The New York Times reports:
Pressure is on to change the Roman Catholic Church in America, but it's not coming from the usual liberal suspects. A new breed of theological conservatives has taken to blogs and YouTube to say the church isn't Catholic enough.
Enraged by dissent that they believe has gone unchecked for decades, and unafraid to say so in the starkest language, these activists are naming names and unsettling the church.
— In the Archdiocese of Boston, parishioners are dissecting the work of a top adviser to the cardinal for any hint of Marxist influence.
— Bloggers are combing through campaign finance records to expose staff of Catholic agencies who donate to politicians who support abortion rights.
— RealCatholicTV.com, working from studios in suburban Detroit, is hunting for "traitorous" nuns, priests or bishops throughout the American church.
"We're no more engaged in a witch hunt than a doctor excising a cancer is engaged in a witch hunt," said Michael Voris of RealCatholicTV.com and St. Michael's Media. "We're just shining a spotlight on people who are Catholics who do not live the faith."
John Allen, Vatican analyst for the National Catholic Reporter, has dubbed this trend "Taliban Catholicism."
This "Taliban Catholicism" has done more than just upset the Roman Catholic Church. Ecumenical relationships have been upset as well. Vatican II brought closer ties between Christians world-wide but those relationships have been endangered by those who see churches outside Catholicism as less than fully Christian (sadly, this includes the current pope).
Efforts to fight poverty have also been impacted. Returning to the story in The New York Times:
The work of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is another frequent target.
Activists and bloggers, including Bellarmine Veritas Ministry of Texas, have been investigating the bishops' Catholic Campaign for Human Development, a national grantmaking program created in the 1970s to support community organizing and economic development.
The activists concluded that some of the grantees back same-sex marriage, artificial contraception or abortion rights. As part of the push, activists accused the director of the bishops' national social justice office of serving on the board of a nonprofit while it advocated for gay marriage and abortion. The claims against him were shown to be unfounded.
Still, the bloggers had an impact.
The bishop who oversees the anti-poverty grants said that a few, but not all, of the accused grantees had indeed taken positions contrary to church teaching and had been defunded. Since the controversy erupted, 10 of the 195 U.S. dioceses have suspended or dropped annual parish collections for the program, and the bishops are reviewing their grant policies.
Two Portland-area programs have been defunded as part of this crusade: Children First for Oregon and Street Roots. Street Roots published a story recently on their experience:
After five years of financial support through the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Street Roots was informed this spring that it would no longer be eligible for funding.
The reason given by the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon was the a single listing in Street Roots’ Rose City Resource, a pocket-sized booklet listing 300-plus resources for people experiencing homelessness and poverty. There, under the category of health care, was a listing for Planned Parenthood, which in a half-inch space included a description of the various basic services, including contraception, that the organization provides to low- or no-income customers seeking health care.
As the Portland paper notes, this is part of a larger trend:
Why now? What changed after five years of CCHD support for Street Roots? How did a piece of information suddenly morph into a theological offense?
Starting in autumn 2009, other groups began asking the same questions. The Chinese Progressive Association in San Francisco was among the first to get the call: CCHD, which was one of the founding funders for the 38-year-old Association, had to cut ties with the workers’ rights program. Also in California, the Young Workers United was told it was being cut from funding as well, as was the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, which helps homeless and disadvantaged women who have children. L.A. Community Action Network was “defunded” at its own request after CCHD tried to censor its newspaper. Women in Transition in Louisville, Ky., had its grant rescinded, and Preble Resource Center, which serves homeless youths in Portland, Maine, was ordered to return to CCHD funds for its Homeless Voices for Justice program. In Oregon, Children First for Oregon, a child advocacy group for vulnerable children, was culled from the list of grantees earlier this year.
Besides CCHD’s support, and beyond the commonality of their missions, these groups share something else: They were all targeted, investigated and determined unfit by a campaign of Catholic conservative groups that, via the prolific capacity of the Internet, have formed a nationwide coalition calling for the defunding of more than 50 poverty-alleviation organizations, and a radical overhaul — and even disbandment — of CCHD....
“These are politically motivated attacks,” says Chris Korzen, executive director of D.C.-based Catholics United, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization doing online advocacy and education programs around the Catholic Social Tradition. “And they fit into this broader narrative that we’re unfortunately seeing in our system now, where social change is limited to charity and not actually fixing social structures that cause poverty and other problems.”
The intent of these attacks, Korzen says, is to demonize community organizing behind the arguments against abortion and same-sex marriage. That’s the end result of what this campaign is doing,” Korzen says. “It’s taking away care from those who need it.”
A Catholic himself, Korzen says Catholic social teaching is being hijacked by political agendas.
“This hyper-individualism that some are pushing in a political context does not have a lot of support in Catholic social teaching,” Korzen says. “So, essentially what we’re seeing is groups who are using Catholic teaching to promote what really is a secular agenda.”
It’s not a new thing, Korzen says. Indeed, CCHD for decades has had its critics. But today it gets the added boost of leveraging political gains with a galvanized voting block, further inflamed by the personalities parading through our ever-expanding media options.
Obviously, Roman Catholics are not alone in facing the problem of radical fundamentalism. We see this at work in the Protestant tradition as well. There is a dangerous "You're Either With Us Or Against Us" mentality at play. Groups like Focus on the Family and the Institute on Religion and Democracy are prime examples of the "Protestant Taliban." Religious fundamentalism is a threat not only to the church universal but also to civil society and the democracy we enjoy in a pluralistic society.
