Building a Bridge by Martin James

Author:Martin, James [Martin, James]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Catholicism
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

Sensitivity

Let’s return to the beautiful word sensitivity. Again, we can use it to mean not denigrating the bishops or the hierarchy. And again, that is not only simple human courtesy; it is Christian charity.

But I would like to use sensitivity in another way. I would like to invite the LGBT community to more deeply consider who is speaking and how they are speaking. Here I’m turning to theology—specifically ecclesiology, the branch of Christian theology that looks at the church itself. I would like to focus on the theological idea—which is part of Catholic teaching—of different “levels of authority.”

As Catholics, we believe in various levels of teaching authority in our church. Not every church official speaks with the same level of authority.

The simplest way of explaining this is that what your local pastor says in a homily does not come from the same level of authority as what the pope says in an encyclical. The different levels of authoritative teaching begin with the Gospels, which are followed by the documents of church councils and then papal pronouncements. Even the different papal pronouncements have various levels of authority. Among those with the highest authority are constitutions or encyclicals, addressed to the whole church; followed by apostolic letters and motu proprios; then the pope’s daily homilies, speeches, and press conferences, and so on. There are also documents from synods and individual Vatican congregations and, on the local level, documents from bishops’ conferences and pastoral letters from local bishops.

Each has a different level of authority. They all need to be prayerfully read, but it is important to know that they do not all have equal authority.

Of course, the hierarchy is not the only group that speaks with authority. Authority resides in holiness as well. Holy men and women who are not members of the hierarchy, like St. Teresa of Calcutta, and holy laypeople, like Dorothy Day or Jean Vanier, speak with authority.

Also, it’s important to be careful about taking what the mainstream media says about “church teaching” at face value. Recently I read a headline that said, “Keep Homilies to Eight Minutes, Vatican Tells Clergy.” I thought, “The Vatican says this?” Sure enough, when I read the article, I discovered that it came from an individual bishop working in the Vatican who was offering his own suggestions to preachers. The headline was false. The “Vatican” wasn’t doing any such thing. So, again, sensitivity is in order.

Moreover, we need to be “sensitive” to the fact that when Vatican officials speak—whether the pope or a Vatican congregation—they are speaking to the entire world, not just the West and certainly not just the United States. A topic that seems tepid in the United States might be shocking in Latin America or Africa.

To that end, I was disappointed in the reaction of some LGBT Catholics in this country to the pope’s apostolic exhortation on family life, Amoris Laetitia, “The Joy of Love.”

In that document, Pope Francis says:

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