Archbishop Timothy Dolan, of New York City, has just been elected leader of the U.S. Conference of Bishops. For a class focussed on pleasure and desire, this shift in the Catholic Church's priorities represents a significant cultural development.
As Laure Goodstein reported yesterday in a NYT front page article, the choice was between Bishop Gerald Kicanas, who advocates for "social justice issues" and the more conservative Dolan. Goodstein quotes the theologian Thomas Reese, who notes: "This is a signal that the conference wants to be a leader in the culture wars." How exhausting. Do we really need more culture wars?
As Goodstein explains, Dolan's election was part of a long, gradual shift in the church's focus. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the U.S. Conference of Bishops frequently spoke out in favor of liberal and social justice issues: inequality, the treatment of workers, poverty, the environment, immigration, peace. By the mid-1990s, the Conference started to focus more often on abortion rights. Once gay marriage had become a national issue, the Conference of Bishops emerged as one of the most consistent leading opponents. There are 63 million Catholics in the United States (or about 23 percent of the total population).
Dolan's election and our national mid-term elections two weeks earlier seem almost like bookends in the culture war. As a nation, we have decided to replace Nancy Pelosi with John Boehner as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. John Boehner campaigned on the economy and jobs during this election season, but now that he has been elected he is making abortion a central Republican priority. Nancy Keenan (president of NARAL) reported in the Huffingtonpost yesterday that Boehner has voted eight times against the protection of abortion clinics (after a series of threats and attacks, some of the them fatal, on abortion providers), twice against federal funding of abortion care for survivors of rape and incest, and seventeen times against allowing women in the military to use their own money.
With this shift in leadership in the House of Representatives and in the Conference of Bishops, will our culture wars grow even more intense? Hmm... social justice issues or culture war? Which priorities do you prefer?
Many commentators hoped that with the election of President Obama in 2008, the culture wars were finally over. We could go on to address serious issues like the unbalanced economy, two active wars (the Afghanistan war being the longest in American history), and a level of inequality greater than at any time since the Gilded Age. Alas, we are back to abortion and gay marriage. [The photo below is from about.com, accessed on November 18, 2010].
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