on the abuse of labels in the recent contraception blowup
Whatever else the recent blowup over the ACA contraception mandate might have shown, it's that Americans need a better epistemology. The news story has interested me on many levels and will probably pop up in blog posts from time to time. But one philosophical idea kept seeming to float to the forefront, at least in my mind as I read the different ( Read more... )
The RCC, like all religious institutions represents its tradition, not the current view of all its members; and the members get to vote by agreeing to be a part of it or not.
This is the sentence that basically pushes me to respond as I do. I'm not seeing an unclear expression, I'm seeing one that's pretty clear. It's just that I cannot see a way of interpreting that other than by saying that if I want to be RCC, I can only do that by accepting that tradition as it is currently formulated by the religious institution - specifically, by the bishops who "represent" us. The tie you made here between the bishops and the tradition was simply too strong, and the position assigned to the laity is simply too congruent with the bishopric's self- understanding of its institutional position in relation to lay Catholics.
Going on to the critique of liberals' critique of Catholicism, though, I think the problem here is that the interpretation of what is Catholic is political, and we expect it to be... not that. We can politicize the RCC one way by saying saying that the Catholic position is represented by how many Catholics violate the reproductive decrees of bishops; we can politicize it another by saying that Catholicism is determined by "the tradition," as represented by the clerical hierarchy, not a popular vote. However, unless the latter critique is attached to some kind of actionable agenda in this context, in order to make that latter position something we can actually use against the power elite of this country, and that's both significantly different from either of the major positions in the debate already, I see the critique of liberalism as defaulting us to a political non-obstacle.
That I think makes it far more useful to the forces of reaction than to the forces in favor of a more humane hermeneutic and society, and that I just can't take, given that the Church hierarchy is already committed to dragging its members down with them into a reactionary tailspin. The best defense of the plurality of the RCC as a tradition is not contesting the liberal view of the representative function of the Church hierarchy, it's spurring the many Catholics who don't accept Church teaching on birth control to find some way to act on their non-acceptance.
I say this because I think there's a reasonable case to be made that one can articulate all the decrees one wants and say they constitute the institutional identity, but what a majority of believers *are actually doing* can be as valid a way of determining what is "Catholic" (or Jewish, or Methodist, or American, or atheist, or whatever) as the self-articulated self-understanding of an institutional representative, or a minority body. There are contexts when it is appropriate to argue in that way about identity. Critique is often that appropriate context - when one tries to shake a group or a person out of complacent self-definition, or out of bad faith self-definition.
Now as I said, to the degree that secularizing democratic liberals simply appropriate that split among clerical hierarchy and a large number of lay people without urging the latter to make their failure to comply politically relevant by explaining why it is appropriate as a Catholic to disagree with the hierarchy, then yes, there's a problem; but I contend it's still the lesser sin than Catholics failing to counter in action their Church hierarchy.
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