Gay Marriage, in Today's News 01.09.10

Gay Marriage. The Wall Street Journal today has a opinion piece titled "Washington, Gay Marriage and the Catholic Church." The point of the article seems to be to convince the Church not to do anything foolish now that the DC City Council has passed legislation legalizing gay marriage.

"By passing gay marriage, the City Council has put...the Archdiocese of Washington, in an awkward position. Either the church will have to recognize gay marriage or it will be forced to abandon a large portion of its charitable programs."

The article has the following advice to the Archdiocese, "...follow in the footsteps of Gerogetown University, the District's largest Catholic organization. There, an employee, whether gay or straight, married or not, receives full benefits for himself plus one legally domiciled member of his or her household. This would allow the archdiocese to save face by pretending it isn't knowingly recognizing gay marriage."

This gambit of placing the Church in this position has occurred in a number of places, most notably the United Kingdom. It seems to be one of the favored tactics to discredit and weaken the Church.

Will the Archdiocese take the WSJ advice and duck the whole issue? Time will tell. The history up to now has not been so great. The Archdiocese only provided "polite" opposition to the proposed legislation. "The archdiocese was not a particularly strong advocate against gay marriage in the District, but it did press for a religious exemption to be added to the same-sex marriage bill." Of course, the request for the exemption lost.

Had the Church leaders provided a principled and very public opposition complete with an educational effort on what gay marriage means to the future of the Church and country, things might be different now. The Church leaders also failed to mobilize the faithful to lobby and to prayer.

In short the Archdiocese leaders response to this deliberate provocation of the Church was pathetic; completely pathetic. 

And so, now, the Archdiocese will have to pay the consequences. It is in a lose-lose situation. And it has made itself vulnerable to pressure from the civil authorities to make nice and play along, quietly sweeping the Church's teaching under the rug.

One wonders how many times the Church will be kicked around before the Church hierarchy gets the message that there are very strong forces out there who want to destroy the Church, and that they had better do something a little more decisive to stop the attacks.