Have a question that I’ve been dealing with the last few days.
When the Bishops put out one of their “letters” as they seem to do quite frequently on various topics… Are we allowed to disagree with the letter on a public forum? Say Climate change…there is a lot of discussion about it…man made vs natural cycle etc. Can we say we disagree with them or do we have to be silent and obedient?
I think a lot of people take the wrong approach when it comes to statements from the USCCB.
Sure, there are varying levels of authority. Sometimes, the bishops will release a document that gets voted on by all of them (and even, ultimately, recognized by the Vatican). Other times, a document or statement will come out of but one of the various USCCB committees. Still other times, a statement comes from one bishop who is in charge of a certain committee.
All that said, I find a lot of people misinterpret what the USCCB says because they simply don’t bother to actually read what is said but only look for the “highlight reel” in some second-hand news source. This quite frequently leads to people getting it wrong as many of those news sources put a partisan, political slant on it. This is what leads (more than the statements themselves) to people thinking the bishops are getting “political”. All these news sources simply are unable to view anything other than through a political lens. You have to take off those glasses to read anything coming from the bishops. It’s the only way to properly understand them.
Take health care, for example. The bishops aren’t getting political. They are focusing on the dignity of the human person. They (as we should) want people to have access to health care. That shouldn’t really be controversial. But they do not follow lock step with either political party on the issue (nor should we). They objected to “Obamacare” and opposed it’s being passed because of the deficiencies of the bill. But now that it is here, they oppose a repeal with no plan in place to replace it. They also oppose certain amendments to it that are still problematic. This is because they always have at the forefront of their mind those principles that Deacon Jeff succinctly stated. They’re not trying to advance a political agenda. They are trying to encourage us to keep our eyes on these core principles so people don’t needlessly suffer and die.
Can you disagree with them? In certain aspects, yes, but in certain aspects, no. We cannot disagree with the core principles. And (in my experience) much of the time what people point to as “disagreements” are not with anything the bishops are actually advancing. Take climate change for example. When a bishop mentions those words, too often we allow ourselves to “fill in the blanks” and we begin to automatically assume the bishop is 100% aligned with the Democrats and the liberals and are endorsing every problematic and/or wrong-headed thing they are advocating. Again, this misses the larger point that we are called to be good stewards of creation.
But even if we are talking about something that we can disagree with a bishop (or bishops) about, we still owe them respect and reverence. Far too often, this is sorely lacking in such public and/or online discussions. We cannot seem to respectfully disagree, but we have to accuse them of being shills for a political party while we’re at it. Or of overstepping their bounds. (“Just stick to theology, Your Excellency, m’kay?”) There are good, productive ways of disagreeing, and there are bad, disrespectful ways of disagreeing. We need to go with the former and reject the latter.
One last point, even if we think (and especially when we know) we disagree with this or that statement from a bishop or bishops, we should give them the courtesy of hearing them out. Rather than responding with a knee jerk (for example) “I don’t have to listen to what you’re saying because I already know man-made global warming is a sham”, we should stop and listen to what they are saying, why they are saying it, and what they are getting at (again, by reading the actual statements rather than getting them filtered to us through some second-hand source). Even if we walk away still in disagreement, we might find that we actually have learned something.
Sorry for rambling on and on.
One of the few things that gets me worked up is seeing Catholics be unfairly critical of the bishops. The majority of the time, it is unnecessary and unhelpful.
