Ask Tony: What does the Catholic Church teach about sex changes?

Caitlyn Jenner, the face of transgenderism.

A couple of weeks ago, in Outside the Asylum, I addressed Pope Francis’ recent letter on the Holy Year of Mercy. Today, I received a question there from Charles: “I know a man who recently decided to undergo a sex change procedure. What is the Church’s position on this?”

A Not-So-Obvious Answer

This question comes at a sensitive time for my family and me, as one of my cousins is “transitioning” from a male to a female identity. The answer would seem to be obvious to many people; the best course of action, then, is to research the question to make sure the obvious answer isn’t wrong.

Surprisingly, the answer doesn’t lie in one single Vatican-issued document such as the Catechism of the Catholic Church or a papal encyclical like Deus Caritas Est. According to the Catholic News Service, in 2000 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith did issue a sub secretum letter to the various papal legates, and again in 2002 to the presidents of bishops’ conferences. Strangely enough for a secret document, this letter has remained secret — unlisted with other CDF letters and ad dubitum documents, unmentioned in the USCCB website, and not readily available through Google or Bing. (Apparently Wikileaks hasn’t gotten around to it yet.)

Nevertheless, various Catholic people and sources have addressed the questions of sexual identity and gender reassignment surgery. In lieu of any formal definitive statement, I can attempt an informed provisional answer. And it turns out the answer isn’t as obvious as you may think.

An atheist defends the intelligence of believers

Image source: bianymeans.com.

It's been said of Roman gladiators that they were required to kill their opponents but not required to hate them. In the best intellectual tradition, people have fought against each other in the arena of the mind while maintaining warm personal relationships with each other in the shelter of society. One particularly good example of this was the long-standing friendship between the skeptical Socialist George Bernard Shaw and the Catholic liberal G. K. Chesterton. A more recent example would be the amity between the great Speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill and Pres. Ronald Reagan, who exchanged sharp words over policy by day and swapped stories over drinks by night.

I can't call Sincere Kirabo a "friend", but I can certainly give him some warm applause for a post he wrote in his Patheos blog Notes from an Apostate, "Why You Sound Ridiculous Claiming Religiosity is a Mental Defect". "Suggesting people are religious because they are dimwitted or suffer from a fabled religiosity-induced mental illness is a lazy, unthinking way to dismiss behavior one cannot identify with," says Kirabo, who urges his fellow atheists to "cease promoting such embarrassingly ignorant ideas."

I recently had a discussion on social media speaking to the unsound nature of ... arguments that use ableist and denigrating language to describe religious people. Because I adamantly opposed these uncharitable assertions that take an unnecessary and harmful route to delegitimize religiosity, I was branded an “enabler” to faith in the spurious and supernatural. But what does research suggest concerning this matter?
I’ve long been an avid reader of material that meticulously investigates mind perception, religion, and the “how” and “why” of religion. For this reason, I confidently stated that any individual belonging to the knowledgeable intelligentsia would laugh such notions out of the building. This caused me to think on two things: One, I doubt those who disagree will diligently explore facts that contradict their worldview (as the Darwinian Golden Rule suggests we do for the sake of intellectual honesty). Two, why not seek out experts to prove (or disprove) my stance? And so I did.

Ask Tony: Should I receive Communion only from a priest or deacon?

In the Crux article referenced in the screencap to your left, the author, Rev. Kenneth Doyle, answers the question with a verbal shrug: “It is, of course, the same Eucharist — whether received from a priest or from a lay minister — and ... I am a bit surprised when someone feels compelled to make a choice.” Referring to a deceased parishioner’s aversion to lay Eucharistic ministers, Fr. Doyle said, “In the scope of things, I felt that his preference was a small issue. For me, it came under the heading of the ‘big tent’ that embraces a wide variety of Catholics.”

The person at Saint Gabriel’s Newsroom who wrote the “Share” was, at bare minimum, uncharitable: nothing Fr. Doyle said was in any meaningful sense modernist, nor did he deny or denigrate the right of the consecrated to distribute the Eucharist. Moreover, the boast that s/he only receives on his/her knees and from consecrated ministers is so pompously self-congratulatory it invites ridicule; as we used to say when I was a kid, “Whaddaya want for that, a Bozo button?”

What really is the issue here?

In 1973, with the approval of Ven. Pope Paul VI, the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship issued the Instruction Immensae Caritatis, which authorized the appointment of “special ministers” from the ranks of the non-ordained to assist with the distribution of Communion. Eventually, to underline the fact that deacons and priests were the ordinary ministers of the Eucharist, the title of these appointees was changed to “Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion” (usually abbreviated EMHC).

Catholic Stand: Why Do We Still Expect Marital Fidelity?

The fallout from the Ashley Madison “data dump” has only begun. Much of the media attention has focused on B-list celebrity Josh Duggar, from his parents’ broken hearts to the inevitable amateur long-distance psychoanalysis and condemnations of the purity movement. However, sidebars do go into the hundreds of federal employees who have accessed the site from their offices, themarriages dissolving as suspicious spouses do their checking, and the expected questions about the morality of offering such a service.

The Oddity of Fidelity

It’s hard to feel any sympathy for either Avid Life Media, the owner of the website, or its many millions of subscribers. In every culture, which has some form of marriage, some definition of adultery obtains; the practice is largely frowned upon, in some cases incurring sanctions ranging from potential civil penalties to death. The oddity in our culture is not that so many people cheat, but rather that some expectation of fidelity is still kept, even after the sweeping changes wrought by the sexual revolution.

On the one hand, according to research published earlier this year, 22% of men and 14% of women have strayed at least once in their married lives; 74% of men and 68% of women admit they would cheat if they knew they would never get caught. On the other hand, the Gallup 2013 Values and Beliefs Survey recorded that 91% of Americans held affairs to be morally wrong, and that the number of people who thought it was acceptable had actually dropped 1% from 2001 to 2013. The most trenchant comment comes from Hugo Schwyzer: “We’ve become more willing to embrace diverse models of sexual self-expression even as we’ve become ever more intolerant of hypocrisy and the human frailty that makes hypocrisy almost inevitable.”

The “why” of cheating is the source of endless speculation, rationalization, and research. Unfortunately, a lot of the speculation ends up at the conclusion, “Monogamy is a myth” … even inarticles which claim to be premissed on established scientific fact. However, such a sweeping conclusion leaves behind an unexplained fact: if monogamy is a myth, in the sense of being a fiction or false knowledge, then surely the oddity is not the rate of infidelity, but rather the outrageously high rates of marital fidelity.

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

The Inconsistency Fallacy

A particular informal argument pattern, which I call the inconsistency fallacy, is becoming more common in culture-war battles. The inconsistency fallacy goes something like this:

• Advocate A holds position on policy p¹, which (presumably) has quality q.
• However, Advocate A also holds positions on policies p², p³, etc., which are not-q or anti-q.
• Either q or not-q should be supported.  (Implied premiss.)
• Therefore, Advocate A must give up his position(s) on either p¹ or on p², p³, etc.

Here’s a paraphrase of one variant I saw earlier this evening: “If you don’t want to sell food for a gay wedding because you don’t want to support sodomy, then you shouldn’t support gluttony by selling to fat people; you shouldn’t sell to divorcées, or to thieves, or to ....” Another variant I’ve seen: “If you’re against abortion, you should also be against capital punishment; you should be against hunting; you should be a vegan; you should be yadda-yadda-yadda ....”

It’s implied, and often stated, that if you don’t resolve the apparent inconsistency by abandoning position p¹, then you, sir/madam/small child, are a hypocrite, and we therefore need not pay attention to position p¹. Although the inconsistency fallacy shares some of the features of the red herring and the abusive ad hominem, it’s best classified as a sub-species of the false dilemma.

Thanks from the Kingdom of God Sisters! Let’s do it again!

Image © Anthony S. Layne.

Hey, folks! We got a “thank you” card from Kim Brown of the Kingdom of God Sisters!

You’ll remember that the KGS is the start-up second-order religious group on whose behalf I wrote last month. (I also kicked in a little of my own money.) Here’s what the future Sr. Kim — or perhaps Mother Kim? — has to say:

Dear Anthony Lane [sic],

Thank you for your gift to KGS and for your promotion on Twitter. Please keep us in your prayers as we strive to do God’s will & know you are in mine.

God is love: let the Kingdom know,

Kim Brown

Now, I say “we” got a card because it was you, Dear Readers, that helped spread the word, mostly through “likes” and ”shares” on Facebook. But I’m thinking we can do better. So please hit the “Twitter” button; share it on Facebook or Pinterest; re-blog it on your own Blogger, Wordpress or Tumblr account — whether you yourself can donate or not, pass the word on! And if you can spare a sawbuck or so, click on this link to go to the KGS’ donation page! Let’s make this go viral!

God is love: let the Kingdom know! Semper Fi.

Pope Francis’ orthodoxy continues to startle

Once again, Pope Francis has gotten people talking excitedly about changes in the Catholic Church by saying basically the same things his predecessors have said. If there’s anything positive about the “progressive pope” narrative frame, it gets the media to pick up on things that they ignored when Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II said them.

What did Pope Francis say this time? Yesterday, August 5, in his general audience, he chose to address the situation of divorced and remarried Catholics. Fairly early into his catechesis, Francis said:

In these decades, in truth, the Church has not been either insensitive or slow. Thanks to the reflection carried out by Pastors, guided and confirmed by my Predecessors, the awareness has greatly grown that a fraternal and attentive acceptance is necessary, in love and in truth, of the baptized that have established a new coexistence after the failure of their sacramental marriage; in fact, these people are not at all excommunicated, they are not excommunicated! And they are absolutely not treated as such: they are always part of the Church. [Bold type mine.—ASL]

Excommunication refers strictly to the formal canonical penalty. Under Canon 1331.1 of the 1983 Code, a person who has been formally excommunicated cannot minister in any capacity in any manner of worship, celebrate or receive the sacraments, or exercise any official office or function of the Church. In some cases, excommunication is incurred latae sententiae; that is, by the fact of the delict and without need of formal declaration (Canon 1314). However, marrying a second person without securing an annulment of marriage from the first is not one of those cases. And excommunication does not deprive one of membership in the Catholic Church; even if you formally apostatize, rejoining is simpler than you’d think.

Consequentialism and the Planned Parenthood videos—UPDATE

If you learn anything about the law — and I’ll freely confess I’m not a lawyer — you learn that the way a statute is written is very, very, very important. The simpler a clause is written, the more it leaves open to interpretation.

Katie M. Geary of the Becket Fund explains the problem in The Federalist. To make a simple explanation simpler: Abortion providers can’t perform what the law calls a “partial-birth” abortion, a procedure in which the unborn child’s head is manipulated into a breech presentation, then has its brain removed while stuck in the birth canal. On the other hand, stopping the heart with digitoxin before dismembering the child ruins fetal stem cells for research purposes. (See the footage and the transcript.) “These babies are being strategically maneuvered, crushed, and dismembered under ultrasound guidance — while still alive.”

There are two legal questions: 1) Are the abortionists working for Planned Parenthood “altering” the abortion procedure within the meaning of 42 USC 289g-1(b)(2)(A)(ii)? 2) Are various Planned Parenthood employees abusing the “reasonable payment” loophole in the illegalization of the sale of fetal tissue in 42 USC 289g-2(e)(3)? Unfortunately, none of the pro-abort attempts to “debunk” the videos really reaches these questions; the one state government investigation to date — Indiana’s — was done with such indecent haste that we’re justified in wondering how much effort was really put into it. (As for the videos being “heavily” or “deceptively” edited ... well, the full-length videos from which the press-release “good parts” edits were taken are readily available both on the Center for Medical Progress’ website and on YouTube; so you can make that judgment for yourself.)

Anthony Esolen on reform and renewal

Anthony Esolen.

Let’s get straight to the point. We no longer live in a culturally Christian state. We do not live in a robust pagan state, such as Rome was during the Pax Romana. We live in a sickly sub-pagan state, or metastate, a monstrous thing, all-meddlesome, all-ambitious. The natural virtues are scorned. Temperance is for prigs, prudence for sticks in the mud who worry about people who don’t yet exist. A man who fathers six children upon three women and now wants to turn himself into a “woman” attracted to other women — he is praised for his courage. Justice means that a handful of narrowly educated and egotistical judges get to overturn human culture and biology, at their caprice.

We are not in partibus infidelibus. We are in partibus insanibus.

This is how Anthony Esolen, a writer I admire tremendously, begins his latest offering for Crisis, “Reform and Renewal Starts with Us”. Lest you get the wrong impression, though, the piece is not simply an attack on the Culture of Death. Rather, it’s a list of things the concerned Christian can do to “vote with their feet”; i.e., stop supporting the cultural collapse and begin rebuilding:

• Build new schools, reform old schools, and abandon irreformable ones. Aristotle, in his Nichomachean Ethics, said that one of the proper aims of education was to teach students to like and dislike what they ought. If nothing else has been retained of classical education, Esolen implicitly argues that this has: “If your children are in the sub-pagan schools, it will require almost a miracle of God to keep them from becoming sub-pagan themselves. They too will learn to worship the three-poisoned god of our times, self, sex, State. Take for granted that everything in their classes will be sexuality and politics; even in science classes.”
• Restore your parish church and bring reverence back to the liturgy. Incredible damage was done to churches and to the liturgy in the wake of post-Vatican II “reforms”, a period Esolen memorably calls “the Decade that Taste Forgot”. Even now, some pastors and parishes show preference for churches-in-the-round, “resurrectifixes”, sculptures so abstract as to be incoherent, and treacly faux-folk liturgical music. Sometimes it’s just the removal of an icon that makes the difference between a renovation and a “wreckovation”.

Earth 2.0 "bad news for God"? Only if you’re a fundamentalist

Catholic apologists have a saying: “Scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist.” That’s because many atheists, like fundamentalists, believe that Christian dogma is dictated by Scripture alone, with a slight twist — if you can disprove any part of it on scientific grounds, you disprove all of it.

Such is the case with Jeff Schweitzer, a marine biologist who’s convinced that the recent discovery of another Earth-sized planet capable of supporting life puts “paid” to “religion” (though the only religion he really addresses is Christianity, apparently supposing that religions are interchangeable). And he goes to great lengths to say so in a HuffPo article titled, “Earth 2.0: Bad News for God.”

Schweitzer’s entire purpose is to “poison the well”; that is, to fend off any and all Christian explanations as “explaining away”. Why? Because, gosh darn it, the Bible must be taken 100% literally! Everything, from “In the beginning” to the “Amen” at the end of Revelation must be an exact, word-for-word record — no parables, no metaphors, no symbolism. How the various books of the Bible have been understood over the centuries is far less important than how Schweitzer himself understands it, which allows no room for the creation stories to be anything less than literal accounts.

And Schweitzer is quite comfortable with his logical fallacy:

I would like here to preempt what will certainly be a re-write of history on the part of the world’s major religions. [Apparently neither Buddhism nor Hinduism counts as a major religion, as he never addresses their creation myths.] I predict with great confidence that all will come out and say such a discovery is completely consistent with religious teachings. My goal here is to declare this as nonsense before it happens. I am not alone in this conclusion that religion will contort to accommodate a new reality of alien life.

I’m not surprised Schweitzer’s not alone.You see, a brain-dead hyper-literalism concerning Genesis is more important to New Atheists than it is to Christianity ... at least, to non-fundamentalist Christianity. Thus, Schweitzer pays attention not only to what Genesis says, but to what it leaves out, as if the creation story were meant to be a comprehensive and exhaustively-detailed account. But our belief that God created the universe and everything in it isn’t dependant on the scientific accuracy of the Genesis story; indeed, it isn’t dependant upon Scripture at all. That’s a mistake fundamentalists make.