The excommunication of Sister Margaret McBride

The story of Sister Margaret McBride ought to concern all of us. She is a Catholic nun and a senior administrator at a hospital in Phoenix, who as a member of a medical ethics review panel, assented to an abortion to save the life of a woman who was in the 11th week of pregnancy.

Sister Margaret was summarily ex-communicated by the bishop in Arizona -- kicked out of the Church. Not even pedophile priests are excommunicated. One of the doctors who works with her was quoted in The New York Times with this to say:

“She is a kind, soft-spoken, humble, caring, spiritual woman whose spot in Heaven was reserved years ago... The idea that she could be ex-communicated after decades of service to the Church and humanity literally makes me nauseated.”

No allowance was made by her bishop for the difficult dilemma faced by this hospital ethics panel of which she was a part; indeed, the statement from the bishop's office all but said that the hospital should have let the pregnant woman die (along with her fetus) and the nun should have gone along with that. Most of those I know who are anti-abortion are not even that hardline.

This incident should be seen as part of a larger picture. I posted in March that American Catholic nuns are virtually at war with the Catholic bishops. They were on opposite sides of the health care debate (please click HERE to read that post), and they are posing an increasingly vocal challenge to the male hierarchy of the Catholic Church. That the Catholic bishops are now excommunicating nuns while still making excuses for their pedophile scandals is nothing less than outrageous, and tars all churches of every stripe with the brush of intolerance and rigidity.

This column ran yesterday in The New York Times by Pulitzer-prize winning columnist Nicholas D. Kristof and I highly commend it to you:

Sister Margaret’s Choice
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

We finally have a case where the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy is responding forcefully and speedily to allegations of wrongdoing.

But the target isn’t a pedophile priest. Rather, it’s a nun who helped save a woman’s life. Doctors describe her as saintly.

The excommunication of Sister Margaret McBride in Phoenix underscores all that to me feels morally obtuse about the church hierarchy. I hope that a public outcry can rectify this travesty.

To read the full article, please click HERE.

Photo of Sister Margaret from The Catholic Sun.

All True Christians: Bishop Dan Edwards

I am off on the Vestry retreat today, so I am featuring a "guest" blogger: Dan Edwards, the Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Nevada. I met him in an elevator last summer in Anaheim at General Convention. He was the only bishop wearing a baseball cap on the floor of the House of Bishops so I had to like him.

He wrote this the other day on his blog (you can read his blog by clicking HERE). I am reprinting this in full; it is thought-provoking:

All True Christians

By Dan Edwards

“All True Christians Are Pro-Life,” thus said a bumper sticker in Carson City.

I am indebted to this bumper sticker for keeping me entertained for days, spinning out lines of inquiry and wonder at such a curiously arrogant assertion of dogma. These are a few of the things I wonder about.

Who decides what opinions you have to hold in order to be a “true Christian?” For centuries, we worked out our definitions of orthodoxy in ecumenical councils. Bishops from all over the Christian world met in prayerful deliberation, guided by theologians, mystics, and people of noted sanctity. They came to a consensus definition of the faith. In those days, the statements of the ecumenical councils set the limits on Christian belief. There was a lot going on in the Protestant Reformation, but the theological heart of it was the claim that the definitions articulated by the councils had become too precise. Each person, the reformers insisted, should be given a copy of the sacred text, written in his or her own language, and allowed to find their own understanding of the truth guided by the indwelling Holy Spirit -- not an ecclesiastical hierarchy. That opened up the possibilities of “true Christianity” to a radically wider array of opinions. What may be new in our time is the extension of this individuality to the right of each individual not only to discern his or her own interpretation but to declare that interpretation to be orthodoxy itself and pronounce anathema on anyone who has reached a different interpretation.

So who defines a “true Christian” today? Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition took most of the pending legislation of the 1990’s, prescribed a right position on that legislation, and claimed that any legislator who voted wrong on any issue was not a “true Christian.” But how did Ralph get that authority? He couldn’t even get himself elected Lieutenant Governor of Georgia. Yet he claimed a greater authority than the Council of Nicaea.

It used to be so simple. For Paul, if you could say “Jesus is Lord,” you were a true Christian even if you had some harebrained ideas. Eventually that 3-word affirmation grew into the Apostle’s Creed, and finally the Nicene Creed. In the 4th Century, being baptized and saying the Nicene Creed were enough to call yourself a true Christian even if you could not have passed Ralph Reed’s gauntlet of legislative issues test. Who decides whether someone is a “true Christian?” Maybe we could go back to objective standards like the Bible and the Ancient Creeds. Otherwise, we are in the hands of the manufacturers of bumper stickers.

But what about the substance of the claim itself? Are all true Christians “pro-life?” The threshold issue is: what do we mean by “pro-life?” If it means a basic orientation toward life and engagement with the world as opposed to life-denying asceticism, then I have to agree that a true Christian is pro-life. We are an Easter people, a people of the Resurrection. So we are for life – no doubt about it. I would think being pro-life compels one to be an ardent advocate of the Millenium Development Goals, to eradicate death-dealing malaria, tuberculosis, HIV-AIDS, and malnutrition. A pro-life person sends Nets For Life to Kenya. Since life depends on health, surely one who is pro-life must oppose toxic waste dumping, nuclear proliferation, global warming, and smoking. Are all of these positions essential to being a true Christian? Is that what the bumper sticker means?

Of course, that is not at all what “pro-life” means in American politics. It means support for government regulation of a women’s choice to carry a pregnancy to term as opposed to abort. I have no doubt whatsoever that a true Christian can be “pro-life” in that sense. I know many of them. But is that moral stance so indisputable as to be the core of Christian faith? It is probably not in Scripture (one verse is possibly – but it’s a stretch – arguable). It is definitely not in the Creeds. It is not an ancient dogma of the Church. It was never addressed by an ecumenical council. The Episcopal Church’s Resolution on abortion is “pro-life” in that it regards all life as sacred, it holds any abortion to be a “tragic choice,” and says abortion should never be done for trivial reasons – but it finally affirms that this is an intimate moral decision to be made by a woman with pastoral guidance and moral counseling – not something to be regulated by the government. So, if being “pro-life” means I have to support legislation, I would have to defy the teachings of my church in order to be a “true Christian.” Yet, so many of the Epistles and the writings of Church Fathers like Ignatius of Antioch and Clement of Rome say that a true Christian respects the teachings of the Church. The bumper sticker does put many of us on the horns of dilemma.

How do we define a “true Christian?” What are the standards? My son-in-law, an ordained presbyter of the Methodist Church, recently “became a fan” of a Face Book page supporting gay marriage. A friend wrote him a lengthy exposition explaining that homosexuality is a sin, so she could not understand how a Christian could support such a thing. She was making a host of major assumptions which many of us who think of ourselves as Christians do not share – for example the basic function of the Bible as a rule book, the interpretation of ritual purity violations as “sins” even though both Testaments clearly treat them differently, the idea that forbidding one specific sexual practice implies the prohibition of others, the idea that rules explicitly directed against men can be extended to women, the notion that most ritual purity rules were superseded by the gospel but a select few were not, that the whole of moral revelation was complete in the Scripture, etc.

Again, there are clearly thousands of people on both sides of this issue –thousands who have been baptized, who receive the sacraments regularly, who recite the Ancient Creeds, and revere the Holy Scriptures, all saying “Jesus is Lord” and meaning it – yet who disagree about the morality of homosexuality. Is it possible for these people to disagree and yet recognize each other as “true Christians?” Yes, if . . . .

And here I gulp at what I feel compelled to say. In this post-modern age of devout subjectivism, I know this sounds hopelessly conservative. We can do what our forebears did. We can disagree and have high-charged energetic provocative conversations about the implications of the faith, but only if we embrace a strong orthodoxy and a vigorous orthopraxy.

The orthodoxy consists of a commitment to the sacred text, our holy Scriptures, as the starting point of discussion; a commitment to the ancient creeds as the framework, the language structure for our image of God; and a willingness to listen respectfully to the teachers, saints, poets, and sages of our tradition more than the pundits of today. The orthopraxy consists of a commitment to the Summary of the Law. To love God with all our hearts is to love a mystery, to revere a mystery, and so to be humble in the presence of that mystery. To love my neighbor as myself is to give him what is his due and what I expect in return, a decent respect for my integrity and my conscience. It occurs to me that adherence to the Summary of the Law might imply a certain reticence in what I paste to my bumper.

KANSAS: Wichita-area clergy, Presiding Bishop express horror at George Tiller's murder

June 02, 2009

[Episcopal News Service] Bishop Dean E. Wolfe of the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas and a dozen clergy who serve Episcopal churches in the metropolitan Wichita area have issued a statement expressing their sadness and horror at the murder on May 31 of abortion doctor George Tiller.

Tiller, a physician who provided abortions, had become a target of people who oppose the procedure. He was shot dead during a Sunday morning service in his church, Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said in a June 2 statement that she was horrified to learn of Tiller's murder "made even more painful for occurring in a place of worship and sanctuary. I pray for him and for his family, that all may know they are held in the palm of God's hand. I also pray for those who believe that violence is ever the answer to disputes or differences, that they, too, may be healed.

According to reports, 51-year-old abortion opponent Scott Roeder was arrested a few hours following the shooting as the prime suspect in Tiller's murder.

The Wichita-area clergy included 10 priests and two deacons, along with Wolfe. In their statement, they said Tiller's murder "was not a Christian act; this is not what Jesus taught," adding that their faith in Jesus Christ makes them "absolutely certain that violence will never prevail, and that darkness will not win."

The clergy said they were reaching out to neighbors of all faiths in Wichita and beyond.

By early afternoon June 1, two Wichita rectors had announced that they would be available to their parishioners for special prayers June 3. The Rev. Cathie Caimano of St. John's Church said her parish's regular Wednesday Evening Prayer service would include special prayers for the tragedy. Dean Kate Moorehead of St. James' Church told her parishioners in an email that she would be at the church in the evening June 3 to pray and talk with anyone who wanted to stop by.

The clergy statement, along with its signatories, is available here.