quarter century of dissonance among Catholics and a drastic erosion of the very authority Pope Paul VI had sought to protect.
For the current generation of young Catholics, the church is no longer the authority in sexual matters that it was for their parents. Like many others, Ann Marie Kamensky, 30, still goes to mass on Sundays, but privately she disagrees with the church's stands on abortion, premarital sex and women priests. "I think faith is about trust," she says, "and I don't trust my church." For comfort, Kamensky has joined a feminist group of other Catholics who share her views. Yet, she acknowledges, the strain of trying to reconcile her morality with her religion "just leaves me torn up."
Indeed, what the pope has yet to contend with is the church's increasingly vocal majority: women. They now teach in Catholic seminaries, direct diocesan chanceries and in some parishes do everything a priest does but say mass and hear confessions. Though many are not contentious, they are constant reminders that the church has an attitude problem that even ordination of women to the priesthood won't solve. The church, says Lisa Sowle Cahill, a distinguished moral theologian at Boston College, needs to revise its "attitudes that women do not really have a right to control their fertility; that to avoid pregnancy and childbirth is to reject one's destiny of motherhood; that for women to seek roles outside of motherhood is selfish, narcissistic and materialist, and that self-sacrifice is a specifically 'feminine' duty."
The church is honeycombed with groups who want more: the democratic election of bishops, optional celibacy for priests, a declaration of rights for dissenting theologians and blessings on monogamous gay marriages. "You can be gay now in the church," says Jeffrey Janson, an artist in Chicago, "but you can't have sex. You can't even masturbate, so what do you do?"
But for most adult Catholics these concerns are peripheral compared with the routine moral problems young people face. The United States has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the industrialized West, and a divorce rate to match. Fear of AIDS and date rape and confused gender roles have further complicated the road to sexual maturity. Studies show that those who enjoy the presence, stability and love of two parents tend to do better in school, in their emotional lives and in building marriages of their own. "Permanence, commitment, fidelity--this is what people want even if they haven't experienced it in their own families," says Paulist Father Michael Hunt, Catholic chaplain at Tufts University.
"The idea that husband and wife are in this together," says Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, editor of the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal, "gives us a kind of patience and willingness to work things out--qualities that are absent in the modern sex ethic." But the church isn't always there to help. When Patricia Cahill, a 31-year-old Chicago woman who was married last weekend, went to her parish priest for mandatory marriage instructions, she didn't hide the fact that she'd been living with her fiance--or that she intended to use contraceptives. The priest, who is in his 70s, "had his head down and never even looked up," Cahill recalls. "I felt so sorry for him because he seemed so nervous about having this conversation."
Indeed, in their passion not to appear authoritarian, many priests have failed to pass on the core of the church's message on human sexuality. "The ethic that MTV embraces is that sexuality is simply a matter of imperious feelings without a long-term horizon," says Robert Royal, a Catholic scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. "And many more kids watch MTV than hear the church."
The sexual revolution is now a quarter-century old. That's a moment in the life of the Catholic Church. Certainly this pope is unprepared to alter centuries of accrued moral wisdom for the sake of avoiding conflict within the church. Nor is he impressed by pressure from the outside culture. But Scripture teaches that the Lord hears the cry of the people. Somehow, they must be heard.
Is the Catholic Church's position on the following...
TOO TOO ABOUT DON'T
CONSERVATIVE LIBERAL RIGHT KNOW
Human 40% 7% 43% 10%
sexuality
Abortion 41% 7% 43% 9%
AIDS 30% 6% 34% 30%
Birth control 62% 5% 27% 6%
Women's role 46% 6% 38% 10%
in society
FOR THIS NEWSWEEK POLL, PRINCETON SURVEY RESEARCH ASSOCIATES TELEPHONED A NATIONAL SAMPLE OF 503 ADULT ROMAN CATHOLICS AUG. 3-5. THE MARGIN OF ERROR IS +/- 5 PERCENTAGE POINTS. COPYRIGHT 1993 BY NEWSWEEK INC.
