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A Vatican Swiss Guard salutes bishops arriving for an afternoon session of a two-week synod on family issues at the Vatican, Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2014. Francis has urged bishops to speak their minds about contentious issues like contraception, gays, marriage and divorce at the start of the meeting aimed at making the church's teaching on family matters relevant to today's Catholics.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO)
It is one of those interesting convergences that happen in life.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently declined to consider lower federal court rulings in five states that allow for same-sex marriage to stand. Meanwhile, the Third Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops is underway, at the Vatican, with a small delegation from the U.S. among those in attendance to discuss the "pastoral challenges for the family in the context of evangelization."
The convergence highlights not only the makeup of the court, whose members are either Jewish or Catholic, but also the influences -- legal, religious, cultural, that shape society.
There are six Catholics among the nine Supreme Court judges. These include Chief Justice John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Sonia Sotomayor.
The United States Catholic Conference of Bishops had been outspoken in its support for the Defense of Marriage Act, which classified marriage as the union between a man and a woman until it was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2013. They have issued recommendations, to be implemented on the parish level, to encourage Catholics to oppose same-sex marriage, abortion and aspects of the Affordable Care Act that mandate employers to provide coverage for preventative contraception.
Their legal argument hinges on the infringement of religious liberties. Marriage, between a man and woman, is a bedrock of Catholic teaching. The issues being addressed at the synod involve a review of answers to a confidential online survey available to Catholics earlier this year.
The survey sought answers to questions about everything, from co-habitation to domestic abuse to teen marriage. The Church has already said the purpose of the survey is not to change Catholic doctrine, but to better implement it. Pope Francis wants a more pastoral approach to implementing Catholic teaching, both in terms of its appeal to converts, as well as to estranged Catholics. The synod is charged with making recommendations to a 2015 synod which will forward its proposals to the Pope.
Presumably, the Catholic bishops' 2006 "Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination: Guidelines for Pastoral Care" was intended to be a more pastoral approach. But, there is no defense for how the Church, in the guise of being pastoral, defends its opposition against the lifestyle of gay Catholics.
The document is hard to digest, even in terms of how the Church seeks to empower itself, at the expense of gays, in general.
The guidelines read in part:
"Persons who experience same-sex attraction and yet are living in accord with Church teaching should be encouraged to take an active role in the life of the faith community. However, the Church has a right to deny roles of service to those whose behavior violates her teaching. Such service may seem to condone an immoral lifestyle and may even be an occasion of scandal."
This brings us back to the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roberts surprised everyone when he voted to uphold a mandate within the Affordable Care Act, that essentially allowed the act to remain valid. He was joined by Sotomayor, and the three Jewish members of the court, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan.
Interestingly, these four justices dissented from Roberts' majority opinion in the contentious Holly Lobby case. Roberts, joined by all of the other Catholics on the court, except for Sotomayor, ruled that requiring corporations, owned by families, to pay for contraception under the Affordable Care Act violated a federal law protecting religious freedom. In a different case, Sotomayor, who attended Catholic schools as a child, granted the Little Sisters of the Poor an emergency injunction from the same mandate.
Roberts and the justices, who had previously allowed bans on same-sex marriages to remain in two of the states involved in the Oct. 6 ruling, kicked the can down the road, waiting to see further rulings in federal courts. No decision on the constitutional right to same-sex marriage emerged on the same day the two-week, closed-door synod, with some 200 participants, mostly celibate males, opened at the Vatican to discuss issues of family.
The Supreme Court in a 2013 ruling in the United States v. Windsor case relating to the Defense of Marriage Act, granted federal benefits for same-sex couples married in states that allow such unions. In that case, the dissenters were Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito, who this month is receiving the 2014 St. Thomas More Society of Maryland's Man for All Seasons Award, in the Baltimore Archdiocese.
Interestingly, Kennedy, joined by Sotomayor, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan, -- perhaps the lineup in any future decision - wrote the majority opinion in the Windsor case, as reported in the New York Times:
“The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure those whom the state, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment.”
He said the law was motivated by a desire to harm gay and lesbian couples and their families, demeaning the “moral and sexual choices” of such couples and humiliating “tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples.”