{"id":37,"date":"2010-07-19T09:33:13","date_gmt":"2010-07-19T09:33:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/moral-problems-at-the-vatican.html"},"modified":"2010-07-19T09:33:13","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T09:33:13","slug":"moral-problems-at-the-vatican","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/moral-problems-at-the-vatican.html","title":{"rendered":"Moral problems at the Vatican"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"apple<\/span>The widespread astonishment, contempt, and anger
\nthat has greeted the Vatican’s decision to include the “attempted
\nordination of women” among the “graver crimes” falling under the
\njuridical purview of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
\n(CDF) has forced apologists for the new norms to issue explanations for
\nhow it’s really not the case that (as I put
\nit<\/a> back on July 9) “Ordaining Women = Raping Children.” The
\nexplanations boil down to distinguishing between violations of the
\nsacraments and moral derelictions. <\/p>\n

As Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, the
\nVatican’s abuse prosecutor, put
\nit<\/a>, “Sexual abuse and pornography are more
\ngrave delicts, they are an egregious violation of moral law…Attempted
\nordination of women is grave, but on another level, it
\nis a wound that is an attempt against the Catholic faith on the
\nsacramental orders.” In other words, a rotten apple is not the same as a
\nrotten orange, even though they both need to be thrown out. I could be
\nfired for sleeping with an undergraduate, plagiarizing an article, or
\nmurdering my next-door neighbor, but that doesn’t mean that those acts
\nare equivalent. <\/p>\n

Enough said? Not quite. That neat distinction
\nbetween the moral and sacramental levels is, I’m afraid, bogus. Consider
\nhow the CDF came to be involved in sexual abuse cases in the first
\nplace. <\/p>\n


\nAlong with the new norms the Vatican issued a fascinating
\n“Historical
\nIntroduction<\/a>” explaining the evolution of this latest exercise in
\ncanon law, going back to the 1922 letter (reissued in 1962) that
\noccasioned some heated back and forth after the NYT published its long article<\/a>
\nJuly 1 on Pope Benedict’s time as head of the CDF. This account does
\nnot quite correspond with the analysis<\/a>
\ncanonist and Vatican critic Fr. Thomas Doyle did a couple of years ago,
\nbut never mind. If your Latin is good enough, you can confirm from the original
\ndocument<\/a> (“Crimen Solicitationis”) that the involvement of the CDF
\nin abuse cases stems from the need to discipline priests who use the
\nconfessional for sexual purposes. [Update: English version here<\/a>.] <\/b>The fifth section of “Crimen” simply
\nextends that concern (“mutatis…mutandis<\/i>“) to “very bad” sex
\ncrimes engaged in by clergy outside the confessional.<\/p>\n

The point
\nis that the original jurisdictional issue had to do with a crime that
\nwas both “moral” and “sacramental”–a moral violation of the sacrament,
\nif you will. But is that even a meaningful thing to say, in canon law
\nterms? Does the Vatican claim that it’s not immoral to ordain a woman?
\nNot that I’ve heard.<\/p>\n

The crux of the matter is that the Pope and Curia have deemed it more
\nimportant to give the CDF the power to try bishops for ordaining women
\nthan for covering up sexual abuse by priests. By their lights, the former
\nis a more serious problem than the latter. By mine, that’s a moral
\nproblem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The widespread astonishment, contempt, and anger that has greeted the Vatican’s decision to include the “attempted ordination of women” among the “graver crimes” falling under the juridical purview of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) has forced apologists for the new norms to issue explanations for how it’s really not the case…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nMoral problems at the Vatican - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/moral-problems-at-the-vatican.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Moral problems at the Vatican - 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}