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Being Catholic Means Not Feeling Sorry about Being Catholic -- By: Kathryn Jean Lopez

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The likes of Time magazine, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe want to see the moral voice of the Catholic Church muted, if not completely silenced, on hot-button social issues of the day. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the current debate over homosexuality -- an issue that has become increasingly difficult to talk about in the public square. Just ask Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, who stands nearly alone in the media in discussing the existence of homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood as an ingredient in some of the sex-abuse cases of recent decades, and its existence in the seminary and clerical culture where abuse of teenagers all too often went unpunished in the past.

The issue is, of course, broader than sex-abuse scandals. In the Denver and Boston archdioceses, schools have recently been faced with decisions about whether or not to accept in private Catholic schools the children of same-sex couples. It strikes me as quite apparent that a school run by a Catholic parish should be free to choose not to take on such a challenge.

I will be the first to acknowledge that not every Catholic school lives up to its mission of evangelizing. It is also true that some parents send their children to Catholic schools for the scholastic quality or because the Catholic school in their area is physically safer than the area?s public school. But a Catholic school that is being truly Catholic and fulfilling the religious portion of its mission is going to have an intrinsic and obvious problem with an openly gay couple being partners in that full mission of the school.

The same-sex couple at the Christmas show, for example, is a lot more scandalous to what the school is trying to teach about morality than the divorced couple -- simply because the scandal is much harder to avoid. There will be hurt feelings all around; the most charitable thing for the school to do may simply be to decline to accept the child of two lesbians into the school in the first place.

You can certainly disagree with me on this -- or with the forthright shepherd Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, or with the next Catholic-school principal or pastor who has to make a call on the application of a so-called alternative family. But the school should nonetheless be free to make that decision about the identity of the school and how best they can serve all of the children in it, as a matter of religious liberty.

The outcry about these decisions to say no underscores the broader problem that strong cultural forces -- notably, the media -- have with the moral voice of the Church. It?s not just Pope Benedict that they wish would pipe down; it?s also the local parish school. They are encouraging an environment in which even Catholics feel awkward about letting a Catholic school be Catholic. And they are using victims of abuse at the hands of Catholic priests -- priests who were themselves being unfaithful to the Church in an especially shocking way -- as cover for their own moral agenda.

This is what Time magazine recently did, when it announced on its cover that ?Being Pope Means Never Having to Say You?re Sorry.? That headline simply doesn?t pass the laugh test. Christianity is a redemption story. Christ, the faithful believe, came precisely because we sin, and believers are implored to say ?sorry? -- in a sacramental way -- in the Catholic Church. The Pope himself, on the matter of what he has called the ?filth? of the crimes committed by abusing priests, has been forthright in asking forgiveness and talking about the need for redemption and renewal; even Time had to acknowledge that, if begrudgingly.

When Time magazine, the New York Times, and the others work overtime to try to depict the current pope as part of the problem rather than as part of the solution, they reveal their agenda -- an agenda that may be fought out in a local Catholic parish school near you, sooner rather than later.

-- Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online. She can be reached at klopez@nationalreview.com.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on June 07, 2010 (boomark / email).