Religious challenge to same-sex unions crosses lines of church and state.

In a simple and ideal world, on the Prince Edward Island of Anne of Green Gables, where differences are transient and justice and happiness prevail, Bishop Richard Malone’s view of things might have some resonance: men and women marry, have children, raise them well, and the human race continues. The church points the way.

But that is not the world we know; so, ignoring reality, the bishop’s – and Vatican’s – neat matrix doesn’t fit. Marriage has changed through the centuries and the church’s views of it, e.g., from early recognition of consensual divorce to rigid denial. Industrialization, secularism, a sex-saturated culture, and mushrooming numbers of broken families have now made the traditional family uncommon.

Recent years have seen abandonment of the sexist pastoral counsel that a wife should suffer endless spousal abuse and the view that procreation is the “primary purpose” of marriage. The Second Vatican Council emphasizes mutual love which naturally leads to procreation. The sense of the faithful has reasserted the right of divorce. Curia Cardinal Walter Kasper finds denial of the Eucharist to the divorced and remarried unacceptable; John Paul II announced a commission to review relevant canon law.

Given the clerical patriarchy’s complicity in clergy sexual abuse and its continuance of unrealistic strictures on divorce despite the people of God’s rejection of them, it is unsurprising church leadership has not met the challenge of recognition that sexual orientations are given, not chosen. If it can stonewall for generations the pain of exclusion of divorced and remarried from the Eucharist and cover for thousands of sexual abusers, the dismissal of this moral challenge by calling millions disordered and condemning all same-sex relationships is only more of the same.

Enter same-sex marriage and a wide mainline Protestant embrace of it in Maine as a civil right. Bishop Malone’s response is hopelessly handicapped. As the record confirms, the church has “never gotten sex right,” since Augustine, as psychologist Eugene Kennedy once observed – a long time. If it cannot recognize good sense and ordain women, same-sex morality presents an impossible challenge. In clinging to an ideal as the only norm, Malone cannot imagine same-sex marriage or credit evidence of same-sex couples’ ability to raise children well.

There is a pattern here: For 30 years now, the hierarchy has failed to instill respect for all human life as the moral ground for opposing the abortion liberty. Its preoccupation with life before birth while tolerating sexual abuse of children and no more than murmuring about violent Central American repression and Palestinian dispossession, the starvation and slaughter of millions of Iraqis, and funding world domination to the neglect of the hungry billions our wealth could feed has cost it any credibility. Yet, the bishops continue determined to legislate their will, preaching to a command audience that isn’t listening.

Bishop Malone’s letter makes matters worse. He erroneously returns marriage’s purpose to procreation alone, which never made sense in view of procreation being impossible for many married couples, arguing that to allow marriage without procreation is to “render marriage meaningless.” Thankfully, he stops short of the nonsense that traditional marriage is threatened by calling same-sex unions marriage; heterosexual couples see no threat and gays seeking marriage are championing it. As with the abortion liberty, he blurs the realms of church and state by challenging state-sanctioned same-sex unions.

In law, for same-sex couples to enjoy full spousal rights, state recognition of their union is necessary. Call it civil union, marital union, or marriage; it is the state’s business. The hierarchy has no business burdening those in the pews with fuzzy claims otherwise. (It never so burdens us with our complicity in illegitimate war or despoiling the Earth.)

In Germany, my wife and I were obliged to have a civil marriage for legal purposes prior to a church wedding. We should have the same here. Same-sex couples may call it marriage if they would; the hierarchs can call it what they will. Bishop Malone’s responsibility is to champion Christian married love and to “support it in all ways possible,” as he promises, not to deny full civil rights to those of different sexual orientations.

William H. Slavick is coordinator of Pax Christi Maine and has published widely in the Catholic press. He lives in Portland.