Pro Marx, Contra Marx.

o I was going to write a post about Car­di­nal Marx and his dumb remarks recent­ly about how Catholics are per­fect­ly free to be flex­i­ble with the Cat­e­chism, espe­cial­ly when it comes to those trou­ble­some para­graphs on homo­sex­u­al­i­ty. Then I saw that Bish­op Strick­land opened his yap about it on Twit­ter, and so I guess I have to sweep up the detri­tis of Strick­land’s error before I turn to Marx’s.

Strick­land saw the sto­ry at Catholic World Report and, appar­ent­ly with­out exer­cis­ing any the­o­log­i­cal fore­thought, tweet­ed that Car­di­nal Marx had “left the Catholic faith.”

Real­ly? As I thought about that claim, I kept hear­ing a sen­tence in my head: “This is the Catholic faith, with­out which a man can­not be saved.” It came after a long state­ment defin­ing what “the Catholic faith” is. Where had I read that? I cud­geled my brain, then decid­ed I must get on Google and look it up.

It’s in the Athanasian Creed. You’ll remem­ber how it begins:

Whoso­ev­er will be saved, before all things it is nec­es­sary that he hold the catholic faith; which faith except every one do keep whole and unde­filed, with­out doubt he shall per­ish ever­last­ing­ly.

And the catholic faith is this:

What fol­lows is a state­ment defin­ing the Trin­i­ty, the Incar­na­tion, and the death and res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus Christ.

That’s about it. I don’t read any­thing in there about homo­sex­u­al per­sons or homo­sex­u­al sex. “The Catholic Faith” is belief in the Trin­i­ty and the Incar­na­tion and the Res­ur­rec­tion. End stop.

So unless Bish­op Strick­land can pro­duce some state­ment some­where that Car­di­nal Marx has denied the Trin­i­ty, or he has denied the Incar­na­tion, or he has denied the Res­ur­rec­tion, then he should be an hon­est man and recant his state­ment that Car­di­nal Marx has “left the Catholic faith.” Marx has not.

•••

But that does­n’t exculplate Car­di­nal Marx either. Not entire­ly. With­out ques­tion, Marx is a dis­senter. He does not pro­fess the ful­ness of what the Catholic Church teach­es to be true. He even claims it’s okay for a Catholic to be a dis­senter. The Cat­e­chism, he says, is “not set in stone.” “One is allowed,” he says, “to doubt what it says.”

Now, if by “not set in stone,” Marx means no more than that what is in the Cat­e­chism is not all infal­li­ble, that a par­tic­u­lar teach­ing only has as much author­i­ty as the orig­i­nal source of that teach­ing, he would be cor­rect. Pope Bene­dict XVI said that wery thing. But with­out that par­tic­u­lar nuance, and with the added remark that a Catholic is per­mit­ted to “doubt” the Cat­e­chism, Car­di­nal Marx is implying—or at least per­mit­ting Catholics to enter­tain the notion—that we can just reject teach­ings we don’t hap­pen to like; some day they might be changed. And that’s not at all true.

To begin with, the Cat­e­chism is a Mag­is­te­r­i­al text. I’ve cov­ered that already here. St. John Paul II pro­mul­gat­ed the Cat­e­chism in Fidei Deposi­tum. FD is an apos­tolic con­sti­tu­tion; an apos­tolic con­sti­tu­tion is the high­est, most solemn decree a pope can issue. In that doc­u­ment, JP2 called the Cat­e­chism a “faith­ful” and “sys­tem­at­ic” pre­sen­ta­tion of the “authen­tic Mag­is­teri­um.”

In the sec­ond place, the Con­gre­ga­tion for the Doc­trine of the Faith has made clear that Catholics are not, in fact, per­mit­ted to doubt or ques­tion the authen­tic Mag­is­teri­um, inde­pen­dent of the lev­el of author­i­ty a teach­ing has. The CDF says that in Don­um Ver­i­tatis, a doc­u­ment I’ve also writ­ten about: here. Dear read­er, I’m not going to give Car­di­nal Burke or aux­il­iary bish­op Schnei­der a pass when they dis­sent from the Mag­is­teri­um, and I’m not going to give Car­di­nal Marx a pass either. Accord­ing to Don­um Ver­i­tatis, doubt­ing the Mag­is­teri­um “cause[s] great spir­i­tu­al harm.”

DV goes on; these are all direct quo­ta­tions:

• More fre­quent­ly, it is assert­ed that the the­olo­gian is not bound to adhere to any Mag­is­te­r­i­al teach­ing unless it is infal­li­ble. Thus a kind of the­o­log­i­cal pos­i­tivism is adopt­ed, accord­ing to which, doc­trines pro­posed with­out exer­cise of the charism of infal­li­bil­i­ty are said to have no oblig­a­tory char­ac­ter about them, leav­ing the indi­vid­ual com­plete­ly at lib­er­ty to adhere to them or not.
• The free­dom of the act of faith can­not jus­ti­fy a right to dis­sent. In fact this free­dom does not indi­cate at all free­dom with regard to the truth but sig­ni­fies the free self-deter­mi­na­tion of the per­son in con­for­mi­ty with his moral oblig­a­tion to accept the truth.
• Set­ting up a supreme mag­is­teri­um of con­science in oppo­si­tion to the mag­is­teri­um of the Church means adopt­ing a prin­ci­ple of free exam­i­na­tion incom­pat­i­ble with the econ­o­my of Rev­e­la­tion. … [To do so breaks] one’s bond with Christ.

A Catholic is not per­mit­ted to dis­sent from the Mag­is­teri­um of the Church. I’ve quot­ed time and again the words that appear in Lumen Gen­tium, in the Cat­e­chism, in the Pro­fes­sion of Faith, and in the Church’s canon law, which say that a Catholic owes the Mag­is­teri­um “reli­gious sub­mis­sion of mind and will” inde­pen­dent of how much author­i­ty a par­tic­u­lar teach­ing has. I’ve used those words to cor­rect right-wing Catholics who reject Pope Fran­cis; but Car­di­nal Marx needs cor­rect­ed on this point too.

Now, I need to clar­i­fy that some of what Car­di­nal Marx says is absolute­ly true. “Homo­sex­u­al­i­ty is not a sin,” Marx says, and he is right. But the Cat­e­chism does not claim that it is. I’m going to quote the Cat­e­chism in full so no one makes the charge that I’m mis­con­screw­ing any­thing:

2357 Homo­sex­u­al­i­ty refers to rela­tions between men or between women who expe­ri­ence an exclu­sive or pre­dom­i­nant sex­u­al attrac­tion toward per­sons of the same sex. It has tak­en a great vari­ety of forms through the cen­turies and in dif­fer­ent cul­tures. Its psy­cho­log­i­cal gen­e­sis remains large­ly unex­plained. Bas­ing itself on Sacred Scrip­ture, which presents homo­sex­u­al acts as acts of grave deprav­i­ty, tra­di­tion has always declared that “homo­sex­u­al acts are intrin­si­cal­ly dis­or­dered.” They are con­trary to the nat­ur­al law. They close the sex­u­al act to the gift of life. They do not pro­ceed from a gen­uine affec­tive and sex­u­al com­ple­men­tar­i­ty. Under no cir­cum­stances can they [i.e., homo­sex­u­al acts.] be approved.

 

2358 The num­ber of men and women who have deep-seat­ed homo­sex­u­al ten­den­cies is not neg­li­gi­ble. This incli­na­tion, which is objec­tive­ly dis­or­dered, con­sti­tutes for most of them a tri­al. They must be accept­ed with respect, com­pas­sion, and sen­si­tiv­i­ty. Every sign of unjust dis­crim­i­na­tion in their regard should be avoid­ed. These per­sons are called to ful­fill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Chris­tians, to unite to the sac­ri­fice of the Lord’s Cross the dif­fi­cul­ties they may encounter from their con­di­tion.

 

2359 Homo­sex­u­al per­sons are called to chasti­ty. By the virtues of self-mas­tery that teach them inner free­dom, at times by the sup­port of dis­in­ter­est­ed friend­ship, by prayer and sacra­men­tal grace, they can and should grad­u­al­ly and res­olute­ly approach Chris­t­ian per­fec­tion.

In this pas­sage, a num­ber of things are evi­dent to me:

• Homo­sex­u­ality (i.e., the mere fact of being a homo­sex­u­al) is not a sin. Only homo­sex­u­al acts are. Homo­sex­u­al­i­ty is no more a sin, of itself, than orig­i­nal sin.
• The Cat­e­chism says that homo­sex­u­al incli­na­tions are “objec­tive­ly dis­or­dered.” That does not mean that homo­sex­u­al per­sons are “dis­or­dered” (they are not), nor does the Cat­e­chism tell us any­thing about the sub­jec­tive cul­pa­bil­i­ty of any­one who is homo­sex­u­al or who engages in homo­sex­u­al acts.
• The Cat­e­chism tells us that dis­crim­i­na­tion against homo­sex­u­al per­sons is unjust and that Catholics have a duty to reject it and to treat them with respect and com­pas­sion.
• If the Church, in con­demn­ing homo­sex­u­al acts, appeals to what tra­di­tion has always taught, then Car­di­nal Marx is on thin ground when he claims that none of this is “set in stone.” 2000 years of tra­di­tion seems pret­ty stony to me.

Car­di­nal Marx can make any of those points with­out telling us Catholics can “doubt” the Cat­e­chism, because none of those points require “doubt­ing” the Cat­e­chism. They require affirm­ing the Cat­e­chism.

Except that Car­di­nal Marx has no inter­est in stop­ping there. Some Catholics make a habit of walk­ing right up to the edge and hold­ing their pinky toe over a pool of error with­out jump­ing in. “Look, Ma!” they cry. “One foot!” Car­di­nal Marx jumps in and invites us to come in with him.

“Peo­ple,” he says, “live in an inti­mate lov­ing rela­tion­ship that also has a sex­u­al form of expres­sion. And we want to say that this is not worth any­thing?”

That also has a sex­u­al form of expres­sion. Car­di­nal Marx is hon­est; he does not do what some defend­ers of bless­ing same sex cou­ples do and protest: “Oh, but of course, we don’t mean that they’d be hav­ing sex. It would be a chaste spir­i­tu­al friend­ship!” I con­cede that Car­di­nal Marx is an hon­est man. He con­flates homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and homo­sex­u­al acts bold­ly and beats his chest in the Ger­man press.

The Vat­i­can says that priests are not per­mit­ted to bless same-sex cou­ples; the Cat­e­chism says homo­sex­u­al per­sons must be treat­ed with com­pas­sion, that their incli­na­tions are a tri­al, that homo­sex­u­al­i­ty is not a sin of itself but that homo­sex­u­al acts are, and homo­sex­u­al per­sons are called to chasti­ty.

Car­di­nal Marx says that’s not enough for me, I can doubt the Cat­e­chism, why should­n’t I, I’ve blessed same-sex cou­ples, the sex­u­al expres­sion means some­thing, we are all sex­u­al beings after all, even me, even though I am not in a rela­tion­ship because I’m a priest and I’ve tak­en a vow.

He says this because he’s an hon­est man. Some Catholics dan­gle their toe over the pool and say they’ve kept the let­ter of the Mag­is­teri­um, but not Car­di­nal Marx. Car­di­nal Marx jumps. He’s hon­est.