Well, it doesn\u2019t make me wonder too much when I\u2019m reminded by poll after study after survey that without American Catholics, that thing known as the secular left would never have made it this far.\u00a0 The vast majority of American Catholics, after all, out-liberal most God-hating leftist atheists.\u00a0 They support abortion rights, proudly use birth control of every variety, and typically adopt the post-Christian notion of God as a concept by which I measure my own reality (St. John Lennon 3:16).<\/p>\n
Of course they also come close to where the Church appears to be going.\u00a0 Though not officially pacifist, one has to admit that one is hard pressed to find an armed conflict that has had the Church\u2019s backing in any recent memory.\u00a0 And while the Church officially allowed for the use of capital punishment in extreme (if unlikely) cases, in recent years both Pope Benedict XVI and a growing number of bishops also want to follow the modern way of jettisoning the death penalty altogether.\u00a0 Likewise, when it comes to such things as social justice, immigration, and general financial distribution, the Church certainly tacks to the more progressive, modern mindset. <\/p>\n
In fact, if you get right down to it, if it were not for the staunch adherence to preserving natural life at all costs, there would be little to separate the Catholic Church and where its leadership appears to be heading from any one of a dozen mainline Protestant denominations, c. 1990.\u00a0 Even its recent statements concerning homosexuality, while still opposing marriage of non-heterosexuals, sounds more comfortable in a modern, secular psych magazine than anything found in traditional Christian reflections. <\/p>\n
But that is also another thing to notice.\u00a0 The Church has certainly opened itself up to being in line with the latest scholarly and scientific theories.\u00a0 As a general rule, it seems pretty happy accepting whatever is the latest idea to come out of academia.\u00a0 There is only the qualifier that God does too exist, added to whatever has been said.\u00a0 So when it comes to the theory of Evolution as currently understood, the Church appears to say, \u201cWhatever, sounds good, but God does too exist.\u201d\u00a0 Increasingly I notice that biblical commentaries and scholarship hearken more to the post-Christian, secular critical school of scholarship, acknowledging that entire swaths of Scripture may be nothing more than fables, with huge hunks of the Old Testament, and maybe even a few sections of the New, no longer applicable without reading it through a narrowly defined set of true canonical texts.\u00a0 Of course the Resurrection still happened.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
In short, I sympathize with Catholics who are more progressive, more liberal.\u00a0 Were it not for the womb to tomb emphasis on the sanctity of life, there is a shrinking number of teachings in the Church that don\u2019t echo, if not wearily, the same basic path taken by our more liberal brethren in various progressive denominations.\u00a0 Still, there are a few things that the Church stands firm on, and those two are that marriage is still between a man and a woman, and abortion in any case will ever and always be an intrinsic evil.\u00a0 Period. <\/p>\n