It matters what Catholics think about sex. Just not enough to change their church
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Version 0 of 1. Does it matter that the Roman Catholics of Europe and north America overwhelmingly reject some of the church’s sexual teaching? We learned last year that there are still men in the Vatican who don’t think it matters because they haven’t noticed that millions of Catholic disagree with them. The questionnaire sent out in advance of the synod on the family last year contained some questions that would never have occurred to anyone who had actually talked about these things to a heterosexual lay person at any time during the last 30 years. On the other hand it did contain enough realistic questions for the results to be suppressed by the bishops’ conferences in most countries. The synod on the family has a clear set of changes to make if it is to deal with the families that actually exist today In particular, regular churchgoing Catholics reject the ban on communion for remarried divorcees, completely reject the ban on artificial contraception, and are relaxed about equality for gay people. This is partly a result of their demographics. Like most Christian groups in the rich world, English Catholics skew old. There are younger ones who see in the teaching about abstinence an exciting and countercultural sign, but the older ones, in whose generation numerous marriages have failed or been built on the ruins of earlier ones, take a more realistic view. Two recent surveys each of between 300 and 400 committed Catholics, one conducted by the liberal pressure group Acta, the other by an energetic parish in Wolverhampton, show a comprehensive rejection of some aspects of the official doctrine. Of the Wolverhampton parishioners, 80% wanted communion extended to couples who were merely living together, and 90% of them wanted it extended to remarried divorcees (who are of course in official doctrine merely living together as well, not properly married at all). When it came to gay people, similar majorities wanted gay people in relationships to receive communion, and while only a third of them wanted the church to recognise gay marriage, it was only another third of them who were clear it should not. A clear majority favoured the recognition of civil partnerships. This is a long way from the “intrinsic moral evil” which Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI thought to detect in homosexuality. It is much closer to Pope Francis’s celebrated question “who am I to judge?” Similar figures came out of the Acta survey. So it looks as if the synod on the family, when it resumes this autumn, has a clear set of changes to make if it is to deal with the families that actually exist in the world today. You can also read Pope Francis as being very sympathetic to that programme. Yet things are not so simple. There is a substantial bloc of clerical resistance to any change. Even in this country 500 priests signed a petition urging the church not to change its teaching on the matter – a far higher proportion of conservatives than you would find in the laity. The higher up the church you go, the greater the desire to hold the traditional line. It is clear that any open change in doctrine would provoke a ferocious row and possibly a formal schism. Related: Pope Francis is a bit like Naomi Klein in a cassock | Giles Fraser: Loose canon At the same time, any failure to change the practice could have almost equally disastrous effects. The ban on artificial contraception no longer matters since all the evidence both of surveys and of relative population sizes shows that Catholics simply ignore it. But in countries with high rates of divorce and remarriage, like those of western Europe, the ban on remarried couples taking communion does alienate large numbers of the laity. In this country it is largely circumvented – when it seems right to the priest – by the argument that refusing a couple at the communion rails would cause a scandal much more damaging than the original offence. That judgment is not just casuistry. Any attempt actually to enforce the official teaching on sex causes real outrage among western Catholics: in April, more than 100 prominent Catholic lay people in San Francisco signed an open letter asking Pope Francis to sack their conservative archbishop, Salvatore Cordileone, after he tried to make Catholic schools teach that homosexuality was “a grave evil”. Since the church is financially dependent on lay people, that sort of row cannot, literally, be afforded either. So it does matter a great deal what ordinary Catholics think of their church’s teachings. But it probably doesn’t matter enough for the doctrines to shift. They will simply lapse, by not being enforced. This will please neither liberals nor conservatives but I don’t see how else a global church can be held together. |