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Bless the Lord, for We Are Good

Oakland Diocese Celebrates Itself

By Phil Sevilla

The diocese of Oakland sponsored a daylong catechetical congress at Carondolet High School in Concord on November 16, 2002. There were approximately 650 attendees, mostly women and Hispanics -- presumably parish-level catechists and religious education functionaries from around the diocese. Oakland's Bishop John Cummins made a brief appearance at the opening convocation held in the school gymnasium.

No sacred images were present at the site to identify the event as a gathering of Catholic religion teachers, but plants and pumpkins were situated on the floor of the gym around the speakers' microphones. During the opening convocation (a half-hour of hymns and prayers), a woman, weaving a multi-colored tapestry, sat on stage with her back to the audience. (What her function was -- if any -- was unclear; the bishop and the speakers were situated on the gym floor below her.) Another woman in a long gown glided across the gymnasium floor with an incense bowl. Guitars accompanied a Vietnamese religious nun in habit who, with other companions, led the crowd in multicultural folk hymns sung in Vietnamese, Tagalog, Spanish, and English.

A lay woman who led the opening prayer (interspersed with acclamations and songs) declared that the Oakland diocese has earned a reputation of being a "Vatican II diocese" under Bishops Begin and Cummins, who have been "open to changes, new ideas." Instead of addressing the challenges of educating Catholic youth and catechumens, which, presumably, was focus of the congress, the speaker spoke of the diocese as a place that celebrates multiculturalism, diversity, and social activism. She blessed God for His help in the fight for racial justice, civil rights for farm workers, and for the promotion of peace. She blessed the Lord for making Oakland an immigrant church that has welcomed people from all over and so has offered a diversity of liturgies and cultural celebrations for "African Americans, Asian Indians, Brazilians, Chinese, Filipinos, Ge'ez, Haitians, Indonesians, Khmu', Koreans, Latinos, Polish, Portuguese, Tongan, and Vietnamese." (Copies of this prayer were distributed to attendees in their packets.)

The event featured a large exhibit of publishing houses and diocesan organizations advertising and selling their wares. Over forty organizations and bookstores were represented. The Daughters of St. Paul bookstore was there offering sound Catholic books and materials, while the Maryknoll Sisters offered Creation Spirituality guru Brian Swimme's book, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. A book by feminist movement leader, Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, was also on display, its cover featuring a picture of Buddhist monks. One could also find a book by Thomas Groome dealing with empowering catechetical leaders. In this book, Groome claims that the figure of Wisdom in Scripture personifies God as a feminine figure. In another book for sale at the congress, Priestless Parishes by Virginia Stillwell, the claim is made that "the appointment of laypeople to lead parishes is opening windows once more and allowing a breath of fresh air into individual parishes and into the Church as a whole."

Father Richard Sparks gave one of the event's workshops, "Catholic Moral Decision Making for the 21st Century." Sparks, a Paulist priest, is the pastor at Holy Spirit/Newman Hall in Berkeley. Sparks might not seem an obvious choice for a talk on moral decision-making given to Catholic catechists. In a talk given to a homosexual audience at his parish the past summer, Sparks said of sexual morality, "there's truth on both sides of that. Penis and vagina, and sperm and ovum and ninety some percent of the human race says something. Somehow that's different from, let's say, anal sex where sperm ejaculates near feces or where you put a dildo in to imitate a penis." In the section on homosexuality in his book, Contemporary Christian Morality, Sparks conveys the impression that more and more theological support is growing for the qualified or full acceptance position, whereby "homosexual genital actions would be moral only within the context of a committed, monogamous, covenant relationship, akin to a childless marriage."

In his workshop, Sparks introduced his topic with a slide that said Catholic teaching may have changed, evolved, or simply become nuanced. He said the same goes for the issue of natural family planning, which gets more nuanced today especially with older high school students, who want to debate the issue. Father Sparks, however, did not offer any assistance in how to deal with these "debates." He did provide his audience some rules of thumb for Catholic morality. For example, he explained that that not all moral issues are clear-cut, so we don't have to be afraid of moral complexity; but, again, he did not advise his audience of religious educators on how to deal with questions of morality in religious education classes.

According to Sparks, conscience is a verb more than a noun; morality he defines as one's values, choices, and actions. In his book, Contemporary Christian Morality, he states: "influenced by a variety of overlapping communities in which we live, ultimately each of us adopts our own hybrid morality." In his workshop, Sparks proceeded to suggest that the Catholic tradition of instructing Catholics about the objective evil of mortal and venial sins has changed over the last fifty years from exclusively judging the morality of actions. He said he thinks "morality seems to be more about who we are." He appeared to confuse objective norms of morality with the practice of human virtues. With Sparks' relative standards of morality, one could conclude that a homosexual couple that give alms to the poor and the Church, that are honest in their dealings with others and faithful and exclusive in their sexual relationship, are living a moral life. Sparks said that one can possibly disagree with one's church and remain as a member in good standing. "Only in the gravest of moral issues (e.g. blatant racism, bigotry, or licentiousness) where public scandal is a distinct possibility, might a church take action to dismiss or 'excommunicate' a member," he said.

In the afternoon, Father Sparks gave another workshop on biomedical ethics. In this session, when asked directly from the floor if a Catholic nurse would be complicit in the sin of abortion if she witnessed an abortion without assisting in it, he said it was the "straight party line" that she would be innocent, especially if to keep her job, she is required or forced to witness the abortion as part of her training. When asked if this nurse would not be as guilty or complicit as the innocent bystander who watched a murder without lifting a finger to stop it or attempt to save the victim, Sparks responded that, for the nurse, to leave or witness the abortion would be a "judgment call."

On the topic of euthanasia and end of life care, Sparks made no distinction between extraordinary care for a patient on a life support system and ordinary care consisting of intravenous feeding and hydration (water). He stated that there is nuance in the Church's tradition, especially when the patient has little or no means of recovering. When asked if he was not confusing extraordinary means of life support with what the Church has said are ordinary means of sustaining life (food and hydration), Sparks stated that there was a debate on food and hydration among Catholic moral theologians. He quoted Father Kevin O'Rourke, a bioethicist from St. Louis, who holds that even when the patient is not dying, it is acceptable to remove all means of support, including food and water, if the patient does not have a reasonable chance of recovering. This means in effect that Sparks and O'Rourke support the starving of patients if the attending physician and family agree that the cost or burden of sustaining the patient is difficult.

In a phone interview, Dr. Eugene Diamond, professor of clinical pediatrics at the Loyola Medical School in Chicago and member of the Catholic Medical Association, said he was aware of the opinions of Sparks and O'Rourke. Diamond said that removing feed and water from the patient will always kill the patient and that the only situations where it is licit to remove all support is if the patient is in danger of imminent death. The presumption, according to the members of the Catholic Medical Association, is that the patient should always be fed. Even if there is present a socio-economic burden of supporting a person who is not dying but is in a prolonged coma, the moral action that should be taken is to continue to feed the patient. This does not ordinarily pose an extraordinary burden of time and expense to the caregivers, said Diamond. Ultimately, in these cases, according to Diamond, the person's death is up to God.

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