Positive and negative

Catholic New Times, April 24, 2005 by Rabbi Michael Lerner

Condolences to our many Catholic readers and members of the Tikkun Community on the passing of the pope.

From the standpoint of progressive spiritual people outside the Catholic world, this pope played both a positive and negative role. On the positive side, he continued and reaffirmed the strong Catholic teachings on the importance of social justice. He advanced the connection between Catholics and Jews and took some important steps to symbolically affirm the sisterhood of Christianity and Judaism. He made symbolic gestures of recognition of Islam. He courageously stood up to communist dictators in Poland and the military junta in Brazil, pleaded for an end to the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, went to Japan and denounced nuclear war. He took a step toward modeling forgiveness by visiting in jail the person who tried to kill him. He called for reconciliation between Israel and Palestine. And this is only the tip of the iceberg of many good deeds and positive values he espoused.

It is the Jewish tradition that in remembering the dead, we talk honestly and not just say the good things. So, we must say that this pope played a distressing role in undermining progressive voices within the church, while elevating church leaders who sided with the status quo. Not only were these progressive voices at the forefront of liberation theology, they sided with the poor and the oppressed, seeking to build upon the progressive spirit intended by the Vatican Council II in the mid 1960s.

Rather than widening and building on that spirit of liberalization by taking actions like including women in the priesthood, allowing priests to marry, welcoming homosexuals into the church, this pope not only reaffirmed the most sexually repressive aspects of his tradition (few of them actually based in biblical texts) but also elevated these issues into the central issues of loyalty to the church (e.g., in insisting that the doctrine of ordaining only men was a position that required full loyalty from the faithful), condemning moves to open the church to homosexuals, and rebuffing attempts by women to gain more influence in the church.

He elevated into positions of leadership the most conservative and least socially conscious elements in the Catholic world, ensuring that the Church will continue to play a repressive and reactionary role in these matters.

--Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine